Homeplace

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  He did not look at Mike as he walked. But all eyes were on his tall figure, slightly bowed with this newest of the sorrows he carried, the beautiful, burdensome wife clinging hard to his arm, her face ravaged with real grief as well as alcohol. Mike heard the soft catches of breath and the murmurs of sympathy as Lytton watched this most lustrous of its native sons bear his burdens gallantly to the foot of the coffin of the only father he had ever known. Behind them, Priss Comfort snorted.

  Mike looked steadily at him. She seemed to see him, suddenly, in a kind of pentimento, in some vast, paneled office with crossed flags behind his fine head. She thought, inanely, that he looked like one of those photos that you find in drugstore wallets when you first open them, and remembered with absolute and instant clarity the photographs in the terrible flamingo-pink plastic wallet she had bought when she first ran away from Lytton to Atlanta and had kept there in place of her family’s photos, and his. She looked at vulnerable, dwindling little Sally Sewell. She isn’t going to be a burden to him at all, not a bit of an obstacle, Mike thought. She can drink herself to death, and probably will, and people are only going to say what a saint he is, and how brave and good he’s been. It’s going to help him. His poor, drunk, doomed wife is going to be a political asset. It’s amazing. Nothing can stop him. She let her mind play fully and unswervingly over all the afternoons in the urgent upstairs bed, all the things they had done and said to each other, all the heat and writhings and frog-leaping excesses of their two bodies. Nothing in her, mind or body, flinched away from the memories. That flesh had been the flesh of another woman entirely. All Mike felt, looking at the face of the man who had been her love and her lover, was a faint and clinical distaste.

  The choir sat down and the organist began to play again, not a hymn this time, but the achingly sweet and delicate Largo from Dvořák’s New World Symphony. “Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m just goin’ home …”

  Oh, Daddy, Mike said soundlessly, and turned to Priss Comfort behind her. Priss gave her a small nod and a smile. Mike knew the music, including the homely, dignified old hymns, had been her choice. “Thank you,” she mouthed. Priss nodded again and blew a brief kiss.

  There was a silence, filled with rustlings and soft coughings and a few more whispers, and DeeDee made as if to rise, and Mike thought, suddenly and frantically, that her sister was going to get up and go to the foot of the altar beside the coffin and sing. She remembered the awful days of Yma Sumac. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, she thought, idiotically, and for a moment laughter so flooded her chest and throat that she was afraid it was going to burst free and spew over the congregation. But DeeDee only straightened her skirt and subsided massively onto the pew again. She looked surprisingly handsome today, in a simple dark shirtwaist that Mike had never seen before, and obviously new black patent pumps. In her little pink ears were small pearl buttons, and her dark hair was pulled back into a French knot. Her face was scored and swollen with her grief, but DeeDee today wore a dignity that Mike had never seen, and that sat upon her well. Priss again, Mike thought. She must have taken DeeDee into Atlanta or to one of the nearby malls and bought her the dress and shoes. It must have been earlier this morning, after the terrible business at DeeDee’s house. She wondered if Priss knew, somehow. She thought not. DeeDee would wear the scars of Priss’s wrath in some visible way if the truth had come out.

  The young minister Mike had met earlier in the summer came out of a door beside the choir loft and mounted the steps up to the pulpit. Mike almost did not recognize him without his jogging clothes. He wore a dark robe and white vestments, and his face was calm and open and thoughtful. The rose light glinted off round, metal-rimmed spectacles. He looked very young. He paused a moment and looked out over the congregation, and then at Mike and DeeDee, and smiled faintly, and then picked up a leather-bound prayer book. In a soft, slow voice dense with the melodic drawl of one of the old Creole coastal towns, Mike thought perhaps Savannah or Charleston, he began to read: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die …”

  The words were music, the music of the old King James version of the Bible, the music of childhood. Mike felt herself borne up and out on the music of the young minister’s words, back into the world of her own childhood and into whatever of safety and sweetness she had known in it: Rusky, Priss, sometimes DeeDee, once or twice, in moments of great stress and childish anguish, the brief haven of her father’s hard arms. It was warm in the church, and the warmth seemed to curl around and through her and wrap itself around her heart, shrunken cold and small and stonelike, somewhere deep within her, so that it swelled just a little, made as if to bud. Something in her chest, which might have been that child’s fiercely guarded heart, seemed to loosen and expand. Her muscles let go of themselves, and her hands relaxed in her lap. Around her, the grief of these people who had long known her father reached out to her and gathered her in, and though it was not fresh grief, nor deep, nevertheless it was real. Mike closed her eyes, hearing the beautiful Creole voice going on and on: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling; hold not thy peace at my tears; for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were …”

  Mike felt washed, lapped, bathed, if not in mystery, then in a kind of peace and the beginnings of a small hope. This is what Sam meant, she thought, and Priss. This, right now, for just this minute, is goodness.

  “O spare me a little,” said Tom Cawthorn from the pulpit, “that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

  Presently he was finished, and the congregation shifted and murmured, getting ready to rise for the final prayer. But instead, Tom Cawthorn said, “John Winship’s family has asked someone who loved him as much as they did to say a few words for him. Sam?”

  And Sam Canaday rose from the pew beside Priss and walked down the aisle and up into the pulpit.

  DeeDee drew in her breath sharply and turned to glare fiercely at Mike, and the congregation frankly buzzed among themselves. Duck turned a reddened face to Mike that seemed to swell and grow in girth as she looked at it. Bayard Sewell did not turn around, but Mike felt, rather than saw, his shoulder and neck muscles harden. She gave DeeDee and Duck back a long, level look. She was not sure what she would have done if they had made any sound or gesture of protest, but she knew she would have done something irrevocable and shocking, and apparently they read it in the look, for both subsided, looking away. They did not turn to her again.

  “Good girl,” Priss whispered from behind her.

  “Way to go,” J.W. said under his breath.

  Sam Canaday clasped his hands loosely and laid his forearms on the pulpit. He looked slowly over the church, up one row and down the other, letting his green eyes drift over and past everyone in the light-flooded sanctuary. He saw, fully, Mike sitting there beside J.W., but he did not acknowledge her. He continued his slow sweep of the church, and then took a deep breath and straightened himself slightly. In a voice that was like and yet totally unlike Sam’s voice, soft and resonant and clear and carrying, he began the great, joyous words of John Donne:

  “Death be not proud, though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

  Die not, poor death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

  From rest and sleep, which but they pictures be,

  Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

  And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones and souls’ delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,

  And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

  One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shal
t die. “

  He did not read the words, but recited them as from long and easy familiarity, and in the absolute silence and stillness that followed them, the power of him thrummed in the air almost audibly, almost palpably. Something that belied and exceeded the quiet, measured words leapt and flickered around the old church like captured lightning. What a preacher he must have made, Mike thought, shivering. From somewhere outside himself he has pulled about him this complete and incandescent new persona. No wonder he stopped preaching. No one could live with that kind of responsibility.

  Sam leaned on the pulpit again. “We come today to say good-bye to our friend John Winship,” he said. “And before we see him off, there is something I want to say to you. There will inevitably be some question as to whether he knew what he was doing. Whether he was clear in himself when he went into the wreckage of his family home and lay down there to die. Some of you might wonder if this death was what the world calls a suicide.

  “Well, let me tell you that he knew. He absolutely and truly and totally knew what he was doing. Oh, yes, he knew; there was not a thing he didn’t know. He knew about love and betrayal in equal doses, at the end of his life, and he also knew that the greatest of these is love, and he proved that with his death.”

  Sam paused and took another deep breath. He let it out slowly. The congregation seemed to breathe with him.

  “It was a magnificent death,” he said. “It was a hero’s death. Don’t let anybody tell you that there are no heroes anymore. A hero died last Tuesday for what he loved best, and we lay a hero to rest today.”

  He looked at Mike and J.W. and DeeDee and Duck, and then over at Bayard and Sally Sewell. DeeDee sobbed aloud and dropped her face into her hands, and Duck looked down at his lap. Bayard Sewell did not move his dark, narrow head. Sam Canaday raised his voice suddenly, and his words rang out as if being struck from sparking stone: “Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God; defend me from them that rise up against me. Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from bloody men.”

  He fell silent and looked at them all again, and then said, in an ordinary, conversational voice, “John Winship was not a suicide, and he was not a victim. He was a victor. He lived as his kind of man should, and he died as any man would be proud to die. And what he won was immense.” He looked directly at Mike and smiled, and she smiled back, holding the tears at bay with all the concentrated force of her will. DeeDee caught a great, ragged breath and sobbed on.

  “This was a man,” Sam Canaday said. “We shall not look upon his like again.”

  He stood there for a moment, and then walked back to his seat and sat down. The church was silent. Then the young minister said a benediction, and the funeral of John Winship was over.

  Mike said nothing to Sam on the short drive to the old Lytton cemetery, except, briefly, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  The midafternoon sun beat down mercilessly in the old cemetery, glancing knifelike off the dingy, pitted old tombstones, hurling itself in arrows from the few large statues of angels and saints and cherubim, and the two or three modest family mausoleums. The old cemetery was not well cared for; Mike had heard her father say that the town could not keep a sexton, and all the work that was done around the graves and plots was done now by the families of the dead. Weeds and vines straggled up out of the hard red earth, and plastic pots of geraniums leaned drunkenly against some of the graves, bleached and bled to blotched pink by the suns and rains of many seasons. There were few newer graves here, and no fresh ones except John Winship’s. People in Lytton laid their dead to rest now in the new perpetual-care cemetery down the highway to the south. Mike got out of the shining old Cadillac and walked with Sam Canaday to the hole that yawned in the dry earth toward the back of the old cemetery, covered with the undertaker’s canopy and banked with florists’ wreaths and sprays.

  The Winship plot was edged with granite coping, and its scant grass was neatly mown. J.W., Mike knew. Beside the new grave there was a neatened stone that read CLAUDIA SEARCY WINSHIP. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. 1918-1946. There was space behind the two graves for four more. Folding chairs had been set out around the new grave, and DeeDee and Duck were already seated in the front row, under the canopy. Duck’s arm was around DeeDee’s shoulders, and she was still crying monotonously into a sodden handkerchief. She did not look up as Mike slipped into the chair beside her. Neither did Duck. J.W. and Sam and Priss stood behind Mike, and the small knot of people who had come to the newly dug grave filled in the chairs around and stood in serried ranks behind them. The young minister, still in his vestments, stepped up to the head of the coffin, which had come there in the hearse, and began the brief graveside service: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me, and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out …”

  Mike sat with her head bowed under the fist of the sun, eyes closed, resolutely thinking of nothing in particular, only half listening to Tom Cawthorn’s voice. Her father had nothing to do with this place and these people; nothing to do with this raw new hole in the earth and the mound of pink dirt piled beside it; nothing to do with the grave and beautiful words that he had abjured in his later life. She wondered, suddenly, what he looked like, lying inside the great, Buick-like coffin, and was grateful that Priss had talked DeeDee into having it closed at the funeral. She did not want to look upon her dead father, and she did not want anyone else to look at him, either.

  “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother John Winship, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of Resurrection unto eternal life …” Tom Cawthorn intoned. Presently, his voice stopped, and Mike looked up to see a stumbling, weeping DeeDee, supported by Duck, dropping a handful of earth onto her father’s coffin. It made a flat, splatting sound. Mike looked around to see if anyone was going to give her some earth to drop upon her father, but no one made a move to do so, and she supposed that DeeDee, as the oldest, automatically had the honor of casting clods at him. And then she felt something being pressed into her hand from behind her, and she looked down at the finger-printed ball of red clay that rested there, and the single drooping vine of fiery scarlet roses that J.W. Cromie held out to her.

  “From the homeplace,” he said in a low voice. “Go on an’ throw ’em in there, Mike.”

  Mike closed her eyes and tossed, and the earth and flowers hit the casket with the same dull and final sound, and the electric winch began to whine, and John Winship rode into the earth of Lytton, the earth and fire of the homeplace riding with him.

  * * *

  At seven o’clock that evening a great storm broke, driving the thick, still heat before it and lashing the trees outside the Pomeroy Street house with muscular silver skeins of rain. The air darkened until the twilight became full night, and Priss and Lavinia Lester dashed onto the porch and pulled the wicker furniture to safety. The last of the guests who had come to nibble at the buffet Lavinia had produced and hug the Winship girls had fled as the first great spatters of rain bounced and sizzled on the hot pavement outside, and only the core group remained.

  Mike sat, silent and dull with fatigue, on the loveseat in the living room, sipping cooling coffee. DeeDee and Duck and Bayard Sewell sat on the long white damask couch against the opposite wall. Under the ministrations of the mourners, who had hugged and petted and made much of her, DeeDee had at last stopped crying and looked, now, stunned and uncomprehending. Duck made rambling, jocose conversation about the funeral and the turnout and the sermon and the food Lavinia had provided … a sort of free-lance funeral review, Mike thought dimly. He was obviously uncomfortable in this room, with Mike, and did not look at her. Bayard Sewell lounged, grave and composed, balancing a coffee cup, his long legs stretched out elegantly before him. He looked often at Mike, and his gaze was mild and clear. But he said little, only listened to Duck. He had taken a wasted Sally home much earlier, and had come back, and remained as the
crowd thinned and then was gone. He and DeeDee and Duck had been on the verge of leaving when the rain started. Now they were unwilling prisoners together in this room that had loomed large in all their lives, trapped by the teeming bars of the rain. Mike did not want to be in the room with them, or even the house, but she was too tired to get up and leave, too tired to speak, too tired to think. And so she sat still.

  Sam Canaday came into the room just as a great bolt of lightning struck somewhere nearby and the lights flickered. He and Priss had been in the kitchen most of the afternoon, out of sight but standing by. Mike felt rather than saw their presence, and was dumbly glad of it.

  “Yow,” said Sam. “The big guns are out. Listen, everybody. I wonder if you’d mind coming into the Colonel’s study for a minute before you go. There’s something I need to go over with you. It won’t take long.”