In Memory of Junior Page 2

  Mrs. Fuller, she went on and on like she always does. Every once in a while she spit into that handful of Kleenex. Sometimes Miss Laura she act like she hear her, but I don’t think she do. Miss Laura be leaning to the side a little, looking back and forth from Mr. Fuller to Mrs. Fuller, then at that bird, who be walking around in his cage, shivering, dragging his tail. He usually don’t even walk. But when Mrs. Fuller get to talking, sometimes he walk around, shiver, drag his tail.

  Mrs. Fuller had done told Miss Laura twice about the tombstone—the little boy’s—I know, cause I heard it, sitting right here in this hall. But sometimes she get a new detail mixed in, and I like to hear her talk, no matter.

  So Mrs. Fuller go on and on, bringing that handful of Kleenex up to her mouth every now and then. I do declare I believe I’d use a little jar myself if I was going to dip at a neighbor’s house. She go right at it—telling the story—like Miss Laura can hear her, which maybe she can, but I doubt it. I have to pure-t yell at her sometimes. Real loud: Miss Laura, git yo ass on the pot.

  Wilma Fuller

  “Tate’s been the most sensible of the two, even though they both been ugly. At least that’s my notion. And thank goodness he had enough sense to go to college and then teach on the college level. The high schools is pure bedlam these days. Of course Tate hadn’t had to go through a real tragedy like Faison has. And it was such a tragedy. Such a tragedy. I know I told you but you just don’t remember, Miss Laura.

  “See, June Lee . . . No ma’am, June Lee—Faison’s wife—had been going to Preacher Gordon for counseling a good, oh, two months when the car wreck happened. Lord, lord. Such an awful tragedy. I guess she had been a member of the church for almost a year. Then found out she needed some counseling—what with her divorce from that John Moody and child custody and all that.

  “You know, people didn’t used to get divorced.”

  I’m telling all this to Miss Laura again. She forgets real easy. But it’s about her family, even if it was stepfamily. A family is a family. She needs to know, to keep up. And somebody has to tell her. “Anyway, Mary Bowden says she’d seen them go shopping together at some point way back. Her and Faison. Before she got her divorce from the Moody boy and married Faison.

  “It’s good she was going to Preacher Gordon on a regular basis when the wreck happened because it was natural for her to keep the visits up regular, you know, just to come on over and see him on her next scheduled visit. And he’s still got a full schedule on Monday mornings—and Thursday nights too, which a lot of people don’t know about. He has to do it at night because so many people work now, full time, in the day. Women.

  “Harold, close that blind so the sun won’t get in Miss Laura’s eyes . . . There, that’s better. We can more or less tell who’s coming to see Preacher Gordon because he’ll drop in on the circle meeting and say something like so-and-so might could use a little visit from somebody, and we’ll know so-and-so has been in to see him about some worry of hers, and so one of us’ll drop in to visit her that week. And there are ones he don’t mention, too. He knows which ones to mention.

  “Anyway, we was stopped at the intersection of the expressway and, ah . . . What road was that, Harold? Redmill? Or Arcadia?”

  “Redmill.”

  Harold will go to sleep on you.

  “Redmill Road, no more than a minute before the wreck, when she come barreling through there with that boy in the backseat leaning way up forward with his hands on the back of the front seat, sort of holding on. Didn’t have a shirt on, and you could see dirt rings around his neck. She was trying to make the light. If we hadn’t been turning to go to the mall we would have come up on the wreck, sure as the world.”

  “He was dead before he hit the ground. Flew fi’ty-one feet.”

  “Harold. Miss Laura don’t want to be hearing about that.”

  “Took off both ears.”

  “Harold.”

  “She just had the one broke rib and a bump—”

  “I don’t think—”

  “That’s what Drew said.”

  “Harold . . . Well anyway, Miss Laura, the thing about it is, nobody knew what was going on behind the scenes about the tombstone business until Preacher Gordon sort of, I guess, verified the facts behind it all. Told Graham Fisher, and then too, Mary—two doors down from where Faison and June Lee lived, you know—kind of pieced it all together. She said Faison spent the night over there several times before they got married and I think before she got divorced—or at least stayed real, real late. Don’t surprise me a bit in this day and age. Faison’s got one of them camouflage trucks. Course you probably knew that. Did you know he had one of them camouflage trucks, Miss Laura?” She can’t half hear.

  “Well he does. And lord a mercy—how anybody could live in a motel is something I don’t know, either. How he can afford it. I mean, it’s a very cheap motel, but I still don’t know how he can afford it—with the kind of work he does, moving houses. Twenty dollars a night—that’s what, six hundred dollars a month?”

  “He rented a house.”

  “That’s right. He did rent a house.”

  Harold’s sitting there twirling that ball cap in his hand. He’ll wear it anywhere. He tried to wear it to church twicet.

  “Anyway, Mary says Faison was good to that boy. But I don’t think he’s much of a house mover. When do you see a house getting moved around here? Of course I guess he travels around doing it, and you’re just not that aware of it. Did you ever get to hear the whole story about the tombstone thing, Miss Laura—the little boy’s tombstone? You know, what broke them up. You been so sick. Did you ever hear it, Miss Laura?” Deaf as a cabbage.

  “Near as I can tell, the little boy’s name was John Moody, Junior, after June Lee’s first husband. But she’d had such a rough time of it with John Senior, she promised Faison that as soon as they got married she would change the little boy’s name to Faison Bales, Junior. Legally. They were just calling the boy Junior, irregardless, anyway.

  “Well, the first thing Preacher Gordon thought about when she told him about the name change was how the boy felt about it, because he says he—Preacher Gordon—thought changing a little boy’s name was a kind of critical thing to do unless the little boy was one hundred percent in favor of it. He asked her to bring in the boy. She did, and the boy said he wanted his name changed. So Preacher Gordon counseled him a little bit, you know, but the little boy stayed all in favor of it.”

  “Faison’s got a camouflage boat, too,” said Harold. “Took the boy fishing some.”

  “Preacher Gordon says he thought there might be some legal problem with calling somebody a junior after somebody who was their stepfather, but of course he never got around to checking into that before the poor little boy was stone dead and I don’t know what the law might be on that.”

  “I think you can name them whatever you want to.”

  “Well I don’t think so, Harold. Then after the burial service—he won’t but eleven or twelve, poor thing—after the burial service, Faison and her, June Lee, had started walking back toward the family car when he looked down on the little nameplate that they had stuck in the ground for the gravediggers, I guess, and he pulled her over there and started giving her down the country. That’s what Celia Joyner told Mary. Can you imagine that—at a funeral?

  “But you know, Miss Laura, Faison’s problems, his whole general attitude, is bound to stem from them boys being left by their mama like they was. Bound to.

  “Anyway, there at the burial service, I was too far in back of the crowd to hear anything, but I saw him holding her by the arm and pointing down to the ground talking about something. I thought it had something to do with the flowers and didn’t pay that much attention to it. You didn’t either, did you, Harold?”

  “I wadn’t there.”

  “That’s right. You stayed home. But Mary did have to call the sheriff out there to their house to break up a fight a few days after that. Said they fought across
the backyard and into the garage—like dogs. Idn’t that awful? They were fighting about the name—about what name was going on the tombstone. Mary heard them.

  “After that fight is when she started in to see the preacher sometimes more than once a week. Once it was twicet in the same day. At the time, I didn’t know whether to say anything to Preacher Gordon or not, you know, about whether I ought to visit. She had a couple of friends in the church—that Watkins girl, and Sheila Peterson talked to her sometimes—so I didn’t say anything. Course I ain’t known Faison Bales to set foot in a church since he was a boy. And I don’t imagine you have either. I don’t understand how they change so.

  “Well, right many people got interested in what the tombstone would say on it. Claremont done it. And they are . . . slow. It was right big, not too thick, and dark. Dark gray. People had got interested enough, you know, to want to see what was written on it. On the stone. What name they used. First off they didn’t bury him in the Bales section, they buried him in some neutral site out there amongst that little clump of trees where there ain’t ever been no graves because of the roots. But they got root cutters now just like they’ve got everything else under the sun we don’t need. Well, anyway, there it was: John Moody, Junior, 1978-1989.

  “Then it wadn’t more than two days passed when here comes Mary telling me there’s a footstone out there, a light pink one, in place of the tombstone. The tombstone had been removed.

  “Me and Harold drove out to take a look. Course we didn’t get out of the car—you could drive right up to it and read it without getting out. Sure enough, it said Faison Bales, Junior, with the dates. The grave was still red and fresh. The tombstone at the head was gone and there was that pink footstone at the foot. Mary says he hauled that thing out there in his truck hisself, and switched them. When I saw that name, Faison Bales, Junior, I knew it won’t right. I could feel it. That boy ought to be named after his blood daddy . . . Ma’am? What did she say, Harold?”

  “She said, ‘Where was they going?’”

  “Where was who going? Where was who going, Miss Laura? . . . Oh, the little boy and his mama. When they had the wreck, you mean. Well, I don’t know as anybody knows. She was in a hurry was all I could tell. She was going away from the mall. Mary did say she’d just had a argument with Faison and had pulled that boy out of the house by his arm. Then barreling through that intersection going too fast, and that boy sitting up on the edge of the backseat with his shirt off and dirt rings around his neck. It was a yellow car. If he’d been wearing a seat belt that might have saved his life. Of course the car could have caught on fire and then both of them could have got all hung up in there and burned up.”

  “She was wearing hers,” said Harold.

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

  “Yep. That’s what Drew said—up at the rescue squad. What I don’t understand is why they don’t make you wear seat belts in a bus. If they’re so safe. You can get thrown forty foot in a bus and still be in there.”

  “What does that have to do with anything, Harold?”

  “Them seats and poles and stuff in there is hard”.

  “Well, anyway, I’ve never heard anything up to it. She quit coming to church and to see Preacher Gordon.

  “And that house that Faison was moving, out on Lake Collier Road, has been sitting there on them blocks with that truck hooked to it, lord, for . . . how long, Harold?”

  “Month or two.”

  “Month or two.

  “Course you know I would have thought she’d have changed that footstone back by now. It’s been well over a year . . . What’s that, Miss Laura? What? What did she say, Harold?”

  “She says she wants a pink footstone, too.”

  “You tell Faye, Miss Laura. You tell Faye. I think you’re already set.”

  “Maybe she can get the boy’s, after it’s changed again.”

  “Harold.”

  “Well, all they’d have to do was turn it over and put her name on top.”

  “Harold!”

  “Ain’t that right, Miss Laura. You wouldn’t mind having a used footstone, would you?”

  Harold gets right ridiculous sometimes. Showing off. “Har—”

  “Look, she’s laughing.”

  “It’s not funny, Harold. Miss Laura ain’t going to have a secondhand footstone. Are you, Miss Laura? No sirree. Speaking of that, me and Harold got to pick out ours one of these days. It’s something you can’t do too early. But. We got to be getting on now. Lord, we been sitting here over an hour. It’s good to see you sitting up again, Miss Laura, and you tell Faye we come by to see you. Harold, go out to the car and get that little pretty we brought Miss Laura. I forgot it.”

  Harold’s knees pop evertime he stands up. And he’s got so he limps. And hisses at that bird like some teenager. Harold’s a something.

  “Harold is just a joker, Miss Laura. Don’t you pay no attention to him. Here, let me push you back up straight. You got to leaning a little bit there. Why, you’re liable to be around longer than any of us . . . Ma’am? . . . No, Harold is in lectronics. He’s got a lectronics shop. You know that, Miss Laura . . . No, he don’t make tombstones. It’s Claremont made that footstone, the pink one. They’re the only one does pink ones, I think. Here. Here comes Harold with a little box of something for you—I know how much you like it—and you keep that smile on your face, and keep sitting up. We’ll be seeing you—and Preacher Gordon ought to be by sometime soon.”

  Gloria

  I was sitting in the kitchen, eating my afternoon sandwich, when they passed through, headed out.

  “How’s Mr. Bales?” Mrs. Fuller ask me.

  “He bout the same,” I say. “He asleep now. Been bothered with the bedsores some.”

  Miss Wilma looked around, checked out the kitchen. She will check up on you. It was clean and straight. The kitchen is one thing I always keep straight. That teenager that spends the night leaves crumbs and dishes sometimes.

  “Well, we’ll be back to see him before too long,” she said. What she always say.

  See, way back, Mr. Glenn he got sick and Miss Laura she took care of him for years and years, and then she got sick too, and that’s when I come to work, in the daytimes, mostly. That teenager come in at night. But she don’t have to do much but baby-sit. They fired two for not looking in on them like they ought to.

  When Miss Laura’s daughter, Faye, come from Charlotte for a day or two, me and the night girl both get off. Faye come most weekends.

  Them boys don’t visit their daddy like they ought to. I don’t care what the reason—but then too, my chiren don’t visit me neither. Nobody’s chiren visit much anymore. It’s a bad sign about the times.

  But I’ll tell you this. I’ve seen days I could choke them everone—I’m talking about these people. They so picky. You know what I mean? But then too there been days I wished I was white and everything wouldn’t be so hard, but most time I realize if I was white how much I’d miss out on.

  Mr. and Mrs. Fuller they sit down and talk to me sometimes. They right nice. Course they talk to anybody.

  See, they reasons that if Miss Laura die first, which had always seemed very unlikely, then when Mr. Glenn die, the homeplace would go to the boys, and none of it to Mr. Glenn’s sisters—that’s Miss Bette and Miss Ansie—who have raised the boys, and who, word is, figure they deserve at least some of the homeplace, being as they worked the land all their lives and raised the boys. It would go to the boys because Mr. Glenn, they say, won’t leave no will because he think that would hurt somebody’s feelings. It’s right complicated and I don’t try too hard to understand it because it ain’t none of my bidness.

  Course this is just my surmising from what all Mr. and Mrs. Fuller say, but mostly I think they visit because they got good hearts. They do surmise a good bit though. Specially Miss Wilma. She really do. She surmise a lot. But you can’t say she ain’t good to Miss Laura.

  Laura

  I open the box and look
over the different shapes of chocolate. Whitman’s Sampler. My very favorite! Yes sir! My very favorite!

  I always was blessed with good neighbors.

  The first piece of warm chocolate candy is that boy, Faison. I swallow him—the one always stuck his tongue out at me, cussed me even. Then run away at sixteen—stole Glenn’s truck with the wood saw in the back—to stay with that Grove McCord, Evelyn’s brother, and ended up no-count at all.

  I finger another little hunk of chocolate, with a nut of some sort in it, I bet. I eat it. Oh, it’s got a crunch. It’s that Grove McCord. And who—Harold?—said he heard he’s coming back here to die? Somebody heard it. Nobody wants him back here.

  I eat that other boy, Tate, that ran from me, wouldn’t mind a thing I said. At least he went to college.

  A lumpy piece. Evelyn. The one that left Glenn. I eat her. She deserted those boys.

  Now, that awful Grove, Evelyn’s brother. Did I just eat him? I’ll eat him again. This is good candy! My very favorite!

  Then I lick a pretty little piece, a piece that is my warm daughter, Faye. Born of Elliot. Sometimes I wish so hard that Elliot had lived. Sometimes I wish so hard. My Faye takes care of me, pays for the nurse, won’t put me in no nursing home, stands between me and the whole black ocean full of snakes and alligators and those two ugly, mean boys. Glenn can’t do nothing for me no more. Lord, he’s worse off than ever and I can’t help him. I’ll eat him in a minute. I lord spent every ounce of energy I had left in the whole world tending to him all those years and bless Faye, she was right to insist on that joint ownership of this farm. I said it didn’t make any difference. She said it did. She knew what was right. So that I don’t get left out in the cold when all is said and done.