第11章 The Undertaker

Obadiah Sneed kept his business in a yard behind the Anchor and Crown, and it was said of him in the lower town that he was the only man in Cinderthorpe who never wished anybody ill and never wished anybody well, because his living came out of the grave and the grave came to everyone at last, and all he had to do was wait with his nose for the weather. He was a long, thin, mournful, dryly cheerful man with a black coat brushed to a shine and a voice like a shovel on gravel, and he had buried Prudence's father and had not charged her for the pall, a fact he had never once mentioned since. He came to the shop on the Tuesday evening, because she had sent Ned with a note, and he stood among the jars with his hat in both hands and said, before she could speak, "I know why you sent for me." "Then you will save me the asking." "You want to know what I have seen in the boxes." He said it without a flicker. "I have been waiting to be asked for two months. I would have come myself, but there is no living in it, and a man must feed his family before he feeds his conscience." He sat down on the chair by the counter, which no customer had ever been offered, and began, and it was clear at once that he had the whole of it ready and had been holding it, the way a man holds a full cup he cannot set down. "I have taken up eleven of the Unity's people since autumn, and I can tell you them by name, and I will tell you the thing that made me watch. I have handled more bodies than any doctor in this town, Miss Ruddock; it is my trade, and I am not squeamish about it and I am not sentimental, and I will tell you plainly: the dead have habits. A man dead of the fever is stiff and swelled and going green about the jaw by the second day, and he smells, and the smell is a fever smell, which I could not put a name to but would know again in the dark. A man dead of drink is waxy and yellow. A man dead of the lung is thin and blue. I know them all the way a shoemaker knows a foot." "And the cordial dead?" "Clean." Sneed said the word and let it stand. "The cordial dead were clean. No swelling, no green, no smell, or next to none, and stiff as an ironing board, and the colour of them when they came from the box was a sort of grey, like a man who has been in the water but has not been in the water, and I have taken up eleven of them this season and they were all, all eleven, the same, and I have not in thirty years taken up eleven that were the same of anything." He turned his hat over. "I went to Dr. Creel and told him, because it is not for the like of me to speak of poisons, and he listened, and he thanked me, and he wrote fever, same as the certificates, and he gave me a shilling, and I went home and drank it. I am not proud of that. But he is a doctor and I am an undertaker, and when a doctor tells you a thing is the fever, you mind your box and hold your tongue." Prudence was quiet. The account she had assembled from books and bottles and a mouth that remembered the weeks had now been handed to her from the other end of the trade, from a man who had it in his hands and not his head, and the two accounts fitted so neatly, clean body, clean bottle, that she felt the floor of the thing go solid under her at last. "There was a girl of nineteen at Throstle House," she said. "Alvina Cardew laid her out. Do you know the one?" "I know the one. I took her up in November." Sneed's voice did not change, but his hands did, folding the brim of his hat and unfolding it again. "A girl of nineteen who should have been strong as a horse, and she went down in a fortnight and came to me grey and clean with her baby in her arms, the two of them in one box because the parish would not pay for two. I have buried mothers and their children in one box before; it is not rare, and I have a hard heart and I do it without thinking. But this one I thought about. This one I thought about all the way to the ground and I have thought about her since, and I will tell you why, and then I will tell you no more, for it is not a thing I like to say aloud." He looked at the fire. "The child was not slack and it was not sickly and it was not, so far as I could see, dead of anything the mother had. It was a good, round, whole child, and it was dead, and a good round whole child of a young healthy mother does not die unbidden, and I have taken up enough of them to know the difference between a child born too soon and a child born whole and stopped. There is a difference in the face. They look surprised. This one looked surprised, and it has vexed me all winter." "And the ground at Sallowfield?" "For a body or for the truth?" He understood the question before she had finished asking it, and answered the one she had meant. "The poor ground is chalk a foot down, and chalk does not rot a man and does not keep him either. It holds him. It holds him exactly as he went in, only quieter. The good ground is gone to bones in a year and there is nothing left to weigh but a stain. The poor ground of Sallowfield is still a body at six weeks and will be a body at six months, and if a man wanted to know what a body had in it, the poor ground would be the town's one mercy in the whole business, which is a strange thing to say of the Christians' chalk and I will say it anyway, because I have known it thirty years and never had cause to say it until tonight." "Mr. Sneed," she said, "I want to open a grave." He did not move. He did not even blink, which for a man in his trade was as good as a shout. "Jonas Figgis," she said. "Sallowfield, the second of November. Gone a matter of six weeks. I want a sample from him, and I want it taken properly, and I want a man present who knows a body when he sees one and can swear before a magistrate that he saw it and not another. I will pay you whatever you ask, and if it comes to ruin, I will take the ruin on myself and say you were paid and did not know why." Sneed sat a long moment with his hat. Then he set the hat on his knee and looked at her, and the dry cheerfulness came back into his face, and it was the look of a man who has been waiting for a reason to do a thing he wanted to do anyway. "Miss Ruddock," he said, "you should know that Barnaby Skell took the Union's burial contract off me year before last and gave it to a cousin of his own, and that I have done the poor of this town for thirty years at a loss and been thanked for it by every soul but him. That is not my reason. My reason is the eleven clean ones, and the girl of nineteen that Miss Cardew laid out, and the fact that I am an old man and will stand before the great box myself before long, and I would rather go into it knowing I had done one thing in my trade that was not merely tidy." He stood. "I will bring the gravedigger, who is my nephew and owes me nine pounds. We do it on the Sunday night, after the chapel, when the fog is thickest. Bring your vials and your pen and a strong stomach, and wear nothing you care to keep." ---