The Year No One Died
©2019, Olan L. Smith
When I was growing up in the small town of Huntsville, Missouri, I remember a time when nobody died for over a year. Now, mostly that is good news for a small town of under two thousand souls, but not if you're in the undertaking business, a normally flourishing business. Surely, somebodies going to kick the bucket, right? Don't get me wrong, I'm not a mortician's son, however in a small town you know when an important business is suffering, and God knows we are all going to need the business sometime or another. We weren't necessarily praying for someone to die, mind you, but we were all concerned. What if we had to send our loved ones to the neighboring town to get embalmed? God knows there ain't no blood lost between the two towns, and we were certain there would be a lot of bodies rolling over in their graves if someone had to be buried by a Moberly undertaker; God forbid.
Since, it was unlikely we were going to raise Bloody Bill Anderson from the grave, and have him make a mid-night ride down Main street shooting people as they slept, we were going to lose our undertaker's business. Like most old funeral home businesses, started in the nineteenth century, our mortician still sold furniture, but we weren't about to all buy new beds just to keep them fed, and nearing the second year of no deaths, the mortician had to sell part interest with a neighboring town, but for sure it wouldn't be a Moberly funeral home; no he went the other direction, west, to find a partner. You see, we consider Moberly an upstart town. The Huntsville settlement existed since white folks settled the area, and Moberly didn't exist until the railroads came along. We were the county seat before their town existed, and later they came along and wanted to be the county seat, young whipper-snappers. However, that's water under the proverbial bridge, but now people are dying as they should, and at a regular pace. Sooner or later, it will be my turn to be buried, a seventh generation family occupant of the Huntsville City Cemetery, right alongside my folks and grand-folks, and all the other dead folks who once called Huntsville their home.