Ferris Beach (38 page)

“Break, break, break,” he said and ran his dirty palm over the stone. “That’s what the waves do, caught in the act of breaking.”

“Why didn’t he write a book?” my mother asked, and I could tell she was not far from breaking herself. Her eyes were now fixed on
her
side of the ship, the narrowed upward slant of the bow, where it said “Cleva O’Conner Burns, wife of Afred Tennyson Burns, May 11, 1924,” and then there were some blanks and Seymore had already filled in the “19” on her death. Seymore saw her looking and explained that he had done the same thing on my father’s, had it all measured out in advance so that when the time came he could fill it in at a moment’s notice.

“And what if I decide to hang on until the year 2000?” she asked, with a look of indignation that caused Seymore to shuffle and stammer.

“Golly, now,” he finally said. “I should’ve known better. Fred sure would’ve known better with his head for numbers.” Seymore ran his fingers over the “19,” forehead furrowed, mouth screwed to one side. I knew he was trying to figure out how he would turn that “19” into a “20” if he had to. “That’s what happens when you try to put the cart ahead of the horse.” He pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped it over his face, blew his nose, shook his head from side to side. “It’ll be hard, but I suspect I can make it work if need be.” He looked at Mama and smiled. “And I won’t charge you at all,” he added, assuming that
he
would certainly be around for the turn of the century.

“It’s obvious he
wasn’t
thinking much of me,” she said, waving her arm at her side of the ship. She started crying again after making Seymore
promise, vow, declare, and swear on the Bible
that he would not have that
monstrosity
delivered until after the funeral.
Seymore looked hurt but agreed before she could start explaining to him again why she did not like the monument, did not want the monument, but since it was in Fred’s will she had no choice about it, at least for the time being, that she hoped it fell off the truck on the way to the cemetery. She was still mumbling all this when we were walking away, and I happened to turn back and see the other side of the ship:
Cleva, dear Cleva, mere words cannot express.
She rushed back to rub her finger up and over every letter of her name and then knelt there, face pressed against the stone, her neat cream-colored pumps and matching skirt covered in yellow dust. “Fred always said he’d give me the rest of the poem to go on that side but . . .” Mr. Crane stood there helplessly, raised his hands and shrugged as if to ask what he could do. I went and stood beside her, waited until she pulled herself up and dusted the front of her skirt.

I had my temporary permit—my birthday was only a little more than a week away—and was shocked when she handed me the key and said that I
had
to drive. “Wife of Lord Alfred,” she said as we were driving down Seymore’s bumpy dirt road to the main street, and I couldn’t tell if she was going to laugh or cry. “‘Mere words cannot express’-—well, he is absolutely right about that; there aren’t many women who would have tolerated a man like Fred Burns with all his crazy ways and doodling, doodling on everything from the refrigerator to the arms of his chair, year in and year out, thinking up old rhymes and murders and numbers and nonsense.” She wiped back the wisps of hair that hung around her face, her mascara smudged under her eyes. “It has not been the easiest life, I’ll tell you that.” Her eyebrows were raised like stiff circumflexes as she waited for my answer, my nod. “But,
goddamnit
” she screamed suddenly, beat her fists on the dash. I was so shocked that I almost ran a stoplight, causing the driver of the car crossing in front of us to slam on his brakes and blow his horn.

“Is that how they teach you to drive?” she screamed, shoulders shaking as she hunched forward, her forehead pressed into the dash. I sat until I got my own breath and then turned to her.

“Mama, Mama?” I put my hand on her back to try to get her to stop crying, to be that solid, never wavering person I was used to. “Please don’t do this. Please?” I was crying then, too, the person behind us blowing for me to go. Mama rolled down her window and motioned for him to go around, then she straightened up in her seat, pulled a tissue from her purse. “Forgive me,” she said. “I do not like to use the Lord’s name that way. But I am going to miss that fool father of yours more than I can bear.” She looked at me then, surprising me once again, her face grimacing as if she were going to burst into tears and then straightening. “I do hope Theresa Poole is not at our house when we get there,” she said. “If she is I want you to tell her to go home. Fred was right when he said she was starting to get senile. Fred was just about always right, I guess.” She sighed, shook her head. “Fred had one blind spot, that’s all, that one blind spot.” I knew she was referring to Angela, but I didn’t say anything, just started driving again as she sat staring at her hands, at the wedding ring on the left hand and then, on the right one, the mother’s ring. There I was, the only child, a chip of a stone harnessed in gold; that mother’s ring had been all she’d talked about, all she wanted the Christmas when I was eight.

When I finally got Angela on the phone, she said that she would come as soon as possible, that her car had died and she’d have to find a way. She talked that fast way of hers—
What was Cleva thinking to make him work in such heat?
and
Why didn’t you call me sooner?
—and then she paused, sobbed into the phone. “What am I going to do without Fred?” she kept asking me, as if I knew the answer, as if we weren’t asking that same question.

She arrived at our house in a taxi the next day with just enough time to change her clothes before the funeral. She came in with
an overnight bag, a tissue held to her nose, sunglasses never removed, as she gave Mrs. Poole a brief nod and rushed upstairs to the room where she had stayed before. Five minutes later, she was back in the foyer with us, wearing a black jersey dress that hit several inches above her knee and black leather platform sandals. I saw Mrs. Edith Turner’s mouth drop open, and my mother’s would have too if she had not been staring out into the yard where the bright red canna lilies stood six feet tall, the large dark leaves forming a thick hedge.

Angela sniffed and dabbed at her cheeks all the way to the cemetery; my mother never even looked at her, just kept her hands clasped neatly on top of her little black clutch as she stared out the darkened glass of the funeral home limousine. “I’ve ridden in a limo before,” Angela whispered to me. “But it was under much happier circumstances.” She drew in a sharp breath, voice shaking, nostrils flaring as she tried to speak. “Fred was more than an uncle to me.” At this my mother turned slightly, gave her a weak smile. “Fred was more like a brother. Or more like a father.” It was a sizzling day, not a cloud in the sky as people stood there by the graveside and wiped the perspiration that rolled down their faces and necks. Unlike Whispering Pines, the new cemetery had been cleared in one big swoop and now they were starting over with seedlings of trees here and there. It was a barren stretch like a desert, straight gridlike marks dividing the plots. I knew then why my father had wanted to add extra space to Whispering Pines, to make a place for himself beneath the old shade trees that leaned against our house.

Mr. Rhodes had brought an extra-long extension cord so he could plug in a small record player in the outlet of the little office of the cemetery. He had gone the day before to measure the distance and now, Ethel Waters’s voice, despite the bumps and gristle of my father’s old worn-out album, came through loud and clear. /
sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free.
I glanced
in the distance and saw Merle leaning against a monument, awkward and stiff in a suit Pd never seen, maybe his father’s, maybe Mr. Landell’s, a dark navy tie and jacket which he kept on in spite of the heat. He held his hands in front of him, and of all the people who were fanning and mopping their brows, Merle never moved; it was as if he were frozen there. Overhead birds were flying, and far away in the distance was a humming like a lawn mower or an airplane. I felt my mother’s hand on my arm and realized that the song had ended, the prayer as well, and now Mr. Rhodes was playing “Graveyard Dream Blues” just as my father had requested.
Blues all around my head.
Mama was pushing me forward, and I concentrated on everything except the hole in front of us, and the pile of earth ready to fill it in. Instead I thought of my father stretched out on the living room rug. “C’mon Kitty,” he teased. “All you gotta do is roll me up and drag me down the hall.”

That night my mother, Angela, and I picked over all the food that had been brought; there was more food than the three of us could ever possibly eat, and Mama in a tactful way had suggested that Angela take a lot of it
home
with her. I knew she was trying to find out
when
Angela was leaving exacdy and also if she was still with her husband, but the plan didn’t work and Angela just nodded and said that she sure would. She was sitting there, auburn hair parted down the middle and hanging to her shoulders as she held a drumstick in one hand and a cigarette in the other, a glass of my father’s scotch in front of her. “You know,” she said, chin trembling all over again, “Fred was more than an uncle to me.” She paused thoughtfully, took a drag off the cigarette, then put down the drumstick so she could sip her drink.

The phone rang at nine-thirty just as Merle had said, and I ran out into the hall to answer; I could hear voices in the background, his parents’, a television. Oftentimes he just called to say good night and that’s what we did then, the comfortable silence
in the telephone line a promise that we’d see each other the next day when he finished at the warehouse. I forgot to thank him for coming to the funeral, to tell him that I saw him there, at the far edge of the crowd. “Good night,” he said again, and I just sat there with the receiver pressed to my ear, the buzz making me feel numb. When I walked back to the doorway of the kitchen, I could hear Angela saying that same thing over and over. I just waited there in the darkness of the dining room, the furniture like dark shadows. I knew I could have felt my way over every inch of the room, so exact and precise was that room kept; the chair my father always sat in, a head chair with tooled mahogany arms, was against the wall on the far side of the china cabinet. I sat down in the darkness, watching and listening. “Fred was much more like a big brother to me. He was like
the father I never had.”
My mother chimed in at the end with her, and Angela looked up suddenly, sharply. “Don’t make fun of me, Cleva,” she said. “I
loved
Freddie.”

“I
loved Freddie,
too,” Mama said, and began clearing the table. “And he
was
a lot more to you.” Mama’s voice got higher and faster just as it had in the car that same morning as we drove from Seymore’s. “He was your guardian, and I’d say he did more than the average guardian angel.”

“Money, right? We’re talking money. Well, I have never taken a cent that I didn’t deserve,” she said. “Think what you want.” Angela stood and drained her glass, placed it with a firm clink onto the lazy susan. “You promised to take care of me.” She drew her thin robe tightly around her and faced my mother. “You were supposed to be like my mother, Cleva.” She laughed and slapped her hand against the table. “That’s what you told me one time, remember? ‘Oh, Angela, I hope you can think of me like a mother.’” My mother’s face flushed with her mimicry.

“And I tried my best,” my mother said. “You’re the one who never tried. And no, it’s not all money. We had the money. It was feelings, our feelings,
my
feelings.”

“Oh, I tried,” Angela said. “But I tried for Freddie, not for
you. You never gave me a chance. You criticized everything I ever did. From the first day I moved in with you, you were telling me what to do.”

“Not everything.” Mama sat down in a chair, propped her feet on another, ankles crossed. “You know that’s not true, Angela. You also know that you weren’t always honest with Fred. You took advantage of him.”

“You wouldn’t say that if he was alive.”

“No, but now we don’t have to pretend.” My mother reached up and wiped her eyes, then kept her hands on her cheeks. “Kate?” she called, and I jumped with the sound of my name, backed out into the darkness of the foyer and answered her from there. “Come here a second, honey.”

By the time I got back into the room, Angela was apologizing to my mother; she turned as I came through the door. “Oh, Katie,” she said. “I’ve just been so terrible to your mother and here she’s been so good to me. Why, I guess I’m just so racked with grief I just wasn’t thinking.”

“What happened?” I asked, and my mother opened her mouth but before she could speak Angela jumped in.

“It was all my fault,” she said. “I hurt Cleva’s feelings in the worst way. I told her how just over Christmas, Fred had asked me to try and help her get herself looking better, you know like we did that summer with her hair.” Angela shook her head from side to side, patted my mother’s stiff shoulder, ever stiffer with her touch. “But I guess I didn’t say it very tactfully, did I?”

“No, you didn’t,” Mama said, and went back to wrapping pies and cakes in aluminum foil. “Now, Angela, I believe you said you prefer pie to cake so I’m going to choose a couple that are easy to travel with, maybe this pecan from Edith Turner.” She wrapped the pie and then put it in a paper bag. “And this Dutch apple that Maralee Landell baked.” There. She folded and wrapped the bag over the two pies and then handed it to Angela. “These should be easy to handle on the bus.”

“The bus?” Angela’s face went solemn. “I’ll call Greg before I get back on the
bus.
That’s why I was so late getting here, because
the bus
stops in every hole-in-the-road town.”

“You’re leaving?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mama said. “I
begged
Angela to stay but she’s got to get home. She’ll be leaving tomorrow. You know she’s got a man to take care of.”