CHAPTER 2 AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS
AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS
I wait for her to say she’s joking or that the hexagonal shape surrounding me is something else, but she just laughs and skips over to the other side of the room to play Legos with her cousin like she hadn’t admitted to wanting to hold hands with her dead grandma’s corpse and then drawn me inside a coffin.
I push the drawing as far away from me on the table as I can.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I’m happy to have a distraction from the little girl and her weird drawing. I glance at the screen and see a text from Noah.
NOAH: I’m starving. I got some tacos. You want me to bring some over?
ME: We’re doing a service.
NOAH: NEVERMIND
He sends a GIF of somebody screaming in terror.
ME: You’re just as bad as Caleb.
NOAH: Nobody is as bad as Caleb.
He has a point.
Mrs. Lang’s viewing comes to a close and the children’s caregivers collect them.
They leave in a tangle of tearstained faces and embracing arms. Mrs. Lang’s body is loaded into the hearse and taken away for the graveside service.
As I straighten up the playroom I consider tossing all the crayons in the trash since people’s kids want to draw creepy pictures of me.
“I appreciate you watching out for the kids, baby,” my mom says.
I spin around and find her propping the door open.
“Not a problem,” I say. “Look at this.” I hand her the pictures the little girl had left behind. “Weird, right? It’s her and her dead grandma holding hands.” I show her the other drawing. “This one’s supposed to be me.”
Mom studies the drawing, then touches her quivering bottom lip.
I gently put my hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”
She pats my hand and folds the drawings in half, handing them back to me. “Kids, right? They don’t know what’s going on sometimes. Or maybe they do. Who knows.” She clears her throat and smiles at me. “Makes me sad, that’s all.”
I think seeing people’s grieving families bothers her more than anything else in our profession.
“Throw that picture away,” my mom says.
She doesn’t have to ask me twice. I crumple the paper up and toss it into the trash can.
That evening, Mom orders takeout and I’m setting the plastic containers at the dining room table when the front door creaks open. My dad, clad in black, his briefcase dangling from his hand, trudges in. He slips off his shoes and hangs his coat on a hook in the entryway.
His job in the funeral home is hands-on, technical.
He preserves bodies and handles the legal paperwork.
His work outside the house is a never-ending series of conferences and lectures.
When I was little he taught gothic literature in addition to his duties as a mortician.
Every once in a while he picks up teaching a class or giving a talk but it comes second to his work with the faculty in Cornell’s anatomy and physiology departments.
He’s constantly honing his mortuary craft and learning the latest and greatest in preservation techniques for the dead.
He’s a perfectionist and he doesn’t like feeling as if he’s behind the curve in any way.
If it’s new in the world of mortuary techniques, he knows about it and is already figuring out a way to incorporate it into the care of our guests.
Basically, he’s the opposite of my mom. Where she’s the bubbly face of our business, willing to talk to anyone, he keeps his head down and avoids interacting with anyone who still has a pulse. He likes it that way. He and my mom are like two pieces of a very strange puzzle.
“Hey,” I say.
He jumps even though he’s looking right at me, almost like my regular speaking voice is too loud. “Oh, hey,” he says softly as he runs his hand over the day’s worth of stubble dotting his chin, then rests it on his chest like he’s trying to calm his racing heart. “How’d it go today?”
“Everything went smooth. Mrs. Lang’s family was really happy.” I pause. “Happy isn’t the right word.”
“I know what you mean,” he says. “Happy with the work, devastated that it needs to be done in the first place.” He smiles in that way that’s all mouth and no eyes. Like he’s got something else on his mind and is just going through the motions.
When I was younger, I thought moping around was just the way you had to act if you were an undertaker. Dealing in death takes its toll, but melancholy clings to him like a heavy blanket most days. He is haunted.
What I’ve come to understand is that it isn’t just death and dying that overwhelm my dad—it’s life, too.
Death is final and the processes after a death are predictable—bodies decay at a certain rate under certain circumstances, they come to us to be preserved and restored, there’s a homegoing, and then the bodies go into the ground or a crypt or to cremation.
He’s good at those details because he knows exactly what to expect at every turn.
It’s regular everyday life that stumps him sometimes.
He doesn’t really know what to say or do during the planning of a funeral.
He’s not great at talking to people and his whole demeanor is a little too on the nose for most folks.
It’s always been like that, though. He has always seemed out of place.
He stuck out like a weed at my piano recitals and my school plays.
Mom was always there to remind him that he wasn’t actually a corpse, but he always seemed surprised to remember that little fact.
“How are my babies?” he asks, glancing toward the back door.
“You know they don’t like me,” I say.
“Not true,” my dad says. “They love you. Why wouldn’t they?”
His babies are an unkindness of ravens that he’s been feeding and caring for, for years.
He’d always been fascinated by them and their myths.
They circle battlefields and often pick at dead and decaying things.
They symbolize death and so it’s not surprising that they gather here at our funeral home.
Where it goes a little off the rails is when my dad spent a week carefully cutting a hole in the wall next to our back door and fitting it with a small window he could open and close from the inside.
It has a platform about the size of a sheet of printer paper that sticks out of it, a feeding station for the ravens.
He leaves them seeds and they bring him shiny little trinkets—coins, buttons, the odd ring or bracelet.
The happiest I ever see him is when he’s tending to his birds.
He goes to the little window and opens it.
He scoops out a heaping half cup of birdseed from a bag on the floor and scatters it across the platform.
Not a second later two large ravens, black as night, eyes like glinting black beads, descend and begin to peck at the feed.
My dad smiles. I think he could reach out and pet them if he wanted to.
“You know there’s this old movie called The Birds ,” I say. “It’s about a bunch of birds that attack people.”
Dad gives his ravens a quizzical look, then shuts the little window. “Where’d you see a movie like that?”
“Film studies,” I say. It’s one of the classes I’d been wanting to take and there had been a wait list, but my English teacher, Mr. Brennan, put in a good word for me and my name got bumped up the list. “It’s a horror movie.”
“Movies exaggerate things,” my dad says. “They never quite get it right.”
“Get what right?” I ask. “They’re scary movies. They just make stuff up.”
My dad looks thoughtful, then comes over and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Where’s your mom?”
“Changing,” I say. “We got takeout.”
He surveys the assortment of plastic containers, fold-top boxes, and plastic cutlery. “Looks good. I’m starving.”
We sit next to each other and serve ourselves, hoping Mom won’t mind too much, but when her footsteps sound on the stairs we both put our hands in our laps.
Mom comes downstairs in a pair of high-waisted jeans, a cropped navy sweater with bat-wing sleeves, and a pair of gold flats. Even after work, she is dressed to impress.
“I wanna be like you when I grow up,” I tease.
“Oh, I know,” she says, jokingly. “Give it time, baby. You might catch up.” She winks at me.
She stands by the table and pushes her hand down on her hip, striking a little pose and smiling.
“You look amazing,” my dad says as his eyes grow wide. A soft smile breaks across his face. One thing that can always get him out of a funk is my mom.
She smiles back at him. “Thanks, babe. Looks like you two started without me.”
“Want me to make you a plate?” Dad asks.
“No, I’m okay,” she says.
“There’s steamed rice,” I say. “I know your stomach’s been bothering you. You really gotta get the doctor to figure it out. It’s been years.”
“Who you tellin’?” Mom huffs.
My dad reaches out and takes my mom’s hand, squeezing it gently, as she sits down. He doesn’t look her in the eye, though.
Mom shakes her head and spoons some white rice out onto her plate. “Don’t worry about me. I just need to be more careful about what I eat, that’s all. Doc thinks maybe it’s a gluten allergy. I don’t know. He says I’d need a biopsy of my small intestine to know for sure.”
My parents exchange a look that’s a cross between worry and sadness. I glance at my mom. If something was wrong—really wrong—I’d know.
“You’re seeing somebody good, right?” I ask. “Somebody who knows what they’re doing?”
Mom waves off my concerns. “Dr. Albert Hayes. He’s a specialist. I have an appointment next week, just to follow up.”
That makes me feel a little better.
Mom shrugs and gives a little laugh. “It’s fine, and I’m tired of trying to figure it out anyway.” She sighs. “That’s really the last thing I need.”