A Dimple In The Afterlife

A recounting of a young boy's first visit to a funeral home and the mischief accompanying it.

   “I’m here to see the undertaker. He’s expecting me,” my mother said to the tall woman standing just inside the mortuary foyer.

    The woman appeared to be in her early fifties and was immaculately dressed in a perfectly pleated grey skirt and black high heels. Rings of pearls, maybe as many as six, looped around her neck. Her dark blouse was pinned with a shiny brass nameplate engraved Mrs. Lorna Barron. My mother’s attire was more modest and not the prerequisite dark color of a grieving widow as society would have expected in 1952: she wore a simple brown and white checkered dress, black pumps, her long chestnut-colored hair pulled back, held behind her ears with barrettes in the shape of a lady bug. In her left hand, she held to the handle of a large, bulging handbag that hung well past her knees. Peeking out of the top of the handbag was the corner of my father’s burial flag. I was dressed in my shiniest shoes and early-rise Sunday-best clothing, complete with tie.

     Mrs. Barron smiled, welcomed us, and escorted us to a flowered archway where underneath stood a wooden podium holding the visitor register, its open pages already filled with a scrawl of names. I glanced momentarily at the flowers and hated them. To me, they represented all the flowers my mother would never ever again receive from my father.

    My mother lifted the pen beside the register and signed her name. I stood on my tiptoes, inched my nose over the register’s page to view her signature in beautiful script. I was shocked. For the first time I could recall, my mother wrote her last name not as mine and my father’s, Drury, but as Stockton--her maiden name. Ann Stockton I said in my mind. I didn’t like the sound of it. 

   “Joshua Stockton,” I said under my breath. The sound of it made me cringe. I lifted the register and pen from the podium, sat down on the floor and balancing the register across my knee, wrote below my mother’s name my own--in just one word . . . Joshua.

    "Let me get my husband for you" Mrs. Barron said, turning on her heel to leave.

    "Tell him I want to see my husband's body as well."

   Mrs. Barron stopped. She turned to face us and raised an eyebrow as if in disbelief to what my mother had last asked of her. "I'll tell him, but I wouldn't recommend viewing your husband." She cut her eyes down to me. "I'll say no more in front of the boy and just let my husband explain."

    Mrs. Barron returned less than a minute later. A stocky and bespectacled Mr. Barron accompanied her and greeted us. He stepped close to my mother. He wrung his hands. “Please, ma'am, I apologize for my difference of opinion, but surely you don’t want to look in that coffin. Believe me when I tell you it’s your husband lying in it."

   "I just want to see him and make sure he's mine, before I claim his body," my mother said. "Please, open his coffin." Her eyes shifted left and right, as if searching for my father among the three rooms beyond the foyer.  "Which one is he in?" Mr. Barron pointed to the single room to our left. My hand still in hers, my mother walked us toward it.

    In the middle of the room a wooden coffin sat atop a marble pedestal. The coffin was bare of surrounding flowers, but on it sat a framed picture of my father dressed in his Army uniform. The coffin appeared ordinary, void of fancy trim. Great care had evidently been taken though, to insure its lid could not be easily opened: It had been secured shut with screws. There was no hint of odor, foul or otherwise, surrounding it, as my then-young mind would have suspected.

    Behind the coffin, a wall mural depicted Christ hanging from the cross, his eyes upturned, sorrowful, and horribly vivid in agony. At that moment, I felt a gut-wrenching sadness within me. I looked back at my father's photo, hoping he hadn't suffered before he died and wondered if, like Jesus, I too would someday be in Heaven with my father.

     My mother lifted my father's picture from the top of the coffin. "Please take the screws out and remove the lid, Mr. Barron."

      Mr. Barron, now accompanied by an Army sergeant, who was part of the honor guard for my father as well as a childhood friend of his, moved to where both he and the sergeant stood between my mother and the coffin. "Please, ma'am", the sergeant added, "looking inside there will only affirm what the good Mr. Barron has already told you. Your late husband's face and body are beyond any repair to make him recognizable. But it is your late husband, I assure you. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt."

      "You're sure, you're both absolutely sure? How do you know?"

      The sergeant nodded as Mr. Barron pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped his brow. "Yes. The sergeant is correct. Both he and I could only verify your husband's identity through the military and their records because there is no such thing as recognizing him as he once was. Only God knows the true identity of any of his children without doubt or question. Please, I beg you not make me open that coffin. He died a hero in the war but at a terrible cost to his body. He was shot so many--"

     My mother interrupted. "Alright, Mr. Barron. That's enough. I understand."

     "Thank you. I tried my best to make your husband viewable, but I simply could not. I apologize. Maybe we can discuss an alternative to an open viewing, or even burial. Have you considered cremation?"

     My mother did not answer Mr. Barron. Instead, she turned her back to him and the sergeant, knelt beside me, and took my face in her hands. She looked me in the eyes.  I was even sadder because I recognized the look on her face. She was about to cry.

   "Joshua, I need to talk to Mr. Barron some more, but by myself." She pointed at the room next to us where a small group of people stood outside its door, waiting for the funeral of Mrs. Locklear, our church pianist.  "Go in there and sit down. You can visit with the Locklear family for a while. You understand me?"

   I smiled and nodded. Without hesitation, I did as my mother asked and caught just a glimpse of the door closing behind me. I covered my ears against the rise and fall of my mother's wailing as well as the mournful, piped-in organ music that drifted throughout the mortuary.

     I sat down next to a man dressed in a black suit. The man was crying. Every few seconds, he wiped his eyes and uttered softly to himself, "Oh, Mama. You're gone. Oh, I miss you, Mama." I moved away from the man and stood beside a young girl I recognized from church. Her name was Marcy. She was my age, my height, but at that moment stood a foot taller as she was perched on a small step bench, peering into a bronze-colored metal casket.

    "Can I see?" I asked.

    Marcy smiled down at me and held her hand out. "Sure, but you can't touch her."

   I took her hand, stepped up and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her, looking at my first dead body. I held my breath, only to breathe again when I asked Marcy, "Aren't dead people supposed to smell different?"

   "Like how?"

   "Like something dead, rotten and stinky."

   "You be polite," Marcy scolded. "She's my grandmother, and she smells good." She leaned over and into the casket, her face close to the old woman's bosom. "She smells like fresh starch, just like when she was alive." In the background, I heard Marcy's father, still murmuring and crying to himself.

     I leaned close to Marcy's ear and whispered, "Why can't I touch her?"

    Marcy whispered back, "Cause you'll be cursed if you do. Preacher Hemby said so."

    Marcy's grandmother's thin body lay deep in its white satin bed. Her cheeks were wrinkled and sunken, powdered the color of a pale orange, and her lips were pursed, as if in a kiss, shrunken tight against her teeth and painted a bright red. The expression on her face was neutral, but her brow, nose, and jaw were sharp and angular, as if someone had chiseled them in a mad rage. Her blue-white hair lay neatly combed against her forehead, apparently glued in place with hairspray, and beneath her hair, I could see the outline of what I thought to be her skull. I asked Marcy, "Do dead people ever smile in Heaven?"

    "Don't be silly, Joshua. Ain't no such thing as dead people in Heaven. It's our soul that smiles when the pearly gates to Heaven open. Or, if Jesus tells a good joke. That's what my daddy says." I turned to look back at her father, but he was no longer in the room. We were alone. I was thankful--and curious.

   "I wanna touch her," I said to Marcy. Marcy was speechless at first, staring at me, eyes wide and round, mouth sprung in surprise. "I won't tell a soul, Marcy. I promise."

   Marcy rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Boys! You're all crazy! Every last one of you!"  She bit her lower lip and turned her head away. "Go ahead," she said, sounding reluctant and almost in a whisper, "but I ain't look'n 'cause I don't wanna be part of no curse, you hear?"

   I nodded yes. "At least watch out for me, Marcy. Okay?" She nodded as well but put a palm to each side of her face, fingers extended past her temples, acting as blinders to the mischief before her.

    I reached into the coffin and put my fingertip to one of the dead woman's shrunken, clasped hands. I rolled her cold flesh beneath my own in a circular motion, but it didn't move or feel like my own skin. It felt like putty.  I pulled my hand back and lay it upon Marcy's arm. She winced, tried to pull away, but I grabbed her hand and held tight to her and said, "Go ahead, touch her. Ain't no such thing as a curse."

   "You sure?" she asked.

   "Yep."

   "How you know for sure?"

   "Because my Uncle Walt says Pastor Hemby drinks whiskey in secret and is always talking junk, even at Sunday services." I guided Marcy's hand into the casket. "See, it's easy. Noth'n to it," I said, pushing her fingertip toward the dead woman's face. Marcy winced at my heavy-handed touch and jerked her hand out of mine, but not before the damage had been done.

   Both of us were speechless for a few seconds as we stared wild-eyed at the dead woman--and the dime-sized dimple now in her cheek.