SermonStudio

It was on a warm Saturday afternoon, late in the spring of 1911. I'll never forget the day. I had just returned from my regular Saturday fishing excursion with old Doc Hallister. We hadn't caught any fish - we rarely did - but we enjoyed each other's company. Doctors and morticians have many things in common. I used to kid him that my job was to bury his mistakes, and he used to accuse me of hovering around his office door like a vulture. This incipient black humor was just between us: a way of coping with the stresses and tensions of our work. He confided in me once that he had never gotten used to watching people die. He said it was his business to keep people alive. That was why he had become a doctor. He felt like a failure when death won the day. That was the way he had put it. Young people and children, whose mothers he had attended at their birthing, were the hardest, he said. I told him it was the same for me. Friends and the children of friends were the most difficult for me to bear. But we were both philosophical about it. These were our callings, after all: his to care for the dying, mine to prepare the dead for burial. So we went fishing every Saturday - if he wasn't out in the country somewhere delivering a baby, and if I wasn't embalming a corpse - and we talked about other things: politics and books we had read, the best tenor we had ever heard, women we had known or would like to have known, and baseball, the other great passion we shared. We were planning to take the train to Chicago to see the White Sox play in their new stadium. Cominsky Park, they called it. He never did get to go. I went with my wife a few years after he died, and I thought of him as we sat in the upper deck. Doc was a great source of comfort to me. I was glad that he was still alive after what happened on that Saturday afternoon.

As I pulled into the dooryard that day, I saw a rider bent over his horse, waiting for me under the butternut tree just beyond the gate. I pulled my rig over beside him. When he raised his head, I was able to see his face beneath the brim of his hat. It was one of Rupert Jones' boys. Rupert was a dairy farmer who lived about four miles outside of town, beyond the railroad bridge on the other side of the Little Pine River. He and I had been chums in grammar school, and we worked the railroad together when we were young bucks. We ran around together to dances and barn raisings, chased some of the same girls. He went into farming with his father after he married Pearl, and I joined Pa in the mortuary business. Rupert had asked me to be godfather for his first boy, Frank. We didn't see each other much after that. This was one of the younger ones, Earl, I think his name was.

"Pa sent me to bring you," he said. "Frank's dead - kicked by a horse this morning."

I didn't question him about the details. There was no need. It was a common occurrence in those days. I exchanged my fishing tackle for my embalming equipment, Earl tied his horse to the back of the buggy and joined me on the seat up front, and we were off. We rode in silence all the way out to the farm. Earl didn't say one word. He was in shock. I guessed that he must have been present when it happened, and I didn't try to get him to talk. It would all come out when he was ready.

The farm yard was already filled with neighbors who had come as soon as they heard. Wagons and buggies were parked all along the driveway. Some of the men had simply unhitched their work horses from the plow and ridden them across the fields. They stood in their harnesses with heads low, glad for an opportunity to rest early in the day. The men stood near their animals, speaking in quiet voices, going over the details of the accident. Small children were chasing each other around the barn. Rupert shook my hand when I got down from the buggy and thanked me for coming. He took me directly into the house, past the parlor filled with neighbor women, through the front hall and the kitchen, and onto the back porch, a lean-to room that had been added to the house as an after thought and served as a summer kitchen. It was a large, screened-in room, meant only for warm weather use. It served well for large family gatherings and as a place to feed threshing crews at harvest time. In the fall, when the air turned cold, they butchered deer and rabbits there and hung the carcasses up to cure for a few days before canning or smoking. Pearl was there with Frank's two sisters and several other women relatives. They had laid Frank's body out under a sheet on a long, hardwood table, with only his head exposed. I expressed my sympathy to Pearl, and then asked them to excuse me for a little while so that I could prepare the body. They all filed out, wiping their eyes, blowing their noses, and leaning on each other for support. The sight of me had set off a new round of weeping. It always did. I was the final harbinger of death. There was no more denying it, no more hoping that it wasn't true, after I arrived to do my work.

I pulled the sheet back and surveyed the body. There was a large red welt on the chest, but no marks on the head or face. The technical part of my job would be easy. I set myself immediately to the task at hand, trying not to let myself think too much about the life of this handsome, well-muscled young lad whose body lay before me. I would weep later, on the way home: get it all out, as I always did, before I greeted my own son. Oh, how my heart ached for Rupert and Pearl, but I put it out of my mind so I could do what I had to do. I had turned to get the needle and hose out of my bag when I heard a voice behind me speak my name.

"Mr. Cummens, is that you?"

I was startled to say the least. I turned around and there was Frank, sitting up on the edge of the table. He pulled the sheet around his body to cover himself. Then he spoke again.

"I know why you're here, and I won't interrupt you for long, but I have to tell you something before I go. Promise me you'll remember what I say. It's important that Ma and Pa hear the whole story. It will make it easier for them."

I promised him that I would listen carefully and tell them all that he said.

"Pa and I haven't been getting along," he said. "I was planning to run away and get a job in the city. I took some money out of the cash box - about $50 - just enough to get me started. I would have paid it all back. It's buried next to the big rock under the apple tree in the barnyard. I was going to leave in the morning while they were all at church. Pa probably doesn't know the money is missing yet, but he'll find out as soon as he looks in the cash box, and he'll know it was me that took it. I want you to see that he gets it back. And I want you to tell him and Ma that I am sorry for the trouble I caused them, and that I will always love them."

Then he laid his head back down on the table and was still. I stood there, numb, for a long time. I couldn't move; I couldn't even think. Finally, I forced myself to go over and touch the body. It was cold and there was no pulse. Afterward, I wasn't sure if it was Frank's ghost or Frank himself, in the flesh, who had sat up and spoken to me, but I had no doubt that it had happened. The words that he asked me to remember are forever imbedded in my memory.

The family must have wondered what was taking me so long. When I finished, at last, I bid them come in. Some of the men brought in the coffin and placed it by the table. Frank's mother and sisters would wash and dress him, and then his body would be placed in the coffin and carried into the living room for the wake that would go on all through the night and into the next day, until the time of the funeral. I would come back with the horse hearse and the preacher. My work would be complete after the procession and the burial in the cemetery. I picked up my bag of embalming equipment and the large blue bottle filled with Frank's blood, which I would dispose of later, and asked Rupert to join me outside. I walked out toward the apple tree in the barnyard with Rupert following along. When we came to the big rock, I picked up a stick and dug around until I found the package of money wrapped in a piece of old oil cloth. I gave it to Rupert, and then I told him everything that Frank had said. When I was finished, he grabbed me and hugged me to his big farmer frame so hard that I thought for sure he had broken several of my ribs. Then he turned, without saying a word, and went back into the house.

When I had finished repeating the story to old Doc, as we sat fishing on the bank of the Little Pine the following Saturday morning, he leaned back against a log, blew a big puff of smoke from his pipe, and said, "I'll be damned. Maybe death doesn't win!"

Author's Note: This story is shared in loving memory of Eleanor Cummings Steinhaus, who was a funeral director, with her husband Carl, in Montello, Wisconsin, from 1947 to 1976. They inherited the business from her father, C.A. Cummings, who founded it in 1905.