Marching to Zion Read online

  George McCallum sized her up once more in a long, slow glance from her toes to the top of her head. He didn’t run into people like Mags every day, a pretty young gal about ready to drop from excitement over learning how to care for the cold and gone. He struggled to keep his delight buried until they could work out the details of her pay.

  Well, most times a body’s got to be born to the death trade to study it proper, he told her while scratching his chin with the back of a rubber glove. But I suppose I could teach you if you were willing to work especially hard.

  Oh yessir. I will work day and night to get me such skills. I promise you that.

  He gave her a tour of the rest of the funeral home, educating her about how city folk with enough coin in their pockets buried their dead, about the rooms for laying out, the rooms for grieving, and the rooms for receiving condolences. He showed her the chapel, a kitchen, a showroom for coffins, and an office. Up on the second floor were living quarters, he told her, but these were off-limits.

  When they were through and had come to agreement on salary and hours, Mags felt as if she herself had died and been resurrected. She walked on a heavenly cloud back to Miss Emily’s rooming house, buoyed by hope and accomplishment. She felt exceedingly proud of herself. Only two days in the city, and already she had a loan, a home, and a job that would prepare her for the future of her dreams. Later, she announced her success to the night-crawling­ residents of Miss Emily’s as they gathered for breakfast at six p.m. She was unconcerned at first when Chesty gasped and Bobsy shrieked, when Rain knocked every piece of wood in the room, when Cat closed her eyes up tight and pushed her nostrils up in disgust. Miss Emily, stirring a pot on the boil, frowned with one half of her mouth.

  Fishbein’s. Fishbein’s. She’s goin’ to Fishbein’s, Chesty said in a voice halfway between speech and prayer. She swayed back and forth the way mourners keen.

  The women echoed her, murmuring the name Fishbein like a chant. Rain threw salt over her shoulders, right and left, then admonished Mags to reconsider her decision carefully as the Angel of Death did not appreciate being made light of, not at all. And that Fishbein, well, he had a reputation is all. He was a Jew, to begin with, a Jew who buried coloreds for a livin’, Rain finished up. Now, that alone is odd enough to lend belief to everythin’ they say about him.

  It never occurred to me to ask about the owner, Mags told them. George McCallum is the boss over there.

  If you say so, child, Chesty said.

  Now, look you all, that’s just about enough, Miss Emily added. It was me sent her over. It’s not as if she ran there blind like a calf skitterin’ home to its ma.

  Mags had no idea what any of them meant, but she was grateful Miss Emily’s words shut the others up as they shrugged or sniffed and changed the subject. One thing was certain. City people were peculiar about death. Let them try living in the country with farm animals, wild things, babies and old folk, young men in their prime, all of them dying by the barrel full in every rough season. They’d soon get over their superstitions. As she dipped her bread in coffee and chewed on a crisp stick of bacon, she felt superior to all of them, at least until the conversation turned toward public transportation and she demonstrated some fresh ignorance about the frequency of stops on the trolley line. The others laughed and teased her relentlessly the rest of the meal.

  It wasn’t until later that night when everyone but Miss Emily had gone to work and she lay in her bed reviewing the day, telling it all to Aurora Mae in her mind, that Mags wondered who and where this Fishbein was. There’d been no sign of him at the home. The third floor had been as quiet as a tomb. She puzzled over her housemates’ reaction to his very name and decided that it was natural a man who owned such a business might be considered fearsome. By the time she found out more about him, a half dozen lives gone had been readied for the earth under her hands.

  Certainly George McCallum didn’t offer much information. He never so much as referred to the owner of the funeral home by name. He was the Man Upstairs. Given the way death and mourning and the consolations of prayer inhabited the house like hot air in summer, Mags thought for a while he was referring to God.

  Don’t be draggin’ that chair ’crost the floor, he told her the first time she helped him set up the reception hall for a crowd. The Man Upstairs don’t like that. He can hear you, don’t you forget it. He can hear every little thing goes on in this old house.

  Amen, brother, Mags said, as if they were in church and the Divine had been summoned. Amen.

  God’s ear, she thought, was much occupied. The house was full of sound all the time, from one end to the other, upstairs and down. It creaked, it moaned. It gave off sudden loud pops and hums as if whatever currents of energy that kept it going blocked up then belched. There were voices, too. Male and female whispers sometimes in response to each other, sometimes in chorus, sometimes repeating themselves over and over as if issuing ignored commands in plaintive tones. Mags suffered a shivering fit when she first heard them. For her, they were like nothing so much as the complaints of the dead.

  George McCallum laughed when she told him her thoughts and said, The Man Upstairs had visitors today, don’t you know.

  She did not find the image he provided comforting. It took a fresh little dip in her well of resolve to get to work the next morning. She summoned Aurora Mae’s voice telling her before she left home, Anything worth doing is worth doing two weeks to see if it takes. You feelin’ unsure after that, you quit.

  It was good advice. After several weeks, Mags got used to things the way they were. She was learning a lot and saw there was much more she could learn from George McCallum. She took to making lunch for them both in the kitchen on the first floor of the main house. She’d tired of stale bread and the odd slice of cold meat Miss Emily gave her wrapped in newspaper to take with, and George McCallum offered to provide the fixins if she’d provide the cookin’. It was good to get out of the basement every day for a bit, when she could take the cotton from her nose and give her throat a rest. The air was always sweet from flowers and scented candles in the next rooms, especially so when no waiting corpse accompanied them. Sometimes, it gave her a bit of a faint when the first blast of ripe, cloying air hit her, but it felt nice in a strange way, reminding her of walking into Aurora Mae’s house when that woman was deep in boiling or grinding up roots and whatnot for her mustards and draughts. If a day came when all was well, when the newly dead were old and died in peace, an event more common than ever she knew, the association made her warm inside, happy. On other days, when a child came into the basement morgue or a woman hideously beaten, when the faces of the dead were fixed in the worst horror or pain, it made her dreadful homesick.

  It was one of the former days. She’d put up rice then sautéed collards with onion and garlic in fatback to toss in the rice when it was done. She’d bought the fatback on the way to work, a special purchase to celebrate her first full month working at Fishbein’s Funeral Home and in residence in the bustling city of East St. Louis. It was also a way to do something nice for George McCallum, who was growin’ on her. They didn’t talk together much beyond the necessaries during the training he gave her, but what he did say was always interesting, sometimes humorously so, other times downright wise. He was a kind man, she thought, and respectful. Besides that, she felt he liked her. So she stirred her tribute lunch and hummed an old song her daddy sang on Sundays and Wednesdays after prayer meeting. Little sparks went off in her chest as she pictured George McCallum settin’ down to such a feast when a great chorus of heavy steps came clattering down the service staircase at the back of the kitchen, a staircase that had offered nothing but silence in all the days and weeks she’d been at Fishbein’s Funeral Home. She jumped and spun around, dropping a spatula on the floor. The door to the staircase swung open fiercely to hit the wall with a bang.

  There, on the bottom step, was Magnus Bailey.

 
; Mr. Bailey? Mags asked, not that she was uncertain of his identity but rather of his purpose. Why was he here? Why now? Was it to collect from her? She’d given a dollar already to Miss Emily to give to Magnus Bailey as she claimed to see him regular. Had her landlady cheated her? Why else would he pose on the edge of that step in his three-piece pinstripe suit with watch fob, a bowler hat on his head, his gloved hands bracing his form on either side of the wall to keep himself balanced on feet housed in sparkling spectators?

  It was the briefest moment that he did so, but she remained perplexed even after he completed his movements in a graceful landing remarkable for its lightness. He went to her, took her by both arms to set her aside from her pots, removed the skillet from the burner, and dumped its contents in the sink. When he spoke, his words were exasperated, but the tone he employed caressed, as Magnus Bailey’s voice always did.

  Never, he said, never use fatback in this house. The scent of it makes the Man Upstairs ill.

  Startled as she was by her creditor’s appearance, Mags’s mind boggled at the idea that fatback enfeebled the Almighty. Then she realized her misapprehension.

  You meanin’ Mr. Fishbein?

  Who else? Magnus Bailey rolled his green eyes at her.

  You were with Mr. Fishbein?

  On business.

  She couldn’t help herself. What business? she asked. Whatever his business was, she figured, it had nothing to do with grief or loss.

  Magnus Bailey arched an eyebrow and pursed his lips, raised a finger at her and wagged it. His business was no business of hers, that eyebrow said. Bailey tamped his bowler down on his head and left by the back door off the kitchen.

  From that day, Mags spent a considerable amount of time speculating about Mr. Fishbein. When she asked George McCallum why the smell of fatback made the Man Upstairs sick, he told her Jews ate peculiar sometimes. He had no idea why. Mags knew nothing about Jews except that they killed the Lord Jesus Christ. She was often lost in confounding conjecture. Whenever she was in the kitchen, she’d pause now and again, hold her breath, her ears cocked to listen for any sign of his existence. Although that old house continued to knock and wheeze, she had no way of knowing which noises were that of Mr. Fishbein, which of ghosts, and which of the house itself. George McCallum insisted the last was generally responsible. It was another month before she learned anything new.

  Fishbein! Fishbein! Fishbein!

  From the third floor, the forbidden floor, came an angry feminine voice followed by a crash of porcelain or glass. Mags and George McCallum stopped the arrangement of floral tributes in the viewing room and stared wide-eyed at the ceiling. A woman’s sobs muffled by the wood and plaster between them followed, then thumps made by the knocking about of heavier objects or perhaps the woman herself hurled into a wall.

  Mags put a hand on George McCallum’s arm.

  Should we go upstairs?

  No. No, I don’t think so.

  Another crash. Another thump. Mags’s heart sank, imagining a woman in extreme distress. Her hand tightened, she stepped a tiny bit behind him for protection.

  I disagree, George.

  She’d never used his given name to address him before. He inclined his head toward her, more fascinated by her voice uttering his name than the commotion going on above them.

  Someone’s in trouble up there, George.

  She saw his chest swell, felt the heat come up from him to envelop her. He set his jaw with determination and pulled apart from her, patting the hand that remained on his arm.

  I’ll go now. I’ll go.

  There followed ten long, torturous minutes of waiting. When George returned to the reception hall, he was shaking his head, in confusion, in surprise, in thoughtfulness.

  He wants to see you.

  Mags’s jaw dropped.

  Me?

  Yes.

  What do I do?

  Go.

  Alright, she said, alright. And wiping her hands on her skirt, she ascended the kitchen staircase humming that old Sunday song her daddy sang for courage.

  III

  The song worked. Mags achieved her destination filled with the spirit and feared no evil nor Jew. The landing was large, its floor covered by a rich carpet patterned in swirling reds and golds. Before her were double doors of a rich, dark wood with two brass knobs. Potted plants and stained-glass windows flanked the doors. Shafts of light poured in through the windows’ green-and-blue glass to give the place an eerie, sacral air. It was a world apart from downstairs. Despite its chapel and the calls upon Jesus’ name whenever a corpse made it up from the basement and into the parlor for a short stay of celebration, that place was a universe of rankest flesh. It was as if a different, second house was plunked down directly on top the first, a habitation where the rippling murmurs and woeful moans of the bereaved below were snuffed out.

  Mags paused to inhale deeply, twice. She put her hands on the two knobs and pushed. The doors swung forward, leaving her standing with her arms outstretched, a hand on each knob, her neck elongated, and her head tilted up to help her keep her balance against the doors’ unexpected swing. She looked like an actress making a grand entrance onstage, an actress meant to embody all that was proud and privileged instead of resembling what she was, the cautious servant of betters like Aurora Mae, Miss Emily, George McCallum, and now this Mr. Fishbein. Her eyes swept the room, looking for an injured or cowering female or broken glassware or pots or broken anything that could have made the commotion that led to her summons. She found none. What she found was Mr. Fishbein, the saddest man in all the world.

  Before she came to work at a house of the dead, Mags had witnessed plenty of heartache. She’d known women whose babies died at birth, young men whose brides were taken away by fever before the honeymoon sheets had time to grow cool, let alone cold. She had a cousin who saw the face of his little girl, a beautiful child, mauled by a pack of wild dogs. She’d seen motherless children, fresh from putting their mama in the ground, shuffle through a storm of sorrow. But never had she seen a man, woman, or child with anguish so etched into his features, his posture, that it was more an expression of what dwelt within. It was his very essence.

  Fishbein’s eyes were large and heavy-lidded, the whites of them entirely red, brimming with unspilled tears. Deep grooves led from the eyes down his cheeks, as if carved there by a constant weeping. His mouth had a downward cast that made her sad-sack housemate Rain’s look cheerful. His thick, wild eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair were wiry, the latter poking out in all directions from beneath a tasseled cap as if long ignored or torn at constantly by despairing hands. His shoulders were stooped. Wearing a belted dressing gown and pinstripe trousers, he sat at a great rolltop desk covered in papers. His long, thin legs were pressed tightly together. His hands were folded fast in his lap so that the knuckles went white and the fingertips red. He looked to be trying to keep a raging torment still in his gut, to carry it in silent sufferance. Mags thought that if a man who looked like that tried to laugh, it would come out in a groan or a sob.

  It was hard to look at him. What’s more, her life’s training instructed her not to look directly at a white man too long. Her gaze left him and studied the room instead. Everything around her was rich and exotic, from the crystal chandeliers to the dark paintings of stags at mountain waterfalls to the collection of silver animals that crowded the mantelpiece. Mags took it all in while struggling to hide her fascination. Fishbein spoke, startling her.

  You are George’s Mags? he asked.

  Mags was not aware she was George’s Mags, but she warmed unexpectedly at the sound of it. Since a month or two in the city, even a month or two in company with the naked dead, does not remove the shyness in a country gal, her cheeks went hot as she nodded her bowed head.

  I hear you are doing very well down the stairs. George tells me you have a talent for our work.


  Fishbein had an odd accent, spoken in a wet rasp as if his words had drowned in wretchedness. She knew that people far downriver spoke differently from those up north. She thought maybe that’s the way they speak downriver, very far down. Even more far than Memphis, maybe, she thought, as if she knew such things.

  Thank you, sir.

  He coughed, clearing his throat, but the wet rasp was not gone. I am also hearing that what goes on here earlier disturbs you.

  Mags chewed her lip. What was she supposed to say to that?

  It is my daughter, he said. She is not well, and sometimes not herself.

  Mags remained mute, unsure of what she was supposed to say. She was stuck on the question of why a daughter would call out to her daddy by their family name. Counting on the fact that white people, even Jew white people, she assumed, expected Negroes to be of wandering mind, her glance searched the room again, looking for this Fishbein gal. There were two corridors off the room in which she stood, and the daughter was likely down one of those, in an equally strange room, quiet now and with any luck returned to herself. At last she managed to say, I am sorry for that, sir. She meant she was sorry he had a daughter who was sometimes not well, because she judged this misfortune to be the reason for all his trouble. He took her differently.

  Do not apologize, he said. There is a terrible rumpus, I agree. Of course you concern yourself. But all is well, this I promise you.

  The more he talked, the greater Mags’s discomfort grew. By the time he dismissed her, her head ached from the dozens of uncommon ways in which she’d had to stretch her experience to figure out what it was this woeful white man wanted from her, why she was standing in front of him confronting the wobble of social bound­aries she’d lived with all her life through. One thing was certain. She did not want to suffer another such interview anytime soon, which she told George McCallum the second she returned to their basement workshop.