Deep in the Heart

Deep in the Heart

Prologue

Clarice: The Amarillo Railhead, West Texas, 1915

My grandparents Jimmy and Florence Cunningham had five children and Aunt Clarice was the only female, one strike against her, but she was the oldest and that was worth double. There would have been six if they counted the baby that killed their mother, though life starts with breath and that bitty creature never drew one. No point wasting time with souls that never were. The Cunningham boys, her little brothers, were Walter, Jacob, Lloyd and Jimmy T junior—my poor daddy.

Clarice was born July of 1905, but no one remembers the day including Clarice. There was a second anniversary engraved on her heart, chiseled like the headstones she sold in her shop. An ill-fated date for all, save Clarice. For her, it was a second birth.

The air was bitter the May night of 1915 when my grandma, Florence Cunningham, died on the lip of the Caprock. When her pains took hold, the Comanche midwife came up from the gulch where she and her kin hid out. Some claim General Ranald S. Mackenzie and the 4th US cavalry slaughtered every man, woman and child of them. Others claim that the lion’s share got away and he only killed their horses. Either way, Florence Cunningham swore by that pigeon-toed woman when it came to birthing her babies. And she didn’t live long enough to change her mind. Those two were the only living creatures down in the dugout that night, so the truth will be theirs to tell when Judgment Day arrives.

What manner of afterlife the Lord prepared for heathens was none of Clarice’s business. She’d a hunch, though, that when those glory days arrived, the Good Lord would scare up some red folk to clarify the distinction. The determination between the saved and the damned was his to make. And no one else’s.

The dark was growing thick around Clarice when that little woman started yodeling loud enough to scratch the drum of the left-eared moon. She was burning her weeds and snake oils down in the dugout, and smoke began pouring through the vent holes in the tarp, stretched taut to keep the warmth in. Smoke always made the boys sputter and sneeze then smear their filthy palms across their overalls. All Clarice could think of was how soon she’d be scrubbing those same overalls in a barrel of lye.

Not one of the Cunningham children had any but the clothes on their backs. But Florence Cunningham liked her offspring to look sharp and wouldn’t stand for grime, so she’d have Clarice strip the boys down, and launder their soiled garments even if those little runts had to run around bucknaked until their clothes dried out. “We may be short of money,” she said often enough, “but we don’t act like po folks. We may not have wordly goods, but we are cut from finer cloth than those scotch-irish heathens. I was born a Jones, of pure English stock, and I will die one.” Thanks to her Charleston-born scruples, Florence was a fastidious woman, and her daughter felt duty-bound to honor that virtue in her, much as she hated the doing of it.

So while Florence Cunningham was birthing her last baby, Clarice swayed on the rim of the dugout, lamenting her lot in life, not her mother’s, even though that poor woman was lowing in the dug-out-hole beneath her like a milk cow startled by sunrise. Then the sounds stopped and her mother’s yodels of pain with them. But there was no baby howling this time to make up the difference. The Comanche woman poked her popcorn head through a hole in the tarp and drilled Clarice with a regard that might have raised the dead were her mother not headed in that direction to spare them the effort.

The little Comanche woman, Clarice swore, was no taller than her nine-year-old self and just as skinny. And that eerie night, they looked like dumbstruck sisters with so little light to distinguish them.

“Go fetch your pa,” the woman said, or close enough for Clarice to catch her

meaning.

Clarice had performed this assignment many times, dragging her

father home from the saloon by his good-for-nothing dripping- drunk collar, but this time, scared as she was, she did it right. She still had her wits about her as she always would. All she ever had to rely on. For if she was a Jones, like her mother said, she didn’t have to keep up with anyone but herself.

She cut a switch from an overhanging cottonwood and sharpened it with the pocketknife she carried in her pocket, for killing and cutting. Properly outfitted, she swung through the double doors of the Davy Crockett Saloon and strode right up to her Daddy who lay crumpled over the bar. Without a second thought, she hauled him up by his suspenders. One might presume a drunken man to be heavier than a sober one, but as Clarice had discovered, liquor directs gravity in the opposite direction.

Ain’t you ashamed?” she cried out like a preacher herself. Before Jesus Christ and all his apostles, ain’t you ashamed to be called a Christian? The mother of your children is birthing another of your babies and all you can do is pour her good living down your throat, spill it like slops all over your sorry self!

No one in the saloon was willing to dispute what she said—nine-year-old child that she was. She dragged her father out into the open by the mangy suspenders he never took off (however much his wife fussed at him that they were caked in his filth). Clarice was as fierce that night as a being possessed by an angel or a demon—she never would say which.

He slid down onto the ground like a Raggedy Ann without its stuffing then waited—or so it seemed—on his whipping. He hadn’t sufficient strength to speak, only to raise his hands and cover his face, to protect his vanity she supposed, and his teeth. But she’d never been one for pity. She beat him this way and that, over his head and trunk until she drew blood. She was hungry for it, like a coyote loose in a chicken coup. She wanted him to feel raw pain in his innards that was deeper than her darling mama was feeling on his behalf. But still he uttered not a word or

a squeak. He just drooled rum and bile down over his bib. Liquor, the girl reckoned, was its own anesthetic. Gilead’s balm for sinners. Clarice could neither read or write at that moment in her life, but she knew scripture by heart.

If she’d had a napkin, she might have wiped him clean, but any consideration for his dignity soon passed. She was not his keeper and vowed that from thenceforth she would be no one’s but her own.

She hauled him up by his collar, by the nape of his neck as she would the mongrel dog that lived off their scraps, and she set him walking westward through the dry, cold prairie. She prodded him between his ribs to keep him upright. She wasn’t putting up with any toppling or teetering. Whenever he cried out, Flo, her mama’s name, into that piteous night, she beat him all the harder. She beat him for shame, she beat him for his just deserts, she beat him from the Amarillo railhead to the patch of dirt they called home. But this home was not a house. It was a twelve by nine-foot hole in the ground with a tarp flung over it like a lid as though a family of seven were living in a tin of tobacco. It was the worst place on earth to raise a family. “Why,” she opined, “God must have been drunk himself when he dreamt up such a place.”

All of Florence Cunningham’s precious heirlooms had been ruined by the moisture that leaked through the rain sodden tarp. The walls leaked, too, because, like the roof, they soaked up water but could not retain it. Damp seeped into her mama’s hope chest and left it buckled and cracked and its fine brass handles tarnished; her white-painted writing desk warped and its finish marred with stains as though babies had been writing on it in free hand. Her ma may have been

better off storing her possessions in the wagon than letting them ruin through exposure. The cast iron cook stove was the one piece built to withstand every whim of wind and weather, and when they had logs and kindling to burn, they slept around it like pigs in a poke crowding in on their sow. Only their father slept by the wall rolled up in his overcoat. Jimmy Cunningham never took his shoes off, which, mercifully, spared them the stench of his foot rot.

Clarice’s father was in high spirits the day he’d framed the dugout with shards of timber, then braced it with a split of silver pine. But he never got around to securing the tarp to the bluff of rock that served as both buttress and back wall. So the sides would flap open in a storm and the rains, like wailing women—Clarice could be fanciful in her utterances once she got going—would blow in from whichever direction they felt like blowing.

On occasion the ladder they climbed down would tip over as though it too were planning to crush them. Once it hit little Jimmy on the crown of his head.

Walter, Lloyd and Jacob split their sides laughing. Texas boys are meaner than Jesse James. Every last one.

Clarice drove her father as fast as she could, but they were still too late for her ma. The Comanche midwife had done little to fix her up, fearful that the girl and her father would come directly after her with a posse to throw her in jail, or worse. So Clarice looked away and covered her mama’s nakedness with the Indian blanket lying on the dirt beside her body. Nature has its rules and it behooved Clarice to respect them. She came from those loins, and there was no going back inside without damnation.

She could never recall, however fiercely she focused her memory, whether she had worked by candle or lamplight that deep, brittle night, only that the dugout was lit as though by Providence itself. Her ma was cold to the touch. She must have been dead an hour or so as rigor mortis was setting into her forehead and cheeks where it starts its long descent into the grave. Those who dress the dead know there’s a sweet spot where the bottom jaw attaches to the skull, and that if you aim just right you release the spring at the back and then everything gives into the palm of your other hand. A sensitive touch can work miracles, and it was just as she’d shooed all the others above ground that Clarice chanced upon that holy notch herself and broke her mother’s locked jaw free.

Little Jimmy was the only one of the boys who stayed down in the dugout, the others had the good sense to stay away, frigid as it was outside, but he was all but a baby and yelping just like one. Occupied as she was, she knew better than to cast him out and away from his sweetheart mother, even when if she were dead. She threw a second blanket over him and instructed him to hold still or she would feed him to the wolves. He fell asleep to ease his fright, as his older sister set to working on the rest of her mama’s face. But it wasn’t their mama’s place anymore, it was a new country, a cleaned off surface, flat as the prairie and just as still and wide. Death had displaced the flaws that reveal the soul within. All smoothed over, flattened out, her mother’s spirit had fled with barely an afterglow to signal its direction home. So Clarice had to look elsewhere for the picture of her face. She thought to pray for inspiration, but her imagination beat His to the draw. It presented in whole cloth a living portrait of her ma, who would sit of an evening in

her rocker rehearsing verses from her Bible, and as worn a creature as she was, took such pleasure in hoping, in rocking, in leaning, like Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, on the charity of her Lord. In this attitude, Clarice recalled, her ma was as beautiful a creature as any in God’s kingdom. And true to her likeness inside her silver locket, the only treasure left in her hope chest that her husband had not bartered for liquor and vittles. But there was no need for Clarice to go hunting that image down. It was pasted in her mind’s eye.

This fanciful ability was Clarice’s calling card to the undertaker’s art, to her sensing the shape of soul as it crossed over to the other side. And though the Lord said to beware of graven images, she truly believed he exempted her in this regard. Clarice was to learn the craft of embalming and that took bookwork and practice: it was no inborn skill, like her others.

But there is more to dressing a body, she told me, than draining and infusing. It’s an act of resurrection. Redemption: that is God’s work.

With her bare hands Clarice scooped up a handful of the Caliche mud from the floor. Florence Cunningham must have known from instinct that childbirth was as often as not a one-way door to paradise so she swept the dirt floor when her pains settled in to keep that pathway clear.

With a sprinkling of water from a saucepan the Comanche woman had left on the stove, Florence’s daughter worked this orange mud into a thin paste, thinner than pie dough, closer to gruel, a tincture of unblemished ochre. And Clarice pretended her ma had the features of the daintiest damsel she had ever set eyes on because dainty was how her mother was reared and dainty was how she

should appear in death. First she made her complexion whole and then she stirred in a clump of redder dirt to thicken and darken the mix. She made her mother oxbow lips and gave them back the plumpness of her youth. She rouged her cheeks and set dimples beneath and beside, and a beauty mark above her upper right lip, which was not in the locket cameo but which she deserved, lady that she was. She blotted, smudged and she always swore that she caught a glint of a squirrel smile in the corners of her mother’s mouth as though she were pleased, with herself and with her daughter for seeing her that way. Yet Clarice always insisted that her purpose was sentiment not magic, but she would add, with a mischievous twinkle, that sometimes a little magic slips in unseen. And who was she to nix it?

She brushed and braided her mother’s thinning hair to look as lustrous as a girl’s, and worked in a few drops of kerosene to make it shine. She manicured her nails as best she could, given the utensils available. Then she set her mama’s hands in a position of prayer and her Holy Bible on her breast, the one Florence Cunningham had preserved through every affliction that beset her. Clarice opened it at the twenty-third Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… She covered her mother’s chest and torso with a woolen shawl after she’d bleached and swabbed any lingering impurity from her skin. And she sewed the little Comanche woman’s blanket around her waist with pig gut twine so no living creature could break it loose, not even a carrion crow.

She believed she knelt beside her mother that evening and kissed the vanished warmth back into her cheek. In her memory she did and memory, she

told many a grieving relative, is where we greet the dead, where we exchange our vows and take stock of our affection.

She suspected her daddy would break down like a child when he beheld his wife, fair as the rose whose bloom he had destroyed. And he did for there was no one else to blame, not the babies he left her to lift and hoist on her hip even when she was ripe with another. Not even the one that finally felled her.

They buried her fast, for as frigid as it had been the night she died, the summer heat was coming on and Clarice did not want either her mother’s flesh or her finish to spoil. The boys dug deep, then Walter and Jacob stood in the grave to receive while Clarice, Lloyd and little Jimmy lifted her down. They covered her with her wedding dress—Clarice might have fastened it around her had her body not been too swollen to fit—and her virgin bridal veil and above that a leftover tarp. Then they loaded the grave with stones to keep the coyotes from breaking in after dark. Later they marked the grave with a wooden plaque, which her eldest brother Lloyd had cut and carved.

Florence Cunningham 1885-1915. Beloved wife and mother. May her soul rest with the Lord.

Clarice wanted him to add “into eternity,” but it was too hard a task for Lloyd, even with his corn shuck nimble fingers.

The day they buried their mother their father went mad and took off without a backward glance at his motherless children. He high-tailed it to Yellow House Canyon, where the road drops plumb into Quitaque and sandstone mittens stand up stiff as upturned thumbs from the canyon floor, where cottonwoods,

yucca, juniper and soapberry bloom in succession from February through late fall, where golden eagles and painted buntings burnish the skies, and coyotes patrol the scrub. Thenceforth blasted by insanity and plagued by his iniquities, he built himself a dugout against the hard canyon wall and lived out his days. Crazy as a wall-eyed coot, they say, and never drank another drop.

Like father like son was all that Clarice had to say on the matter. Others, like my uncle Lloyd, have divulged more. Clarice’s grandfather, Jimmy T Cunningham, had been a cold-blooded murderer, so hearsay had it, who had gunned down his own brother. This aforesaid brother disappeared one day, never to be seen again—until fifteen years later his remains turned up under Jimmy T’s porch folded up like a parcel in a rusted trunk. The only identifying marks were his overbite and confederate pin. When I asked my aunt Clarice’s opinion of these scurrilous rumors she observed this was one of those tall Texas tales that held a kernel of truth. Bad seed drifts away from righteousness, she said, the moment it is scattered, there’s no reforming it.

Clarice never sought her father out. She was a survivor and that required courage. And those who would judge her, she said, should think their logic through. We are taught to cherish kindness, but the Lord gave us free will to decide where we bestow it.

She was to come upon many in her time driven mad by the personage of death, some laden like her father with sin and shame, and others, the more sensitively inclined, who broke like tender reeds when they encountered its ravages. So she devoted her life to repairing atrocity before a griever had to lay his

eyes on the dearly departed. As a professional mortician she believed herself charged to tidy up both the corpse and its manners.

Certainly, she conceded, there were some came into death so banged up that duty is near impossible to fulfill. The tornado that ripped through Sweetwater in 1942 and tore out both sides of Main Street generated both her nest egg and a mess of carnage. It tore through the white side of town and left the colored untouched. No one saw the justice in that. Was the Good Lord color blind? Clarice had to take on extra help for a week and a half to haul in sufficient ice to ward off putrefaction.

“Most corpses,” she declared with her usual candor, “hunker down and slide into their coffins easy as batter into a pan. What death truly distresses, she said, is a pretty complexion—it wears the softest of chamois thin as paper. That’s why she sometimes had to spruce a body up with a good lick of pain’t.” And she passed on that skill to me.

In her life, she saw so many slumbering in death’s beard she ran out of numbers to count them with—for death did not dismay her. Her misgivings lay elsewhere.

She would close her own eyes as she was falling asleep and that slice of sin rushed in to plug the empty space behind their lids. For male or female that thing had flesh all right, and blood, a mess of it served up with its mother’s entrails. Half of it was stuck inside her mama so she could never have seen its face even if she had sought it out, nor would she try to as close as she had come to its fragile leavings. Small wonder she never birthed one of her own, nor indulged in any

behavior that might induce it. That’s what she told me, her niece, in her usual biblical cadence. No, it was childbirth she feared, not death.

But God was merciful and when her spirit was beset, he stretched his hand through its black-eyed misery. He shone his light to show her the way. For her ministry was as clear to her at the end of her life as it was on the night her mother died.

Clarice Cunningham, Undertaker, licensed and bonded. Funeral services and all the fixtures.

“Old maid I might be, but I am neither afflicted nor undefended,” she said, “I know more about this world and its ways, than most could ever dream of let alone read up on in the encyclopedia.”

When she grew stout, she bought an Oldsmobile 98 to take the weight off her feet. When she grew weary the Lord eased her burden, “ He sent you to me,” she said, “my brave Irene!”