The embalming room smells like formaldehyde and dish soap and something underneath both that you stop noticing after a while, Ray Harmon says, or maybe you just decide you have. It is 7:15 on a Thursday morning in late November, and the temperature outside is eleven degrees and dropping, a flat gray sky pressing down over the Pratt County courthouse four blocks north. Ray is in his office, which is really a converted parlor with wood floors and a window that looks out onto Fourth Street, reviewing a death certificate that came in wrong from the county clerk. He catches it before the family does. He almost always does. This is most of the job — not the grief, not the ceremony, but the thousand quiet administrative catches that keep a family from finding out at the worst possible moment that someone filed the wrong middle name.
He has been doing this for twenty-three years. His father Harold did it for thirty-one years before that. His grandfather Eldon did it for thirty-eight years before that. His great-grandfather Vernon Harmon — who came back from France in 1919 with shrapnel still lodged near his left hip and a calm that his family would later describe as the war's only useful gift to him — opened the original location on Main Street in 1922 with a borrowed $400 and a hand-painted sign. The sign is still there, behind glass in the entryway. The wood has gone the color of strong tea.