The Business of Dying by Richard S. Wheeler

Author:Richard S. Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2017-08-08T16:50:48+00:00

Dead Weight

Here lies the coffin-maker

Barcelona Brown

Laid in his finest,

Six feet down

Dodge City does a good deal of dying, which is good for business. Mostly it’s a summer occupation, when the drovers push up from Texas with their longhorns and beeline for the saloons with some Yankee dollars in their jeans. They tend to perforate one another after downing a few tumblers of red-eye.

We get a little help from hot weather complaints as well, such as dysentery and cholera, and sometimes the ague. There is not much business in the winter, with the Texians gone south like the geese, but sometimes a consumptive parts from us when a good Canadian blue norther cuts through, or the catarrh or lung fever swathes through town, and then Doc McCarty ends up recommending me, Phineas Agnew, to the bereaved. McCarty and I try to steal each other’s business, but in the end I always win. Morticians have a monopoly. It isn’t a perfect monopoly, because sometimes there is no corpus delicti. But it’s good enough for a man wanting a secure living, without the vagaries of boom and bust, famine or plenty.

I always come out ahead. It’s an art, you see. To maximize the profit, you have to catch them at just the right moment. The moment of deepest grief is the time to suggest the finest casket, the fanciest send-off. When those Texians come up the long trail carrying one of their own in the cavvy wagon, all swathed in canvas, killed by lightning south of town or a stampede or bad water, then’s when I mint money.

Surely, I say, you would each expect the same from your comrades of the long trail? Surely your dear old mothers would want the finest money could buy? Surely you want to do better than the Bar X, or the Hashknife boys, who bought a princely box for their departed? Surely, after all that suffering on the long trail, the lonely nights, the endless rains, the dismal food, you want to provide some comfort for your friend? A fine, waterproof, spacious, oak coffin, and a dandy parade, with a coronet band playing dirges and my four-horse black lacquered equipage with cut-glass windows and black pom-poms to take the departed to his last home?

That always works, and as fast as their trail boss shells out the trail wages, they’re appropriating the fanciest box they can afford for old Tom or Red or Dusty, and forking over cartwheels for all the extras, too.

It is a principle of my business to sell the gaudiest goods just when the widow is wiping back the first flood of tears, or when the children, bereft, orphaned, adrift, are suddenly faced with the loss of their pa or ma, or maybe even a grandmother or aunt.

Now, I don’t keep many coffins on the shelf because it isn’t necessary, or at least it wasn’t until recently. Dodge City was blessed with a cabinetmaker of uncommon ability, able to do magical things with wood.

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