Curtains Page 6

  “Do you have to touch them?” one of my workmates asks.

  “Who?”

  “Dead people.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I mean, not all the time. Just in the prep room. And loading them into the retort, you have to check for pacemakers. And dressing them. So yeah, a lot, I guess.”

  “What do they feel like?”

  I have to think about this. I look around the restaurant.

  “Chicken breasts.”

  ——

  My wardrobe needs work so I buy three stiff white dress shirts at the Bay, not a natural fibre among them, and new black shoes. Richard says that at funerals I will meet men of the generation that look at your shoes before they shake your hand. I order books online: a 1951 hardback copy of Successful Funeral Service Management by Wilber M. Krieger, he of the Beautiful Memory Picture, and one of Jessica Mitford’s favourite whipping-boys. In the book Krieger says boldly: you cannot create demand. “A huge advertising program a few years ago created a demand among women for cigarettes. I have never yet seen any program of advertising or public relations that created demand for funeral service.” Apparently, it needed to be said: we are at the mercy of nature and chaos and, save the odd good flu season, medical science is improving, and this impacts the bottom line. Alan Wolfelt’s Funeral Home Customer Service A–to–Z is more contemporary, of this century. Under B for Burnout, he talks about “funeral director fatigue syndrome,” the symptoms of which include the following:

  Exhaustion and loss of energy

  Irritability and impatience

  Cynicism and detachment

  Feelings of omnipotence and indispensability

  Some of these I bring to the table already. Feelings of omnipotence and indispensability will come when they come, if I work at them, but B for Burnout makes me think of what Neil told me about his family.

  “It works very much like the family farm,” he said of the funeral trade, which is true enough if you consider both are in the business of planting things in the ground for money. Beyond that, it gets complicated. To say the Bardal family saga is a story of easy succession from one generation to the next is to say King Lear is a story of easy succession from one generation to the next.

  Neil’s story starts with his grandfather A.S. Bardal, who, when he was a child in Iceland, once found a human skull in a field, tied a piece of rope to it and dragged it home to show his mother, thereby launching a hundred-plus-year family death-care dynasty through accident or fate, depending on how you read it. Later he would immigrate to Canada, setting up a wood-framing and horse-drawn taxi and livery service from a storefront on Sherbrook Street in Winnipeg. From there it was just a leap of imagination: like the Reese who first brought chocolate and peanut butter together, A.S. Bardal figured he could combine his efforts, retool the wood shop to build caskets and refit the carriages into hearses, and that’s how he became the first Bardal undertaker.

  The funeral home was one of the city’s Original Eight, which still are spoken of with reverence, like the Original Six of NHL hockey. At the time, the city was informally split by the eight families of undertakers on geographic or cultural lines: A.B. Gardiner had the white Anglo-Saxons, the French Catholics went to Desjardins, the rich merchant families used Leatherdale, and to this day, if a Shriner dies, chances are Thomson on Broadway has the arrangements—if the picture in the newspaper obit shows a man in a fez, you know where the service will be held. Bardal’s had the northern Europeans, German Lutherans and “assorted gypsies,” in Neil’s words. With respect, the Original Eight might have been more like the five Sicilian families in The Godfather: they knew their territories and they settled their disputes at monthly luncheons. Gardiner was titular head of the eight families, a white-glove undertaker who served sherry at arrangements, spoke of the greatness of the dead man and made it clear it was a privilege for you to be there. The Winnipeg undertakers were unambiguously more powerful than priests. Neil remembers seeing, from his bedroom on the second floor of the funeral home on Sherbrook, his grandfather on the church steps across the street, in a fur coat, arms raised to signal the end of a service, the pastor huddling behind him, knowing his place.

  But they weren’t businessmen, least of all A.S. Bardal, who sank money into a scheme for a better internal-combustion carburetor (which flopped) and travelled the country and overseas on behalf of the International Order of Good Templars preaching against drink with a slide show and a clicker. His sons Karl and Njall (Neil’s father) tried to talk him into incorporating the business, and he told them, “This is my baby. If you want a baby, go out and make your own.” Instead they waited him out, and when the senior Bardal died in 1952, omnipotent and indispensable to the end, they took over the funeral home and spent years driving it back into the black, one hardwood casket at a time. Or Karl did. Njall Bardal had less enthusiasm for the game. After having served in the Second World War, he had less enthusiasm for everything.

  Neil’s father had been with the Winnipeg Grenadiers, shipped to Hong Kong in 1941 just in time for it to fall to the Japanese. He’d spent the war in a prison camp, where they called him The Undertaker. There he watched men being tortured and beheaded, but he also saw how the Japanese disposed of the dead: cremated without ceremony. It was clean and efficient and it saved his mates from further harm, desecration and the indignity of being buried in enemy turf. This, Neil thinks, is what turned his father into a closet cremationist (sacrilege for a Bardal at the time), and his dad kept these ideas to himself when he returned to the family business, thin, depressed, but with the Icelander’s skill at repressing it.

  “My father had swallowed all these psychic hand grenades,” Neil says. “And for the rest of his life they went off one at a time.” He showed me a photograph of himself as a child, with his dad, just after Njall got back to Canada. The boy is smiling, the father is not, and his hand is barely touching his son’s shoulder, as if the photographer had told him to put it there to create interest.

  “That’s what he was like,” Neil says. “And look—he’s wearing spats. No one told him they’d gone out of style while he was away.”

  Later, with his father and his uncle Karl running the shop, it came time for Neil to decide if he’d take up the trocar, but the decision was made for him: his father scored him a place at the Chicago embalming school and arranged for him to apprentice at Trull Funeral Home on the Danforth in Toronto. Njall Sr. said he had met Trull on a train from Calgary. It was all set. When Neil showed up in Toronto, Trull had to admit he’d never met anyone named Bardal, on a train or otherwise. But there was plenty of work (Trull had a handsome piece of the action east of Yonge Street, nearly half the city), so they took Neil on. Senior undertakers wore tails, striped pants and bowlers; juniors like Neil wore morning suits and homburgs, and in the summer they dressed up in powder blue suits. No hazmat gear in the prep room, they just flipped their ties over their shoulders and got to work, usually with cigarettes in their mouths, the ash dangling over the open corpse. Here he learned to cut clothing, a no-no at the Chicago school: you cut the collar, possibly the whole shirt, in the back, with scissors, to get a looser, more relaxed fit on the corpse (which tended to puff up in the prep room). Chicago considered clothes-cutting an indignity, a shortcut. At Trull, they liked shortcuts. They were busy. Viewings were scheduled from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. daily, like cinema screenings. Trull himself was an infrequent visitor to the funeral home. He had his own railroad coach for skiing trips, and a house in Jamaica. It was a lucrative business, and a good life.

  One day Neil got a call from his mother. His father was ill in hospital, so Neil flew home to Winnipeg. He found Njall Sr. not at the hospital but at the Legion playing pool with the rest of the Hong Kong vets.

  Why did you lie? Neil asked him.

  His father said: Because I need you here, and you wouldn’t have come home if all I did was ask.

  Again, his course had been decided for him. Neil gave up Toronto and settled into the family bus
iness. He kept his homburg from Trull. He wore it once, for a service at Chapel Lawn cemetery. The next day he got a call from Sam Sander’s father who ran the Shell station near Deer Lodge on Portage Avenue, who’d seen Neil driving the lead car to Chapel Lawn. Sander asked him where he’d got the ridiculous hat. So Neil put it away and never wore it again. He was, for better or worse, home.

  Two forces shaped the industry in the ’60s: first up, the Mitford book and the seeds of a social revolution that challenged tradition and ritual and forced the undertakers either to accept cremation as an alternative or to ignore it in the hope it would go away, like the hula hoop craze. In Winnipeg there was only one local retort, at Pineview cemetery. When it opened in 1965, the mayor was there to cut the ribbon. The permit to cremate human remains was still pending, so, for the sake of ceremony, they cremated a pig. The pig burned out of control and blew the door off the retort. From then on Pineview was known as Swineview, and in Winnipeg it was easy enough to continue to dismiss cremation as a fad. The second force came from Texas and Des Moines, Iowa: the funeral conglomerates. They were buying up family funeral homes in Canada and the United States, building empires. Here was something Njall Sr. and Karl Bardal couldn’t ignore. By 1968 they were exhausted, ready to cash out. Des Moines was ready to buy. Neil, who had assumed he would one day inherit the family funeral home, found out through a third party that his birthright was to be sold to an American chain. All he could do was scare up enough cash and bank debt to make a counter-offer. The senior Bardals grudgingly accepted Neil’s bid. But their message was clear enough: this is our baby.

  The Original Eight franchise offered ready access to raw materials (the funeral home was across the street from a hospital) and Neil had no reason to tinker with the business plan: embalm, casket, bury, repeat. The traditional model served him well through the early ’70s when, as Neil says, it was impossible to be an undertaker and not make money, as long as you worked long hours and shunned vacations, as he did. Neil’s own confrontation with cremation came finally from an unlikely source: his own father. “My father said, if you were smart, you’ll have me cremated when I die and show people there’s another way to do this,” a simple alternative to the fuss and flowers of the full-fig funeral. The closet cremators had come out. “But when he died,” Neil told me, “I’m sorry to say I chickened out. He had a very traditional service. Because that’s the kind of business we were in.” Njall Sr. was buried in the family plot at Brookside cemetery in 1977.

  Where does Neil’s son Eirik fit in? He’s next in line for a throne with a history of being yanked from under its heirs apparent. Of course, Eirik grew up in a funeral home. As children, he and his brother Jon and their cousins played hide-and-seek in the showroom, lying in closed caskets until they were found. (As he was one of the few living people I’d met who’d actually been inside a casket, I asked him what it was like. “Surprisingly comfortable,” he said.) But when he was old enough to work, he became the first Bardal in four generations to reject the call of the embalming room. “I was basically raised by my mom,” he says. “She was my hockey coach, my swimming coach, my Cub Scouts leader, my Beavers leader. I saw my dad four times in like six years, and I decided I couldn’t work like that.” So he took jobs in construction, laying paving stones, on the ski lifts at Whistler and as a commercial fisherman on Lake Winnipeg. One winter his boat got trapped in a blizzard. Unable to see land (this is pre-GPS), the skipper pointed in one direction while the first mate pointed in another, and this was when Eirik decided he’d live longer if he went to work for his dad. He got his undertaker’s licence in 2000.

  “I grew up with the changes in the business,” he says. “Unlike Dad and my grandfather, I didn’t have all the baggage of how things used to be done.” Eirik was a child of the cremation era. Which is why I was surprised when he told me about his own wishes for when he dies. “It’s against everything Dad would want,” he admits, “but I would go traditional myself. I would be in the plot with the family in Brookside, with a viewing and a service and a reception, with music I like. Dean Martin, Rat Pack stuff.”

  In the meantime, having learned first-hand what it’s like to grow up with an absentee father, he’s spending time with his own kids, ages seven and eight, taking them fishing and swimming and to weekend games of laser tag, even if it means sacrificing time at the funeral home. He wants his kids to have a father.

  And what about the other non-Bardals who, by definition, can go only so far in this business before hitting the glass, or oak, or 16-gauge stainless steel ceiling? Richard will never own this place, Shannon will never own this place. They have the wrong last name. This is why ambitious young undertakers join the conglomerates where blood doesn’t matter. And maybe this is why, while I was gone settling up my old life, Natalie quit. Glenn says she went into Neil’s office one day, voices were raised, a door was slammed, and within weeks she was working at Eddie Coutu’s in St. Boniface as an arrangement director, selling Last Supper– themed caskets and urns to Italian Catholics. They don’t even have a prep room at Coutu, so she’s no longer embalming. What happened? As far as Glenn knows, it came down to a difference of opinion between Natalie and Neil on how to run a funeral home, with only one person in the room in a position to call the shots. “Focus on what you have to do and keep your mouth shut,” Richard says. This is his advice for working in a family business. Natalie’s mistake, he says, was that she was good at the first, but lousy at the second.

  We’re driving to Starbuck, a small farm town south of the city, for an afternoon funeral. The back of the van is loaded with gear: wood planks, AstroTurf and the Device for lowering the casket into the grave. Starbuck cemetery is too small to have its own staff, so we’ll be “dressing” the grave ourselves. The planks are still covered with dried mud from the last interment, their ends propped on the dashboard, banging the windshield whenever we hit a bump.

  Richard has been an undertaker since the late ’80s. His father was a bus driver who knew Neil through Masonic circles, and his daily route that took him past the old family funeral home on Sherbrook Street. When he got sick with cancer, he sat down with Neil, “held my arm like this,” Neil told me, gripping my forearm, and made Neil swear he’d see the boy through medical school. Neil said he would. After his father died, Richard worked at Fort Ignition selling spark plugs and auto parts, but he grew bored, and wound up at Cropo funeral home on Main Street looking for work. Instead, Neil hired him, figuring that if the boy was intent on the funeral trade it was better to have him close at hand. Richard’s been with Neil ever since. The closest he got to medical school was the prep room. He and Eirik became friends. They’d drink together at the Palomino Club and then go back to the Aubrey Street funeral home to listen to AC/DC and Rush on the sound system, just the two of them and whoever was resting on the casket bier in the chapel. Richard knew he was suited for funeral service, he tells me, when he first had what he calls “the dream.” In the dream he was in the prep room, working on a body, and just as he was about to cut into the neck to raise the carotid artery, the body sat upright. The man wasn’t angry, just confused. He didn’t know why he was on the steel table or why he was naked. He told Richard he wanted to go home. So Richard found him some clothes and opened the door, and he was gone.

  “Neil says every undertaker has the dream at some point,” he says. “If you don’t, it means you’re in the wrong business.”

  That would be enough to scare me back into a career at Fort Ignition, but for Richard it was a mystical moment.

  “It was neat,” he says. “I guess it would’ve been worse if he was already in the retort.”

  At Starbuck cemetery (established in 1902, ancient for the Prairies), he parks the van on the grass next to the open grave. There are only a few dozen headstones. Around us are nothing but grain fields, and in the distance I can see both ends of a long freight train, too far away to hear. We set the planks along both sides of the grave and cover them with the AstroTurf mat
s, their green tongues hanging into the hole. We use a big mat to cover the mound of dirt, presumably to disguise its purpose. Putting together the Device is like constructing a playground swing set when the instructions are in Mandarin: pipes fit into gear-boxes that fit into other pipes and then canvas straps are stretched over the frame and wound tight around the side rails. It works on friction and gravity: no batteries required. As long as the gears are locked, the straps will hold the weight of the casket. Once the brake is released, the side rails turn, slowly, held back by the gears, and the straps grow more and more slack. The casket sinks into the hole. The effect is as if God’s own hand is lowering the box. Richard says when he dresses a grave he usually turns his suit inside out. Then, when it comes time for the service, he can flip it around and no one will see the dirt. I decide I’m too superstitious to take my clothes off in a cemetery, and besides, all I’ve got is a ring of muck around my pant cuffs. I wipe them on the grass.

  When we get to the church, Neil’s already there with the hearse and the casket. On top of the casket, in place of the usual spray of flowers, is a bundle of dried wheat, in honour of the dead man, who was a farmer. Inside, the church is late-model Lutheran with exposed brick and skylights, blond-wood pews and a Henry Moore-esque stone baptismal font. A sign by the door says BLESS YOU FOR NOT SMOKING. Richard decides to stay, to corral pallbearers and work out the seating for the family, who’ve yet to arrive, freeing Neil and me to head into town for lunch.

  The main street of Starbuck is deserted, save four men in hunting camo outside Archie’s Meats and Groceries, loading brown-paper bundles of bloody meat into the back of a pickup truck. Only the store and the hotel restaurant appear to be open. At the hotel, the man behind the counter asks us if we want the bar or the coffee shop. If we want the bar, it’s closed but he’ll open it. If we want the coffee shop, he’s it. He opens a fridge and studies our options. He can offer us ham and cheese sandwiches, but he has no bread because it’s the end of the week. The best he can do is to thaw a couple of frozen hamburger buns in the microwave. We pour ourselves two cups of coffee and sit down. The place is painted bright pink and green, and hanging on a bare plywood wall is a picture of a chicken.