The following memoir came from an exercise at StoryArts.
This story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced without the permission
of Julie A. McCracken.
In the 1950's and '60's, small town funeral home business was generally a family affair. My sister Jo and I took turns accompanying Dad on long ambulance trips and body retrievals. The sick and the mad rode by ambulance. The dead usually rode in the hearse, but the ambulance was utilized in a pinch. Jo got the dead rides and I got the sick or the mentals.
This particular summer morning was gray and rainy. My eyes were still sleepy. Dad and I stopped at Memorial Hospital to pick-up a woman—I'll call her Evelyn—to transfer her to the state mental hospital in Jacksonville, where mental patients were more warehoused than treated. Jacksonville was about two hours away and over two lane roads through one small town after another, each nurtured by corn, soy beans, and the few remaining coal mines.
Evelyn brought with her the smell of hospital and sickness: piney disinfectant, starched sheets, unwashed hair, sour body. In her normal life, she probably twisted her thick gray hair into a bun or a French roll, but deprived of hair pins and a good brushing, her long hair lay in matted clumps against the white pillowcase. I'd never seen an elderly woman with her hair wild around her face. This was in its own way disturbing. Women just didn't go out without combed hair lacquered into place. Her cracked, dried lips bore the permanent stain of a woman accustomed to red lipstick. Her tongue continually moistened her lips as if she missed the feel of lipstick. Despite the restraints, she could still open and close her fists and the sheet crackled with the movement.
Dad decided that I, all of eight or nine years old, could calm her, maybe because I was female, maybe because I couldn't drive and was useless for anything else. The ambulance had been converted from a station wagon with a split back seat. I sat on the right back seat next to her head, which was elevated by the ambulance cot. A series of well-worn leather bands looped across her shoulders, waist and arms, thighs and ankles. Wind-driven summer rain beat at the car from all sides and rumbled against the under-carriage. The inside of the windows steamed up quickly and the defroster roared.
We had just passed the Dairy Jubilee drive-in when she started screaming. Her voice was dry and hoarse, like she'd been screaming for a long time. Although tall for my age and proud of it, I tried to be small and fit into the narrow space between the car door and the seat. I covered my ears with my hands and tried to think myself somewhere else. Over and over Dad told her to shut-up, and she began cursing "Bastard! Son of a Bitch! Bastard!", all the bad words. Dad asked me to try to calm her down, but I didn't know what to do, so I asked her what she wanted.
"Out! I want out! Out!"
The screaming and cursing started again. I wondered who Evelyn was? Was she someone's mother? Grandmother? A farmer or coal-miner's wife? Preacher? Nurse? A waitress or a bar-maid? A sales clerk? Whose hands did her busy fingers seek? All the while she thrashed against her restraints and screamed.
Somewhere outside of Pawnee Junction, Dad pulled onto the shoulder of the road and said in his meanest voice, "If you don't shut up, we're going to the nearest hospital and they'll shoot you up so far with drugs that your tongue won't be able to find your lips."
This quieted her and she asked him to loosen the leather straps that were cutting into her feet. Dad got out of the ambulance, went to the back and opened the rear door. The rain fell steadily down his deeply-tanned face. Before he could re-latch the buckle, Evelyn kicked him in the face with such force that she bloodied his nose. The rain washed the blood into pink ribbons down his white shirt, already transparent with rain. He cinched the leather strap achingly tight but Evelyn did no more than flinch. Trucks and cars passed us at such velocity that the ambulance slightly rocked in their wake. Dad didn't say anything, but grabbed a towel from underneath the cot, held it against his nose, got behind the wheel, and drove until his shirt was dry.
Evelyn was silent now. It was as if kicking Dad was the one thing she really needed to do and once done, she was appeased.
We delivered her to white-coated men who transferred her from the ambulance cot to the hospital's gurney. She looked up into the gray summer sky and the rain falling onto her face. No one moved to cover her or wipe away the rain, and she disappeared with the snap of the heavy metal-plated door and the darkness beyond.
The rain was only a warm sprinkle by the time we stopped for lunch at a small town diner. My jaws ached from the tense hours. The cherry phosphate and too-sweet apple pie with vanilla ice cream were, I supposed, my reward. We didn't discuss Evelyn or Dad's swollen nose crusty with dried blood or the blood stains Mom would later bleach from his shirt. By my choice this was my last such trip.
Later—this was not an immediate response—I wondered what sort of people, what sort of parents, would take children along to deliver the mad, the sick and retrieve the dead? At its most simple, I think Dad wanted the company, wanted the feel of family close by. Then, too, the family insisted that the Business (with a capital "B") of illness, dying, and death was normal, no ghosts allowed. The Business was only a service, like a plumber called to fix a leak. Yet, was it possible to touch illness, madness and death without having the gesture returned in kind?