A Very Skilled Mortician

© 2000 Erin Daughtrey
All rights reserved.

As much as I fail to comprehend it, there are people who feel quite comfortable around the dead. They are at perfect ease at funerals, thinking nothing of stooping to kiss the cheek of the deceased. They hold the hands of the other mourners and coax them through the loss of life in an attempt to pass on their own lack of disquiet. Not myself included amongst these advantageous few, I cannot help but to admire their poise. All of my confrontations with the dead leave me thoroughly shaken.
Ironically, in contrast with my avoidance of the deceased, for the summer of my eighteenth year I found myself employed by my uncle's funeral home. I had no choice whatsoever in the matter. Some of the meager staff had unexpectedly quit, and my parents offered my labor to fill the shortage. I attended the doors during services, and occasionally I was required to chauffeur the hearse. I dreaded the job completely. All that was required of me was to nod to the passing mourners and transport a corpse or two—yet, even being in that place made my breath come unevenly. The dead had always unnerved me so. It seemed that whenever I set foot upon the grounds of the funeral parlor or a cemetery, I was without question on their domain. It would always plague my mind that the dead, while posing no direct harm, would always and forever outnumber the living.
Not everyone shared my discomfort. Indeed, everyone else employed at the home seemed to be far better suited for the job than I was. Yes, there were some people with notably high spirits. Yet, there was always one person who stood out clearly as the one most at ease. His name was Morgan Vasili.
Morgan was my uncle's apprentice, an aspiring mortician. I once overhead my uncle say that his apprenticeship was a mere formality; Morgan simply could not get an embalmer's license or a mortician's license without having been an apprentice. Apparently, he possessed some sort of remarkable talent in the preparation of the corpses. He was young to have such talent, as he was only two years my senior. He had attended a school of mortuary science for two years straight out of high school; he had known where his calling lay. It appalled me to think that someone my age had made a conscious decision to choose such a macabre ambition.
Morgan was a very amiable person, in spite of his morbid profession. While my uncle had a good disposition, even he was not nearly as outgoing as Morgan. Around the funeral home Morgan kept us all in high spirits and never let us dwell on the concept of death; it was often hard to appear somber during a service after conversing with him. It puzzled me as to why he had chosen his profession. One thing that further confused me was the fact that he was handsome. He had curly blond hair and wide blue eyes, and he often appeared even younger than his twenty years. He could probably make a decent living off of his looks alone. Still, for some reason, he had chosen embalming. It perplexed me.
As I got to know him, though, it became a bit more clear to me. He was enchanted by his work. Once he had a particularly difficult preparation to endeavor. A young man had been in a very severe car accident, and his family had requested an open-casket funeral. Morgan had put all of himself into the job, working several hours' overtime, and he had done quite well. In spite of my squeamish attitude toward corpses, even I had to admire his work. The reconstruction that Morgan had done for the young man's face was so skilled and so subtle that one might have sworn that the man was not dead at all. As I looked cautiously into the coffin where the body lay, Morgan stepped up beside me.
"It's a shame to bury him," he said wistfully. Casually, he stroked the dead man's cheek.
I must have shuddered inadvertently, for he smiled at me. "I forget, you don't regularly handle bodies."
Occasionally, when he was not working, Morgan sat in on the funeral services. My uncle encouraged this, for it enforced the idea of a funeral home that cared personally about the deceased. Morgan always sat in the back of the room, offering his condolences to the family afterward. I myself found his behavior to be somewhat unnerving, for I always watched him closely during the services. His breath became slower, heavier, and his hands played restlessly with the cuffs of his shirt. It was if he were struggling to contain some sort of outburst. And always, invariably, his gaze remained fixed upon the coffin at the front of the room. He never once glanced at the speakers. And on his face, it seemed I could detect a faint anguish in his features.
Over that summer it gradually occurred to me that Morgan had an affection for the dead. I found this understandable, since he was ever so serious about his work. How could he not form some attachment to the bodies he prepared? It was no different than an artist, really, who is fond of his paintings. Still, I finally realized that his attachment was a bit stranger than that.
It was about an hour before the next service, and I was looking for Morgan. The casket had already been wheeled out for early viewers and the flowers arranged. The casket was still closed, for the caskets are always closed when we move them. The corpse was a fairly young woman, a suicide, I believe. The family of the deceased had asked to meet the mortician before the service, and Morgan had done the embalming.
I thought that I might find him in the chapel, sitting in the last pew awaiting the commencement of the service or perhaps admiring his work. The room was empty. I searched all of the other rooms, even daring to set foot in the embalming room. I could not find him. Retracing my footsteps hurriedly, I found myself back in the chapel. It was still empty. In growing exasperation, I called his name.
"Yes?" he asked, from behind me.
I whirled around to find him standing next to the open coffin. His hair was tousled. His shirt and jacket were rumpled. As he straightened his tie, I noticed that his breath came more quickly than usual and his face was flushed.
"The Stevensons would like to meet you," I informed him. "They are in my uncle's office."
He nodded curtly and left the room without a word. It was then that I began to puzzle over how he had entered the room without my hearing him. The chapel had three sets of doors. Two led off to the other areas of the funeral home, while the other led to the outdoors. All of the doors were made of very heavy, very solid wood. I would have heard one of them open. Even if I had not, Morgan would have had to walk into the room directly behind me to answer so promptly. Had he done so, I would have run into him when I had turned around to shut the door behind me. He must have already been in the chapel. But where? There was nowhere for him to be completely concealed. No place at all. Except....
In a grotesque sort of awe I turned back to the coffin. My feet carried me to it with a mind of their own, and I peered inside.
It had been closed the last time I had been in the room, and now it was open. The corpse lay there rigidly, but it seemed as if the satin surrounding her had been disheveled. Indeed, her clothes seemed a bit off-center as well. I might have convinced myself that a hasty dressing job had been done, but I knew it was not so. The corpse's lipstick, which had been meticulously applied by Morgan, was now smeared. With shaking hands, I straightened her up as best I could.
He had been in the coffin with her!
During the service I found it hard to concentrate as I stood by the door. Morgan attended it, but his attention was for once not focused on the body. He kept stealing glances at me, and I did my best to avoid his gaze. After the service left the chapel for the funeral procession, he came up to me casually.
"It was a beautiful service, wasn't it?" he asked softly.
I simply nodded, not trusting my voice. I noticed something that furthered my discomfort. There was, on Morgan's bottom lip, a faint smear of lipstick. As he realized I was staring, his hand flew nervously to his lips and he wiped away the pale traces, then looked at his hand.
I do not know what I expected him to do. Perhaps I expected him to be embarrassed and mumble some false excuse or another. Or possibly not say anything at all. I did not expect what he did do. He stared at the lipstick that had rubbed off onto his finger and then looked back to me. Then, he flashed a charming smile and gave a very deliberate wink. Before I could react, he walked away.
Needless to say, I no longer felt at ease in Morgan's company. He made many attempts to converse with me, possibly to reassure himself that I would say nothing about what I had seen. I kept conversations with him brief, but he needn't have worried. I would not have been able to speak of it if I had any desire to do so. As the summer wore on, I found myself repressing the memory. At times, his behavior was so obviously normal that I fancied I had imagined it. While I could not forget what I had seen, I refused to think of it.
Even if I had completely erased the memory, I am certain it would have come back to me one particular evening. My uncle and I had left the parlor early, leaving Morgan behind to complete his work upon a body. In our departure, my uncle mistakenly grabbed the keys to the hearse, rather than the keys to his car.
"Will you get them for me?" he asked as he handed over the hearse keys. "I need to lock the doors to the chapel; Morgan only has the keys for the other entrance."
I nodded. "Where are they?"
"Probably the embalming room." My feelings must have been clearly written on my face, for he laughed. "Don't worry, boy; a corpse can't get you. Besides, there are no bodies in there now. I'm sure Morgan is in the other preparation room by now." There were two rooms, one for the actual embalming and the other for the application of cosmetics. My uncle was probably right. I went back into the building, ill at ease.
When I got to the embalming room, I hesitated. My disquiet had grown considerably, since I had first reentered the building. Irritated by my own jumpy nerves, I resolutely pushed open the door and immediately wished that I hadn't been so hasty.
It looked at first as if Morgan were merely leaning over a body on the embalming table. It disturbed me, how closely he leaned in toward its face. But as I moved farther into the room, I could see that Morgan was actually on the table with the body. He was on his knees, legs straddling the corpse as he leaned forward.
He looked up calmly as I entered. "I thought you had left already."
It felt like a full minute before I found my voice. "W - we took the wrong keys." I held up the keys to the hearse with a shaking hand. I saw that my uncle's keys were on the other side of the room. I would have to walk around the table.
Morgan settled back to watch me as I moved around the room, actually resting his weight on the body. The corpse's eyes stared blankly toward the ceiling. From where I now stood, I saw that Morgan's fingers were tangled in the corpse's hair, toying with it. I suppressed a groan and acted as if I had not seen. Morgan's eyes followed me back to the door, and I eagerly turned to go. Some demented impulse made me turn my head back, made me glance back at Morgan. Having already forgotten me, he leaned back over the body, one hand on its cheek, leaning so far forward that he must be at least partially lying on the corpse. I left in a hurry.
Not soon after that, my uncle no longer needed me to work for him. I left the job with relief, glad to be out of that place of the dead. Even more was I glad to be rid of Morgan, who seemed genuinely sad to see me go. I have never been at ease around the dead. And even If I ever find some way to make myself more comfortable, I pray that I may never be as comfortable as Morgan.
Near the end of the summer, my uncle made a discovery. He, too, witnessed Morgan's indiscretion with the corpses. What he'd seen was apparently worse than what I had witnessed, and he fired the skilled mortician. Like myself, my uncle would not speak of what Morgan had been doing.
I only saw Morgan once after my job ended. It was after his had ended, as well. One dreary afternoon on an erratic impulse I visited the cemetery. I will never know what brought me there. A few relatives of mine are buried there, but none were close. I knew immediately that I should not have gone there, but I found myself aimlessly walking the grounds. It was there that I saw Morgan, sitting on the damp ground with his back to a tree, staring out at the fields of tombstones. He did not see me. He looked like a painting, his blue eyes staring vacantly and the slight breeze touching his blond curls. His features held a sort of peaceful blankness, and I knew why. That was where he felt most comfortable, there in the domain of the dead. I left abruptly without speaking to him.

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