Curtains by Tom Jokinen Page A

sister hasn’t been home for thirty years and the brother thinks she’s only come back so she can get her piece of the dad’s estate. He’s seated them on opposite sides of the chapel. The pastor raises her hands and says, “We’ve come to hear the good news for Jim and for us. Please be seated.”
    A few hymns later the guests are sent downstairs for sandwiches and raisin buns and coffee while we load the casket into the hearse. Neil and I hustle to the cemetery in the van, and Richard follows, leading a procession of cars. Pallbearers lift the casket onto the straps of the Device and I hold my breath. The pastor makes the sign of the cross on the lid with dirt from our Gerber jar, and Richard flips the hand brake with his foot. Unlike at city cemeteries, they’re not shy here about seeing the box all the way into the hole. The casket lurches, and stops. Richard kicks the Device. Now the casket sinks slowly until it hits bottom, and I can breathe again. The brother produces an ice cream bucket filled with dirt he brought from the farm. He drops a handful into the grave and I can hear it scatter on the wood. Then he hands the bucket to his sister. She won’t take it.
    When they leave to join their friends for lunch at the church, Richard and I strike the set, folding up the greens and dismantling the miraculous, if temperamental, Device. I look into the open grave, at the dirt on the lid and the sheaf of dried wheat, and I think of what Neil said: The funeral home works very much like the family farm.

T O K EEP T HINGS THE W AY T HEY A RE , W E H AVE TO C HANGE
    S
ummer at the Factory means the smell of freshly turned earth from Brookside cemetery, and Zep bug spray, which Shannon uses to fog the dressing room to keep flies off the customers.
    “The last thing you want is to open the casket and have a fly come out of someone’s nose,” she says. Shannon’s full of helpful hints. When threading a needle in the prep room, she says, resist the urge to put it in your mouth. Moisten the end with water from the sink: “Never lick anything in a funeral home.”
    I remember when I first came in here, how gruesome those curved needles looked, what it felt like to poke one through leathery skin. Neil told me to be patient, that my natural fear would evolve into something deeper: respect and awe for the body. We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract theirproblems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpse-handlers. That’s us. In time I’d get used to my social role. And the people I worked with would get used to me, once they figured out I wasn’t after their jobs. This is a cutthroat business, he said, the corporates are panicked over low death rates and new competition from low-end discount cremationists. They are laying off staff. Every new face in a funeral home is a threat to someone’s groceries.
    At first my co-workers were polite but guarded, explaining and demonstrating technique while I took reams of notes, and absorbed the mantra:
We do this for the families
,
we treat the dead like we’d treat our own fathers and aunts
,
each case is handled with respect and dignity
—all fuzzy noble notions made fuzzier by repetition. When Glenn showed me for the eighth time how to operate secondary and primary burners on the retort he must have wondered: when is this guy going to leave? But I didn’t (or I did and came back), and soon enough they grew bored with my presence, a good sign that I was fitting in. I did my removals, and cleaned orifices and fingernails, and I wet-mopped and swept my way from suspicious novelty to the guy who could be trusted on scut jobs, like picking up Super Glue (for closing lips on difficult cases) and a curling iron at Costco. I’d joined their caste. But I still can’t sew up dead skin without feeling my own skin prickle. I’ve tried imagining it as not unlike trussing a pork roast, but these pork roasts at Neil’s have hands, and fingers, and suntan shadows