Hiram Putz

I always wanted to be an undertaker. It seemed like a solid, quiet livelihood and a fulfilling mission for a comfortable life. To usher people quietly into their eternal resting places, to reassure their loved ones, quietly, without really having to say anything, that it would all be the way it should be. Indeed, it was a good life for me for thirteen years—until it wasn’t.

My life was just fine until supposedly dead people started waking up and screaming when I pricked them to drain their blood. It scared the living bejesus out of me. They started screaming bloody murder. It was a great shock. Every time. Like I dreamed that I woke up in shock to find myself holding a bloody knife, having pulled it from the spurting chest of a gasping fellow human being. I didn’t want this. I wasn’t a murderer. Every fiber of my being fought against this, but it happened anyway. It was a recurring nightmare, just as frightening the tenth time, waking up in a cold sweat, as it was the first time. Even after it happened sixty times, it was still a shock, a violation of nature.

People who had left us for a better world, people for whom, after they passed away, after all their family and friends had murmured that their death was all for the best, no more suffering for them—these people aren’t supposed to wake up screaming, usually in pain, and once again start demanding things from their husbands and wives, from their formerly grieving offspring. I wasn’t ready for it. Their family wasn’t ready for it. It sadly seemed unnatural, grotesquely unnatural and horrible.

How did it begin. I almost don’t want to remember. I speak these words while still numb from the experience. Actually, not everyone who was wheeled in to the Schlep-Putz funeral home and crematorium came alive, so I never knew whether a body would continue to be just a body that deserved respect, or would suddenly become a screaming monster, like Frankenstein’s monster, a naked horror in pain all over again. How can you respect a monster, a body that is supposed to be a quiet dead person, but that wakes up angry and screaming bloody murder?

OK. The first time. We had been expecting old Mrs. Abigail Wheeler for weeks. Her son, Bill, had come in and made all the arrangements—the coffin, the flowers, the music, the eulogy, the time of day for the service, it was all decided. It was a spring morning when she died. She died quite a bit later than everyone expected. The flowers had already arrived; they were beautiful and fresh. Mrs. Wheeler, I thought, bless her, looked better in death than she had looked in life. I just had to fix her up for her eternal rest before my assistant, Peter, came in and dressed her in her favorite dress. Then we would lay her in her coffin as pretty as a spring day. It was all normal and easy. No problem to have her ready for an afternoon service.

That’s what I thought. She came in at 11 o’clock. I wheeled her into the mortuary. She was dressed in a hospital gown. That was normal. Everything seemed normal. I had no idea.

She just woke up and started screaming. Here she was, mostly naked, with me, in a cold room. She wasn’t prepared for this. Well, I wasn’t either.

She sat up, screaming, and it took me about thirty-five seconds to catch my breath. I almost passed out. It seemed more like thirty-five minutes. We don’t keep warm blankets in the slab room. There wasn’t anything to comfort her. I took off my lab coat and rushed it over her shoulders, but my sudden action only frightened her more. It was pure awful. Pure torment both for her and for me. Eventually, I found my voice, which had crept into a dark corner, and I said to her, “Mrs. Wheeler, please stop screaming. It hurts my ears, and you’ll only tire yourself out.”

She calmed down and I stopped trembling and sweating. Peter heard the screaming and came in. I think he had gone into the alley to smoke a joint, so he was pretty much out of it. So he started laughing; he went hysterical. No use at all.

Ha ha. You might think it was funny, but actually, it wasn’t. Not for Abigail Wheeler nor for me.

I sat on the floor and I think I cried. Only for a few seconds. But Peter had started blubbering and I could tolerate his blubbering, so I stood up and slapped him. I gave him a good right-handed slap on the left side of his face. I think, actually, if I weren’t in shock, that I would have been angry. But I didn’t slap him out of anger. It was a purely practical means of returning him to his senses. It made a loud slapping sound and he returned, too, to the land of the living. I think the slap also affected Mrs. Wheeler, because she started asking me questions. Maybe she thought that it would be her turn next, I don’t know. She asked me, “Where the Lord am I? Is this heaven? What are you doing here, Hiram? What have you done?” It was a small community; she had known me since I was a child. But I hadn’t done anything.

That’s when Peter said, “What do we do now?” It wasn’t a situation that we trained for. They didn’t teach us this in mortuary school. But I said to Peter, “Go get Mrs. Wheeler’s favorite dress and a warm coat.” He left, and I said to Mrs. Wheeler, “I’m sorry. Truly sorry.” I was. I thought, “Surely we can make the best of this horrible predicament.” I was sadly wrong.

Everything would have been fine, after a while, if it didn’t keep happening. But it did. Worse, after the first half dozen or so, nobody in a few hundred miles around wanted to take their dearly departed to any other funeral home.

I became apprehensive. I started testing the bodies when they came in, like Tex in the Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant movie, Carousel. Tex comes into the church, goes up to the coffin, takes a long needle out of his inside pocket, and stabs Miss Hepburn’s dead husband to make sure he’s dead. Tex turns around, smiling, in front of everyone, and strides over to a pew. Tex was satisfied, but the dang thing is that many of the dead ones, in my case, didn’t stay dead. I wasn’t satisfied at all.

It was just as bad when they didn’t wake up. Maybe even worse. Like why did I let them die? (I didn’t. They were already dead.) Do you think we don’t care? (No. I don’t think that.) Do you think we don’t deserve to have our father alive any more? There was not much I could say. Nobody was happy.

To this day, I don’t know why. I know why the people died. They all had something, like cancer or a heart attack, even suicide. Sometimes it wasn’t pretty, but it was always understandable. Not so their resurrections. That seems impossible to explain. Dead is dead, right? Didn’t they all have a doctor who examined them and who came to a confident conclusion that here we had a dead person? Here was the death certificate! But it didn’t mean a darned thing when the dead person involuntarily stopped being dead.

It really wasn’t supposed to happen, like flipping a coin over and over and every time the coin stands on its edge. Tell me how you’d feel if everything you believed in suddenly turned out not to be true.

You might say that these were blessed miracles. Maybe they were, but I didn’t train to have all these miracles popping up in front of me, screaming their hearts out. I didn’t really know how to reassure the newly awakened. I wasn’t a priest. I was just a man who performed a needed service and didn’t want to talk with his clients.

I always wanted to be an undertaker, not a strange parody of Jesus standing over Lazarus and not saying “Arise,” but saying, “Please stop screaming. It hurts my ears.”

Well, one guy who woke up on my slab didn’t scream. That was Joe Smith. He just opened his eyes and said, “Whoa there. Where am I?” At that point, I wanted to turn out the lights, crawl into bed, and pretend that this wasn’t happening to me, but I almost knew how to answer him.