Cold Call

The dead man arrives with half a face. The right side stayed at the grain bin off State Road 12, where the auger took Harlan Dietz at the collar and the deputies walked the dry October beans until dark for what the machine let go. They came back with a cap and a hearing aid. The left side still belongs to Harlan Dietz, sixty-one on the intake sheet, grain farmer. The right side now belongs to Ansel Marsh.

Ansel washes the body with germicidal soap. He shaves the cheek that exists. He sets the features before the chemistry, as his father taught him in this same room, under this same tube light with its green stutter. An eye cap goes under the surviving lid. The needle injector goes against the gum.

Tak, tak. The barb seats in the mandible, and the maxilla takes its twin. He twists the wires together and the mouth agrees to stay shut.

He raises the carotid with an aneurysm hook and ties off high. Twenty-index fluid, cut with warm water, runs the line. The Porti-Boy pushes, color climbs the neck the way a stock tank fills, and he keeps his eyes on the pressure gauge until the reading settles. Later the trocar drinks the cavities dry and the hydroaspirator argues in the sink until he shuts the valve.

Then the wax comes out. The face divides into thirds at the brow and the base of the nose. The ear runs the length of the nose. The corners of the mouth fall under the pupils. His father kept the rules taped inside the supply cabinet, and the tape yellowed, and every face since has come out right. Ansel derives the ruined side from the whole one. Wire and cotton go in first, then wax carved thin and stippled to take a pore. The ear he builds keeps the regulation length. Harlan Dietz grew his lobes attached to the cheek, and the lobe on the new ear hangs free.

At four the van from Hollander Floral backs up to the dock. The reverse alarm quits, the door slides, and Iris Hollander comes out of the diesel smell with a casket piece riding her forearms like a sleeping child.

"Two standing sprays and the spray for the lid," she says. "The stargazers rode up front with me. Your cooler runs colder than mine, so they go in first."

"The service is at ten."

"Then they peak at ten." She rests the piece on the rail and hands him the clipboard. Green stains rim the heel of her hand. Her wrists smell of stems cut this morning and still taking fluid. "Anthers are pulled. Pollen outlasts bleach, you know that better than anybody."

Her invoice slants uphill, and she crosses every seven. She has tucked her hair behind one ear, and the lobe hangs free. The thirds of her face run long in the middle. The corners of her mouth reach past her pupils, and the rule loses, and Ansel signs the clipboard.

When she takes it back, the left corner of her mouth tucks, a small fold, a stitch of skin that catches and releases. She leans into the cab, trades the clipboard for the lilies, and hands them across on both palms. "Careful, they bruise."

Every Thursday the dock ritual runs four to four oh two by the clock over the door, and it has run six years. Peonies come up the ramp in May with the ants still working them. Gladiolus comes all summer. December brings evergreen blankets wired for the graves, and her breath shows over the boxes, and the clipboard crosses in gloves. He has never stood inside her shop. She has never stood inside his prep room. Between them they dress every funeral in the county, her side of the casket and his, and the clipboard passes back and forth across a dock that works like a border checkpoint and stamps nothing.

The habit started with Ruth Ambler, four years back. A clot went into the right hemisphere and shut down the left side of her face, and after that she chewed on the right and kept a napkin pressed to the left corner for whatever got away from her, and death came through behind it and notarized the damage. Ansel wired the mandible, set the line of closure, and the mouth came out level and wrong, a mail slot cut into a kind face. He stood over her until the wax went cold on the spatula. Then his thumb tucked the left corner into the small fold from the dock, a stitch of skin that catches.

Gerald Ambler leaned into the casket the next evening and stayed bent a long time. "That's her about to laugh," he said. "Fifty-one years, she always looked about to laugh. Where did you find that?" Ansel straightened the register book and handed Gerald the pen.

The trade calls the last look the memory picture. The casket opens, the mourners file past, and whatever face waits on the pillow overwrites the wedding face and the hospital face. His father sold the memory picture in the arrangement office for three thousand dollars more than a closed lid, and he kept a second line for the families still deciding: "The face you bury is the face you keep." A good memory picture outlasts the house.

People talked over ham at the luncheons after the burials, and Marsh & Son got a name for the mouth. Families who would have closed the lid started paying to leave it open. Then the name grew past the mouth.

The drowned teacher, Carol Fenwick, took the unattached lobe, and her sister touched her own ear at the rail and left her hand there. Deacon Pardoe took the asking arc, the brow Ansel set a hair higher than its partner, and half his congregation wept at a question he had never worn in life. Dana Till from the drive-through window took the philtrum, that shallow channel above the lip, and her mother said she looked ready to say oh. Bev Lockhart, who cut hair in her kitchen for thirty years, took the eyelid crease, and her daughters called it peaceful, and peaceful is the word families reach for when the face is doing a thing they can't name.

Ansel attends the visitations he builds. He stands at the back by the door where the draft comes in, in the same gray the folding chairs wear, and he watches families arrive at his work. A farm wife bends to Bev Lockhart's eyelid and speaks another woman's name at it. A grandson studies Deacon Pardoe's brow and promises it he'll do better. Three counties carry Iris Hollander in their memory pictures now, a lobe here and a fold there. The mourners kiss the fold he first gave Ruth Ambler, and a son says "Mama" into it.

On the bad nights he drives past Hollander Floral after close. The cooler glows blue through the front glass, and inside the glow the buckets hold roses and carnations and her namesake irises, which die faster than anything else she sells. He idles at the stop sign the law requires and goes home to the apartment above the caskets.

In June the Hollander van backs in with a boy in earbuds at the wheel. He stacks the delivery on the dock edge, and a box of lilies slides off and lands flat, whap, and he says the box is fine, and he leaves. By evening brown thumbprints rise on the white petals where the cardboard pressed. They bruise.

"Iris on vacation?" Ansel asks him the next Thursday.

"Who?" The boy checks his route sheet. "The owner? She's fine. She does the Terre Haute market run herself now, up at two. I got hired through the wholesale house for the drops."

That night Ansel drives past Hollander Floral after close. Iris stands in the blue glow of the cooler and strips leaves from a bucket of irises. He idles at the stop sign the law requires and goes home.

Ansel phones in the Hutchins order, and a voice at her shop spells gladiolus back to him wrong.

Late that month, the county morgue calls about a release, one removal, the usual run. The clerk reads the sheet in the clerk's voice.

"Hollander. First name Iris. Thirty-four. Single vehicle, rollover, State Road 12, yesterday morning. Family's asked for Marsh."

Ansel takes it down on the pad by the phone. When the date needs a seven, he crosses it.

The market vans come back loaded at dawn, and hers came back on its roof in the beans within sight of the Dietz bin. The deputies who walked those rows in October walked them again in June.

Ansel does the removal himself. He drives the Marsh & Son van slow on 12, out and back. Past the Dietz bin, stargazer lilies stand upright in the ditch grass where somebody stood them, and no report carries a line for that.

In the prep room he unzips the pouch to the waist and stops and stands with his hands at his sides. The compressor kicks on behind the wall and runs, and he puts his hands to work because his hands are the only part of him with a license.

He washes her with germicidal soap. Trauma took the left side of the face, orbit to jaw, and the bridge of the nose. The right side survived whole, and the weather line survives on it, that border where the dry lip meets the wet, and her lashes survive, and the green is gone from her hands. He sets the features first. An eye cap goes under the right lid. The injector goes against the gum.

Tak.

His thumb rides the wire an extra beat before the twist.

Twenty-index fluid runs the line, color climbs, and the gauge holds steadier than the hand that set it. The trocar stays in its drawer longer than it should and then does its work. He packs and sutures and builds the left orbit out of wire and cotton, and he lays the foundation wax, and then he arrives at the mouth, the part he has practiced on strangers since Ruth Ambler.

The rule says derive the ruined side from the whole one. He reads the right corner the way he has read six years of Thursdays.

The right corner rests level, and no stitch of skin waits there to catch. He tilts the lamp and reads it again, and the anatomy declines to testify. The dead hold structure, and structure is all the wax can take. The tuck he has installed on four years of strangers lived in her left corner, if it lived anywhere, and the left corner is with the lilies in the ditch grass. What he holds in evidence is a face he saw for the length of a signature once a week in loading-dock light.

He goes to the file cabinet, because the manual orders reference before reconstruction. Every restoration sits in its folder in Polaroid, before and after. The Ambler file and the Fenwick file and the Pardoe file give him back his own work, and every sleeve shows an edition of Iris Hollander.

He opens the wax tin.

His thumb makes the fold before he votes on it.

He carves the rest of the night. The lamp burns a white ring on the steel. When he finishes, the face on the table matches the face he has carried to the back of every visitation. It lies there about to laugh for nobody, and Ansel washes his hands past clean at the sink.

Lorraine Hollander arrives at the small viewing room to see her daughter. She comes up to Ansel's collarbone in a wool coat too warm for June, and she refuses the chair twice. Ansel folds back the cover cloth to the shoulders and steps to the wall.

She stands at the table a long time. Outside a mower goes over the cemetery and turns and goes back over. Lorraine's brow sits heavy and level. The corners of her mouth reach past her pupils. His eye takes her thirds without permission, the way his eye takes everything, and he stands against the wall and clasps his hands like a man at his own visitation.

"You do good work," she says. "Everybody in this county says you do good work." The mower turns. "Who is that?"

"We can adjust anything before tomorrow."

"Your father buried my mother. He had a line he liked. 'The face you bury is the face you keep.'" She keeps her eyes on the table. "Ruth Ambler had that same little thing at the mouth. I stood at that casket and told Gerald she looked about to laugh. Carol Fenwick had my daughter's ears. I stand in all the lines, Mr. Marsh. It's a small county."

The cover cloth stays folded exactly where he folded it.

"I told myself you had a style," she says. "Painters have a style. I told myself that at three funerals."

Her purse clasp clicks. She takes out a photograph in a plastic sleeve gone soft and cloudy from handling, and she holds it out without looking at it, the way people hand over the last of the money.

"She never made that face in her life," she says, and she lifts her chin at the table. "Her cousin's wedding. Her father took it the year before he passed. Use this one."

The woman in the photograph laughs straight up at the sky. Her mouth runs wide, wider than any rule, and the front tooth carries a chip from a diving board or a dare. The brow sits heavy and level with no asking arc anywhere on it. The nose bumps at the bridge where a nose gets broken young and set at home. She grips a bouquet of stargazers with the anthers left on, and the pollen has already rusted the front of her dress, and she lets it.

A stranger looks out of the plastic sleeve.

He holds the photograph flat on both palms, the way Iris handed the lilies across. They bruise.

"Tomorrow at ten," Lorraine says, and buttons the coat, and goes out through the smell of other people's flowers.

The prep room at midnight holds one white ring of lamp on steel. The photograph leans against the wax tin.

He works. He widens the line of closure out to the width the laughing woman demands, and the rule loses, and he lets it lose. He mixes a heavier brow and buries the arc. He lifts the upper lip with the spatula, loads a No. 2 brush, and paints the chip onto the front tooth, the cheapest repair he has ever made and the only one that ever subtracted. He builds the bump into the bridge with wax the size of a lentil. He checks the photograph between every pass. The stranger in the sleeve laughs at the ceiling and gives him nothing to keep.

The corner waits.

He sets the spatula flat and takes the fold out in one pass. The wax comes away in a curl the size of a lash. He smooths the corner level as a mouth at rest, and he lifts the spatula, and his thumb comes down on the warm wax behind it and lays the fold back in.

He takes it out. His thumb lays it back.

He takes it out.