His face turned pale, but he nodded. He fished a small crank from somewhere underneath the coffin, inserted it into a hole down near the foot, and began to turn.
Almost as if by magic, the lid levitated an inch or so. When it did, the strong and unmistakable smell of decomposition roiled out of the interior. Burt flinched, and his face tightened into a mask, but he reached out, grasped the polished wood, and lifted the lid. Inside was Aunt Jean, still in the stained blue dress. Her hair was cleaner than when I’d seen her in the refrigerated trailer, and somebody had made a valiant effort to curl and brush it. The effect was bizarre but poignant, coiffed hair fringing a nearly bare skull. The few remaining tatters of skin served mainly to underscore how much bone was showing through: the zygomatic arches, the gaping teeth, the pointed chin, the sharp-edged eye orbits. When the light from the overhead fluorescents hit the face, a few maggots scurried for cover, and the funeral director turned a whiter shade of pale.
“We did our best to clean her up,” he said. “I’m so sorry about that.”
Burt didn’t respond, so I kept quiet, too.
Burt leaned down and studied the teeth, just as I had, down at the makeshift morgue a few days before. “I’d know that smile anywhere,” he said, “even without the face around it. Damn, Doc. She died two months ago, and I made my peace with it then. But seeing her like this, it’s as if she just died all over again, only worse. The indignity, you know?” He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. This time Burt wasn’t playing for the cameras.
“I know, Burt. I’m sorry,” I said.
“Mr. DeVriess,” began the mortician, “on behalf of all of us at Eternal Rest Mortuary, I’d just like to express our deepest—”
“Shut up,” snapped Burt. “Don’t you say one single sanctimonious word to me.”
The man’s jaw sagged, then clenched tight.
Burt pointed at the lustrous lid. “Now close it up.”
The man scurried to crank the lid shut, and Burt nodded to Helen. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
She pressed a button, and the furnace door opened. She slid the coffin in, closed the door, and touched the button labeled AFTERBURNER, then PRE-IGNITION. I heard the whoosh of flame, and in a matter of moments the hand-rubbed finish of the mahogany ignited and Aunt Jean began to burn.
CHAPTER 24
ON THE WAY BACK FROM THE CREMATORIUM, I STOPPED at a Hardee’s for a bacon cheeseburger. I was just about to pull up to the drive-through speaker when I remembered what Helen had said about the crematorium’s ashy dust—“it gets everywhere”—and I flashed back to the small cloud that had erupted from the processor when she’d ground the bones that day. Let’s wash our hands, I thought. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the water that swirled down the drain did seem a tad murkier than usual.
I ordered the burger and a sweet tea, and while I waited for the sandwich, I went to the drink counter to get my tea. There’s no consensus in the South about the ideal sugar-to-tea ratio in sweet tea, and over the years I’ve found that the ratio can vary wildly, depending on who’s doing the mixing. I dispensed a small sample into the bottom of the cup, so I could see where on the scale this batch happened to fall. The tea was so thick and syrupy I could almost have eaten it with a fork. There had to be at least a five-pound bag of sugar in the five-gallon urn. One pound per gallon, I thought. It’s easy to remember, and there is a certain symmetry to the formula. To lower the risk of a sugar coma, I looked for lemon—one lemon per cup would probably be about right—but there was none. The next-best thing, I decided, would be to cut the tea with lemonade from the soda fountain. I filled the cup halfway with tea, then began adding lemonade, pausing to resample every few spurts. By the time I’d gotten to a fifty-fifty blend, I’d reined in the sweetness, but the tea flavor was now pretty dilute. Life is a series of compromises, I reminded myself.