In Memory of Junior Read online

  “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.”

  Evelyn

  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.

  She was hit between the eyes too, she said, knocked down to her knees. She told me that she could not walk away and not love me, there in the clean little community way down there in North Carolina, away from the commerce, chaffing, haggling, swapping, bartering of New York. But she couldn’t ask me to go with her.

  And she couldn’t ask me not to go with her.

  That day at the wedding, she had walked out into the front yard where others were gathered. I had followed.

  “This is hot weather,” she said.

  “It is, isn’t it.”

  “Did you grow up around here?” she asked.

  “Down the road a ways. It gets bad in the summertime, especially July and August.”

  “I think I rather like it in a way,” she said. “It’s very human somehow. No, that’s not the word. It’s very . . . something.”

  “It’s pleasant in the mornings, after a night rain.”

  “Do you have a family?” she asked me.

  “I’ve got two boys and a hundred in-laws.”

  “Do you ever get away?”

  “No.”

  “Do you ever want to?”

  “Yes.”

  We stopped along the road and had some sandwiches made and put them in a white paper bag—Honour kept white paper bags—and then we drove until we found a dirt road and t
hen a field with a cart path. We took a blanket out and sat under a tree, eating sandwiches and drinking cold orange juice, fresh squeezed and smelling good, and the june bugs were popping in the field and the boys weren’t hanging all over me—for the first time, it seemed, in my life. The boys weren’t in my face, between my legs, at my elbow, and the pull deep inside me—for my children—was relieved by the popping of the june bugs, the sight of Honour sitting there on the blanket, already unbuttoned some. I forced everything that was wailing and rearing up to a place behind me. I forced it all down, though it did, at times, rise up and overcome me. Honour was always there to help me regain myself.

  You see, don’t you, that my husband Glenn had never, ever told me that he loved me. Do you see what I was up against, what I was in? But Honour could talk about love. She could flat talk about love. She quoted Shakespeare, Song of Solomon, and others.

  And I knew that if Honour disappeared, even for a minute, I would be draped, suffocated in a black guilt. And I knew that as long as she was there, I would have a happiness that rode herd on all that back there behind me where those two boys would get more attention—surely they would—than they could handle. And surely they’d have a chance to live on that farm. Even though they were my blood, they were their blood too, and somehow all of it back there hadn’t quite took. I hadn’t took to it. I’d been repelled by it, and I never knew that until Honour came.

  I decided that the boys would take, in time, to all those aunts and uncles and their grandma and grandpa. They had already took. They wouldn’t miss me so much. I remembered, and have remembered over and over again, the Mama-Papa-Glenn-Bette-Ansie-aunts-uncles-cousins glob of mudclayglue. In the glob are the two small diamonds that are my boys. But I keep them covered. If they are about to shine through I run my fingers over the mudball, shaping it so the diamonds are covered again and again.

  And Glenn was such a baby. Such a baby.

  Part Three

  You’re History Longer Than You’re Fact

  7

  Gloria

  Sunday mornings I don’t come in until ten. Relieve the teenager. Last Sunday morning, Mrs. Fuller drove up same time I did. She was on the way to church, stopping by to check on Miss Laura. Time we got in the door, we could hear Florida saying “Nut ’N Honey” over and over. I liked him better with his mouth shet. The teenager was out the door like a cat. She always that way.

  While I put up my things, Mrs. Fuller, with her handful of Kleenex, kind of dawdled into Miss Laura’s room, where she stay about fifteen seconds, then she come shuffling out like a trotting mule. “Lord” she say. “Lord almighty,” she shout, “she’s dead, she’s dead! Lord gosh almighty.”

  It had happened. I stopped at the phone, picked up the receiver, and pushed 911. “We got a mergency,” I said. “Somebody passed. Turner Road, first driveway on the right past the Antique Mart.”

  They want to know how long she been dead and who I was.

  I said I didn’t know, and that I was the practical nurse.

  That teenager. Marsha What-ever. I knew it. She supposed to check in on both of them at bedtime, in the night, and next morning. I bet she ain’t done none of that.

  Well, finally. This look like it mean them boys was going to get the place, when all this time it been looking like it gone be just the opposite.

  I was already checking the wall list for Faye’s number.

  “Miss Faye, it look like your mama have passed,” I said.

  She say, “What?”

  “Passed away.”

  “Is this Gloria?”

  “Yes’um.”

  “She’s what, Gloria?”

  “Dead. She just died.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yes ma’am, a few minutes ago. That’s what Mrs. Fuller say. I’m real sorry.”

  “Was Mrs. Fuller with her?”

  “No ma’am. She was in there by herself. We called mergency and they’re sending a amulance.”

  “Does Mr. Bales know yet?”

  “No’um, we ain’t tole him but I imagine he heard the racket.”

  Then I called Faison and Tate but neither one of them home. I was stalling, hoping Miss Wilma had gone in to tell Mr. Glenn. Lord have mercy, I hated to do that.

  When I hung up, I looked toward Mr. Glenn’s room. Mrs. Fuller stood there in the door with her back brace up against the doorjamb. She start sliding down to the floor, real slow. A tissue drop from her hand, then another one. Time I got to her she was sitting in the floor, with her head tilted back. She was fully fainted, passed out. Gone.

  Mr. Glenn, see, he was dead too.

  Faye

  As soon as I got off the phone with Gloria, I drove to Summerlin. I realized as I drove that I was less prepared, emotionally, than I thought I was. The farm would, of course, go to Faison and Tate. Well . . . I could turn that loose. But Mother deserved something other than her meager final rewards. She took care of Glenn so long.

  I walked into a houseful of visitors—all just out from church, I’m sure. As soon as I got into the hallway I stopped, brought my hands to my face. A dark lead blanket had dropped over me.

  Mrs. Fuller walked up and put her hand on my shoulder, then hugged me. I hugged back. I almost loved her for a minute.

  Then I stood there thinking, Why can’t I just get in and get out? Why can’t I just get in and sign a paper and get it over with, have the funeral, get back to Charlotte, back to work, and remember what my mother and real father and life were all like when I was growing up. Why can’t I just grieve alone, and not have to put up with those boys, those aunts, and all that. It was enough knowing that Tate and Faison would end up with the whole place.

  “Oh, Faye,” said Mrs. Fuller, “she was such a wonderful lady. We’re all going to miss her. But I know none of us will miss her like you do.” She tried to hand me one of those Kleenex tissues. I refused it.

  “And we ain’t got no way of knowing which one died first,” she said.

  “What? When?”

  “First.”

  “First what? I didn’t . . .”

  “Died.”

  “Do you mean . . . Are you telling me that Mr. Bales died too?”

  “No. What I was telling you was we ain’t got no way of knowing which one died first.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mama or Mr. Bales.”

  “Mr. Bales died too?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “NO.”

  It was as if the room suddenly started spinning. Two deaths had occurred in the same night. My own dear mother and this man, her husband. Besides all the immediate, complex confusion was the fact that I was suddenly in the middle of some kind of inheritance nightmare with those Bales brothers.

  I had to sit down and get my breath.

  Wilma Fuller

  They must have died at the same time. That teenager is no-count. Of course, both of them dying like that, something fishy could have been going on, but I ain’t going to mention that unless somebody else does.

  Faye was right distraught, of course.

  It all took my breath. I fainted. But that ain’t the first time. Someday I’m going to sit down and write down all the times I’ve fainted.

  I just discovered them—one, then the other. I walked into Miss Laura’s room and there she was sitting up, dozing, I thought, leaning a little to one side, you know, like she sometimes got when we was visiting. Me or Harold used to push her back up straight. She looked just exactly like she was asleep. Then I walked over there to the bed and said, “Miss Laura, Miss Laura, are you asleep?” Well, of course she didn’t answer. She had gone to her reward. And Florida saw it all, bless his heart. I moved him out in the hall so he wouldn’t have to be in there with her.

  Next, I made the announcement, see, to Gloria. About Miss Laura. Gloria got on the phone and I went in to tell Mr. Glenn of course—I hated to—and Lord almighty, he was dead too. I declare if I didn’t think he was sleeping hisself, but I said to
myself as I walked over to the bed that for sure . . . I said Lord have mercy this could not happen twicet in the same day, lightning striking twicet. But, bless his heart, he was stone dead. And before I knew what was going on, Gloria was fanning me in the floor and Lord the rescue squad had to split up and work on both of them at the same time I reckon—I couldn’t look . . . What do you reckon they do when somebody is already dead? I guess they relax. Slow down a little.

  I sat on the porch while they was in there, and then that Murphy fellow, Percy Murphy’s boy, youngest, called the funeral home—the boy that got his foot cut real bad in the county lawnmower that time at the schoolhouse—told them to bring two cars, that lightning had struck twicet.

  Poor Faye. She was in such a tizzy. I have never really deep down liked her all that much, but those kinds of feelings just can’t count when somebody loses their mama. I don’t care if they’re in prison, even. There’s something about losing your mama that makes the kind of person you are not count at all.

  I told Faye not to worry at all about food. I’d made a few phone calls and the chicken and cakes and pies were already rolling in.

  I asked Faye what she thought we should do with Florida. Maybe give him to Gloria? But she couldn’t think about Florida right then, she said, and of course she was right. And right then Florida whistled and then said, “Harold, that’s not so.”

  He says some of the funniest things. Harold says he sounds just like me. I say he don’t. He says he does. Once that bird got well he started talking up a storm. Says anything he hears on TV—or anywhere else—that he decides he wants to say. I heard him say “Toyota” one time. They got more commercials than McDonald’s.

  Course the big question everybody is going to be asking I suppose, once all the grief dies down, is who died first?

  I knew all about the funeral arrangements so I explained to Faye as carefully and gently as I could. The arrangements were for Mr. Glenn to be viewed there at the homeplace, and Miss Laura up at the funeral home. Then I wondered while I was talking if I had it backwards. But I told her, and I’m sure she knew this, that it was Claremont. And they are the best. Mr. Simmons had said for Faye to give him a call. He’ll tell her who’s going to be where.