The Resurrection

here goes Lester Boatwright, hugging the far side of the street, eyes straight ahead, on his way to work. He's a night janitor at the Citizen's Bank Building over in Paducah and has to pass this way to get to the street car line, but he never looks in this direction. I don't think he blames me for what happened, but I guess the sight of me or the business still confronts him with something he hasn't ever been able to handle.

Lester first began hanging around my place of business when he was in his early teens. I thought it was just a passing phase, but when he kept on I realized it was a genuine interest. After a while, I began to use him for odd jobs and even let him watch as I worked, tried to answer his questions, loaned him some of my books to read.

I suppose it was odd for a boy his age, who hadn't been brought up in it as I was, to take an interest in my line of work. It couldn't have done much for his social life, though I don't expect Lester had such a thing. His mama was a widow with no other interests and kept a close watch on where he went and who with. But she didn't seem to mind him hanging around here, maybe even encouraged it. Soon after Lester graduated from high school, she came to me with Lester in tow.

"Mister DuPree," she said, "I want Lester to be an undertaker."

"Yes, Ma'am," I said. "And what about Lester?"

"Me, too," he said.

"And I want you to train him," she said.

"Well, that's mighty nice of you, but that's not the way things are done."

"Oh, I know that, I've looked into it, and I know he will need to go to school and then pass a state examination for his license. I also know he's going to have to spend a year working under somebody afterwards. That's where you come in."

"Lester is a good boy, and he shows a real interest in the work, but I'm afraid my business is just not big enough to afford a second embalmer."

"But it won't cost you anything. He'll work for nothing. He'll have to spend that year somewhere, and if he had to go off to do it, it would take everything he might make and more for him to live. Here, he can live at home, and even working for nothing we would come out ahead."

I could see she had thought it out pretty thoroughly. I wondered how she was going to do without him while he was away at school, but she had thought that out, too. She went with him.

When they got back, Lester came to work for me. He turned out to be good, very good at embalming and preparing a body for viewing, better than I was and I'd been at it a few years. But when it came to dealing with the living, he had a long way to go. He seemed to have no interest in people and so just stood around and looked solemn, which people read as cold and uncaring. I wondered if I would ever be able to help him with that part.

Miss Violet died on a Wednesday. I know because Doc Hellums and Sheriff Woolums were here, and Wednesday was the night we always got together. We would have supper and then sit around a bottle of sour mash whiskey, courtesy of the sheriff and we never asked where he got it, and play cards or sometimes just talk, hoping the phone didn't ring because we all three were always on call.

They came, Doc and the sheriff, partly because of Mama's cooking. She would fix the meal and then go off to the Wednesday evening prayer service at Ebaneezer Baptist church and leave us to serve ourselves. And partly because they liked the talk and the sour mash whiskey. And partly because, associated as we were with the painful times in people's lives, we were all three something of outcasts in the community, welcome when we were needed but otherwise they'd as soon not have us around. The Bad News Three, they called us. There was a saying: "May the good Lord deliver us from the Bad News Three -- Doc Hellums, Sheriff Woolums and Mister DuPree." So our weekly meetings were a kind of sticking together. We had a lot in common and felt easy with one other, and neither Doc nor the sheriff was bothered by my mixed blood.

Oh, yes. I know I don't look it, but I'm a mongrel, offspring of a white father and a colored mother. He was Littleville's undertaker before me, and she was his housekeeper. His wife was dead, and Mama's husband had long since run off and left her. I was born with a white skin, straight hair, thin lips and a narrow nose. It created a scandal, of course, but people eventually had to accept it. I was brought up in the business, and when my father, Mister Ogg, died, everybody seemed to think it natural for me to inherit and carry on. Mister Ogg had buried all the dead in Littleville, white and colored. I do the same.

The color of my skin has made it possible for white people to do business with me. The color of my mother's skin lets the colored people see me as almost one of them. But none of them, white or colored, would think of inviting me home for a meal or even just to sit and talk, so you will understand that I valued highly my Wednesday nights with Doc and the sheriff.

Miss Violet died late in the afternoon. I got the call from Doc Hellums. "Yes, she's gone, Jim. Not unexpected. We've known about that heart for years, though she never would let me really examine her. You remember the arrangements."

"Oh yes. As you well know, she's made that plain several times. Willie May is to dress her and I'm to do nothing more than place her in the casket."

Willie May was Miss Violet's colored maid.

"Well, we may have to alter things just a bit. Willie May is perfectly willing to dress her, but she point blank refuses to spend the night here. I suppose we could get someone else, but it's getting late. Why don't you come get her and keep her overnight?"

Doc waited to help me get her into the hearse, because Lester and his mother were not back from Frankfort where they had gone for him to take the test for his embalming license. Then he followed me back and helped me put her on the table in the embalming room. And since it was near supper time, we went on back to the living quarters and had a nip of sour mash while we waited for the sheriff to show.

Helms was his real name, Andrew Helms, but people had trouble saying it and called him Doc Hellums or just plain Doc. Doc likes to tell the story about a woman bringing her young daughter in for treatment. He introduced himself to the little girl as Doctor Helms. As they were leaving the little girl said to her mother, "He said his name was Helms."

"It is," her mother said.

"Then how come you call him Hellums?"

"Because that's his name. Now hush."

Doc had come to Littleville a dozen years before, fresh out of medical school, to take over from old Doc Gore when he retired. He had brought a young wife and bought a house up on the hill to the west of town, but she soon got tired of his never being home and went back to wherever it was she had come from. It didn't seem to bother him. With both the white population of Littleville and the colored to look after, he had enough to keep him busy and then some.

Sheriff Woolums was the other member of the group. He didn't live in Littleville, but the three of us were often brought together professionally, at the scene a crime, say, or an accident, and we got to know each other pretty well. And he soon realized it didn't hurt at all to have two people as well known in the community as Doc and I were to vouch for him and advise him, especially at election time.

And speaking of elections, everybody called him Sheriff but he was sheriff only half the time. The other half he was just a deputy. By law a sheriff could not, in that day, succeed himself in office, so you would team up with a partner. You would run for a four- year term and your partner would be your chief deputy. The next time, the partner would run and you would be his chief deputy. If one partner was strong, he might call all the shots regardless of his title. Or they might decide to split the county evenly. That's the way it was in Sheriff Woolums' case. Littleville fell in his jurisdiction.

Just as we were sitting down to eat, Lester came in with a big smile on his face. "I just wanted to let you know I passed, and I'm a licensed embalmer now."

He accepted our congratulations and then hurried off to take his mother on home since they were just getting in.

"There was never any doubt in my mind about him passing," I told them. "He knows more about it already than I do and I was brought up with it. And as for making a corpse look natural, he's as good as I ever saw. You have to have a gift for it and he's got it."

"You better watch yourself," the sheriff said. "He might just set up shop and run you out of business."

"Well, he's still got most of a year to go before he can operate entirely on his own, and even then I doubt he'll be ready." I said. "Preparing a body for burial is only a small part of undertaking. Your main concern has to be with the living. And here's something Mister Ogg taught me: The message death sends is that life has no meaning. Good or bad, rich or poor, in the end it all comes to the same thing. It's your job as undertaker to argue against that, to somehow convince people that the life that has just ended was after all worthwhile, and that life for those remaining is still worth the effort. And you do this by treating the dead with dignity and reverence and the living with compassion and respect and by any number of other things you can't begin to describe but know when you've done them. And if you do everything right, people will leave the funeral with hope in their hearts instead of despair."

I could tell by the look on their faces I had become way too serious for comfort, so I grinned and said, "Or something like that. Anyway, I'm not sure Lester will ever even understand that part of the job, much less be able to do it."

We finished the meal and moved on to the sour mash and the talk turned to Miss Violet.

"I plan on the funeral tomorrow afternoon," I said. "I know that's rushing it, but in this weather and without embalming, I don't want to put it off. I talked to Reverend Sloan and he sees no reason against it. So the visitation will be at the house in the morning and the service at two at the Methodist church."

"Why no embalming?" the sheriff asked.

"Strict orders," I told him. "She made it very plain to me and to Doc, too, on several occasions that when the time came, Willie May, who's worked for her for years, would put the dress on her she had set aside to be buried in. The only time I was to touch her was when I placed her in the casket, and she would thank me to do that as circumspectly (her word) as possible."

Doc Hellums chucked to himself. "I was remembering that story of Jake Finkle's. Jake used to run the shoe store. Once when he had stepped out for something, Miss Violet came in and Jake's son tried to wait on her. 'Young man, are you married?' she asked. When he said no, she said, 'I thought not. The very idea! Now you just go get the manager and be quick about it.' And when Jake came, she asked him if he was married.

"'Why, yes,' Jake told her, 'and four kids.'

"'Very well, you may fit me for shoes. I'll not have an unmarried man touching my feet. And if you expect my business in the future, you'll see one doesn't try to.'"

"And then there was the run-in she had with the Methodist preacher," I said. "Not Sloan, the one before him. He preached a sermon on the Resurrection of the Saints which upset her more than somewhat. 'I am appalled, Reverend, that you would claim there will be a resurrection of the actual body. Appalled!'

"'But, Miss Violet,' he said, 'the Bible says--'

"'It says no such thing! And yet you have the nerve to maintain that when the trump of God shall sound, actual bodies will rise up, bodies that have been in the ground so long their clothes have rotted into dust will rise, naked as jaybirds, for all to see! Why, if I believed that, I would think twice about being a Christian at all!'"

The sheriff said, "I heard an epitaph once that sounds like it was made for her. Goes, 'She lived to the age of three score and ten, and gave to the worms what she refused to the men.'"

I don't know why the sheriff's joke was any different from what we had been saying about her, but it was, and Doc must have thought so, too.

"Well, Miss Violet may have been overly modest, but, if you count that a fault, the good she did more than offset it. I expect she taught more than half of the people in Littleville to read and write," he said, then looked at me and added, "half of the white people, anyway."

"Some of the colored, too," I said. "After the county retired her, she filled in at the colored school whenever she could."

The sheriff snatched up the cards and began to shuffle, put out that we didn't appreciate his joke. "Five card draw, " he said. "Jacks or better."

It was maybe an hour later when the sheriff, who was facing the door that led to the funeral parlor, gave a gasp and reared back in his chair, knocking his change to the floor. I was sitting to his side and turned to grab him to keep him from falling over backward. The way his eyes were bugged out and his jaw was hanging, I was sure he was having some kind of attack. Doc, who sat facing him, thought so too and jumped up to help. But the sheriff was on his feet now and backing away and pointing a quivering finger at the door and hollering, "Hah! Hah! Hah!"

You can't blame the sheriff. It was true he was no stranger to death, but he didn't deal with it day in and day out as Doc and I did, and so it was only natural that he misread what he saw, although later he denied with some heat that he had thought it was a ghost. Even if you didn't think it was a ghost, it was a scary enough sight, that dark figure in the doorway, its face covered in blood, the front of its clothes soaked, too, its head bent, its arms dangling. As we watched, its knees began to buckle, and then in slow motion the figure knelt and rolled forward onto the floor.

Doc Hellums was the first to move. He snatched a napkin from the table and went to the figure and turned it over and wiped away some of the blood. "It's a scalp wound," he said. "They bleed like the devil. Here, Jim, hold this on it while I get my bag."

I took the cloth and pressed hard. "What is it?" the sheriff asked. He was still across the room, his back against the wall, and not yet over his scare.

"Not what, who," I said. "It's Lester Boatwright."

"What's the matter with him?"

"I don't know. Looks like he's been knocked in the head."

Then Doc was back with his bag and a dishpan of water and a fresh tea towel from the kitchen. He cleaned the wound and cut away the hair from around it and stitched the edges back together. Lester was unconscious all through it. "We need to get this shirt off," Doc said. "I want to look at his arms and chest."

I unbuttoned Lester's shirt, but as we raised him up into a sitting position to take it off, he came to and started screaming. Doc took it off anyway and as we eased him back down he passed out again. Doc looked at the bruises on his arms and chest and said, "Thought so. Whoever did this to him must have been using something like an iron bar or maybe a heavy hammer and he put up a pretty good fight. No bones broken in his arms it looks like, but I wouldn't be surprised if these ribs aren't cracked. I'll tape them up, anyway. It won't be as painful when he wakes up."

"He's going to be all right then, you think?" I asked.

"Well, he's lost blood and he's concussed, and you never know how that's going to turn out, but we're in no immediate danger of losing him. Now who would have done this to him and why?"

"Well, now," the sheriff said, finally recovered, "I expect finding that out is my job." But we all helped.

Lester was beginning to regain consciousness again and was thrashing around and mumbling. We got him out of his bloody pants and wrapped him in a light blanket and stretched him out on the couch. Then sheriff and I left him to Doc Hellums, and we followed the drops of blood down to the embalming room and there answered the question of who, though at first we couldn't believe it. She was sprawled on the floor beside the table and with the bloody hammer still clutched in her hand.

"It's just not possible!" the sheriff said.

"If Doc made a mistake, it is," I said, "and obviously he did."

I had to prize her fingers open to get the hammer out of her hand, and then we put her back on the table. I felt for a pulse and put my ear to her chest.

"Dead?" the sheriff asked.

"As near as I can tell, but Doc will have to say for sure."

Doc joined us almost immediately, and we told him what we had found. He made a more thorough check than I had and said, "No question this time, I'd bet my hat on it."

"You don't wear a hat," the sheriff said. "But what I'd like to know is how an old woman you both thought was dead could have come back to life and beat the hell out of a young sprout in his prime. And if she could manage to do that, how come she's not still alive."

"To answer your first question, in times of fear or great stress, people are capable of great feats of strength. You read of cases all the time. Maybe Miss Violet woke up and thought she was being attacked."

I noticed the top few buttons of her dress were undone. That was not the way I had left her. "Like being sexually attacked," I said.

"That would certainly do it."

"So she's lying there," the sheriff said, "and she comes to and sees Lester, and she thinks -- What was Lester doing here, anyway?"

"He's got a key to the outside door. Maybe he came back for something. Anyway, he wasn't just standing there, he was unbuttoning her dress." I showed them the undone buttons.

"You mean he really was --?" the sheriff asked.

"Of course not! But I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't going to embalm her."

"But she wasn't supposed to be embalmed."

"Lester didn't know that. What I think happened is he came back for something, saw her lying there and decided to break in that new license.'

"And while he is unbuttoning her dress, " Doc said, "she wakes up, thinks she's being raped and grabs the hammer and begins to beat the hell out of him."

"Wait a minute," the sheriff said. "Where'd the hammer come from? Do you usually keep a hammer on your embalming table?"

"No, this particular hammer is kept in the tool shed around back. See it's a heavy ball peen. We've got a light claw hammer but it's kept in one of the cabinet drawers in the kitchen. I have no idea how this got in here."

"Well, if you didn't bring it in, Lester must have, because she sure didn't."

At the sheriff's words, what I should have noticed before finally registered. On the wall behind the embalming table in a neat frame was Lester's new license. Rather than come up and bother us and maybe have to explain what he needed a hammer for, Lester had gone out to the shed and got the old ball peen which was far too heavy for the small brad he had used it on but he had managed.

"And, I guess, laid it down on the table when he was finished," Doc said.

"All right," the sheriff said, "that brings us to the second question. Why is she dead again?"

Doc Hellums took a good look at Miss Violet again, pulling back the collar of her dress to examine her neck. Her left hand was clenched into a fist. He opened it and found a button with a little scrap of white cloth attached.

"Lester says he killed her."

"What!" the sheriff said.

"That's what he was mumbling about and that's what he believes, but he's wrong. She died of a heart attack."

"Why would he think he killed her?"

"Here's what I think happened," Doc said. "Lester gets home, gets to looking at that new license, thinks how nice it's going to look hanging in the embalming room, can't wait till tomorrow, decides to put it up tonight. He gets here, realizes he's going to need a hammer, makes a detour to the tool shed and fumbles around in the dark and finds the ball peen.

"He comes on in, sees Miss Violet on the table, thinks nothing about it and proceeds to hang the license. Maybe he steps back to admire it hanging there, lays the hammer down on the table beside Miss Violet. Then an idea hits him. Why not go ahead and embalm her, give Jim a pleasant surprise in the morning when he comes in and finds the job has already been done?

"He begins to unbutton her dress when suddenly her eyes fly open and her left hand flies up and grabs the front of his shirt. He tries to back away, but she has a tight grip on him. And then her right hand finds the hammer, and she begins to beat him in the arms and chest with it. He lunges backward and her grip on him brings her up off the table and they fall to the floor with her on top, still whaling away with the hammer. He reaches up and grabs her by the neck and squeezes as hard as he can. The hammer connects with his skull in a glancing blow and puts him out. If it had been a direct blow it would surely have knocked a hole in his head. As it was it maybe fractured his skull and cut a deep gash in his scalp.

"Sometime later he comes to and finds her collapsed on top of him and thinks he's choked her to death. He pushes her off, gets to his feet and stumbles in to us."

"How can you be sure he didn't choke her to death?" The sheriff asked.

"Look at her face. No swelling, no protruding tongue, none of the signs that would be there if he had. No, it was her heart, pure and simple."

"Well, Doc," the sheriff said. "Your version makes sense to me. It could have happened that very way. Let's go up and check it out with Lester."

"We won't be able to do. Not now, anyway. He was asleep when I left him, and I expect he'll stay that way for some time. And maybe not ever. He may never remember what happened. Or remember it wrong, which might be worse."

"We can at least see if he's got a button and a piece of shirt missing, " the sheriff said.

"I unbuttoned his shirt when we took it off and I can already tell you he does," I said. "But what happens now?

"What do you mean?"

"How do you handle all this?"

"I'm not at all sure there is anything to handle. If a crime has been committed, it's been by a dead woman, a twice dead woman, I ought to say. And whatever Lester did, and Doc claims it wasn't anything, was in clear self defense."

"You mean you're not even going to report it?"

"And do a lot of paper work for nothing? That's exactly what I mean."

"Suits me," Doc said. "I'd just as soon not everybody know I'm not able to tell the living from the dead. I've probably got enough black marks against me in the community already."

It suited me, too. A lot of people had a fear being buried alive, and something like this would make it worse. "There will have to be some kind of story to account for the shape Lester is in. What will we tell Mrs. Boatwright?"

"Tell her the truth, or most of it," the sheriff said. "And while I'm about it I'll point out that even though it hasn't been established whether Lester had a hand in Miss Violet's death or not, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I'll warn her that if the story ever gets out, I'll be forced to act. She can account for Lester's injuries however it suits her and we can go along."

And that's what we did. Sheriff Woolums and Doc Hellums took Lester home and talked to Mrs. Boatwright. When Mama got home from Prayer Meeting, I told her everything, and asked her to go down to the embalming room and take off Miss Violet's dress so we could wash out Lester's blood. I figured Miss Violet wouldn't have minded Mama doing it. The next morning Mrs. Boatwright sent word by somebody that Lester had fallen down their back steps and was pretty badly hurt. I got one of my part-time helpers and we put Miss Violet in her casket and took her home for the visitation. And at the funeral in the afternoon, the Methodist church couldn't begin to hold all the people.

Lester's head and ribs healed in time, but his mind never has. Since that night he has never spoken to me or even recognized my existence. I went out there a few times soon after it happened, but he wouldn't see me. Finally his mama said, "I know you mean well, Mister DuPree, but you're just upsetting him. Why don't you leave him alone." And that's what I've done.

Doc Hellums looked after him until the stitches came out, and then they switched to another doctor in Paducah. Doc said Lester either couldn't or wouldn't remember what happened, he couldn't tell which. In any case, that night changed him into a something of a recluse, or, as Doc said, gave him a good shove in the direction he was already headed. He didn't leave the house for a couple of years, or if he did, nobody saw him. Then I began to see him and his mama pass by on their way to catch the street car. Finally, he started coming by alone, going to his night job, which I guess suits him because he doesn't have to talk to anybody.

I know it's unreasonable, but somehow I feel to blame. Doc just snorts and tells me I need help worse than Lester does. "Your problem," he told me once, "is you've got a Messianic Complex."

"I don't know what that is," the sheriff said, "but if it has anything to do with being messy, I agree with you. Just look at the botch he's made of shuffling these cards."

The sheriff is not the sheriff any more. He and his partner lost out in the last election and both retired. But I still call him sheriff, because his first name is Dufus and I would probably never be able to say it with a straight face.