"She stinks pretty bad," I said. Mom and Margaret were adamant that we be respectful to the deceased, but it seemed a little late at this stage. It wasn't a person anymore, it was just a body. A thing.
"She does smell," said Margaret. "Poor woman. I wish someone had found her sooner." She looked up at the ventilator fan buzzing behind its grate in the ceiling. "Let's hope the motor doesn't burn out on us tonight." Margaret said the same thing before every embalming, like a sacred chant. The fan continued creaking overhead.
"Leg," she said. I moved down to the body's foot and pulled the leg straight while Margaret sprayed it. "Turn your head." I kept my gloved hands on the foot and turned to stare at the wall while Margaret lifted up the sheet to wash the upper thighs.
"One good thing that came of this, though," she said, "is that you can bet every widow in the county got a visit today, or is going to get one tomorrow. Everyone who hears about Mrs. Anderson is going to go straight to their own mother, just to make sure. Other leg."
I wanted to say something about how everyone who heard about Jeb would go straight to their auto mechanic, but Margaret never appreciated jokes like that.
We moved around the body, leg to arm, arm to torso, torso to head, until the whole thing was scrubbed and disinfected.
The room smelled like death and soap. Margaret tossed the rags in the laundry bin and started gathering the real embalming supplies.
I'd been helping Mom and Margaret at the mortuary since I was a little boy, back before Dad left. My first job had been cleaning up the chapel: picking up programs, dumping out ashtrays, vacuuming the floor, and other odd jobs that a sixyear-old could do unassisted. I got bigger jobs as I grew older, but I didn't get to help with the really cool stuff—embalming— until I was twelve. Embalming was like . . . I don't know how to describe it. It was like playing with a giant doll, dressing it and bathing it and opening it up to see what was inside. I watched Mom once when I was eight, peeking in through the door to see what the big secret was. When I cut open my teddy bear the next week, I don't think she made the connection.
Margaret handed me a wad of cotton, and I held it at the ready while she packed small tufts carefully under the body's eyelids. The eyes were beginning to recede, deflating as they lost moisture, and cotton helped keep the right shape for the viewing. It helped keep the eyelids closed as well, but Margaret always added a bit of sealing cream, just in case, to keep the moisture in and the lid closed.
"Get me the needle gun, will you John?" she asked, and I hurried to put down the cotton and grab the gun from a metal table by the wall. The gun is a long metal tube with two fingerholds on the side, like a hypodermic syringe.
"Can I do it this time?"
"Sure," she said, pulling back the body's cheek and upper lip. "Right here."
I placed the gun gently up against the gums and squeezed, embedding a small needle into the bone. The teeth were long and yellow. We added one more needle to the lower jaw and threaded a wire through them both, then twisted it tight to keep the mouth closed. Margaret smeared sealing cream on a small plastic support, like the peel of an orange wedge, and placed it inside the mouth to hold everything closed.
Once the face was taken care of we arranged the body carefully, straightening the legs and folding the arms across the chest in the classic "I'm dead" pose. Once the formaldehyde gets into the muscles, they seize up and go rigid. You have to set the features first thing, so the family doesn't have a misshapen corpse at the viewing.
"Hold her head," said Margaret, and I obediently put a hand on each side of the corpse's head to keep it steady. Margaret probed with her fingers a bit, just above the right collarbone, and then sliced a long, shallow line in the hollow of the old woman's neck. It's almost bloodless when you cut a corpse. Because the heart's not pumping, there's no blood pressure, and gravity pulls all the blood down into the body's back. Because this one had been dead longer than usual, the chest was limp and empty while the back was nearly purple, like a giant bruise. Margaret reached into the hole with a small metal hook and pulled out two big veins—well, technically an artery and a vein—and looped a string around each one. They were purple and slick, two dark loops that pulled out of the body a few inches, and then slipped back in. Margaret turned to prepare the pump.