Most days, Eleanor Waylon spoke with a sweet, hypnotic Southern accent, a voice dripping with sugar cane tones, one with highs and melodious lilts at appropriate intervals for the proper charismatic effect, a voice built on years of hard wooing of Southern businessmen, black and white, who thought a black woman running her own business was some kind of pox-ridden risk. But today Eleanor’s voice was rough like the crunch of walking on land next to railroad tracks, each word clipped and forced out of her as if one syllable after the other slashed a fresh wound.

Cognac remnants and saliva collected in her throat and she coughed. Her mortician’s voice spat out, "His body. Not him. This is the body. Not the man." In the sparse chilled room, she spoke to divide herself from the body lying on the metal table in front of her, and to wake herself from the weakness that made her barely able to break the skin on the first incision.

The low frequency buzz of the fluorescents above her, the sour smell of chemicals, the metal tables and machines, the blank walls—she had learned the most about life in rooms like this one. Rooms where she witnessed hundreds of bodies turn useless and desperately ugly. To see someone who had once laughed, and completed calculus, and fucked up and repented, spoil into layers of dirt and pus made human life seem so simple: everyone ended up in a room like this. That knowledge underlined a pragmatism that should have better prepared her for this day.

"I don’t deal in death," the voice said, a rebuke against those who had called her an opportunist. Her heart quickened as she taped the needle to the body’s neck. The words needed to be said out loud, with volume, because they were weapons, each sentence a crutch that kept her standing.

"I am a licensed embalmer." The sounds bounced off the empty formaldehyde bottles stacked high on the shelves. She had poured two gallons in the machine for this body.

The line for fluids leaving the body draped over the sink and the faucet ran low to dilute the blood as it went down the drain. Eleanor stared at the richness of the red against the steel basin, imagining how dark the pipes would be as the blood slid down. Then her legs folded and she fell.

As she stood, she caught a sharp whiff of germicide from the towels she used to wash the body. She tried to remember what to do next. The embalming machine takes a while. Normally in her work, she would leave the machine running and go do other things.

At fourteen, when most girls were discovering the trauma of how dispensable they were in the world, Eleanor was learning the hard, constant profession of embalming.

"It’s steady work," her daddy used to say jokingly when acquaintances asked how he and his wife could do it—let alone teach it to their children.

When they thought she wasn’t listening, people jawed over Eleanor’s family by associating perversion with the funeral business, and said people who could touch dead bodies must be perverted themselves, or at least lacking in some normal human quality—the common-sense revulsion that should have repelled all things living away from all things dead.

Boys never came to her house, so her three sisters fled the shadow of death and went away, eager to have new titles in their lives besides ‘the Mortician’s daughter.’ But Eleanor stayed because her daddy taught her to feel no shame about the business.

"They’re always somebody’s loved ones, if not at the end, then somewheres along the way. This here is our Christian witness, to help families get through the worst experiences in life," he told her at the beginning of her first process.

Then he bowed his cork-shaped head and they prayed in the small, bright embalming room at the back of their house. "Dear Heavenly Father. Please accept this here poor soul into your fold. Bless this procedure so that we show love and dignity to one of your children. In your wisdom and mercy we trust, Amen."

Eleanor opened her eyes and watched as her charcoal-tinged father held his scalpel to the neck of the body lying on the metal table. He made a small, clean incision at the base of the neck.

She jumped back when blood leaked out.

"I thought he was dead, Daddy."

"Yeah. He’s gone, but the blood is still in there. We gon’ have to take it out."

He put a plastic tube into the incision and switched on the pump behind him. Next he laid the other end of the tube in the sink to his right. Eleanor watched the blood sputter then crawl through the tube and trickle down the drain.

She felt it then, a boulder in her stomach rolling up against the laws of gravity until it climbed into her throat. Her daddy held a bucket under her as she doubled over and wretched out the contents of her belly. After that, she emptied her eyes, hot and salty into her sweater, and avoided looking at him.

"It’s okay, little one." He rubbed her back. "I’m surprised that didn’t happen with the smell when you first come through the door."

"Like rotten bananas and burned meat mixed up together," she stammered.

"Yeah. I guess so. I really can’t even smell it no more." He patted her head, which she loved, and her tears dried up.

"Who is it?"

"It was Mr. Banks. Now it’s just Mr. Banks’ body."

She looked at the vacant face lying on that metal table and understood. Mr. Banks had been a nice old man with weepy eyes and a dimple in his right cheek, most days he sat on the bench near the drugstore playing chess and cracking walnuts. The body on the table had no walnuts, no dimple.

Still gloved, Eleanor lightly touched the scattered black and purple blotches on the arms and sides of the body now in front of her. They showed pictures of these on "60 Minutes" last month. She had sat in her mauve living room, on her mauve couch, with her glass of chardonnay, watching the camera scan the body of some poor man in San Francisco, and she struggled to understand how sex could be powerful enough to kill the entire body. She poured another glass and drank slowly, thinking again about Justin.

"Mama, I’m just different," Justin would tell her over the static in the phone line, his baritone voice alternately trembling and laughing.

"Have you seen your Aunt Sheila lately?" Surely Sheila could help him find his way, Eleanor would think.

"Between the restaurant and classes I always miss her."

When had he learned to lie so well?

"You really like it in L.A.?" she asked him once.

"I love it."

"I never cared for it myself," she lied. "Too many cars."

"It’s the best place in the world for me." And then he would tell a story about a party he just came from, or talk about a star who visited the restaurant where he was the sous chef.

"I don’t understand how anybody in California can get pneumonia. Just come home," she begged him the last time they spoke.

"Mama, no. I can’t do that." He was calling from the hospital.

"Come home where I can take care of you." She was cooking dinner, the water in the pot of corn boiled furiously.

"I can’t be there. Like this. I don’t want people talking about the family or your business."

"People don’t do anything but talk around here. You come home, or I’ll come and bring you home if that’s what you want." She listened to her son coughing on the other end of the line.

"Mama, you know as well as I do, that, as a black man, I can get better treatment out here."

She sighed and turned off the corn. "Well then I’m coming out there. See you as soon as I can."

"Okay, Mama. I’ll see you soon."

Now she had to talk with Charles, the father who told them they could go as far away as they wanted to find happiness, as if there was something wrong with living right here in Mississippi. "See the world," he’d said, "go live your life, and don’t be bound by these Southern borders." Justin in L.A., Ronald in Oakland, Steven roaming the world, and grandchildren who barely recognized her. No one around to help fulfill the promise she made to her daddy, to keep the funeral home open, and in the family.

"What’s wrong with him?" Charles asked casually over his shoulder. She was glad his back was still to her as he half-listened, while he ran a piece of sandpaper up and down what would be a drawer one day.

"Why don’t you use the electric sander the boys got you?" she asked to delay what she had to say next.

"I don’t know, I suppose I need the exercise." And with his free hand he gave his potbelly a few quick pats. She knew the motion well enough to recognize it from his back. Still, he turned a little to flash a teasing smile at her.

"He’s in the hospital."

"Is it serious?"

"He’s not sure. The doctor is watching him because he was having trouble breathing. He sounded weak to me on the phone." The scratching stopped as Charles reached for another piece of sandpaper. "Says he’s lost quite a lot of weight."

"Oh?" He leaned in until his nose almost touched the drawer and blew the excess dust away in quick breaths.

"He has sores—on his arms and face."

"Oh. I’m sure everything will be ok." But he let the sandpaper fall from his hands, and looked at his wife. She felt old and weak.

"You all right?" he asked quietly.

She looked down at her thumbs. "He’s sick. My baby’s sick. I can feel it in my bones." Sixty years old, she thought, and I still don’t know a goddamn thing. Can’t even help my own son.

"Is it—is it the gay cancer they call it?" His words were soft and high like a child’s.

"I don’t know. What if it is?" She peered at him over her glasses.

"We’ll have to—make something up. I don’t want my son to be made out as some kind of freak."

"You could have told him that when he was here."

"He knows that I love him."

"If you hadn’t sent them all away, you might be a little surer of that."

It was the same argument they’d had for 30 years.

"You cuddled them too much. They were boys who needed to learn how to be men."

"You never spent enough time with them. You thought they would grow up just fine on their own."

Since they knew all the words they kept their lips tight. A nightingale chirped into the silence, the neighbor’s dog barked, the loud hum of the stand-alone freezer kicked on and then off.

"You always worry too much about them, he’ll be fine." Charles crossed to her and held her in his arms with a gentle firmness.

The sadness sloshing up near her heart started to boil and she pulled away. "I’m going to him. I’ll be on a plane tomorrow."

His face flinched and he let her go as the grey hairs in his eyebrows went up in surprise. "Now, don’t go overreacting. Relax. Let’s give it a few days and fly out together."

"I’ll be on a plane tomorrow," she repeated, and left the garage.

But Jackson didn’t have any flights to L.A. the next day. She drove four hours in a tropical storm to New Orleans and sat in the terminal waiting for the next flight. She sat there, gripping her ticket, rigid on the steel chair, trying not to think about what could happen to Justin, trying not to breathe, willing the weather to be calm, praying the winds would stop whipping up flags and trees and bodies.

Planning what to say to him maneuvered her thoughts away from death.

She was going to apologize for not being around when he was four, and the babysitter bought him the book Animals A-Z. He loved it. Everyday the babysitter read it to him, and each day he picked a different animal to imitate. He learned his alphabet that way. He was on ‘dog’ before Eleanor realized what they were doing. Then one day she came home and he was on all fours, an ice cream cone taped to his nose, pushing into the couch like he was ramming it.

She picked him up and said, "Oh my, are you on the R’s already?"

He said, "Yes mama, I was a rat last R. But this R, I’m a rhinoceros."

She looked at the babysitter. "This is your second time through the alphabet?" The girl nodded and then took him in for his bath, he was trying his best to roar and growl at his mama as he went down the hall, but the sound that came out was more like a sick kitten, high, small, whiny.

Or she could remind him of when he was eight, and she caught him looting her records, mesmerized by the psychedelic swirls on the George Clinton jacket. "Play it please, mama." Unlike his brothers, he hadn’t been ashamed to jump up when the music pumped through the living room speakers. He even pulled at her arms until she was up, too, spinning and stomping in rhythm.

When the song ended and they fell onto the couch he asked, "Why do they say, ‘Tear the roof off this mother’?"

She thought for a minute to make it eight year old appropriate and then said, "It just means to dance until you can’t dance anymore."

He said, "Oh," and when the next song came bursting into the living room, he got up and moved his little body into all sorts of contortions and jumps. She remembered falling asleep that night with a wide smile on her face.

She would definitely tell him how proud she was of how at eleven he started working at the funeral home after school and on Saturdays to earn extra allowance. Of her three, only Justin actually enjoyed being there. He never said it was creepy, or went on about how bad it smelled like the other boys did. He swept, he filed, did his homework in her office, or quietly practiced his juggling in the back parking lot. He never flinched at blood or whined about the work. When it came time to mop the floor of the embalming room, he scrubbed it clean—with or without a body on the metal table. "They don’t bother me none, I won’t bother them," he told Eleanor one day, and she chuckled through her teeth to keep from laughing out loud.

One frigid fall day she watched him sit and patiently hand tissue after tissue to a client wailing in the lobby. He was only fifteen and there was the overwhelming wall of grief right beside him, death’s reflection, and it didn’t unnerve him. He just waited until the sobs became whimpers and then sighs, and then held the client up as she walked, bent over, to her ride pulling up outside.

She was still deciding if she should talk about the day he broke her heart.

"You can live in the apartment above the home, have your own space like any young man. You can commute to Tougaloo."

It was the only card she had left to play. He was nineteen, depressed, edgy.

"I was talking to Dad, and I found this place," he gave her his trump, a brochure to the Los Angeles Culinary Institute.

She set a line in her mouth and looked at him like a stranger.

"Then you can go to culinary school right here."

Justin reached across the couch space between them and held her hand.

"I’m leaving, Mama. It’s gone happen."

"Going to."

"Yes ma’am."

He squeezed her hand.

Then the airport lights went out, and the anxious prayers to get on that plane and get in the air, the daydreaming about holding Justin’s hand, the thoughts of seeing her son again—it all fell out of her, left her face loose and sloppy in the dark. Her breaths came in quick jags as the lights flickered back on. It was useless, she now felt. He was released. She had failed. "Lord, give him peace," she said aloud, then repeated it silently over and over as she listened for her name on the P.A.

Ninety minutes later, sitting in the same spot, she heard it, "Eleanor Waylon, please pick up a white courtesy telephone." She did as she was told and cradled the handle between her ear and shoulder, wondering if there was any way she could have been wrong. She closed her eyes, "This is Eleanor Waylon."

"Please hold for your call, ma’am."

There was a click as if the phone was hung up, and then some labored breathing. Eleanor covered her open ear, and prayed, "Justin?"

"It’s Charles. They called from the hospital. Say—Justin passed on."

Besides his mother passing, this was the only time she ever heard Charles cry.

"Eleanor?"

"Yes."

But he said nothing. A group of young white college kids walked by her, laughing and shouting obscenities at each other. Revulsion swept up in her.

"Eleanor, I’m coming there. We can fly out together, just wait…" He said more, but she was listening to the P.A. again. "Flight 719 to Los Angeles, now boarding at gate 25."

"I have to go Charles, they’re calling my flight." She placed the phone back on the hook before he could respond and flew to L.A., buried in anger.

In L.A., she scrambled to find a home to prepare the body, and finally found a colleague she’d met at a funeral director’s conference a year before. "I’ll arrange to have it picked up, but you need to make sure the place is sanitized thoroughly when it’s done. And no one can know."

"Yes, of course." She hung up grateful but despising the man at the same time.

Later, she stood idly in the men’s section in Sears, when a salesman smelling of Old Spice asked, "Can I help you?"

"My son is dead," she whispered, "I don’t know his size."

"Well, what color do you think is best?" he asked timidly.

"Grey, grey like these Goddamned L.A. skies." He gave her three different sizes, and when she couldn’t decide which was closest, she bought them all.

Again she read the paperwork on the metal table aloud. "Justin Waylon. Cause of death, pneumonia. Called by Doctor Jennings. Time of Death. 2:03 p.m. July 6, 1983." With his high cheekbones, deep-set, almond shaped eyes and square jaw, his face looked like a military action figure.

"Time of Death. Time of Death. Time of Death," Eleanor said to distract herself from the fact that she wanted to lean in and give Justin a hug. Finally the machine stopped, no more blood dripped from the tube. Poison was the cure for his body now, she just had to dress him.

From her make-up case, she removed the pancake-like concealer. She shook the bronze liquid vigorously and poured some into a small bowl. Then she took out another bottle—this one the color of dark chocolate. She poured some of the dark into the light and stirred with a small paintbrush. Then she brushed the color smoothly over the lesions, careful not to remove any skin. It worked. The color covered the dark ominous spots thoroughly.

As she looked closer, she could see the tiniest of needle marks freckling his wrists, forearms and even parts of his thighs. She lacquered concealer over these too, even had to apply second or third coats on these; the holes swallowed up the liquid with each application.

She took some gauze from a small roll and twisted it around her finger, then twisted the gauze smaller and smaller until it fit lengthwise into the nostril. Gently, she pushed it up further and further until the last bit of it hung just outside of his nose. She snipped the overflow with scissors then did the next nostril. For the ears she used small cotton balls that she still needed to pinch up to stuff inside.

It took a little strength to push him onto his right side, then she packed the gauze as tightly as she could in his anus, leaving plenty caught between his cheeks, just in case the body shifted on the flight.

Next, she tugged underwear and suit pants onto his stiff body, which moved like a doll with joints rusted from being left in the rain.

On the skin between each finger she brushed rubber cement. She pushed his fingers together until the glue dried and held, then placed both hands on his chest. It was her last chance to hold his hands, and she felt his absence consume her. Did he reach for her before he died?

Though his eyes were closed, they might not stay that way. When she opened them to line the eyelids with glue, she looked at the soggy brown and white mess in the sockets. Did he look down the hospital corridors to see if she was coming? She dabbed the glue on his eyelids and held them down until they set closed, like she was holding his head underwater. His lips fell open as if to gasp for air.

"I’m so sorry," said her new, tiny, voice. "I’m here now." Gently she placed a wide strip of gauze inside his cheeks, glued the lips and held his mouth closed until it set.

When he was fully clothed in his suit, make-up applied, fingernails trimmed and hair buzzed into a short Afro, she stepped back.

He looked more like Justin now, or an underdeveloped picture of Justin. One that was taken out of the solution too quickly, so the image was threadbare and pale, and only hinted that there was something she couldn’t see—something just beyond the capability of human vision.

She had forgotten to pray her father’s prayer.

"Dear Heavenly Father. Please accept this poor soul into your fold. Let me show love and dignity to this, one of your children. In your wisdom and mercy I trust, Amen."

Soul-bending, soul-swallowing sobs fought their way up out of her, rose into the night air, and lashed out at the pale green walls.