Todd Harra - Mortuary Confidential - Undertakers Spill the Dirt

Brian opened his eyes.

“You all right?” I asked.

Brian shook his head, pushed me out of the way, and sat up. Bright red blood ran from his nose like a faucet, gushing down the front of his suit and onto the carpet.

James yelled, “You better stay down if you know what’s good for you.” He continued circling his prey, waving his bloody fists.

Brian ignored him and got unsteadily to his feet. He took a couple of tentative steps, before he spit a huge bloody loogie onto the carpet, put his dukes up, and said, “C’mon.”

The crowd exploded in yells and jeers, and Brian took a mighty swing at his brother. It caught him in the arm, but with enough force that James reeled backwards into a lamp on a table, smashing both.

“Hey! Hey!” I yelled desperately at seeing my funeral home being destroyed. “Take it outside or I’m calling the cops!”

Surprisingly enough, the mob listened. A couple of burly men in leather jackets grabbed them and said. “You heard the man, lads, take your grievances outside.” They marched them outside like truant children.

The crowd rushed outside, leaving only a crying Mrs. McSomething alone in the parlor with her dead husband. I was torn. I didn’t know what to do. Console the widow, or try to break up the fight.

I ran outside.

There was at least a foot of snow on the ground and the two boys were out in the front lawn just swinging away. The clean, white snow was dotted with little crimson drops of blood. They were still going strong; I had never seen men take such hits before and still be able to stand. I rushed in to break it up but was intercepted by the burly arm of one of the men who had carried them outside. “Let them fight,” was all he said to me.

I decided to listen to the giant, and stood and watched as Brian and James beat the—for lack of a better word— shit out of each other. Brian was wearing a black shirt but I could tell it was covered in blood by the way the sunlight reflected off the wetness saturating it. James was wearing a white shirt that looked like he had worn it while slaughtering a pig. They slowed down until, at the end, they were just taking wild swings at each other.

Finally, James landed a solid blow to Brian’s jaw. Brian dropped into the snow and lay there motionless. James turned away from his conquest, tripped, and face-planted into the snow where he, too, remained motionless.

There they lay, two brothers, motionless in the bloody snow. The burly men carried them back into the parlor and propped them up on chairs; the crowd took their seats and the service resumed with someone saying prayers. The priest had left when the fight broke out.

At the end of the service, I had the casket bearers help me load the casket into the hearse for the ride over to the vault. It was a comical sight, the two brothers, side by side, dried blood covering their faces, James with his one eye swollen shut, and Brian with his broken nose carrying their father’s casket. They looked like two whipped dogs.

I was glad to see the McSomethings go and decided that next time they called upon my services I would be too busy to accommodate them. Unfortunately, I still had to be around them when we buried their father after the spring thaw. I didn’t relish that day, and in fact, dreaded it the rest of the winter.

On the day of the interment Brian and James showed up in the same car, smelling as they usually did, of booze, but strangely enough, the best of friends. They called each other “brother” during the short committal service and boasted of their drinking exploits the night before. I couldn’t believe they were the same two people I had watched duke it out in front of my funeral home not four months prior.

I just couldn’t resist. Before I left I asked Brian, “How did you get that scar over your eye?”

He grinned, revealing several missing teeth. “Fightin’ James.”

Contributed by a Texas Hold ’Em player

Iremember the first funeral I was given to direct on my own after I graduated from mortuary school. It was a disaster…almost. But I’m Lucky. My real name is some God-awful albatross my parents shackled upon me, Chester. So you can see why I prefer my nickname to my real name. I got the name because, whether it be playing poker or nearly ruining a funeral, I can step into a dung pile and still come out smelling like a daisy.

I did my internship at McDaniel-Walsh. It is a prestigious old firm with the physical plant housed in a big old Victorian mansion. I lived on the third floor in a small dorm-type room. It’s the type of room that’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but I was just glad for a place to stay. My rent? The phone for the funeral home rang up in my room from 6:00 P.M. to 7:30 A.M. six nights a week; that’s how I paid rent.

The funeral directors who worked for McDaniel-Walsh were considerably older than me and thought I was just a stupid kid. They couldn’t be bothered with explaining anything to me. I think they thought I should instinctively know it all. Or maybe they thought that just by merely being in their presence I’d pick up their knowledge through osmosis. Either way, they didn’t give me much responsibility at first. In fact, I was like their live-in janitor when I started, and I also had the pleasure of hearing them speak to me like I was retarded—loud and slow. “Chet”—they refused to call me Lucky because it was an “unprofessional” name—“can you wax the cars today?”

So I kept my head down and worked hard, and slowly, very slowly, they began giving me more responsibility.

One morning after I’d been at McD and W for about six months, the phone rang up in my attic apartment. It was Mark, one of the directors. He told me his wife had been rushed to the hospital during the night and he wouldn’t be in to work that day. Could I take the funeral he had planned?

Could I? “Of course I can,” I told him, excited at the prospect of actually doing some funeral directing.

He gave me directions to the church and cemetery and told me the pallbearers would meet me at the church to help me in.

“Do you know what to do?” Mark asked me.

“Yes, I know what to do.”

“Chet, are you sure?” he repeated.

“Don’t worry. Everything will be fine,” I assured him.

He thanked me and hung up. I was ecstatic. This was my big chance to really prove myself and move up from my current custodial duties of polishing the brass ashtrays and replacing the urinal cakes. I ran out and loaded the funeral coach with everything I would need for church: floral stands, sign-in book, pedestals, makeup grip, automobile funeral tags, and the like. I left with plenty of time, but because I was relatively new to the area, and didn’t travel very much outside the immediate area of the funeral home except to go to the grocery store or the occasional movie, I got on the freeway going in the wrong direction.

I didn’t realize my mistake at first, because the exits on this particular freeway are so far and few between, but I finally noticed the exit numbers kept getting bigger. I was looking for an exit number that was supposed to be lower. That’s okay, I told myself, I’ll just get off at the next exit and hop back on. I’ll still be there in plenty of time.

I drove and drove. At one point I contemplated driving over the grass median and getting in the southbound lanes, but it appeared there was a slight ditch and I had visions of getting the funeral coach stuck in the median and making the nightly news. I gripped the steering wheel and willed the next exit to come. It came and I took it. I drove up to the top of the off-ramp, hooked a left turn, and discovered there was no access to the southbound lanes of the freeway. That’s when I began to panic. These were the days before cell phones or GPS navigation devices, and the exit I had gotten off at was for farm country. There weren’t any gas stations I could inquire at, just fields. I had a choice. I could continue northbound on the freeway, or I could try to backtrack through the back roads until I linked up again with the freeway.