DUST TO DUST Part 4

                                         DUST TO DUST

                                              By Nzinga Nzinga

PART 4

'What a calamity!’ the judge exclaimed as he held his big blubbering, weeping baby brother while the two doctors, the matron and the two nurses set about recuperating the poor undertaker.

‘No, Freddie, this man did not kill Dada.” The judge tried to explain to Freddie. “Dada died because something went wrong in his body causing him to suffer a massive stroke which killed him. When this man burnt Dada, it was not Dada he was burning but a dead body that has no feeling. When he burnt Dada, the spirit or soul of Dada had already returned to God who had placed it in his body in the first place. That was not Dada as we knew him. That was not the essence of Dada that he burnt. That was just the container which once held Dada’s spirit.’

‘I don't understand that kind of talk. All I know is that dis man bun up big big Dada till he can hold in a little vase. Dis man deserve fi dead. Fire bun fi him! He can't go around di place bunning up people.’
'Listen, Freddie, it’s his job to burn a dead body if the family asks him to do so. He made a very tragic mistake and burnt the wrong body. Come with me let me show you something.’ And the huge Freddie went obediently with the judge still crying out, ‘Dada bun up.’ The judge pointed to the urn. ‘Dada’s ashes are in that vase, Freddie. That’s all that is left of him but that is not what we will remember. We will remember Dada full of life and love for all of us.’

           
‘Freddie will only member dat dis foolish bad man bun up Dada,’ Freddie, now rendered calm, muttered.

'What a mess this clown of an undertaker has created,’ the diplomat son remarked.

"The scene was so pitiful that the others could not bear to watch it. Freddie and Stanley were the only two brothers who remained in the town where their parents lived. Freddie stayed at home with his parents but Stanley who had taken over the large construction business from his father lived in his own house about a quarter mile away from the family home." 

Stanley looked at the inconsolable Freddie, doubled his fist and cried, ‘Let me go outside before I kill somebody in this place, you hear me? Melanie, respect, eh. You got guts. I respect you, girl.’ he said to his beauty queen niece. ‘Give me pass, Josephine,’ as he brushed against Josephine who was the real white German wife of the judge. 

"Everybody, understanding his feelings and sympathising with them, made way for him to pass through the door. His café au lait wife with marked oriental features and his 16-year-old son, who looked like a slightly lighter copy of him, followed him. The undertaker had been resuscitated and as he looked around in vain for his assistants, his courage failed him and he started to weep: ‘It was a mistake. Anyone can make a mistake. No one is perfect.' 


Colin, the tennis champion and a son of Judge Orville, looked at him scornfully and retorted, ‘But not as imperfect as you have shown yourself to be. Man, there was no way you should have made such a mistake. My grandfather looked like a white man. He was lighter than me and people think I’m white. He could pass for white in America, England, France, Canada, Australia, South Africa and even here in Jamaica. 

"This body you foisted on us was that of a black man, so black that if he was in the pitch darkness of night you wouldn't be able to see him because he and the darkness would become one. How on earth could you have mistaken a white man for a black man? Unless you're blind. And you're not blind.’ 

Turning to his family he said, ‘Frankly, if only Uncle Stanley, Melanie, Freddie and I were here tonight, this man would not be given the opportunity to undertake or cremate or mix-up any more bodies. Believe me, Daddy,’ he addressed the judge.

‘Colin, I am as upset as you are, but under no circumstance would I condone murder. This man deserves punishment but murder is not the answer.' 

               
Turning to his father, the judge, Colin asked, 'What is the next move then, Your Honour, because the longer we stay here, the most likely will there be a murder?’ Colin wasn't laughing as he flicked his well-practiced tennis wrist. His photographer bother took several other shots of the undertaker.

‘Colin is right, Orville.’ Melvin, the Q. C. faced the judge. ‘The sooner we leave here the better for everybody because I am telling you the truth when I say the only reason that I punched out Stanley and prevented a murder is because I knew that morally it is wrong. However, we are human beings and we are all in pain with the thought of this horrible thing that this incompetent man has done. We all know how much Dada was dead set against cremation, so was Mama and I myself am not for it. It seems as if he knew this was going to happen why he always stressed the point that he didn’t mind what we buried him in or where we buried him as long as we didn’t cremate him. Now the question is, what are we going to take back to bury?' 

The judge, who came from a world of habeas corpus shook his head and his voice shook as he said, ‘We have no corpse, we have no body.’

‘We just have to bury his ashes,’ one of his sisters said

‘In a big casket?’ Sandra, the Guyanese Hindu university lecturer wife of Colin asked.

‘And what happens when he is lying in state and the people come to view the body?’ The ex-headmaster-turned-lawyer asked.

'Wait till Mama hear this. You better prepare for another fainting scenario,’ the matron cried.

‘Country people don’t know much about cremation and the little they know they don't like. Witness Dada and Mama. Poor Mama. She fainted when she saw the wrong body. She going to go into coma now,’ their civil engineer son from Louisiana said as he clutched the arm of his recently wed Swiss bride.

‘Lord have mercy! What really hurt me is how this man made us waste our time go into that awful bush place in Trelawny when he must have known that was a wild goose chase. And then to have these bereaved people dig up their body again. All that time the bl..d cl..t man have Dada in a f---ing vase. This man is to lose his license. This is fraud.’ Stanley and his family had come in again and those words were spoken by his Chinese-looking wife Zelma, who ran a restaurant and nightclub. 

There was not one pure black woman in that family. The women also married light-skinned men with strong and unmistakable signs of Syrian, Jewish or Chinese background.

‘All we can do is take the urn and put it in the coffin with some heavy stuff about Dada’s weight and don’t open it up for public viewing. We can find some excuse. We have enough cause to want to get it over and done with as fast as possible since we have had to postpone it.’ That was Irene’s opinion. She was a science teacher at a leading girls’ school in Kingston and a very matter of fact Scottish woman married to Richard, an electrical engineer.

‘That’s it in a nutshell,’ her husband approved of his wife’s idea and so did everyone else.

'What about Mama? She will want to make sure this time.’ Stanley said.

‘I can take care of her. I will convince her not to look at him. All we have to do is seal the coffin. When will we have the funeral though?’ the matron asked.

‘As soon as possible,’ the ex-teacher-turned-insurance executive said.

‘A week’s time then?’ the judge asked.

'Wha-wh-what ab-bo-bout a qui-quiet early mo-mo-morning fu-fu-fun-eral, fa-family a-a-and clo-close friends only? D-d-day after to-tomorrow and then a mem-me-memorial ser-service in a week’s ti-time.’ The quiet voice with the stutter belonged to Leslie, a very prosperous and prominent Mandeville businessman, son of the late Jacob Jenkins. He had not said a word before except, ‘M-m-my, m-m-m-my’ when the Beauty Queen shocked the crowd with her uptown accented explosion of obscenity. 

Leslie was a man who was not given much to talking and a man who never argued. This was one of his longest speeches that they could remember. His proposal took them by surprise because that idea had not occurred to anyone else.

‘The people won't like that. Mama won't agree either. She will say that Dada was a man of the people who would never want to he buried privately. Although it is really the best suggestion, we will have to bury Dada the old fashioned way.’  Orville, the QC son conceded.

‘I think that Leslie’s suggestion is a very sensible one but I tend to go along with Orville that we should do it just the way we had planned, bar the viewing of the body.’ This was the opinion of the civil engineer who pressed the bejewelled arm of his Lebanese wife for approval. She nodded and he loved the way her long red wig – he had no idea it was a wig – bounced up and down on her shoulders. 

“Eventually, the matter of the funeral home was handled with the minimum of fuss. A family consultation unanimously agreed that it would not do to take it to court or to make a big to-do about it, since, if it became a matter of litigation, there would be a prolonged period of publicity, whereas, if settled out of court, it would be only a nine day wonder. 

A court case would open up quite a few cans of worms and besides being greatly embarrassing to them, any hope of keeping the fact of the cremation secret would be lost. They worked out a very satisfactory settlement with the undertaker who was more than happy to escape with his life, especially since Stanley, the Beauty Queen, the tennis ace and the one who was not so right in his head were watching him the way a hawk watches a chicken he plans to have for his next meal.

“They paid no cremation fees, parlour accommodation fees or dressing fees. In other words they paid nothing. It was the undertaker who paid out to the family. He refunded all their costs including transportation in and out of Kingston. They did not let him off the Trelawny leg. He was to write a letter of apology to the bereaved of the Trelawny corpse for any inconvenience they might have suffered and to pay any expenses they might have incurred through the interruption of the burial resulting in the exhumation of the corpse. The final stroke which he wholeheartedly welcomed although he didn't let on, was that it would be to his advantage if he stopped practising in Jamaica and sought a market elsewhere.

‘That’s one business that can't fail. People are dying by the second. People must die and you can't have enough undertakers, even if incompetent ones,’ volunteered the UN diplomat, Norma Jenkins as her parting shot. The undertaker felt that if he stayed in Jamaica he might well need the services of an undertaker pretty soon, what with Stanley and his disciples around. Within three months he had hurriedly closed down, sold out and was last heard of in Birmingham, England, running the same business, specializing in Jamaican funerals, with a discount on cremations.

“The funeral was held a week later, same place, only more people, quite a few coming out of mere curiosity. No one outside of the immediate family knew that the deceased had been cremated. The widow was kept in total ignorance. This time the hearse was dead on time but the disappointment at not seeing the last remains of Old Jakey was keenly felt by his widow and many mourners who wanted to make sure that this time the corpse in the casket was that of Jacob Jenkins and of no one else.

Everything went off with clockwork precision. The programme was strictly adhered to and no time wasted. One pleasant surprise was the duet How Great Thou Art sung by the tennis star, Colin and his Beauty Queen cousin, Melanie. It made the mourners’ day, so well rendered it was. 

There was a great deal of weeping as the casket bearing the last remains of Jacob Godfried Jenkins J.P, was borne out of the church on the distinguished shoulders of a Cabinet Minister, a High Court judge, a Q.C., a neurosurgeon, a photographer, an engineer and a career diplomat, all family members. 

Once out of the church, for the leg to the nearby cemetery, it was taken over by Leslie, Stanley, a son-in-law who was a restaurateur, a quantity surveyor, a professor and Curtis, the manager of one of Jakey’s businesses, a man whose light complexion allowed him to pass as a member of the family to the extent that scandalmongers claimed that he was an illegitimate son of Old Jakey, who was not given the educational privileges of the others, but employed in the block making business as a clerk rising to his present position of manager.

The minister officiating at the vault side in the church cemetery intoned from the Book of Common Prayer:"Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust", and taking up a handful of earth, threw it unto the casket already lowered into the vault, repeating ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ while others followed suit. 

Suddenly, a loud blubbering voice shouted from the area where the immediate family stood, ‘Foolish man bun Dada. Dada in pretty vase. Ashes in pretty vase is Dada in coffin. They say Freddie must forget but Freddie can't forget foolish man bun Dada. Dada not in coffin. Man bun up big, big Dada and put him in a pretty little vase and they put the vase in Dada coffin.’

Only certain members of the bereaved Jenkins family understood why on hearing the strange words of her mentally challenged and irrepressible son Freddie, Mrs Jacob Jenkins, relict of the late Jacob Godfried Jenkins J.P., deceased, fainted for the second time at the final rites of the funeral held for her late husband, Jacob Godfried Jenkins J.P.”

EPILOGUE

“Why are you crying, Lulu?” the raconteur asked in a gentle voice.

“It’s such an unfortunate business and I believe every word of it. Even though they are so stuck-up and colour prejudiced, still it must have been a most horrible time for them. You changed the names but I know who they are. It’s Judge Dunstan’s father, right? I know some of them. I suspected it was them from early in your narrative but do you know that I never heard a thing about it before now?”

“Not surprising for even though this is such a small island, not many people know the truth about that funeral. You were abroad then and the news was neither published in the newspapers nor aired on radio.”

“Belle, can we go for a walk? I am so upset about this story, I am, all of a sudden, afraid to die.”

THE END
All the images were taken from the Internet and I claim no copyright.