The Undertaker

by Austin Smith

The undertaker comes home from work weary
to where we are waiting to describe him.
He looks in the mirror as he washes the red
clay off his hands. The sink is simple;
for a moment he places his wet hands
on the cold porcelain, leans, and looks deeper
as if he is about to ask himself a question,
but then pulls away and goes into the kitchen
where he takes his time fixing himself a meal:
long cold spears of asparagus, a few
salted red potatoes, a piece of peppered steak,
well-done. He pours himself a glass
of affordable red wine, his favorite kind,
and opens a book the way the lonely will
when they are eating alone, but only
glance down at it from time to time.
It is a book on the domestication
of the horse, and he has it open to a picture
that shows the animal’s evolution
from the fox-sized Hyracotherium,
many fossils of which, he reads
in a brief moment of piqued interest,
have been found in the Wind River
Basin of Wyoming, to the modern-day
Equus, the one we brought over here
or broke, the one that has helped us build cities,
win wars, and, today, entertain children
and the mentally ill. In a sudden fury
of movement and clatter of silverware
he turns the book upside down and exclaims,
“The devolution of the horse!”
laughing and bringing the cloth napkin
up from his lap to the corners of his eyes.
We have never seen him this animated before.
Though he is alone, he seems embarrassed
by his sudden outburst and stands up and goes
over to the sink where he washes his plate slowly.
It’s getting late and he’s had a long day.
He draws a bath and while he’s waiting
for it to fill he lifts the needle carefully
and sets it down on the Beethoven record.
He soaks for an hour or so, dries off, dresses,
lifts the needle again, and climbs into bed.
Before he turns off the light,
he picks up the horse book again
and tries to read for a little bit, but soon
becomes confused trying to follow
the complicated branches of ancestry
and, giving up, gets out of bed and walks
over to his desk, where he opens the book
to the illustration of evolution and turns
it around so that the horses are upside down
and from left to right go from big to small.
Then he places a stone he found once
while digging, which he thinks may be
a meteorite, to weigh the page down,
which seems to want to close, as if angry
about the way he has reconsidered history.
He walks back to his bed, kneels down
on the floor, and brings his palms together
in prayer. After a moment of silence
he looks up toward the ceiling and says,
“But who will bury me?”
It is all we can do to keep from running
out from behind the curtain shouting, “We will!
We will!” to reassure him in his doubt
but we resist the urge for the purposes of our tragedy.
He climbs into bed, turns off the lamp,
and, with hands that have dug graves today,
pulls the covers over his head.
The curtain closes and the stage technician
flips the switch that lowers the bed down
through the floor, so far under it
he can’t hear the enthusiastic applause.