The Vile Village (6 page)

“Once in a while someone comes along and wants to buy one—I don’t know what for, I don’t ask. Actually they’re kind a nice,
ain’t they?” he said, putting one hand under his chin and studying the collection of the dead and rotting dead on his barn
wall. “Sorts like a museum or something.”

“Or something,” Stone muttered under his breath, and covered it quickly with a cough. “Uh, fascinating, it really is. I’ve
never—” Stone was just beginning to wonder whether the sight and presence of these denizens of the dead wouldn’t have a deleterious
effect on Hanson’s children when two of them ran along the far side of the wide barn, raising up the sawdust on the floor,
playing tag among the lower bodies chained up to the wall. One hid behind a rotting corpse and then swung it back and forth
in front of him, trying to keep his brother back. Then they both ran off laughing and screaming as the leathery thing bounced
back hand against the wall, setting the nest of the bodies going so that they all rocked back and forth, banging against one
another like a huge, slapping wind chime of cadavers.

“Well, come here lad. Stone, it was—right, Stone?” Hanson said, slamming his big hand down on the discolored steel surface
of the long table once used for autopsies in a morgue and now put to equally morbid use.

“Stone—yes, sir,” Stone said softly as he started over toward the rotund man. Stone wanted nothing more than to go back to
bed and sleep for about a century. But as the fat crazy man in front of him
had
in fact just saved his damn life, and since he already
had
been sleeping for about a week, Stone figured it was a good idea to just keep going—just do anything. And try not to lose
what little solid food he’d eaten that morning.

“Now, I’m going to give you an opportunity here, Stone, because I like you. I’ll teach you a little about the undertaking
business. Something you can carry with you the rest of your life. You know what I mean—a second trade. Who knows where the
vicissitudes of life will take you.” From the number of dead Stone had been seeing—and creating—on his travels, Undertaker
might not have such a bad idea there, Stone thought to himself. There was certainly plenty of product.

“Saw away,” Stone said with a thin grin as he walked stiff-legged over to the man who was shorter than him by a good half
a foot, and wider by about two. A sumo wrestler with the head of a bald Midwestern farmer with tobacco-stained teeth and the
fanatical eyes of a used-car salesman. Just a typical acquaintance of Martin Stone’s, Stone thought, and shook his head slightly
from side to side. Undertaker took a deep breath, as if about to deliver an hour-long lecture with one intake of air, and
started.

“Now, the first thing you need to do is conserve, Mr. Stone, conserve,” Undertaker said sternly, waving his finger in the
air like a sword about to cut off any overspender’s appendages. “That means selecting exactly the amount of material that
will do the job—no more, no less. That’s the only way a man can make a profit. By the square inch, Stone, by the square inch.”

“Gotcha,” Stone said firmly, actually starting to feel just a little better as he stood there beside the fellow. Maybe it
really was a good idea not to crawl back to bed, to get some blood circulating through his racked body. He tried to jump up
and down slightly on his toes to increase the circulation, but after three quick jumps he felt dizzy and stopped. Exercise
postponed until further notice.

“Now,” Undertaker said, rolling up his thick sleeves, “in this case—and this is a slightly unusual case, I’ll admit,” Undertaker
said with a gusty laugh. “But still…” He pulled the head up by the blood-soaked hair from the woven basket the fanner had
left and slammed it down hard on the table like a pineapple just brought back from market. The thing bounced a few times on
its forehead and then settled over on a tilt so that its eyes were sort of looking right into Stone’s. Stone shifted his glance
in disgust.

“But still, we can estimate what was attached until it actually arrives.” He pushed the head around until it was up near one
end of the twelve-foot-long metal dissecting table and set it in the middle. Then he took a long metal ruler and laid it alongside
the thing, walking down the table a few feet. “Let’s see, legs will be here, hips here, feet. Figure this guy can’t have been
more than a couple of inches taller than his
compadre
who brought him. So we’ll say here—the toes are about here.” He laid a second strip of metal down, this one perpendicular
to the table. “Now we just take this…” He lifted a piece of rough wood about two feet wide by six feet long and slammed it
down, lifting the head so that it rested up at the top end, facing up at the roof of the old barn, the light from the dim
afternoon swirling down in halos of gold through the holes here and there in the cone above, and through the window frames,
now glassless, that sat around the second and third stories of the forty-foot-high faded red barn.

For the next two hours Stone learned everything about making coffins with the least amount of wood and nails possible. About
formaldehyde for pickling, about makeup for the dead, about every damn thing you always wanted to know but were afraid to
ask about embalming and funereal procedures. Still, in a bizarre way Stone found it all fascinating, though his stomach kept
gurgling like a sink with something stuck in its pipes.

Before they knew it, there was a knock on the door, and more of the short brown farmers were there with burros loaded down
with the dead.

“Ah, see, Stone, time flies when you’re having fun,” Undertaker said, wiping his hands free of sawdust and chemicals and heading
to the door. He helped the farmers unload their already strong-smelling baggage, and then Undertaker shooed them all out again,
telling them to wait out in front by the funeral chapel—where services were conducted. The moment the door was closed again,
he screamed out for his children to get the Heavenly Chapel all set up and ready, ’cause there was a bunch of ripe ones coming
through.

“Now you’ll see a master at work,” Undertaker said haughtily. “Just keep your eyes on me if you can.” He laughed, leaned over,
picked up the headless body from one of the huge straw baskets, and spread it out on the table. Then he took the severed head
belonging to the thing and held it until it was right in place above the stump of a neck.

“Now come on, Stone, help me, man, help me,” Undertaker bellowed. “Don’t stand there like a goddamn tree. Get me that hammer
there, and one of them long nails.” He gestured with a toss of his head to the side where shelves of tools and revolting-looking
devices were stacked not very tidily. Stone reached over and got what the man had asked for and stood up again, feeling a
little dizzy from the sudden rise. “Now hold this here,” Undertaker said impatiently, nodding at the head he was holding firmly
by the bloody scruff of the neck.

“Oh, I don’t think I—” Stone smiled grimly, starting to back away.

“Get over here, mister, and help me with this. I got too much to do tonight to start playing pattycake with amateurs. Now
come on.” Stone gulped and reached down, half turning his eyes away from the thing. It felt cold and wet. Out of the corner
of his eye he couldn’t help but see Undertaker take a long nail and place it right at the nostrils of the head. Then, with
a few quick strokes, he nailed the missing appendage down right against the neck, the big tenpenny nail protruding from one
nostril like a sinus dripping liquid steel.

“Okay, let go now,” Undertaker commanded, and Stone released his hold. “See there?” The fat man grinned proudly. “Won’t budge
an inch.” To prove his point, he put his fingers around the skull and twisted it back and forth. But the nail did hold the
head quite firmly in place. “Now watch this, Stone. Watch close, man. If things had been different, I would have been a surgeon,
I tell you. A brain surgeon, most likely, and one of the greatest in the world. Perhaps of all time.” That being said, Undertaker
reached down into another box of bloodstained supplies and extracted a long, nasty-looking needle. He looped a piece of nylon
filament about as thick as fishing line through the eye of the needle and then leaned down over the corpse.

“You know, it’s amazing how one skill can translate into another,” Undertaker said as he dug the long needle into the throat
of the dead thing beneath him and pushed hard. “My grandfather was a tailor—showed me a few things about cutting and sewing,
I’ll tell you. And really, there ain’t no difference between tweed and flesh when you get right down to it.” He quickly and
expertly ran the needle in and out between the ring of flesh that was left hanging from the head—and the jagged stump of the
neck. After sewing a circle of stitches around the connection, he stood back and surveyed his creation with pride.

“Now, is that beautiful or what?” Undertaker laughed, slapping himself with both hands against his stomach in a gesture of
at satisfaction. “Looks as good as the day he was born.” Which wasn’t the case at all, for Stone could clearly see the terrible
gash between head and body, the nylon clearly visible with its jagged, bloody stitching. But it was on there all right, it
wasn’t going anywhere, that was for damn sure.

The service in the Heavenly Chapel was a sight to behold. Stone sat in one of the front rows and watched the spectacle of
Undertaker conducting the benedictions for the dead in a sort of cross between Billy Graham and a used-car salesman. He raised
his fist to the sky, cursed the fates, told God to open his arms for some “decent folks who are cumin’ up”, and all in all
created quite a scene. His children, seated around the oak-slab benches, cried and carried on like it was their own pa who’d
been done in, dabbing at their eyes with hankies and consoling one another.

When it was all said and done, the two dozen or so widows and relatives who dared make the dangerous journey from their wretched
farms to the Hanson Farm and Under-taking Palace seemed satisfied. Their dead one
did
look so good—why hardly at all like he’d just had his head sawed off. And with all the pomp and noise, as cheap and as tacky
as it was, they were happy. After all, all that a man can hope to get when he’s gone is a moment of drama. To signify that,
yes, he was worth something in this fucked-up life.

T
he dead were prayed for, anointed with precious oils, inundated with incense, which was lit all over the damn place and stank
to high heaven, and last but not least, laid down in the Cemetery of the Heavenly Acres, whose motto, “Here, The Dead Don’t
Rise,” was painted on a gigantic wooden sign that stood over the entrance to the four-acre plot that Undertaker had cleared
with his own hands of every branch, rock, and corpse-eating groundhog. If not flat, the cemetery, which was fenced in all
around with low stone walls, at least had the look of a real graveyard, with rows of tombstones made of larger rocks rolled
into place above each grave and epitaphs sprayed on them in Day-Glo paint from aerosal cans that Undertaker had chanced to
find a whole crate of.

“A suffering man lies here”

“I died ’cause my woman lied.”

“Avenge me, Martha.”

“I left this world a cleaner place than I found it.”

“I killed Tommy Shefrin, his brother killed me.”

These and numerous other footnotes of the dead were written in a graffitilike scrawl over every three- to five-foot-high piece
of rectangular-shaped rocks over the plots. Again, the families of the dead seemed content with the ceremony and thanked Undertaker
ceaselessly as he led them off, out of the Cemetery of the Heavenly Acres. They promised to send another three dozen chickens
over the next three months, a price Hanson figured was just about right. Be-sides, it was good for the trade to put on a show.
Word of mouth spread, even when it came to dying.
Especially
when it came to dying.

Stone was unsteady on his feet after the day’s events and found himself starting to fall face forward into one of the graves
he had just helped dig. But hands reached out and caught him, and the next thing he knew, he was walking back toward the main
house with LuAnn supporting him around her shoulder. She was looking into his eyes as he opened them, and he almost blushed
from the intensity of the stare.

“Sorry, I must have blacked out for a moment,” Stone said, trying to walk on his own for a moment. But finding that he had
hardly any strength in his legs, he allowed her to help. He hated feeling so helpless. But all things taken into account,
he was lucky he still had legs to stand on, considering how easily those heads had been detached from their owners. Flesh
was so soft. Only those who killed, who sliced or cut human flesh knew its softness. It was like veal, tender spring calf—a
single cut dug deep.

“Oh, Pa can work you hard, let me tell you.” LuAnn laughed, and again Stone felt a surge of energy stream through him, and
a at in his stomach at the way her lips moved, the way they were covered with a sheet of moisture. “Half of us fall asleep
when we hit our beds and don’t wake up till the morning wake-up gong. Undertaker don’t like dawdlers. He says you got plenty
of time to be lazy when you’re dead, but when you’re alive, move your ass.”

“He’s got a point there,” Stone replied, raising one side of his mouth in something approximating a smile. “Man knows his
damn business, I’ll tell you that,” Stone said, liking the feel of her warm body right alongside him. Then they were at the
house, the crickets chirping hard in the darkness, the moths flying into the screen door trying to reach the light of the
burning oil lamps inside, occasionally finding the rips in the screens and succeeding in their fiery suicides. LuAnn led Stone
up the creaking wood steps to the attic and into the bedroom, where she sat him down on the bed and he fell backward immediately,
like a log ready for the paper mill.

“I’ll get these off,” she said, pulling off his dirt-caked boots from the digging. Then his pants. Then, before he could muster
the energy to protest, everything. “Just let me wash off the old coating of herbal ointment and put on a new one,” she said
firmly as she went across the room and came back with a sponge and a bucket of water. Stone started to protest, not even sure
why, and then just shut his mouth and enjoyed it. It felt good when she pulled the warm sponge across him, up and down his
chest and stomach, and then lower. But not quite as good when she slopped handfuls of the white ointment onto him and spread
it around like fingerpaint over every square inch of him. Then she toweled the whole sticky mess off and finally pulled the
blankets up over his now once again white-coated physique.