Curtains (22 page)

We load the casket into the coach, and then Bill gives the vehicle a quick rinse with the hose, wiping the doors with a chamois to get rid of the road dust acquired on the drive from Winnipeg. I take off my coat to help. The breeze from the open garage door feels chilly, and I realize I’m not wearing my suit jacket. I look in the front seat of the hearse. It’s not there. In my head I can see it, hanging on my dining room chair at home, where I put it so I wouldn’t forget it. It would take me two hours, there and back, to get it. Maybe there’s
a spare in the prep room, some dead man’s jacket I can borrow for the afternoon, but I’m likely to forget that too, and wind up wearing it home to Winnipeg. All that’s left is to admit I’m a moron.

“Sorry,” I say, holding up my arms in shirt sleeves. “I forgot my suit jacket.”

“That’s fine,” he says, buffing the door handle on the back of the coach, and I think to myself: here’s a species I’ve never encountered, the mellow funeral director.

On the road to Grunthal I stick close to Bill’s Cadillac so I don’t get lost, but in fact, this is the Prairies: it would take days for me to lose sight of him. We pass factory hog farms and chicken barracks and a few bored dairy cattle, and at every mile, according to the grid system that creates order out of acres and acres of nothing, another crossroad. I turn on the radio, browsing the pre-sets from classic rock to country to Winnipeg’s BOB-FM (“Hits of the 80s, 90s, Whatever”), but then check myself. The man in the back is off to his eternal rest. He needs hymns and prayers to get him there, not “Mr. Roboto” by Styx. I shut off the tunes and drive in silence.

Reinland church is a white clapboard box that looks less like a house of God than a hockey rink or community centre. I back the hearse against the concrete apron at the front door, and Bill and I dolly the casket inside. According to custom, it will be left in the foyer, open, so that parishioners can see the dead man before they take their seats. The chapel is lit with fluorescents that buzz, and the walls are bare: no cross, no pictures. Up front is a bank of chairs with microphones, like in a courthouse or at a Senate hearing, and the pews are straight-backed and worn. The building smells of old, sour wood. Off to the side of the foyer is a “crying room” with an iron crib, painted white. Bill says it’s where women bring their
babies if they start wailing during the service. The place is stripped down to basics. Leave the art and architecture to the Roman Catholics: in Grunthal, Jesus is a minimalist.

Two shy men and a handful of big-eyed children approach the casket. The girls wear their hair in long double braids, and the boys are in white shirts buttoned to the top. They stare silently at the body. Bill briefs the men on how to bear pall, which way to turn the casket so it’ll open to face the congregation when they’re ready to start the ceremony. One of the girls plays with the dead man’s hair. When the briefing is done, we leave. Protocol prevents us from staying for the service, but we’re invited back for sandwiches and snacks before the burial, which will be at the churchyard in Roseau River, forty minutes south, near the Minnesota border.

“Come on,” Bill says, “I’ll show you my horses,” and we head out in the Caddy to his farm west of town, passing a ranch for miniature ponies (“those things are tough as nails”), and Freebird Auto Body, the sign for which is a Confederate flag. Bill tells me his father and mother sold caskets in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, near Saskatoon, simple wood flat-tops that his dad made himself. He and his mother would dress and casket the bodies after they’d been embalmed at the local funeral home, then families would come to their house to pick up the finished package and take it to church themselves. He spent time in a lumber camp in British Columbia, and shows me the stub where his left index finger used to be. He also worked at Penner Dodge in Steinbach where he once sold a pickup truck to the man we left in the casket at Reinland church.

Birchwood has three thousand members, many in Winnipeg. There was talk of opening a satellite shop in the city, but then
Walter Klassen, an undertaker with deep Mennonite roots, opened Friends Funeral Home on Main Street across from the golf course, thereby scooping them on the demographic. Birchwood’s business is mostly traditional burial. “Around here the orthodox do not tolerate cremation,” he says. At the farm he lowers my window and calls out to a horse named Jazz, a spring foal, and two other colts on awkward legs come over for a look. They snort through the window. I wipe horse snot from my face with my tie.

By the time we get back to the church, the congregation is filing out, singing “Shall We Gather at the River?” Those who are going to the cemetery get first crack at the food, with a second sitting for the rest. I follow Bill into the lunch hall where teenage girls in white caps work the room, serving coffee and water from jugs. The tables are laid with raisin buns, orange cheddar, ham and lunch loaf, butter, brownies and lemon curd squares. The woman to my right asks where I’m from and if I speak Low German and why I’m still wearing my coat. I take it off. People stab at buns with their forks, and an elderly man scoops a cut-glass decanter of Coffee-mate with his knife to slide it closer. The children sit still and don’t make a noise. Two old men giggle and whisper into each other’s hearing aids. The mood is festive.

The second sitting is called and we move to the foyer, to ready the casket for transport. “See that woman?” Bill says, pointing to a lady with a tumbleweed pile of red hair. “She never misses a funeral.”

“A Birchwood groupie,” I say, and he nods.

A man in a western-cut rodeo shirt and a dinner-plate belt buckle looks down at the body as we shut the lid. “I worked with him the summer he cut off his fingers with the baler,” he says. It occurs to me that I might be the only one here who still has all ten.

On the highway, Bill leads and I follow, with a few dozen cars in a long line of headlights behind me. At Roseau River I pull the coach into a dirt lot behind a white church, as plain as the last one but much smaller. I park nose-first against a pile of hay next to a wooden swing set. Behind me, in a bare spot that could be confused with additional parking, is the graveyard, with a half dozen or so flat stone markers. The hole’s been dug, the Device installed (Bill was here earlier today), and next to the grave is a pile of sandy dirt with half a dozen shovels stuck into it. Six men carry the box from the hearse onto the straps of the Device, and as it’s lowered, the crowd around the grave sings “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” from photocopied sheets. Children make faces at one another over the open grave. The men shovel dirt in by hand. It hits the box with a startling thump that I feel in my chest.

By now the sky is bruised blue and pink, with clouds like unstirred ink in water, and I hug my arms against the cold. A woman lays a crocheted caftan over an elderly man’s shoulders, which she rubs to bring them both some warmth. Even with the cold and the growing dark, watching the pile get smaller I feel strangely uplifted. Unlike at the other burials I’ve seen, no one’s in a rush to get it over with, and no one’s checking their watches or their cell phones for text messages. They have a ritual to complete, a responsibility to stay until the grave is filled. “
How beau-ti-ful heaven must be
,
must be
, /
Sweet home of the happy and free
,” they sing, and they mean it. Bill shakes my hand. I’m released from duty.

On the drive back to Winnipeg, I play the scene again in my head: the singing, and the rhythm of the sand hitting the casket. It’s the same ritual that sent their grandparents and great-grandparents to the sweet home of the happy and free, and when they
die, and their kids die, someone will dig a hole and bury them too. There’s a symmetry that’s also oddly liberating in its lack of choice. The rest of us get to argue over casket and urn catalogues, flipping from the La Precia to the Fredericksburg Cherry, pricing keepsakes and ash pendants and white-knuckling through a stack of CDs for music for the Celebration of Life. Randy Travis or Travis Tritt? Which one did Dad like? We can’t remember. Play “Wind Beneath My Wings.” We pay thousands for an improvised ritual, a one-off, where only the family gets the inside jokes in the eulogy about Dad’s ill-fitting dentures and the childhood dog he accidentally shot on a hunting trip, who went on to live a long three-legged life, while the rest of the mourners just scratch their heads, as if they’re watching some cryptic home movie.

The Mennonites have it easier: same casket, same hymns, same prayers, and everyone knows the script. This is what it must be like to live in an ordered universe, where the roads meet at right angles at every mile and, if you’re good and you pray and marry the girl God wants you to marry, His plan will be revealed when you die. You just have to get through the hard part: life, with its endless string of chicken-plucking and lousy weather. Forget self-expression or personal dreams and goals, especially if you’re a woman or gay or have doubts, in which case you may be shunned and lose your place in the queue for paradise. You can’t be sort-of orthodox. You’re on the team or you’re not. But the trade-off is clarity. You will go to heaven, and your neighbours will bury your body and send you on your way.

It’s dark by the time I get to the Factory. The lot’s empty, except for a van I don’t recognize. A light’s on in the building. I key-code the back door and find one of the trade clients inside with a late
delivery. He’s wearing a hunter’s camo jacket and cap, and he’s buttering the dead woman’s face and hands with Kalon cream. “Don’t want her to dry out,” he chirps.

Tomorrow there’ll be three more just like her, folks who are alive tonight but who won’t be by morning. The next day there’ll be three or four more, and so on. If God reveals Himself at a funeral home, it’s through His regularity: they just keep coming. Some of them will be carried to the grave and sung at or psalm’d at, but most will be cremated, their ashes sent home to their families, who, with all good intentions, will store them away until they can come up with a good idea for the last, final step.

T
HE
S
TORM

M
onday morning, and we’re heading for a ward removal at Tuxedo Villa, a seniors home on Corydon Avenue. Glenn parks the van in the back between two blue BFI recycling bins. The last time he was here, he parked in front and the staff barked at him about the optics. We roll the stretcher down a dim hallway, past residents in wheelchairs who ignore us. The drapes are drawn in the room with the body. The roommate is on the toilet, door open. In fact there is no door. The dead woman’s slippers are already in the wastebasket, her clothes in a dry-cleaning bag on the dresser. On top of the bag is the death certificate, which Glenn attaches to his clipboard. She was ninety-one. Her head is tilted back in the usual pose, mouth agape, as if she were caught mid-snore. Glenn hands me gloves and we lift her onto the stretcher; she’s very light. She spent her life as a nurse in England,
one of the staffers tells us, and when she came to Tuxedo Villa “she thought she could run the place,” but that was a long time ago. The last years have been hard. Back down the hallway, we turn at the loading dock where an alarmed Purolator deliveryman holds the door open. The service is the next day, ten people, cookies, with Shirley Burton on piano. The ashes are sent back to England in a DS008, a simple wood urn that costs $395 and is made by a local craftsman.

Thursday afternoon: arrangement conference at Aubrey with one family member, the son-in-law. His wife’s mother died last night and he’s the executor. She used to be hale, he says, a gardener. When she was eighty she shovelled a truckload of topsoil and tilled it into her garden bed herself. But in the last few years, she’s been unreachable, “probably schizophrenic.” She died at home.

“So,” Richard says, checking the file, “cremation?”

“Yes, please.”

Forms are signed. Afterwards, she’ll be stored at Aubrey, and scattered in the rose garden in the spring.

“How about April?” says Richard.

“You decide,” the man says. “In fact I don’t care to be there, so whatever the weather permits.” His wife, he says, has three siblings, but none of them are coming home, so there’s no need for a service.

The bill is $2,282.80 with GST. The man takes out his credit card, then pauses. He says his bank has offered to settle estate matters and funeral costs at a lower interest rate than Visa.

“You sure you don’t want the Air Miles?”

He pauses again. “No,” he says, “I’ll go with the bank.”

We’re done in twenty minutes.

We’re deep in a period of what Neil calls the “big black hole,” when the phone never rings, no matter how much he glares at it. Those who do call are looking for cheap and fast. For an industry that should be recession-proof (death and taxes, and all) the numbers are down, not just in Winnipeg but across North America. SCI’s calls fell 11 percent in the first quarter of 2009, which company president Tom Ryan described to investors as a drop “that many of us have never seen in our business careers.” Blame medical advancements against the big three (heart disease, cancer, stroke) and the fact that the current crop of those-most-likely-to-die come from a generation born in the 1920s and 1930s when birth rates were low. There are simply fewer old people and they’re living longer. But here’s the corker: modern death is preceded by an average ten years of chronic illness or dementia, according to the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics. In effect people are dying years before they’re technically dead, lost to Alzheimer’s and such. Family members who processed their grief and loss early, when the disease first took hold, are exhausted and possibly relieved by the time grandfather finally stops breathing. As he has outlived his peers, there’s no call for an elaborate funeral, so they call the crematorium. Is this the fate of the baby boomers? Will the most self-absorbed generation since the Habsburg Austrians peter out in their nineties, die at a hundred and then simply … disappear? Into Neil Bardal’s rose garden?