In Memory of Junior (11 page)

“He's going to want to see his gravesite—with the footstone,” I said. “Why don't we go ahead and get a blank footstone put out there for you or me—in our section. One of us will need it first. We just split the cost and the first one dies gets it. We just don't write anything on it now—just put it there in the Bales section. Low-key, don't say anything. And then when Uncle Grove comes and wants to see his spot we just lay that brass plate on it and he'll think it's his. Then if he dies we can worry about that then.”

“I got a better idea,” said Faison. “I already figured it out. When they call and say they're dropping him off, I'll take the brass plate out there and lay it down on top of Ma Laura's and Daddy's footstone since there ain't no grave there yet, and then when we take him out there he'll think that's his. My way is simpler.”

“How do you know that brass plate will fit?”

“I can tell by looking at it.”

“What if somebody dies—Daddy or Ma Laura?” I said. “A lot could happen in the next three weeks.”

“Then we'll do your plan. But, hell, we could put that brass plate anywhere. And then as soon as he's seen it, we'll take it up. Simple. It'll be down just one day and nobody will ever know but him and us. And you know good as I do that Bobbie and Four-Eyes are gone have him cremated in Arkansas. They're Episcopalians.”

“I don't know about that. I told her I'd come get his body. It wouldn't cost her anything.”

“What would you do, ride him up front with you?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'd rent a U-Haul.”

“Shit, Tate. Anyway, worse comes to worse he could be buried in one of those plots over there beside Junior.”

Gloria drove up and got out with Florida in his cage under some kind of black cloth. “He's already talking some,” she said, carrying him on in. “He got him a new lease on life.”

“Somebody should have fed him to the cat,” said Faison. Then he started in again about a fishing trip. The thing about Faison is, he'll get all up for doing something like that and then it'll just drop.

“It's going to be probably sometime in the middle of the summer before I finish this project I'm working on,” I said. “This is overlapping with some other things I got going. Maybe we can go fishing in the fall.”

“Seems like they all overlap,” he said. “I never knowed one of your projects to finish.”

“Yeah, they kind of do overlap, usually. One thing leads to another. You got to hook it up to something—a grant or something—if you want to get any money out of it.”

“We get this place,” he said, “you won't have to worry about money no more. We sell this place and you can
buy
a airport. This ain't no good for a landing strip.”

“It's a perfect place for a landing strip. And this land has been in the family,” I said.

“You're crazy, Tate.”

“Listen,” I said. “Faye has got as much chance of getting this place as we do.”

He started in on how much Faye and Marilyn are alike, and wanted to know what kind of problems I was having with Marilyn now.

I told him none, that Morgan was the problem now.

“You never whipped his ass enough,” he says. Faison says that about once a month.

“Maybe so.”

“He ain't too old yet.”

“I wish I could get him some summer work.”

“That's what you needed. Work. Work, work, work. You got babied.”

“I worked on the farm. Get off it.”

“What'd you do? Tie tobacco a few times? Pick a few ears of corn?”

“I hear you, Faison.” There is stuff Faison will never turn loose.

“No problem,” he says. “There's a baby in every family. It ain't your fault.”

He loves running this stuff in the ground.

Gloria came to the porch door. “Y'all's daddy wants to see you,” she said.

Inside we stood on opposite sides of Daddy's bed. The railings were up. The room smelled bad. I pulled back the sheet and looked. There was a new smell, a smell like sour urine and something else, sharp, rancid, vinegary. He was so damn helpless.

“I just changed him,” said Gloria, standing in the doorway. “When I get that garbage bag out, it'll smell better in here. You know?”

“Open that window,” I told Faison. Then to Gloria, “Think maybe you could get it out now?”

Daddy's lips quivered. He started crying. He brought his hand to his head. The gown dropped from his arm. His elbow looked like a gray, unlit light bulb and his arm
was thin. He held his hand just above his eyes. His fingers shook. “I didn't want it to . . . I didn't want it to be like this.” He looked from Faison to me, locked his eyes on me. “I wish you-all would just go in there and talk to her a minute or two, Son . . . and see how she's doing.” He glared at me—a kind of hard glare, panicked. “She's always been so good to me. I was lucky to find somebody like her. God has been good to me. You boys just never . . .”

Faison dropped his hands from the bed railing, turned, walked back over to the open window. It was getting to him.

From down the hall came this voice: “Harold, you know it ain't so.”

“Who was that?” said Daddy. “I didn't know nobody was here.”

“The bird,” I said. “Gloria took him in, got him drugged up or something.”

“Tate, oh Tate,” Daddy wailed. He dropped his hands to his sides. “I got bedsores, Son.”

“I'm sorry, Daddy,” I said. “I just . . .”

“She won't ever good to me,” said Faison. “That's the problem. The fact is, she treated me like dirt.”

“Oh, no, no,” wails Daddy. “Evelyn's the one did that.”

“No, she didn't,” says Faison. “She didn't treat me like dirt.”

“She
left
you. She deserted you, Faison. And she deserted Tate. And she deserted me.”

“She never treated me like Ma Laura did,” said Faison. “That's for sure.”

“Laura has done everything she could for you, Son. You just wouldn't ever let yourself appreciate it.” He started
crying. His hands were over his face, his body shook in the bed. It tore at me.

“You couldn't pay me to go in there,” said Faison.

“I guess she had her own problems, too,” I said.

“Shit,” Faison said to the grass outside the window. I could see that the grass was in the shade and the only sunlight was weak at the top of the trees. The sky was light green, and down across the field you could see the weak gray-yellow horizon. It was like we were at the end of something. Nothing was going to change. There was no way.

Then Daddy stopped crying, and he pulled his hands away from his face. “Don't you talk like that in here, Faison,” he said. “And that's right. That's right. She had her own problems, too. Did you even hear what Tate just said?”

“I heard him. But I ain't going in there. She wouldn't come in to see me if I was sick. She wouldn't come to see me if I was dead. And you know that as good as I do, and you know what else, Daddy? You took it. You
took
it. You took it all laying down.” Faison turned from the window and started toward the bed. I was afraid he might grab Daddy. But he just yelled at him. “You wouldn't a bit more stand up to her than nothing. You was afraid of her. Goddamn, that was it, and you know—”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Daddy was yelling, even as weak as he was. “Don't you curse me,” he said. “You never helped nothing work out, Faison. I couldn't help I had to work. You were mean to her. You left. You don't have a right to—”

“Right?”
Faison turned half away, then back. “After working my ass off on this place until I was sixteen years
old? And then I catch it because I don't go to
college.
Come off it. Don't talk to me about what I don't have a
right
to. I worked my
ass
off on this place.”

Daddy held up his hand, looked at me, kept talking to Faison. “You can't even hold a job. Just be quiet.” Then he said to me, “Would you go in there and see her, Son?” He turned on that hard glare—part command, part plea.

I looked at Faison. “No, I don't think so, Daddy.”

Faison walked out, slammed the door behind him.

Daddy's hands were at his face again. He was crying.

“I got to be getting on, Daddy,” I said. “I'm sorry about all this. Try not to think about all that stuff. It's a pretty day outside. Spring is coming.”

And then I met Honour Walters. It was like this. She had come from New York for a wedding. She was originally from England. It was a fancy wedding and she had been sitting behind a table licking icing from her fingertips when I saw her, saw the shape of her face, Mary Magdalene, a soft Spanish look with a soft Spanish nose with a very slight little bump on its bridge, black eyes, and black, long, shiny hair, a dimple in her chin, and her soft white shoulders against the black, black hair, and I felt no choice in this wide world but to leave Glenn's side and walk around that table and—short of breath from the excitement—kid this woman, make a joke about her licking her fingers: “Don't you know this is a high-class wedding?” I asked. I felt the go-ahead to look at her, all
over her, wherever I might have the slightest inclination to look, and there were inclinations to say whatever I wanted to, whatever was ready to come out, inclinations to look at the soft skin that continued on down out of sight, the rounded mounds with the tiny down smooth against the skin, the soft breasts under white cotton. I didn't know if at that moment I could stand the way I was feeling. I knew something had collapsed inside me as soon as I saw those fingertips in her mouth, saw her face, and whatever it was that collapsed was about to re-form and bolt, had to.

Glenn is bound to have delivered the boys to his mama that morning we left. He wouldn't have done anything else and she was sure as the world sitting out on that front porch shelling peas when he drove up. I don't think he would walk across the field with them. Too much trouble. I imagine he put them in the car, drove them by the driveway, and then went on to Salisbury.

I was by that time riding along in Honour's car, already missing the smells, including that other smell, that sweet smell of a baby just out of a bath and dried off. All I knew was that I had felt the falling in my chest, the falling, falling, falling to perhaps my death, the last breath, and knowing that while I was falling, the edge of the cliff higher and higher above me, that I wouldn't wake up because I was already awake. Those boys were left there behind with those sisters of Glenn's, with Glenn's mother who never did
not
suggest what to feed them, how to feed them, what to dress them in, and how; left with the thicket—it seemed, though there were only two—of sisters, their hands all over the boys, mocking punishment, taking both boys out of my sight down behind the barn at
the same time while I sat on the porch with his mother, forcing talk about who was, who wasn't at church that day, who did, who didn't speak ugly words, who did, who didn't drink a toddy now and then, who did, who didn't . . . you name it.

My mistake, one of them, had been to dream of moving to town. With Glenn. Any town. And I dreamed of washing his clothes and hanging them out and folding them and putting them away and cooking for him and setting food before him on the table of a little house in town, but while having the library and clubs nearby. I never guessed that I might drown in something besides water, drown dead in secret
love
with this woman Honour Walters who talked with the clean strong accent from England and who whispered when she talked to me about ME and who was crazy about me, who had fallen in love with me, ME, touched me, said my name over and over, and then kept touching me and touching me and touching me until I could not live another day without the touch, physical, and whatever all else there was. I had to decide to ride in that car, with her driving, straight away from my two sons and that life. Shame settled on me like soft black snow, but lifted and melted away when I looked at Honour. Honour was life away from the thicket. I knew that my own life had become mired in a rhythm, a system on that farm that was the dark side of the moon—mud and heavy curtains falling in front of my face every day, unannounced. Weights hung from my arms. I'd begun to see that life in town would never happen. Glenn was bound to the farm, to his mother and father, brothers and sisters. Bound in a way he was never bound to me, bound with thick cords, while his binding
to me was with tiny, weak strings. I could leave with Honour Walters, warding off the shame. Or I could stay, not leave with Honour Walters, and drown dead perhaps, and still lose the boys to those people anyway.

If I took the boys, I'd be chased down. If I didn't, they'd let me go.

Honour told me over and over that I shouldn't do it, leave my family, that she Honour couldn't promise me anything but travel and no connections to anything but to her, that she was afraid I would somehow tire of her. I said I had no choice, that there was no choice to be made, that it was not a choice between taking one path or the other—Honour on the one hand, or Glenn and the kids on the other—that in fact there was no choice about my leaving. About choosing Honour. It was like . . . rain. It had come and you couldn't do anything about it. I know you can't believe that. But it's true. Believe me, it's true.

Honour had come to the wedding of her college roommate who was marrying a furniture man from North Carolina. She drove all the way down from New York where she was working. And there while she was waiting for the reception to be over, eating cake, I walked up to her. She had in the past—she told me later—been able to love all human bodies, all forms, all legs, torsos, arms, hands, feet, and many dispositions. I had too, and I had fought it down with a vengeance—successfully, not understanding it was anything but evil—all my life. I'd fought it down with religion, then psychology, then shame, then logic, and I was holding it down with a sheer force of will when Honour came along and that heavy banner, laid down over my potential love and yearning, was lifted into the wind and
blown away. I tried to hold on to it in the wind, but it was torn from my hands, and I was left naked, and hungry for her.