The Wet Collection

In Houston, in June, the morning air shudders like set gelatin. Swamp water saturates the air; seen through it, everything takes on a greenish cast. As in all jungles, plants grow ferociously: banana trees, marsh grass, potato vines twirling overnight up guy wires, river cane. If all the people left, plants would take the place in six months flat. Texas heat is, of course, legendary. Believe all you have heard. Blacktop goes gummy; during a Dallas heat wave, the Department of Transportation closes a freeway because eighteen-wheelers rip up the asphalt with their heavy tires.

Houston is a sprawling city with an area greater than that of Rhode Island. As a resident, you can choose to be proud of this or not. In 1999, it’s my first summer here, so I’m trying to decide. I prowl the city’s ragged margins looking for work: singing waitress, journeyman carpenter, Gallup pollster, street sweeper, bikini car-washer, Tarot-card reader, Harley-Davidson seller. No takers. Downtown, Enron thrives, and pundits natter about “the new economy.” The boldest predict that the Dow will never drop below ten thousand. Bull or bear, it doesn’t much matter, because I am broke. I can’t find a job anywhere. And then, in the classifieds of the Houston Press, I see the ad:

Everybody
Needs It!
Cemetery Sales

If the prospect says, “I’m not interested,” smile and agree with the feeling and say, “That’s O.K.; you know, I don’t think I know anyone that’s interested in a cemetery. But since I’m already here, the best service I can give to you is to go ahead and issue this discount certificate and be on my way. May I step in?”

PRESENTATION SCRIPT, HOLLYWOOD CEMETERY

During training week, I learn about “pre-need” sales, visiting potential customers in their homes and trying to sell property (plots or mausoleum space), caskets, concrete vaults, and monuments. We don’t have a funeral home, so all embalming is done elsewhere; we take over at the actual graveside. My manager, Richard Carlo, is a seasoned veteran of the death care business—of which Houston is an international hub—as well as a former postman and paratrooper with the name of his division tattooed on his beefy forearm. We spend hours in the break room of the cemetery’s office, going over our presentation script.

He flips to the next page of the Why Pre-Plan? section, a photo of a teary woman in a black blouse. “Stress to the families that pre-planning sends a message of love to those left behind,” he tells me. “It says to them, ‘I love you and I don’t want you to have to make these decisions alone.’” The woman in the photo looks tired, in need of a comforting shoulder, a drink, a makeover. If only she’d pre-planned. “Why should so many widows be compelled to make these decisions alone?” reads the caption. Much of the sales pitch directly targets women, though nobody admits it.

“Don’t call them ‘graves,’” Richard says. “I don’t like that word. Try to take the dark cloud out of pre-planning—call them ‘ground spaces.’ But for now, push mausoleum spaces.” The new mausoleum was supposed to be finished months ago, and one of the groundskeepers lets me in on why it’s not done yet. The contractor didn’t pay his workers, so they got frustrated and hocked all of his equipment at the Fiesta Pawn across the street. He went bankrupt, and the cemetery owners haven’t found a new contractor. The skeleton frame of the mausoleum stands empty all summer, its concrete foundation littered with construction detritus: lumber scraps, bent nails, empty bottles.

“It’ll have six levels: the floor level, A, we call ‘prayer level,’ B is ‘heart,’ and C is ‘eye.’ D through F are the cheapest levels,” Richard says. “We call those the ‘heaven’ levels. Probably as close to heaven as you’re going to get,” he says. He laughs, and I understand that this laugh is something customers never hear, are not supposed to hear. He is being himself, not a salesman; he has let me into his group. I am torn between distrust and a desire to return his friendship, if that ’s what this is.

Knock briskly six times (do not ring the doorbell), stand to the right center of the door and say: “Good evening, Mr. (or Mrs.) ______ (emphasize their name as though you know them). Fine, I am ______ (your name). May I step in?” At this time step to the left, wipe your feet, and enter the home.

PRESENTATION SCRIPT, HOLLYWOOD CEMETERY

“Well, yeah, some of the salespeople actually do case the neighborhoods,” he says. This is not something he mentioned in our phone interview. “But you have to have strong Spanish skills to be really successful at that. Our target market is typically Hispanic, mid-forties or older, lower to middle income.

There’s a drift of candy wrappers and old newspapers in a corner of the chain-link fence, a gutted washing machine on the curb. A patchy dog bays at us. A woman emerges from the open garage, and Richard says, brightly, “Hello, my name is—”

Her kitchen stinks of garbage and backed-up drains, and I am ashamed of myself for noticing this, for noticing the chinks in the wall where the window frames gap, for pitying the circumstances of her life even as she plans her funeral. She might be thirty-five. It’s hard to tell.

Richard does most of the talking, and he does it by the book. He asks The Question that Always Makes You Look Good: “Have you ever had to make final arrangements for a loved one?” (“If the prospect says ‘no,’ emphasize how lucky she has been. If she says ‘yes,’ remind her of how traumatic those decisions were. Does she want that for her husband, her daughter, her son?”) He shows her the list of “Forty-nine Things You Must Do on the Most Difficult Day of Your Life” (1. Call the coroner 9. Notify pallbearers 14. Provide vital statistics about the Deceased 25. Decide on casket 40. Pay for interment). I hold the presentation book, make eye contact, try not to think about it too much.

She decides on two plots in the Memorial Park (“Our Lady of Guadalupe”) section of the cemetery, near the statue of Jesus Praying in the Garden. Memorial Park is the “most economical section,” as well as the one directly targeted toward Hispanics. Richard told me earlier why these plots cost less: “The bayou, Little White Oak, borders this part of the property, and when it rains too hard, it floods. Remember the big storm last fall?” I did. Semis floated down I-10. “Bayou overflowed. Had water clear up to Jesus’ chin.”

We work out a payment plan, twenty dollars a month for the next six years, and she signs the contract. As we drive away, I ask Richard why he didn’t tell her about the flooding problem.

“Look, we gave her a good discount on those plots, didn’t we?” he says. “You saw how she lived. She’s a grocery checker, she can’t afford anything better than that. Now she’s covered.

“Yeah, so this family had a boy who drowned,” he says. “I sold them that space at-need, plus eleven others on payments. They came to visit their son’s grave after a big storm, and it was under ten feet of water. Man, were they hot. They wouldn’t even talk to me. We had to dig up their son and bury him on higher ground.”

Two telemarketers cold-call people and give us a list of the ones who don’t hang up. As a “Pre-Need Sales Counselor”—now that I’ve finished training, I have a title—I’m supposed to call these potential customers and set up sales appointments with them in their homes. So I do it, I call them, and I’m surprised at how few of them yell at me. If I were on the other end of the line, I think I’d resent that bright voice reminding me of my own mortality—and would I like to beat inflation by buying at today’s prices?

(A Memorial) should not reflect sorrow but rather the long years of warmth and affection typical of the American Family.... As an essential part of our American way of life, a Memorial should speak out as a voice from yesterday and today to ages yet unborn.

“WHAT IS A MEMORIAL?”

Between phone calls and house visits, I read up on monument literature. Monument lit is a genre unto itself; like most propaganda, riddled with wild promises, but peculiarly awful in its pledge to ease the sting of death while providing a measure of immortality. The balm of Gilead, they would have you believe, is made of good Georgia granite. It doesn’t help that the retail price (as per Hollywood policy) is a whopping 385 percent of wholesale. What this means is that a modest headstone runs about one thousand dollars, and that’s just in gray granite; Black Mist or Red doubles the price. A marker for two often totals three thousand, plus engraving.

So, if you’re buying a monument—perhaps one from the “Rock of Ages” product line—what can you expect from your considerable investment? Royal Melrose Granites offers a headstone in Sunset Red, with a “delicately carved acanthus leaf, timeless symbol for the Garden of Heaven.” The ad promises that “the strength of the solid granite design offers comfort and peace.” Maybe it’s possible to ease your pain with a nice slab of granite; people find comfort in surprising ways. But I don’t buy it, not even the more tangible “strength” and “solid.” Hollywood is littered with cracked monuments, victims of the groundskeeper’s manic riding-mower runs.

I study lists of flowers and their meanings: iris for “eloquence and divine message,” pansy for “thoughtful recollection,” oak leaves for “virtue, stability, and faith.” I want iris to be iris and oak to be Quercus, deciduous, bearer of squirrel mast and lender of shade. I want to gag. Only thistle carries a whiff of humanity’s honest stink: “a symbol of austerity, independence, and earthly sorrow.”

Nobody I know is buried in this cemetery. This makes a difference. Here in Houston, I live my life in present and future only; without death, the past has no teeth. And so I walk between the graves—part of my job—and read inscriptions of my unknown dead. Many of them move me, particularly those in Babyland. But of all the monuments, the one that comforts me—about my life and my job in this place, a place that is already starting to get to me—belongs to Fritz Hahn, Houston blacksmith, 1898–1935. His headstone is an anvil. The hollows he pounded are still there, and I rub them with the heel of my hand. The cemetery is not without inhabitants. A yellow-crowned night heron (breeding phase) stalks delicately through a mud puddle. Masses of tadpoles shudder. There’s an alligator in Little Oak Bayou; he slinks away when we get too close. I have never seen anything this clearly, I think. I allow myself to hope.

People leave things at the cemetery. One day, while showing spaces to a pair of prospective customers, Dale spots a plastic bag behind a bush. He doesn’t mention it, but the wife notices.

“The bag had a dead chicken in it,” Dale tells me later. “She yelled so loud, I thought she was gonna bust herself. Someone’d cut the chicken’s throat, so it was all blood and feathers, and underneath was a bunch of bloody clothes. It turned out for the best, though; I got them to buy mausoleum space instead.”

Mysterious things: one morning, I find a red snapper, a pink votive, and a carnation on the grave of a woman who died in 1917. Bluebottles swarm the fish’s empty eye. An enormous grackle perches on a nearby headstone, a rattling squawk coming from deep inside his chest.

I’m not sure what to make of these gifts—Dale calls them voodoo—but some of the other, less cryptic offerings move me. An unopened bottle of Corona. The plastic figures of jungle animals glued to a tiny marker in Babyland. A limp Mylar balloon that reads “You’re So Special.” A warped, rained-on Feliz Cumpleaños card, the kind that plays a song. From across the graveyard, I hear its tinny snatches of music, and finally figure out where it’s coming from. She had been eighteen years old, and beautiful. The locket on her headstone was propped open so everyone could see her.

After a couple of weeks, Richard pulls me into his office and asks me to switch from pre-need to at-need sales. This means that when someone dies, my phone will ring. I worry about getting emotional when confronted with the Recently Bereaved; I worry more about paying my rent, due soon, and figure at least I won’t have to convince people that they need the plot. I take the job. The first thing I learn to do is wait. Between the many small but weighty events that make a graveside service, there are vacant hours. I find things to occupy my time.

Women, they’re almost always women, usually in groups of two or three, and undoubtedly packing a notebook. Amateur genealogists have distinctive field markings. After a couple of weeks here, I can spot them at fifty paces.

By Houston standards, Hollywood is an old cemetery, with the first burial in 1895 (July 12, boy, ten months). So a lot of people trying to fill their charts come here for information. The Research Room is off-limits to them—exclusive as the stacks at Harvard—but not to me. They wait, more or less patiently, on the stained loveseat in the lobby while I look for their dead relatives.

Like Houston, the Research Room is outdated and hard to use, with a logic wholly its own: outsiders, beware. The central relic is a four-foot-tall Rolodex comprised of crimped metal pages that slap together when I turn it. All burials from 1895 through 1980 are listed here, each name typed on a thin strip of balsa wood that looks a lot like a coffee stirrer. A number next to each name corresponds to one of eight clothbound ledgers stacked on a sagging shelf.

One slow afternoon, I leaf through the ledgers, reading the fragments of lives taped to the crumbling pages. In a spidery hand, a woman’s will, dated 1916. A letter typed in 1979, one sister refusing another burial in the family plot, “inasmuch as she had our brother disinterred and moved against his own wishes.” A letter mailed during the Depression: “July 26, 1934, Kingsbury, Texas. We are all well but not prosperous.”

One of my long-ago predecessors had filled the Cause of Death column with notes in a curling, long-extinct script. 1898 2 January, Thrown from Buggy. Congestion Chill. Black Jaundice. Chills of Fever. Locked Bowels. 1902 30 July, Killed in R.R. Collision Near Shreveport. Shot Self while Hunting. Found Dead in Hotel. I total the number of burials for each year. 1944 had been a big one—708, more than double that of 1943. “War Dead Shipped from France” appears, but in a different hand.

The phone rings. It is the undertaker, telling us when to expect the family. Waiting for the next of kin is a nervous business. I want to get my part right, to press the hand with the right blend of compassion and confidence, to pass the correct props (contract, pen, Kleenex), to watch my cues, to defer. I believe they will notice if I get it wrong. It’s certainly possible that I overestimate my role.

Two children, a boy and a girl, sit in the waiting room. She giggles and he shushes her. The room is furnished with a dingy pair of couches, a crooked gold-framed mirror, and a coffee table laid with a bowl of potpourri and an enormous Bible open to John 14–17. The girl slurps a soda and stage-whispers in Spanish. A pair of plastic “bronze” roses, the kind sold as an accessory to grave markers, are thumbtacked to the wall. White-painted burglar bars are bolted to both the inside and outside of the windows. Outside, a Peterbilt idles at the red light, making the windowpanes rattle. I will never be able to smell this particular blend of potpourri without being transported back to this waiting room, this maroon carpet, this stagnant afternoon. Mary the secretary plays oldies in her office: Monkees, Beach Boys. The kids on the sofa pay no mind.

Night falls. I go home and make the mistake of turning on the local news. I can’t decide whether Channel 13’s evening anchorman is companionable, depressing, or just familiar. The bad news never quits: someone finds a dead baby in a Dumpster, another knifes a guy for his station wagon, a boy shoots his cousin. It’s a familiar story—two kids playing with a gun they think is unloaded. “How many times does this have to happen?” I ask the newscaster.

Later, we walk the narrow road to the space together. I hold the lot book and look away when they cry. A pine tree and the shadow of a pine tree. He was eleven years old. The service will be Tuesday.

The evenings are long, but I fill them. I walk aimlessly, read Eudora Welty, paint a picture of the Titanic from a kit. I string pearl-colored beads on dental floss. Pearls = Respectability. I call my mother. She tells me that Lou Holtz used to sell graves too. “‘You’ve never sold anything!’ his wife said. That summer, he sold their furniture, their refrigerator, and their washing machine.” This is the punch line. I brood.

Outside, in the yard below my apartment, a possum noses around a bowl of soggy cat chow. The backs of his pink paws are covered in dark fur; he is wearing black fingerless gloves, very natty, like Cyndi Lauper. Now, past midnight, the sky is a bright pink-orange, Red Lake #40. A Norway rat runs along a power line. He is silent, lean, and speedy. The constant surf of traffic on 59. Thrumming sodium lights.

Tuesday. I iron a black dress, polish my shoes, clip on my fake pearls, apply sunblock. I’ve been burned just walking to a site; how much worse will a service be? The tent, after all, is for family members; they’re paying for it. I will stand aside, at a respectful distance.

When I get to the cemetery, I drive the route in my Camaro, entrance to gravesite, so when the procession arrives I can lead them without getting lost. I envision chilling scenarios: the car runs out of gas. I forget and leave the radio on, loud. I lead the procession down the wrong lane. There are no blind alleys—someone has thought of this—and the layout is basically a horseshoe with smaller loops tacked to it. Still, there is a “way” and a “better way.” Who wants an excruciatingly slow drive-by of the maintenance shed, the broken monuments and stray shovels, the Dumpster with muddy silk flowers scattered out front?

What if the workmen forget to dig the grave? Instead of a deep, cool rectangle, its corners neatly squared, there will be two little red flags, that’s all, two red flags flapping helplessly in the wind. I wait. I worry.

The caterwaul of a siren. Three o’clock: right on time. The procession pulls in, first the hearse—“rolling stock,” undertakers call it, with more than a touch of pride—then the limos for the family, the everyday cars of the other mourners. I ease down Palm Drive at a respectful 12 mph, glancing in the rearview at the hearse behind me, making sure nobody gets left behind.

We arrive. The pallbearers, none of them out of high school, pull the child-sized casket (Our Lady of Guadalupe, #112, gas blue) from the hearse. A little boy of six or seven grabs one of the silver carrying bars. He reminds me of a ring bearer.

The priest wastes no time; he’s done in ten, censer jutting from his pocket like a mike. He shakes holy water over the casket and leaves. The undertaker grabs a pail of crumbly dirt, and as the mourners file past, each throws a pinch on the casket. Like Communion, everyone seems afraid to get too much.

All this takes a while; a line of mourners snakes down Palm Drive. Downy-legged girls, his nervous classmates, too young to shave. Serious men—his teachers. Neighbors, relatives, friends. The PTA sent a floral spray.

Mothers clutch their children. One woman stands behind her son the whole time, arms around his neck, face pressed to his nape. The mother of the dead child is expressionless, blanked by grief. The others, sympathetic, mourn too, but they don’t want to share her place. The mothers hold their children until they squirm.

I stand aside. I am not supposed to take part in this grief. I am here in case of emergency, though what could be worse than what’s already happened? I let my eyes go out of focus. I think about my work.

Once the corollary mourners leave, walking solemnly to their cars, I give the groundskeepers the signal. They have been smoking under a shade tree since the beginning of the service—at a respectful distance, of course, though I could still hear the rise and fall of their conversation. They walk over, pull the tarp off the dirt, and start dismantling the tent. The undertaker motions the pallbearers to move the casket to the grave, and Walter drives up in the big yellow backhoe.

They drop the casket onto the lowering bed. Antonio and José, done with the tent, unspool the strips holding the casket at ground level. One man for each end, they lean over the grave, rolling the bars of the bed until the casket hits the bottom of the concrete vault. Antonio climbs into the grave, pulls the spray of dahlias and gladiolus off of the casket, and boosts himself out. Members of the family stand in the patchy sunlight, watching Walter as he hooks the lid of the vault with the backhoe and maneuvers it into the hole. It lands with a loud chunk, concrete against concrete. The men of the family pick up the shovels Antonio gives them and go to work.

Most of them add one or two clods of dirt, then pass the shovel on, but one handsome boy of eighteen or twenty loosens his tie and keeps digging. It’s not ceremonial; he wants to fill the grave. The shovel bites into the mound of dirt. He bears down on his loafer-clad foot, lifts his load, and throws it in the hole, violently. Time and again he does this. There’s a rosebud stuck in his back pocket. His Adam’s apple shakes as he fights back tears.

When the men have finished, Walter pulls the backhoe around and fills the grave completely. He concentrates intensely, as he always does. Not a crumb falls unintended. Not a stray flower does he crush. Finally he smooths the grave and tamps the dirt. The boy’s parents leave. I hang around, picking up dropped cups and wads of Kleenex.

Antonio and José help me arrange the casket sprays around the fresh grave, and I take a Polaroid. (“Families like to have a picture of the grave looking all nice,” Richard claims.) When the photo develops, the ribbons on the arrangements banked around the grave show up as blue blurs. There is no headstone; there has not been time to have one cut. In the background stands the Dumpster, full of construction trash from the mausoleum. Broken boards and chunks of concrete are strewn around. Downtown skyscrapers show as hazy square shadows. I take another shot from a different angle and run inside just ahead of the sudden cloudburst.

There are the usual economies: reused foil, low-wattage bulbs, the careful laying by of leftovers. I scrimp on air conditioning; my apartment is a sweat lodge. Ninety degrees at midnight. In the closet, shoes sprout filaments of green mold. Check #577, Houston Light and Power, $23.44, July Payment.

After two pay periods come and go without a check, I find out the only thing we don’t get paid for is at-need opening and closing—funerals, essentially, all I’ve been doing since I started. I can quit now and cut my losses, or stay and hope to sell a monument or two. I decide to stay. In the meantime, money is tight. I allow an occasional splurge: grated nutmeg for a meat-sauce recipe, an adventure-travel guide (“Biking across Vietnam”; “Rafting the Omo”; “Summiting Kilimanjaro”), gasoline.

Some nights I can’t sleep, so I drive. The 610 Loop is my standby. Forty-two miles, and if it’s late enough, I can ring the city in half an hour. I pass the Bud brewery, the flaming stacks of the Ship Channel, Port of Houston, AstroWorld’s rickety coasters, Carmen’s Secreto XXX Emporium, and the Transco Tower, whose lighthouse beam sweeps slowly over my city. I tell exits like beads. Some nights I can’t make myself walk up the steps to that apartment, can’t turn on the light and see it empty, can’t face another night in that bed. So I drive too fast, and it is a drug. I drive the funerals and the death out of me and into the asphalt still warm from a long day. I hold it in. I keep going.

The undertaker at one service whispers through the whole thing. “My family was a dynasty of Texas undertakers,” he tells me. “Twenty-four of us in the business, and offices in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, New Braunfels, Monterrey.”

The thing that’s different is his hands. The dark jacket, the forty extra pounds, the razor-parted hair—I expect. All summer, the undertakers I meet vary little from type. But the others have hands that are cool and fleshy; there are no bones inside them, but cartilage, like sharks. This man’s palm is hard as an old boot, and his knuckles are big, like an assembly-line welder’s, knobby from repeating the same motion thousands of times. He stands next to me, clasping those hands in front of him, whispering.

“Every person has ten friends,” he says. “Conquer one, and you conquer their ten friends too. Give these people compassion and you’ll tie them to you with a knot that won’t break.”

Morning. Someone must have made a good sale, because there’s a box of Shipley’s donuts on the break table next to an urn of cremains. I read the Chronicle, but not the obits. Old news by now. If there’s business to be had, the phone will ring.

Dale walks in, eating breakfast on the run. Today, as always, he has a can of tuna, a protein shake, and a bowl of cold oatmeal; as always, he is in a hurry. He talks with his mouth full, never opens his tuna cans all the way. Time is money. As my grandfather used to say, “People are dying now that never died before.”

“Got my head shots back,” he says. And they’re not bad: the Intellectual (Brooks Brothers button-down), the Soccer Star (bare chest, green shorts), the Man Reflecting (eyes closed, droplets of water on the lashes, pouting lip). The Many Moods of Dale. He’s the crown prince of cemetery sales, Hollywood’s top seller two years running, with the plaque to prove it. Glossy composite board with a tiny gold-plated shovel pegged to it. Richard’ll go around the bend if Dale ever leaves, I think.

Grave. Probe. These words should never be joined. But I’m curious, so I go along. The deal is done with a T-shaped bar six feet long. I don’t know which is worse: hitting something, or not. We hit one. It must have been a newer burial, post-1970, after the cemetery started requiring vaults in order to prevent casket collapse. The older burials—1910, 1914, wooden caskets—we know they’re there, but they’re gone.

I find out later that some of the groundskeepers make extra money by selling stray bones the backhoe unearths. “Witch doctors grind them up for potions,” Dale tells me, over the phone, after I’ve already left.

The phone rings. The deceased had served in the Army between Korea and Vietnam. Forty years came and went. I shake hands with his two sons and arrange the service. Because he was a veteran, an honor guard will be there.

The members of the honor guard are older than I expect. The five of them arrive an hour before the service, cramped into the captain’s red ’91 Mustang; they need to set up. I tell them where the grave is and they head for it.

At first, it’s the standard thing: the procession arrives and follows me back to the site (respectful 12 mph), the pallbearers unload the casket (flag draped), the priest says his thing and kisses his stole, an old woman sings a sad song. The honor guard stands at parade rest.

An enlistment-day photo rests on an easel near the casket. I try not to stare, but I do, and it’s a mistake. Bright eyes, dark tonsure of hair, hopeful smile. He’s so young, and so familiar; he looks a lot like my father, whose own enlistment photo hangs on a wall back home, in South Carolina. This picture is even faded in the same way, the whites turned yellow, the blacks and grays gone green. My father is alive, thank God, and I try not to think of him. I look away.

The song ends, and two members of the honor guard, the sagging captain and another, taller man, position themselves at either end of the casket. They start reading from cue cards; English now, though the rest of the service has been in Spanish. I lean against the glossy black quarter panel of the hearse. Distant thunder.

I will forget most ofwhat these men read, as the other mourners will. That is all right. Part of why these uniformed men have come is to provide sound, noise, the semblance of companionship in an empty room. “Our ranks march on, one thinner,” says the captain, and in the darkening gloom it’s easy to imagine rank upon rank of marching soldiers. Uniforms pressed, eyes bright, they advance as one body, bathed in sepia light. We strain our ears for the sound of one slipping out of step, slumping to the ground. And we hear it, just as a coin dropped in a crowd turns heads: we hear what we listen for, what we value.

“Commander, present our nation’s colors to the daughter of our fallen comrade,” says the guard to the captain. They grasp the corners of the flag, lift it taut, and fold it in a tight triangle as the clouds break and the rain comes. The captain turns stiffly and paces to the deceased man’s daughter. Her shoulders shake. He bends at the waist and places the flag on her lap, and she starts to sob.

Homily read, the captain and the guard trudge into the rain and join the other three next to the grave. “Commander, order twenty-one-gun salute to honor our fallen comrade,” the guard says. Three of them snap to attention, as best they can, and shoulder their rifles. Click, boom, they shoot off one round of blanks. Three brass cartridges fall to the wet grass. Click, boom, another, another, until they’ve done seven rounds. And while they do this, it starts raining harder. Rain drums on the tent, splashes on the hood of the hearse, mingles with the crack of the guns and the sound of tight crying.

One of the guards breaks attention to hit “play” on a waterproof tape player set on a stand, and out comes a scratchy “Taps,” barely audible over the spattering of the rain. When the song finishes, all five of the guards drop to their knees in the wet grass, fumbling for the spent cartridges. Rain runs down their freckled scalps and into their ears as they paw the ground, bits of sodden grass sticking to their fingers.

The captain collects the shells in a paper sack, which he gives to the daughter. The bottom of the bag leaks onto her lap. The others gather their rifles, their boom box, their stand, and prepare to go. The short captain winks at me when he marches past. “See you next time,” he says. That’s when it gets to me.

I never knew this man. If he’d been younger, he might have known my dad, served with him in Vietnam, taken his picture at boot camp. Listen: my dad is okay. Today is his birthday—remarkable coincidence—and maybe right now, lunchtime, Mom is cutting a slice of carrot cake for him; maybe tonight they will go out to Steak and Ale. He is all right. And I—I am not sitting in that chair with a flag on my lap. It is not my time. Not yet.

The phone rings. A child, four years. The father arrives an hour later, and I take him into the room with the big round table where we sign the contracts. He has no money. He doesn’t tell me this, doesn’t have to. The one thing we are never to do is give discounts on at-need merchandise. Most things have two prices, pre- and at-need, with at-need generally higher; when you have a captive customer, it makes sense to capitalize.

“Look,” I tell him, “this is what I can give you.” I speak softly, so Richard won’t overhear, and quote a price half of what it ought to be. He signs and leaves, and I give the copy of the contract to Richard.

“This is the price we’re giving them,” I say. What can he do, dock my nonexistent paycheck? “Dale will do their funeral. I’m leaving tomorrow for South Carolina; I’m going home.”

I hope no young woman plans my funeral. I want an old woman with a womb stretched from bearing or small, barren, fig-shrunk: empty. I want someone with small veins and slow blood, whose eyes will stay dry and open and whose mind will be on something else, preferably a grocery list or an unpaid bill. Some common thing of life. I want someone experienced in grief, who can put it on like a coat and hang it on a hook when it passes its time of use.

I want to tell her, Bury me head first, or not. Nobody will know the difference but you, and you’ll forget by tomorrow, when your work day starts again and you do what you do: take the body from those who loved it living, keep it safe, play along. Do the best you can; do no harm. They will forget, have forgotten already, any kindness you may have done. This does not matter. Do what you can and hope that when your time comes, someone will do the same for you and for those who stand around the hole in the ground, looking in.