The Undertaker's Daughter

September 15, 2014
The Mayfield family moved to Jubilee, Ky., in 1959, when the author was in kindergarten, so that her parents could open their own funeral home. In this gently meandering narrative, Mayfield revisits those early years, when she lived upstairs in the rambling three-story house with its constantly ringing phones (“We’ve got a body”) and, along with her three siblings, stayed absolutely quiet whenever a service was taking place downstairs. The embalming room was closed off to everyone but her impeccably turned-out father, a WWII veteran, and his assistants; gradually young Kate overcame her squeamishness to ask probing questions about her dad’s work on cadavers and even spied on him in action laboring over strange equipment and chemicals, which was against the rules. A deep friendship with an older eccentric outsider, Ms. Agnes Davis, offered a Miss Havisham model of independence and decency. The 1960s brought desegregation to the schools of Jubilee, which rattled the status quo for the white residents of the town and also provided the mischievous narrator the opportunity to develop crushes on two black boys, Noah and Julian. Her infatuations garnered severe reprimands from the principal, her parents, and the boys’ friends. Mayfield’s “secret life” forced her to lie and sneak around, and her teenage angst was only compounded by the brutal revelation from her sister Evelyn, a thoroughly unpleasant bully, that her father was a serial philanderer and a drunk. Mayfield fashions a poignant send-off to Jubilee in this thoughtfully rendered work.