Custom Casket

In late 1882 – ‘83 my great great uncle Obadiah Underwood left Montpellier, Vermont under the midnight moon, and blasting through New Hampshire upon his brother Lafayette’s stallion “The Lieutenant”, made haste to Rhode Island where he stowed away upon a merchant vessel heading for the Indian subcontinent. Uncle Sam was getting into all sorts of trouble in a new depression or the “Rich Mans Panic” as it was often called and HE said it was, “All acause o’ them damned devil curs’d trains…And those greedy sons of bitches politicians!”

Obadiah was a blaggard: a tricktser, a womaniser, an alcoholic gambler of ill repute and a self proclaimed expert of many arts but truth be told, he was in fact a master of only two – making caskets and telling lies. From his harlot mother he had also inherited a huge arrogance, a laziness of character and a taste beyond his means for the epicurean.

When the depression hit hard he was in the Saloon Bar with his cronies drinking and playing at cards:

“… no need for a coffin builder of reputation to sully his “workin’ art” with the penniless dead of a hungry, filthy, misguided mob. They aint got no gold in their teeth!”

Of course in those days a man could lose his life over a drap of old rhye and Obadiah’s refusal to make an affordable casket was not to be taken lightly…A specialist could oft be found swinging from the nearest oak if the general consensus judged his work a touch on the expensive side of a little too costly. Still, he was not one to bow to no man’s code nor another’s inferior manufacture or material design -  ‘Badiah, did what he usually had to do;  he upped sticks and left town.

He, after all, and according only to his own testament, had been the lone custom manufacturer of the James family’s greatest outlaw, Jessie Woodson’s casket; and thus would not bring himself to work on the cheap. No matter how poor, lowly or desperate his customers.

Anyway this Obadiah was a superstitious man and he always carried about his person a Smith and Wesson model 3 and his deceased father’s glass eye which he said “could look deep in the future”.

One day he said he looked through the eye and saw a plague of bad fortune in the form of cholera, smallpox, malaria, AND the yellow fever visited upon the children of the European nobility, AND, when the Great Comet appeared in the sky he knew his American days were numbered, and that’s another reason why he stowed away – to make his fortune from the small, white bones and sorrow of the European royalty.

Gt. Gt. Uncle Obadiah Underwood with some of his "furniture" (far left).

Whilst onboard the merchant vessel he came across the famous Oriental, gold-mining midget Yeffer-San whom he employed as his valet and retainer, for he could not breakfast, abroad alone, in the company of the nobility and offered a cut of the future mercantile for each child’s casket. Yeffer-San in time though, would also come to feature as the perfect casket template for the newly deceased children of the European elite. I`ll be filling you in, as is my business, in a forthcoming post!

Yours Eternally,

Charlie Underwood.