Dead People In The House

Dead People In The House

There were dead people in the house.When you're a kid and you visit your relatives, it's a little unnerving to find dead people in the house.Now before you chalk what I just said up to childhood nightmares or late night ghost stories let me make myself perfectly clear.These were honest-to-goodness, lying in their caskets, dead people.But then, our relatives lived in Hartsville and things are a little different there.

My mother was born and raised in Hartsville, as was her mother and her mother before her.It is a small town in upstate South Carolina, and because most of her relatives remained there, we visited a lot when we were children.Going to Hartsville was for us a journey back in time, a time warp where life was simpler and much slower.It would be easy to picture a Mayberry-like town where people sit on their porches, wave to their neighbors, and everyone knows everyone else.That would be true as far as it goes, but don't let the picturesque southern exterior fool you.In Hartsville, sometimes things get a little weird.

For one thing, Hartsville has its own smell.My grandmother use to say the air smelled better as soon as we crossed the state line into South Carolina.I don't know about that, but I do know that as we approached the town limits of Hartsville, the air got decidedly more pungent.The distinctive odor was caused, I learned years later, by the town's largest employer, Sonoco Paper Plant.As children, all we knew was that Hartsville smelled funny.It also has its own dialect.Even in the south where we tend to be very proud of the way we speak and more than a little protective of our accents, people in Hartsville sometimes confound even us.T-h is pronounced D (how's your mama and 'dem), i's are elongated (l-i-i-tes are br-i-i-te), and ends of words are just ignored altogether.Whenever Mama went back home for a visit, it would be a week before we could fully understand her again.

Main Street in Hartsville is a two-lane road lined with small shops and diagonal parking spaces on each side.Most of the stores have been there for generations and until recently included a hardware store that my son loved because they sold skeleton keys from old-fashioned oak bins.What amazed him was that the keys still fit the doors in my aunt's house. The bank is on the corner in the middle of town and not too far down the street is Eli's.Eli's was and, as far as I know, still is a candy store that my mother went to as a little girl.Imagine what an old-fashioned candy store might look like with jellybeans in huge jars, licorice standing tall on the counter, and taffy in barrels on the floor.Outside on the sidewalk peanuts are roasted and sold in small brown paper bags.That is Eli's and what made it a required stop on every visit to Hartsville was its chocolate-covered frozen bananas.The bananas were cut in half, a Popsicle stick in one end, the whole thing dipped in chocolate and then frozen.They were my sister's favorite thing and my mother always said that was why we just had to go to Eli's.I think that was true, but I also think that it was one of their favorite childhood memories and the bananas gave them a reason to step inside and back in time for a little while. The rest of us got dragged along, but we didn't mind too much.It was a candy store for goodness' sake.

Just beyond the town square on the road heading out of Hartsville is Magnolia Cemetery.As you turn off the main road, there is a long drive lined not with Magnolia trees, but with 200-year-old oak trees.It is beautiful, but it is also a little eerie.It's easy to forget that Main Street is just a few hundred yards behind you, as you seem to travel further and further from the living.Not all, but a great many of our relatives are buried at Magnolia and at least one trip to the cemetery was a part of every visit we made to Hartsville.Magnolia Cemetery is where dead people in my family ended up in Hartsville, but not too many years ago, they started out in the living room.Or more accurately, in the front room at Aunt Janie's.

She was actually my great aunt, but we always called her Aunt (pronounced "aint") Janie and she was my grandmother's sister.She was married to Uncle Carl and together they made an odd but devoted couple.They were simple people who never had much in the way of material wealth but who everyone agreed helped raise half of Hartsville, including my mother.They were also completely different.She was devoutly religious (Holiness I think) and had long dark hair always worn up and in a bun.She attended services several times a week and whether she was going to church or not, she never ever wore pants or makeup.He on the other hand never darkened the door of a church and to our great delight he cussed like a sailor.He wore bibbed overalls, kept hunting dogs in the backyard, and every morning walked to work at Sonoco stopping on his way there and back to check on his mother.They lived in a white clapboard house with a big front porch (with requisite porch swing) and a screened front door that creaked when it was opened.As you entered the front of the house, there was a small sitting area with a settee, a large upholstered chair in one corner, and a small vinyl couch in the other.In the room just beyond was a huge oil-burning heater.There were two rooms on each side of the sitting area both used most of the time as bedrooms.It was in the room on the right where they put the dead people.In Hartsville, it was called bringing them back home.

The first time I can remember seeing someone they had brought back home was when Aunt Janie and Uncle Carl's son Ronnie was killed in a car wreck.It was November 1968 and I was 11 years old.I don't remember much about the trip and only bits and pieces of the funeral, but I remember vividly when we arrived at Aunt Janie's.The heater was on high and the house was full of people so it was unbearably hot.Everyone was either quietly crying or walking around in stunned silence, and they were going in and out of that room on the right.They said that's where Aunt Janie was and if we wanted to see her, we had to go in that room.What they didn't say was that Ronnie was in there too.It wasn't unusual for them, there was no need for them to say anything about it, but for a bunch of kids who lived in a place where dead people stayed in funeral homes, it never occurred to us that they would bring their dead people home.We followed Mama in to speak to Aunt Janie and I will never forget what we saw.It was dark and smelled of flowers.A few floor lamps were on, but were spaced far apart and in the corners.All the furniture had been removed and the windows were covered with heavy purple drapes, and on the back wall was a coffin.Mama told us later that someone sat with the body from the time it was brought home until it was taken to the church two days later for the funeral.

There were many others who were brought back home to that same room in Aunt Janie's house.Four years later, it was Uncle Carl and by that time, we all knew what to expect.He too was killed in a car wreck, on the same road and in nearly the same spot where is his son was killed four years earlier.In fact, Uncle Carl was buried on the fourth anniversary of Ronnie's death.Aunt Janie had been in the car with him.They had just dropped off their grandson at his home in a neighboring town and were on their way back.Aunt Janie survived the wreck but just barely.It was Uncle Carl who saved her when he pulled her out of the burning car and away from the wreckage.Then he walked over to the curb, sat down, and died of a punctured lung.And now we were back in Hartsville at their house with Aunt Janie in intensive care and Uncle Carl in the room on the right.Now here's the thing.We knew that when we got to their house Uncle Carl would be in that front room in a coffin.That's what we were prepared for.What we weren't prepared for was what happened a few minutes after we arrived.

Everything was eerily familiar with an unbearably hot house and people everywhere.Mama was really upset and had gone immediately in to see Uncle Carl.We went in with her, but we didn't stay long.It's very hard to see your mother cry.We were back in the front room parked firmly on the settee.Every time the screen door creaked we anxiously looked up hoping to see someone we recognized.Most of the time we didn't, but then we looked up and saw someone we did recognize and we all nearly had a heart attack.Walking in the front door was Uncle Carl.I can't say now how my sisters and brother reacted, but I was scared half to death.We had just seen him not ten feet away and he was unmistakably dead.Only now he was walking through the front door.I don't know if we said something or if he just saw the looks on our faces, but he came over, sat down beside us, and told us that he was Uncle Carl's brother Alec.If he was, he could have been his twin, but we not only had never met his brother, we didn't even know he had a brother.For a long time after that, even though I knew that Alec was real and just happened to look remarkably like Uncle Carl, I could not get over the feeling that Uncle Carl walked in the house that night.I'm still not sure he didn't.

I don't think people in Hartsville bring their dead people back home anymore.There are two funeral homes in town now and we've all been to countless funerals there as adults.Normal funerals where dead people stay in funeral homes and visitations last two hours and are held the night before the service.Still, I can't say that for sure.It is Hartsville and in Hartsville, things are a little different.