Collecting the dead...

My dad used to drive the ambulance for the funeral home in Cozad, Neb. It was really powder green Impala station wagon, but we called it an ambulance. It was the way back home for people who had gone off and died someplace else. Professors, doctors, housewives, dancers, it didn't matter what folks became when they went out into the world. They came back home in the powder green Impala with my dad.

People who died far away were flown to the nearest major airport, then shuttled to a funeral home where my dad picked them up. The closest airport was a six- hour round trip from the farm where we lived. Sometimes he had to go in the middle of the night. Dead bodies didn't wait. They turned pretty quick. Good sense says build a fire, but people like to see their dead. We like to make sure they're dead. We need the shock so we don't go around picking up the phone to call them.

My dad wasn't a mortician. He was a farmer. His cousin Virgil was the mortician. Pop just helped out. Folks said he had the right temperament to work with the dead.

"Harley, don't you get scared riding with those dead people?" they'd ask.

"Nah. It's the live ones that scare me," he'd say.

I don't think he liked retrieving the dead the way he liked growing corn. I think he liked it the way doctors and nurses like what they do. They help people get through illness. My dad helped people get through death. Most of us lose our equanimity around death as if it's contagious. It's people like my father who make death presentable to the rest of us.

Pop usually took the long drive to the airport by himself, but sometimes he took company. Once, before I was in school, he took me and my brother on a night trip to get a body. It was an old man. He was lying on a stretcher, covered with a sheet. Pop and the city undertaker loaded him in the back of the Impala and the four of us headed for home.

I'd seen dead bodies before, but usually they were in caskets with made-up faces and stiff clothing buttoned to their chin. I'd never been on a road trip with a dead person. I peered over the back seat to see if the sheet was moving. Pop said sometimes a dead person would suddenly sit up as if they'd changed their mind about being dead. He said it was their muscles moving around, just like a chicken after you slaughter it.

I really wanted that old guy to move, and by the time Pop pulled over to get gas, I couldn't stand it any longer. I slowly picked up the edge of the sheet and looked underneath.

Now I do remember seeing a naked old man lying still as a board and thinking I was in big trouble for looking at him because he was naked, and I do remember dropping the sheet like it was electrified. What I don't remember is the story that my dad tells everytime I take home a new friend. He says that when he came out of the gas station, I was playing "This Little Piggy" with the old man's toes.

I don't think this ever happened. I do not think that as a child, I took a dead man's toes to market. Yet my father's version of this story remains unchanged, and I do not recall being taken on a second trip in the powder green Impala.

Monday, November 30, 1998

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.