In Memory of Junior (16 page)

And who do I leave my part to when I'm dead and gone?

At least I'm glad that while he was alive, Junior didn't have to go through all I went through. I'm glad I was
around for him, and June Lee was too, and I'm glad he got to play ball up to his last year of Little League.

This morning Uncle Grove had a bad case of diarrhea, and I had to help him clean up. He kept apologizing, and was very embarrassed. I'm glad Morgan was still in bed.

Daddy was on my mind, and something had happened at the funeral home that I haven't heard the straight of. Aunt Ansie called me about it last night. Mr. Simmons had called her. Faison and Faye got into it up there.

I wanted to ride out to the airfield to show Uncle Grove the airplane. He said he felt okay, so we went.

It was cool and clear out there and the sun was in just the tops of the trees. The grass had almost filled out. Uncle Grove wanted to come out in the morning because he says he starts hurting in the afternoon. He's not a complainer so I know it must be something fairly serious. He won't go to the doctor or take any medicine at all, not even aspirin, so I'm going to slip aspirin in his coffee and tea this week, and see if that makes a difference.

At the airfield, Daddy was still on my mind of course. Maybe if I'd been with him just before he died, he might have said he was sorry he hadn't spent more time with us when we were little, said something about all that. Maybe I could have set him up in bed and bathed his back, or something—something that I could remember. I know I should have talked things over with him at some point, but it always seemed like a later time would be best.

Guilt is normal. And there are grieving stages to accept and not fight. I'll be okay if I don't fight it. Faison will fight showing any emotion. I'm not going to.

“Let me get up in there,” said Uncle Grove, at the airplane.

“Sure. Just reach up there and—”

“I know how to get in,” he says. “Hell, I got in one almost every day for twelve years. Son of a gun if it don't smell the same. It
smells
the same. No better smell in the world,” he says. “Hardly.”

He settled into the pilot's seat up front. “Why hell,” he says, “let's go for a spin.”

I'd flown the airplane from the backseat, so I said okay. “Do you want me to talk you through?” I asked him.

“No. Just keep an eye on me. Follow me through on the controls in case I forget something.”

I got on the controls. He brought her to life and taxied out to the end of the strip.

“Hell, this is like I was flying yesterday,” he said. “We got a, what's this, hundred and fifty drop on the left mag, two hundred on the right. Let's see, carb heat, little drop, run her up, looks good.
Release
the brakes. Hold on back there, boy—here we go!”

I held to the controls, lightly. The stick came back between my legs—he was doing a short-field takeoff. We were airborne. He pushed the stick forward as soon as we were in the air, lowering the nose about right. He was steady, holding about eighty miles an hour on the climb out. A little hot, but fine. He was lax on rudder but he was doing it, doing it all.

“She flies good,” he said, over his shoulder, back to me.

I been working for Claremont Funeral Home and Marbleworks for about two months now. I was looking for outside work that would build up my muscles. Toting tombstones is perfect, and we do a little shovel work along with the backhoe. Good hours, don't have to work in the rain.

We were supposed to dig out seven-two-A—me and Isaac—one of a double plot, out at the big church graveyard just this side of Listre, and then do seven-two-B right after that funeral so they could do another funeral right then, or the next day—I don't know which. It was a double death, car accident or some such I guess and somebody wanted a pink tombstone, but there had been a mix-up about that because, one thing, a footstone was already there. But listen to the other thing. Me and Isaac got over there to the spot and found ourselves looking at the grave
already dug.

We double-checked everything. We had the plot map and all.

“Looks like they mussa got somebody else to do it,” says Isaac.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let's go to Big Al's. We got time for a game of pool.”

We've had the same thing happen twice before. They give the same job to two different teams.

We had time for four games. I won all four.

Uncle Grove and I were sitting in the living room at Dad's. He'd called me away from a game of Tetris. Dad was taking a call from the funeral home.

“Listen,” Uncle Grove says, and he motioned me over closer. “I told Tate I was staying with Faison, and Faison thinks I'll be over here. All you got to do is come out there in the morning at sunup and fill in the grave and do a funeral. I want it at sunup, and then I want you to call my hometown paper in Arkansas and tell them. It's the
Cutler Morning Edition.
Write that down.”

I got out my billfold, pulled out a piece of paper, and wrote. It was some kind of joke, so I figured I'd go along with it. He was paying me good.

“Don't back out on me, you hear,” he said.

“I won't,” I said. “What are you going to do after you do the trick?”

He said he was going to take a vacation then head on back home and surprise everybody. Then he started in with all these other details about how he was leaving some money at the grave for me and Bill, that we'd have to nail in the nails and drop the coffin down with two ropes, pile on the dirt, read the Twenty-third something—Psalms. Something in the Bible. He said a note to his wife would be in his coat pocket. All this stuff like you'd see on TV almost. I wrote it all down and had just stuck it in my billfold when Dad came back in.

Uncle Grove kept on talking. “Now you get yourself married sometime after you're twenty-seven and have a
little boy and give him that gun when you find yourself slowing down. I tell you something. I met Huey Smith when he was twenty-seven and I was seven, and then I remember being forty-seven and I realized I myself was twenty years older than
he'd
been when I thought he was a old man at twenty-seven and I knew then that when I was twenty years older than he was right then, then I'd be a very old man. And I'm already older than that and if Huey Smith was alive he'd be, oh let's see, a hundred and two, no, twelve. Now ain't that something? And they think I'm crazy,” he said to Dad.

I think he might be. Something's wrong with him.

I was at the gravesite. It was after dark. Tate and Faison were doing legal shenanigans somewhere. Each one thought I was at the othern's house.

It had been seeming like I was almost through with living for a long time. It seemed like if I didn't handle all the carrying-ons about dying then I'd go to my grave unfinished. In other words, I myself, Grove McCord, wouldn't have finished it all, and it would haunt me the whole time I was history, which would be a long, long time—forever as a matter of fact. I had to finish it. I had to be the one. I couldn't leave it up to anybody else. I'd been worrying about digging my own grave in this graveyard for a long time, and now all I had to do more or less was go through all the motions, and this was my chance, away from Tina and Bobbie and Four-Eyes.

It was a unusually warm night, but so early in the spring that the mosquitoes won't all that bad yet. The man delivered the box like he was supposed to, after dark.

“You the one wants this?” he says.

“I'm the one.”

“Where you want it?”

“Just put it on the ground there. What I owe you?”

“Hundred and twenty-five.”

“You said a hundred on the phone.”

“Twenty-five for the delivery.”

“You said one hundred dollars delivered.”

“Look, I got to make a living, you know? The box costs me eighty dollars to make—in materials. It's like a cabinet. That ain't but a twenty-percent markup, not including labor. And I'm delivering. I could be making another box while I'm delivering this one.”

I managed to sit down on the box. He caught my arm as I started down. Young fellow.

“Did you put a hook and latch inside?” I asked.

“I did. What's that for? Some kind of joke?”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Well, I got to get my money and go. This whole thing is pretty strange.”

I pulled out my roll of bills, pulled off six twenties. The moon was bright enough to see by. I looked for a five. “That honeysuckle smells good, don't it. Or whatever it is.” I found a five. “There's your damn hundred and twenty-five, but you either lied to me or your mouth and your mind ain't working together.” Hell, maybe I was the one got it wrong. “Sit down on this box a minute. I want to tell you something, son.”

He stood there, then sat.

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“Thirty-two.”

“Let me tell you something. I never had a son.”

“Oh.”

“Something else, I knew a man when he was twenty-seven years old and I thought he was a old man. You know how old he is now?”

“No, I don't.”

“He's dead. Something else.” Then I told him about my papa. When Papa died, people come in from Bethel, Summerlin, from all around, and I want you to know they plowed out the whole farm in one day. And another time we had a barn burn down. Lost all our harnesses, six bales of cotton. People came, brought lumber on a Friday morning, laid out the lumber, and by Saturday noon, that barn was built back. Nobody charged nothing. Why—and here I had to laugh, I guess, sort of a laugh—Why son, I said, people don't want to even
look
at you no more. And if they do, they look at you like they
hate
you. People do.

He said he had to go, and stood up.

I went on anyway about how across the yard down to the barn we had all these apple trees. June apples, horse apples, good horse apples. Made cider. Mule apples. Three pear trees. And let's see, between the house and the barn was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—seven big white oaks. The sun didn't hit the yard except from oh, ten-thirty to one-thirty in the summertime. There were lilies there that I guarantee you still come up today.

He walked on over toward his truck. “Yeah, well,” he said, “good luck with that coffin. It's well made.” He slammed the door, cranked the truck, and drove off.

Me and Duck end up at the CFM not all that far from the graveyard me and Melvin been digging a grave in for that old man. So I said, “Duck, let's go over there to the back side of the graveyard and I'll show you a nice piece of work.”

There was a bright moon and all, so we head on over. We get close by and I say, “Hush, hush. There's somebody over there. Shhhhh. Come on.” So we creeped up on somebody kneeling down—over there by that very grave I was bringing Duck to see, kneeling down like he was praying. We creeped up into the corner of that little rock wall and we was right at him.

“And Papa,” he say. “Papa, Papa. I'm coming to join you. It's the only thing left to do. I'm shitting down my leg every few days now. People have to clean me up. There ain't nowhere else to go. We got the whole place plowed out after you died. And well . . . I made friends wherever I went. Some good. Some not so good.”

All this stuff. I recognized the voice, clear. The same old white man, name of Grove. His head was in his hands. He was kneeling beside a box, a
coffin.
He raised a foot, slow, started getting up, stumble a little bit, finally got up straight. “Ah, lord,” he say. Duck, he being quiet and still. The old man push the box over to a spot beside the grave. Pushed with his foot. We watch him, you know. It all feels a little bit like it's on the TV. He pick up two long lengths of rope laying across a tombstone, drop one at each end of the coffin, open the coffin lid, stand there looking into the box. This was getting a little bit spooky. Then. Then
he pulled out a
pistol
from his back pocket and drapped down to his knees, and then turned this way and that and finally got sitiated, sitting there in this open coffin. I said to myself, I'm dreaming, sure. Then he laid down in it, reached up, but he couldn't reach the lid. So he finally got back up and pulled the lid down agin his shoulder, then laid down, close the lid. Just like that. He close the lid. I say to Duck, I say, “I'm coming to work here in a morning, getting fifty bucks to bury the old son of a bitch. And that's a fact.”

We could hear something what sound like a screen-door latch be handled inside there. Then it clicked solid. Then there was a knocking sound against the wood. I look at Duck. Duck look at me, raise his eyebrows, look kind of sleepy, and he whisper, “I just got the idea we ought to be getting out of here. Somebody gone lay this on
us.”

It was like he was knocking around in there with a monkey wrench, and all on a sudden we hear this muffle-up explosion, this bang, in the coffin, and these sparks flash off this great big tombstone, and Duck is up and running, and just as fast he's laying on the ground moaning, holding his leg. He done hit this knee-high tombstone, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I helped him up and we get on back over to the 7-Eleven, but it look like over there they didn't hear the shot, it being in the coffin and all that, so we hang around a minute, buy one more bottle of Mad Dog, and I decide to go back and take a look, see what be the case, now. Find out if anybody else heard and maybe come up on the old man. I was curious. Duck, he didn't want to go, but I had the bottle so he finally say okay.

We get back over there, and there that coffin still sitting just the same, six or eight feet from that open grave. It's one of them old-timey pine boxes. Lord, I seen many a one. And sure 'nough, there's a hole blasted in it about shoulder high.