Unbury Carol(37)

Moxie, nearing the north side of town, imagined Carol plucking finite breaths from a glass jar at her bedside. He felt he had wasted time indeed. Whoever was following him had surely gained. And the rush to Harrows was heightened; the guilt for Carol increased.

Send the Cripple…

Moxie studied Rinaldo’s words.

As the rage within him swelled, the guilt grew, too.

And the sun began to go down on Griggsville.





The office at the funeral home was closed, it being close to dark, but Robert Manders would have answered the door had anyone knocked. The Illness that had come to Harrows, an illness that Doctor Walker believed was either contained or gone, brought the home much work to do, and Manders couldn’t rule out the possibility of more coming. It was a delicate business, being the director of a vibrant town’s one death depot, and Manders never forgot the cardinal rule of his profession: No matter how many bodies came through his front doors, each was the only for those who carried it.

His father took over the home when Robert was ten years old. Until then Dad was a gravedigger, a job that stained his clothes with grass and earth and gave him a distinct odor, a cloud of something not quite antique but not fresh, either, a smell young Robert detected in the house before seeing the old man was home. Dad worked with a digger named Hubert, and the pair discussed much over the empty plots they dug. A favorite topic was the idea of one day owning their own funeral home, hiring gravediggers instead. The sudden death of Howard Lauren, the home’s owner at the time, made this a surprising possibility. After a brief meeting with town officials, the two young gravediggers got permission to purchase the place on loan and begin to run it themselves. Who else was so eager to handle the dead? So ready? Robert and his mother moved into the home with Dad, taking residency on the second floor. And thus began the young Manders’s long desensitization to death, dead bodies, and the crude process of preservation. By the time he was fifteen he could do the work himself. And by the time Robert was twenty, Hubert sold Allan Manders his share of the place and suddenly Robert was next in line, his future secured.

“Robert?”

Manders had been looking out the window, dazed, mechanically watching the men dig a fresh plot. The name Alexander Wolfe played and replayed in his head. Dwight Evers’s doctor of choice. Manders was leaning back in his chair, his fingers to his chin, half storing the image of the silhouettes against the darkening sky. He turned slowly to the door.

“Yes, Norman, come in.”

Norman was wearing his white apron and smelled of the stuffy basement. “I’m finished.”

Robert nodded. “Very well. How did it go?”

“It’s good work.”

Robert smiled. “I’m sure it is.”

When the diggers arrived this afternoon, Manders talked to them about Carol Evers. He discovered the pair had already learned of her death. He walked them to the plot listings on the wood square outside the cemetery gates. There he explained where she was to be buried. The men had other graves to dig, but they assured the director they would get to Carol’s before the sun went down. Manders turned to leave when Lucas said, “Plot Twenty will be an improvement on where she rests now.”

Often the talk between the gravediggers was nonsense to the director, but this bit caught Manders’s attention.

“What was that, Lucas?”

“I said—”

“And where does she rest now?”

“In the cellar of the Evers home, Mister Manders. Heard it from the husband of Missus Farrah Darrow. Girl saw Carol Evers there herself yester eve.”

Behind his glasses, Manders’s eyes grew distant. Then he reminded the men they had much work to do, excused himself, and crossed the gravel drive to the front stone steps of the home.

Much of the rest of his day was spent looking absently out the window.

At one point he left the office and took the stone stairs to the basement where Norman was preparing the body of Wilhelm Boyd, the seventy-seven-year-old former attorney. Though it was Manders’s job to ensure things were done right, the director had given the deceased only a cursory glance. Norman was truly the best at what he did. In his lifetime at the home, Robert had never known a man who performed his part more fastidiously.

“How are we on supplies?” Manders asked, then in the basement. But his voice was distant, his mind someplace else.

“Eh?”

Manders didn’t repeat himself and Norman didn’t ask him to.

The director circled the table supporting Wilhelm Boyd’s body and sat upon a stool at the far wall. Norman worked as if no one was there, and in a way no one was. Manders watched but did not register the steadfast makeup artist. Instead he took in the vague shades of movement, the process he had borne witness to a thousand times, and did not fight to keep his mind from wandering.

Now, both in the office, Norman was through.

“I’ll be going home now, Mister Manders.”

The director nodded. As Norman removed his apron, Manders said, “Carol Evers won’t be coming here.”

The body-dresser bunched his thick brow. Often, under the basement lights, Norman’s face looked theatrical, leathery, and hard. Now it looked downright vaudevillian.

“How’s that?”

“Seems Mister Evers has hired family to take care of it.”

Norman seemed to consider this, then said, “I’ll be going home, Mister Manders. Mister Boyd is ready.”