Iris Welk, A Harshbarger Mills Story

"I loved Ray Welk from the time I was eight years old," Iris Welk tells me. " The love bug bit me down to my toes. He didn't feel it then because he was busy playing war ball with the boys from the Upper School."

When Iris says "upper school," she's referring to the second story of the Red Brick School, built in the center of town in 1902. It was a staunch Federal- styled building, two floors and a low attic. Its windows were kept gleaming by teachers and students, and tea roses grew by the the door. The lower grades had classes downstairs while the older students went to the rooms above. At sixty, its capacity was full.

Old Brick School

Now, it's a staunch skeleton.The windows are busted and a recent, heavy snowstorm collapsed the middle of the roof. The young elm trees are now huge, and the shade has killed most of the grass and, of course, the rosebushes. Soon it will be restored and used as an office for the Senior Townhomes to be built around it.

Iris isn't the type of person you interrupt. For years and years, she was the wife of the town's only mortician, and she's picked up the characteristics of her trade. She's popped in, treating me like a source of income, unannounced and unafraid.

"I told my best friend that I loved Ray Welk, and Patty laughed." She tries to lift an eyebrow but it's a futile effort. Iris lost her eyebrows long ago. The ones she now has are penciled on and arch nearly to her hair line. She looked constantly surprised. "So, I told my teacher. I knew Mrs. Nutter would believe me."

"Did she?" I ask.

"Yes, though at first she didn't know who I meant. That's because I pointed. Ray was jumping left and right to dodge the ball. His friends were jumping with him like bunch of frogs." I pointed again and said, "That boy right there, Ray Welk."

"Mrs. Nutter always covered her mouth when she laughed because she was missing an eye tooth, but that day she threw back her head, and showed the gap. '"Oh, you're a deep one, Iris," she said. "You're as deep as you can be."

She bent over, placing her hands on her knees, and looked me in the eye. Sure of myself, I beamed.

"We married and for thirty years we were never apart but for the time he went to Cincinnati School of Mortuary Science. I was pregnant with Charlie and stayed in Harshbarger Mills. I didn't want to give birth away from home. He rode the bus from Cincinnati to Clovington twice a month and Fred Valentine, who had a car, was waiting for him at the bus stop. After that, I never allowed a bad word about Fred said in my presence."

"After we got the funeral home established, Ray took two showers a day. One before work and one after".

"We'll never go out of business,' he used to tell me, but his shower habits worried my mother to death".

Mom kept saying, "'He'll wash his strength away.'

"'That's an old wive's tale!'" I protested.

"'Heard it all my life,' she snapped. "'Must be something to it.'"

"Ray and I had a good life with no more than our share of trouble until one year right after Christmas. He was taking down a string of lights when he fell over like he'd been shoved. I didn't scream but called Tom Bailey, who drove our ambulance. Tom must have flown because the next thing I knew he was standing in my living room, while Ray was being carried out on a stretcher. Tom had left the siren on, thinking to go to the hospital, but I'd already turned Ray over. The light was gone from his eyes.

"'Turn the siren off, Tom.' I told him. 'Ray's gone.'"

Iris Welk and I look at each other in silence.

" Ray was only fifty one years old!" She glares. "I've been a widow longer than I've been married!"

Then, she asks, her voice childish and high. "Do you think Mom was right?" Iris pats her forehead with a folded hankie and smears an eyebrow. "Do you think Ray washed his strength away?"

I don't know. I've heard too many funeral home stories to have an opinion. Like the boy who got beheaded by a haymower, the woman from Guyan who died delivering a baby that looked like a frog, and the bodies of a man and his wife hacked to death in a cornfield. Their assailant was a nephew who later shot himself. Three Smiths in the morgue at the same time.

"You tell me." I toss the ball back in her court. "You know death better than I do."

Excerpt from "That's Not Love!" copyright Joan Spilman, 2023

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