probably can’t say it anyway—look at you, smiling at me! You can’t say that, can you?
A couple of days after the war, I had all of a sudden sixty deceased in the fridge. Sixty! We stacked them in there like logs. Later I found out how lucky Savannah was we didn’t lose our electric power. God knows what they did with the cadavers where they had no refrigeration.
All of mine were either accidents or, like I said, pacemaker. I never worked so hard in my life as I did that couple of weeks after the war. I was in real trouble. No coffins, low on formaldehyde. I had to go to the county and get body bags. Can you imagine that?
Here I was, selling the most beautiful funerals in Savannah, and all of a sudden I’m doin’ body bags.
Had to. They would’ve stunk. I was just draining away the blood and putting in a weak solution of formaldehyde. I’d display ’em in a real fine casket, and then take ’em to the cemetery in it.
When everybody went home, we’d bag ’em and bury ’em. Had to be that way.
I got a carpenter to start making me boxes. He’d use pine, and sand ’em down. Shellac ’em if he could. So for a while I was turning out a fairly good funeral again. The boxes were just boxes, but the smell of uncured pine is a good smell. I’ve got it in my brain, that smell.
It was about six weeks after the war that we got a visit from the National Guard in Atlanta. They called a meeting of all the VFW and the American Legion and the Sons of the Confederacy and the Rotary Club and the Lions and all those clubs, down at the Hilton. General Trowbridge was the speaker. He announced that an organization called the Georgia Patrol had been formed by the Governor, and this group was supposed to keep refugees out of the state. I thought that was awfully harsh. I don’t have anything against people who need help. But then he started talking about radiation poisoning and looters, and things like people with rabies, and fleas carrying unknown diseases, and all of that. Then he tells about the problem with medical supplies, how the plants have been damaged or are irradiated. Most of them were in the Northeast, and those that weren’t are hardly shipping to Georgia, even if they are operating, and I see that we really are in a hell of a mess.
So then he says there is going to be a voluntary sign-up, that they need five thousand able-bodied men from Savannah for the Georgia Patrol. They are going to be covering the border complete.
The patrol would consist of a hundred thousand people, and they were just to keep the foreigners outside of the state altogether, except if they were known to have business here.
I realized as he talked that he and the Governor and all of ’em in Atlanta were nuts, to think a state in virtual economic chaos could field an army that size and supply it with food and weapons and all—it was damn foolishness,
They must have thought we’d lost the war, and they didn’t want to say it, but they were preparing a last- ditch defense of Georgia in case the Russians showed up.
But hell, if it was a last-ditch defense, I was damn well going to do my part. So on that assumption I joined up. As soon as I put down my job, funeral director, I got an earful about how I could carry a card as an auxiliary, but I couldn’t go on patrol because mine was an essential service, and under the Emergency Services Act passed that week by the legislature, I had to stay in my present business and I had to follow new regulations being worked out now.
I left that meeting mad and all confused. What regulations?
And what about the Georgia Association of Funeral Directors?
Were they involved, had they been consulted?
I buried fifty people that week, and found myself selling cremations real hard because fuel for the digging tools was getting scarce.
In those days the mail was still working, but it was slow, slow, slow. Not like it is now. You mail a letter in the morning collection here in Savannah, and it will be anywhere in Georgia in the afternoon. One thing that goes real good is the mail. Mail’s as good as the phone is bad. I mean, I still can’t get used to phone-call rationing. Hell, I was going to call my coffin company up in Illinois to special-order a real good casket, and here I find myself on a waiting list, the operator says ten days! That was Monday. How the mighty have fallen! I remember the days when you hardly even thought about the phone.
Well, no damn more.
So, getting back, let’s see, they started in dropping like flies.
Then we got gas-pressure trouble. The furnace won’t take ’em in my crematorium. I call the other guys and they all got the same problem. What the hell, we’re in trouble. We get together, and everybody’s in the same boat as me, doing maybe four times his usual business, no coffins, no preservatives, not even any damn cosmetics! And trouble with the digging tools and nobody to fix the damn things because you used to take ’em up to Atlanta for that and now it’s a long drive and they might not be able to help you, and on and on like that. We’re paying people fifty cents an hour to predig graves. We figure we can get some stoop labor if we just make some posters and put ’em up.
We each put up a poster, a meeting down on Cotton Exchange, fifty laborer jobs at half a dollar an hour. Can you imagine? The minimum wage was two-fifty, then. But there was no federal government now, was there? And we did not have that much money. It was a wild time, then. People would buy and sell stuff for peanuts.
I remember, during the famine, I would have to go out and barter funerals for food. Now isn’t that a hell of a note? But I was watching my own kids die. And Jennine did die, that’s my wife.
That was the flu as much as the hunger. And Ed’s not right, we don’t know why. He’s gone what they call catatonic, and the GP is saying it’s against the law for him to have hospital care. I guess it won’t be long before we put that boy to sleep. The hospital’ll do it for free since he’s on the triage due to mental incompetence. Or I could take him to a private practitioner. That death clinic over on Eleventh, the one called Sunshine House, is real nice. They have a live country-and-western group that does your favorite song, and you just go to sleep. “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” would be for Ed. He used to love that song back before the war.
Jennine’d sing it to him at bedtime, and he’d laugh his little head off. Then I’d give him to Weedon’s. I couldn’t do the funeral myself. I remember that boy used to bring me my lunch for a quarter when he was on holidays. Oh Lord. He was a line kid. Full of imagination and fun. Getting good at Little League.
I’ve gotten real close to the Good Lord. I pray all the time. My whole heart and mind is a prayer. I’m burying more than people now, I’m burying a way of life. Praise the Lord. I am burying a world that was so fair.
Dallas, October 10, 1993, 2:15 A.M
I am home again, sitting at the kitchen table with my notebook and a fresh pencil. It is two o’clock in the morning. I arrived home at nine, but so far I haven’t been able to sleep. Jim came back with me but he didn’t stay long. He has nothing like this, and must find it hard to be with another man’s family. The worst losses are those without end, where there is only the question. His own wife is such a loss.
I have seen my wife and son to bed, and now I am alone.
Being on the road so long has made me sharply aware of ordinary household things: the refrigerator’s humming, the kitchen clock’s ticking. Through the window above the sink I can see the moon hanging low in the sky. The night is rich and warm and fills me with expectancy. There is a faint smell of flowers on the air.
I have in my mind’s eye a picture of Anne on the front porch when I came home. At nine the shadows were already dense. I could see the white of her head against the red brick wall of the house. She did not cry out, but came quickly across the lawn, through the tall grass. Then she was standing before me, and I opened my arms and took her in them. She uttered a long sound, soft, and then laid her head against my chest. When she raised her eyes to look at me, I kissed her.
I gave her the little vase from our apartment. She held it a long time, examining it in silence. When we went into the house she put it in a drawer, and I understand that.
That was hours ago. I look at the drawer beneath the kitchen counter, wondering if before Warday any object could ever have been charged with such a combination of remembrance and threat that it could neither be displayed nor discarded.
A mockingbird sings, leaves rustle. I respect how tine a moment the world can yet make. We have been in shattered years, but there is peace in our consciousness now. I saw it in the eyes of the ones we interviewed,
