He taught me how to wash the dead

I've been doing the ghusl at my mosque since 2014. A man caught me in the parking lot after Isha and said they were short on Thursdays. I told him I'd never done it and he said come anyway, so I came.

The room's in the basement, past the furnace. Steel table with a lip around the edge and a tilt to it, so the water runs down to a drain at the foot end. There's a hose on the wall with a sprayer head, same as you'd have at a kitchen sink. They keep the gloves in a box screwed up next to the light switch, like at the doctor's, and the ones they buy run small on me, so I bring my own.

Hajj Adnan taught me. He'd been at it about thirty years already. Small guy, maybe five-six. Hands like he'd worked with them, which he had, because he ran a tire shop off Schaefer till his knees quit on him.

First one, he stood behind me and put his hands over mine and moved them through it. He talked the whole way, low.

You keep the mayyit covered from the navel to the knee the whole time. That doesn't come off. Doesn't matter that there's nobody in the room but you.

You wash him three times. If he's not clean after three you go five, and it's always an odd, I've never had to go past five.

The water's got to be warm, not hot. You test it on the inside of your wrist, same as you'd test a bottle for a baby.

Left hand does the private parts. That's the left hand's job and it isn't doing anything else while it's on that job. You change the glove after.

Then you do his wudu for him, the same order he'd have gone in himself before he prayed. You don't put water in his mouth or up his nose, you wipe them with a wet cloth, because he can't spit.

Right side before the left. Three passes over the whole man.

I skipped one. Before any of that you get him covered and you keep your face off to the side while you're working the bottom half, and you say the thing you say. That goes first, I should have put it first.

The last water's got kafoor in it. You'll still smell it on yourself at work the next day. Then you dry him and you don't leave him wet anywhere, especially the hair.

The kafan's three pieces for a man. Plain white cotton, nothing sewn into it, no buttons or anything like that. You tie it at both ends and once around the middle, and you tie it loose, because somebody's got to untie it at the other end.

Kafoor where he touched the ground when he prayed. Adnan would hold the tin out and not say anything and I'd know what he wanted.

I do machine repair at the stamping plant. Twenty-eight years in March. I take second shift on purpose because I like the drive home when there's nobody out on the road. The boys were little when I started going Thursdays. Yusuf's at Wayne State now, the other two are still at home. So when the phone goes at two in the morning I'm usually up anyway, sitting in the kitchen with the little light over the stove on.

March of 2016 we had a seventeen-year-old. February. It was February, there was still ice on the steps going down to the side door. Kid from Neckel, two streets over from me, I knew him to see him, he used to come past my driveway standing up on the pedals of one of those little bikes with the small wheels. I came in off shift smelling like the press line and I washed my hands twice before I put a glove on.

That was the third one that week. The other two were old.

His mother was out in the hallway and they couldn't get her to sit down. He had one of those plastic bands on his wrist from the hospital and my hands weren't working right, and Adnan took the scissors off me and did it himself.

We finished him and his father came down and we carried him up.

Then there was the rest of it. The towels, and the table gets hosed off, and the screen comes out of the drain and gets rinsed, which is the part people forget. I was over the sink wringing towels out and I heard him sit down on the step by the door.

I sat down next to him. I'm not going to lay all of it out. It was both of us is what I'm saying, it wasn't one of us doing a thing to the other one. It didn't take long and neither of us got up right away after.

He shut the water off at the wall and we went out the side door into the lot.

We never said one word about it, not that night and not in the five years after.

I got home and the TV was going in the front room with nobody watching it, and I sat down and got about ten minutes of a fishing show before I shut it off.

I thought about not going back that next Thursday, but I went, and he was already down there with the table wiped and the tin out on the shelf where he kept it. We must have done forty or fifty more together after that.

He'd tell the man on the table his own name before we started. It's Adnan. I'm going to turn you now.

His heart had been bad a long time. They went in to do a valve in 2021 and he didn't come back out of it.

They called me at four in the afternoon.

Three of us did him. His nephew, and a kid about nineteen who'd been coming a couple of months and still didn't know the order.

He was lighter than I figured on. They'd had his chest open and it was still stapled, so we went around it with a damp cloth and left it be.

His right thumb healed crooked one time and it never did sit flat after.

The kid didn't know where to start. I got in behind him and took hold of his wrists, which isn't how Adnan did it, Adnan had his hands over the top of mine, but the kid's a head taller than me so I had him by the wrists. I talked at him the whole time. Too much. He kept pulling his hands back when I pushed them forward and I had to tell him twice to leave them with me.

We went three times over him and the kafoor went in the last water. I put my hand in the bucket and it was a shade too hot, so I ran cold in until it came right. Then the kafan, and the nephew held the ends while I tied.

His sons carried him. Prayer upstairs in the hall, then out past the airport to the cemetery, about twenty minutes past it. The ground was still hard and they'd had a machine in there the day before. More people came than fit in the lot and there were cars up on the shoulder both sides of the road.

The phone went about three weeks ago, ten after two. Woman's husband, eighty-one, went in the front room at the house.

Zeinab sat up and asked who it was and I said the name, and she knew the wife from the school. Twenty-six years in October. I got dressed in the dark anyway out of habit, boots are by the side door, and the truck takes four or five minutes before the heat's worth anything.

There were two cars in the driveway so I put mine up on the grass. Porch light was one of those yellow bug bulbs. His sister came out to meet me and she knew my mother from way back, and she stood there in the cold about ten minutes asking me how the hip was doing.