Missing May

by Cynthia Rylant

  “Anything with a story to it” is what Cletus says he’s looking for. He keeps telling me I ought to be writing these stories to go with his pictures, since Mrs. Lacey at school has been bragging on those things I wrote for English. But the last thing on earth I plan to do is go digging through the pictures in Cletus’s beat-up vinyl suitcase so we can collaborate, as he puts it. I can just see it: me and Cletus looking at the front of a cornflakes box, searching for deep meaning. Holy bejeezus.

  Cletus had been investigating the Chevy because he thought there might be some old newspapers lining its floorboards. Ob looked out at him that Saturday morning after Thanksgiving (which had been a tough holiday without May) and he said, “Who is that boy?”

  “That’s Cletus Underwood,” I answered, my mouth completely dropped open in wonder at the sight of him in our yard.

  We watched Cletus try the handle of one of the back doors.

  “He trying to steal that banged-up old thing?” Ob asked.

  “Uh-uh” was all I could say.

  Ob watched Cletus a while longer; then he reached for his coat on the back of a kitchen chair.

  “Where you going?” I asked.

  “To get acquainted,” Ob answered, and he pushed open the door and went out.

  Well, of course he didn’t come back alone. There he was, coming into the house with that crazy Cletus Underwood, who had fished his old suitcase from the bushes beside the Chevy and was holding it up against his chest.

  “Hi, Summer!” he said with too big a smile.

  I wasn’t about to encourage him. “Hi,” I answered dumbly, trying to look too boring to be worth staying for.

  But he did. He stayed. He stayed seven solid hours. We fed him lunch just after he got here and dinner just before he left. Seven ungodly hours of crazy Cletus Underwood.

  Thing was, though, Ob really liked him. I hadn’t seen Ob interested in one solitary thing since May left us last summer, and here his face was kind of lit up, kind of full of interest and sparkle, as Cletus made himself at home and told us his life story in between showing us the pictures in his suitcase. It turned out that even though Ob didn’t know Cletus’s parents personally — them being from Raleigh County — he did know some of Cletus’s Fayette County relatives and he seemed genuinely interested to know that Joe Underwood was working in a machine shop down in Durham and that Betty Underwood had dyed her blonde hair black and turned her garage into a combination ceramics shop and religious bookstore.

  I found out that Cletus’s parents were pretty old, nearly as old as Ob, and they didn’t get out much. Maybe that’s why Cletus and Ob had such an easy time of getting to be friends. Cletus was used to older people. And Ob appreciated anybody crazier than him.

  We sat on the sofa looking at Cletus’s pictures while the Lawrence Welk show went on past us on the TV. All those Welk shows were really old, but people loved them, so the station kept on playing them. The only time we lifted our eyes from Cletus’s suitcase was when Ob wanted to watch those two Barbie and Ken dolls dance the tango. Ob loved the tango. Cletus smiled through the whole dance and clapped his hands when it was done. Then we all went back to the pictures.

  “This one here I got from the barber shop,” Cletus said, pulling out a heavy piece of paper with a picture of a slick-looking man advertising Brylcreem.

  “I think the story here,” he explained, “is that Brylcreem guy’s nerves are bad. He’s always cleaning under his fingernails and tweezing out his nose hairs and picking at his teeth. Probably got a whole box of toothpicks in his glove compartment. Bet he sniffs his armpits, too.”

  I was speechless at all this. Just struck dumb. But not Ob. No, he was curious about this Brylcreem guy, now you mentioned it, and he took the picture from Cletus’s chunky hand and studied it.

  “I think you got something there,” Ob told Cletus with a confident nod of his head. “Except the part about the armpits. This man’s too delicate a constitution to be sniffing at his armpits. But all the rest I figure is right on the money.”

  It’s those kinds of conversations we’ve been having since November. Speculations about the armpits of Brylcreem men.

  Still, I guess I am grateful for Cletus. He got Ob through an awful Christmas by bringing over a one-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of the Great Pyramids Christmas morning. (Cletus said he and his parents ate turkey and opened all their presents on Christmas Eve and by morning the holiday was over at his house.) He got Ob to sit with him for twelve hours straight putting the puzzle together. Practically all the pieces were brown — brown pyramid, brown sand, brown people. It looked like pure torture to me. But Cletus and Ob were as enthralled as cats in front of a fish tank, so I just kept them happy by cooking five turkey TV dinners in a row and refilling their RC’s. I spent the rest of my time reading one of the Phyllis Whitney paperbacks Ob got me. I can’t ever get enough of Phyllis Whitney. And reading kept my mind off May.

  So here we are now, two months later in the heart of dark February, with May slipping in, Ob slipping out, and Cletus and me just grabbing at anything we can save. May used to laugh about moving here to Deep Water, West Virginia. She had a helpless kind of fear about water, about rain, and she’d say God was testing her sense of humor, setting her up in a place called Deep Water. She never failed Him. May would tell strangers where she was from, and I would see her glance up at the sky with a sassy kind of grin on her face when she said the words “Deep Water.” Like she was giving God a friendly nudge with her elbow.

  May would tell Cletus and me, if she was here right now, that it’s okay to grab for something or somebody that’s being swept away from you. She’d tell us to hold on tight because we’re all meant to be together. We’re all meant to need each other.

  She’d just remind us that there’s more places to be together than this one. She’d tell us we don’t have to give up if this life doesn’t give us everything we want. There’s always another one.

  But that’s where May and me always parted company. Because I never could count on another chance at happiness. When I got Ob and May after all those years of having nobody, that was my idea of dying and going to heaven. I never expected something that big to happen to me more than once.

  Cletus says I think like a tired old woman. He says I’m going to turn into one of those green-eyed ladies at the Kmart checkout if I’m not careful.

  “Summer,” he said to me once, “drop some of them bricks you keep hauling around with you. Life just ain’t that heavy.”

  I think I must have got old and heavy when May left us. Ob needed somebody to fill the empty hole she left, and I reckon I thought if I aged about fifty years, I might could fill it for him.

  But the only person who seems to be giving Ob anything these days is crazy Cletus. And now, if she plans to stay a while, May.

  “Look here at this.”

  I reached across the aisle of the school bus and took what Cletus was handing me.

  It was an old photograph, fading away like a dawn that leaves you little by little, and it was of a child. A baby in a flowing white gown, arranged on a tall chair out in the middle of a field. The baby’s gown was draped so that the chair was practically invisible, and the only thing you saw was this child hovering in midair, looking at the camera.

  “Weird,” I said, handing it back.

  “I think something like this ought to be in a museum,” Cletus said, pushing a greasy strand of hair back from his eyes. Cletus’s black hair is long, straight, and, from my point of view, slimy. I don’t think Cletus bathes much, though he never exactly stinks. He just seems to me the type who’d layer on the Right Guard for days before he’d finally break down and take a shower.

  “It’s what they call surreal,” he went on. “Taking something real and sort of stretching it out like a piece of taffy into a thing that’s true but distorted. You know. Like old lady Henley’s face-lift.”

  I smiled. Mrs. Henley was our seventh grade art teacher who just couldn’t handle ge
tting old. She was the only person in Deep Water who’d ever had a face-lift — went off to Charleston to get it — and anybody from out of town could have guessed it. She just had this look on her, like she was going to spring loose all of a sudden and snap clear across to the other side of town.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked, leaning over to take another look at the photograph.

  “I was up at Mrs. Davis’s house, seeing if she needed anything from the store. I showed her my suitcase, and she brought me in and pulled a great big box off the top shelf of her closet. It was crammed full of stuff like this. I thought I’d struck gold.”

  “She gave you that picture?”

  Cletus nodded. “I was dying to take home every one of them, but I didn’t say nothing. Just picked through the lot like I was sampling chocolates from a box.

  “I stayed on for hours in her living room, going through all those pictures. I don’t think she planned on giving me any, but finally I guess she figured it was the only way to get rid of me. So she let me take this one.”

  I stared at the floating baby.

  “Did she choose it, or you?”

  “I did. It was just too surreal to pass up.”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t believe you planted yourself in that old lady’s house like some fungus mold till you got a picture out of her.”

  Cletus took one last look at the photograph, then stuck it inside his math book.

  “Aw, she had a good time. She don’t ever get any company.”

  I shook my head again in disapproval. I’m always shaking my head at Cletus. As if I have some need to keep reminding him that his presence in my life is something I neither intended nor arranged.

  “So how’s Ob?” Cletus asked.

  I thought of Ob, this particular cold morning, not even bothering to fix his usual cup of cocoa when he got out of bed. He made sure I was up, and had my lunch fixed, and was out the door on time. But he didn’t have his cocoa.

  “Fair,” I answered.

  Cletus looked longer at me, maybe hoping he could fathom Ob by seeing him inside my eyes. But I didn’t have any deep truths to tell Cletus about Ob. Well … none except that visit from May, and Cletus wasn’t about to get that out of me.

  Which didn’t matter anyway because he got it straight from the horse’s mouth that very night after supper.

  “You believe in an afterlife, Cletus?” Ob asked, handing Cletus a cup of black coffee. Cletus had dropped by on his way home from prayer meeting. Cletus told us he didn’t go there for prayer. He went there for the doughnuts they always had after the service.

  I looked up from the paper on women suffragettes I was writing for history and held my breath.

  “Sure, I do,” Cletus answered, sipping at the coffee, a strand of his stringy hair nearly dunking itself. “Even been there once.”

  Ob’s face lit up just as mine went dark.

  “You don’t say,” Ob answered.

  “I was maybe seven years old,” Cletus began to explain as he settled himself back into the La-Z-Boy. “My grandpa had been real sick and he’d finally died the night before. Next day people were preparing for the funeral and ignoring me in their bereavement, so I just decided to go on down to the river by myself, thinking I’d skip some stones till everything had passed over.

  “Well, I’m standing there on the riverbank skipping rocks when next thing I know I’m drowning. I mean drowning. My foot must have slipped or something, and in I went. And I never was able to swim a lick.

  “And here’s the God’s truth, Ob….”

  Ob set down his coffee cup and straightened up to listen.

  “I passed on. I did. I remember this light ahead of me and reaching out to it. I went after it, and suddenly everything was brilliant white and, I swear to God, my grandpa was there smiling at me and — you won’t believe this part — my little dog Cicero who’d been dead three years, he was with me, too.”

  Cletus stopped talking long enough to take a few gulps of his coffee, and while he drank, Ob and me had our eyes glued to him like a bomb set to explode. Nobody said a word, waiting.

  “So I’m there hugging Grandpa and petting little Cicero and feeling just fantastic when I hear this voice say, ‘Cletus, go on home now.’ I swear that’s what it said. Told me to go on home.

  “And Grandpa and Cicero started fading away and this awful coldness and heaviness come over me, like I was wrapped in sopping wet rugs, and next thing I know I’m there throwing up like crazy and my uncle Willy is threatening to beat me to death for nearly drowning.”

  Cletus grinned at us both.

  Hell, I thought miserably.

  “Heaven!” Ob said out loud. “You went to heaven and back, Cletus!”

  Cletus nodded his head.

  “No doubt in my mind,” he answered.

  “Then maybe it’s you who can talk to May for me. She’s been trying to reach me, but I ain’t too good at communicating on her new wavelength. I need me an interpreter.”

  Cletus gaped at Ob.

  “You heard from May?”

  “Couple of times,” Ob said.

  A couple of times? I had known only about the one time, the first time, when I was there, making bird feeders. It suddenly hurt me that Ob hadn’t told me about the second — and that now he was revealing everything to Cletus instead of me. I felt more than ever cut apart from him, sent off on my own while he took off on his, while he made plans to set aside this life we both knew so purely to try to make it to another one he knew nothing about except that somewhere in it he might find May. I didn’t know how to keep him tied to me. Already he was starting to live among the dead.

  “Well, I’m no psychic or nothing,” Cletus told Ob. “I feel a connection to the spirit world because I’ve been there — sort of like remembering a place where you once went on vacation. But I never get any supernatural messages or anything. I don’t know any ghosts — personally, I mean.”

  Ob shook this off.

  “Don’t matter. You must have something special about you, if you’ve been over to the other side. Maybe just having you in the house’ll help.”

  Holy crap, I thought. The last thing I wanted was for Cletus to have an excuse to hang out at the trailer any more than he already did. Now Ob wanted to keep Cletus here like he was installing some afterlife antenna on the place.

  “But May didn’t even know Cletus,” I said lamely, making a puny attempt at party pooping.

  Ob smiled at Cletus and patted him on the knee.

  “She don’t have to meet him in the flesh to know this boy, Summer,” he said, looking at Cletus’s interested face. “May’s been looking at them pictures over our shoulders all along. She knows Cletus, and I’ll betcha she even knows his little dog.”

  Ob’s smile then slowly disappeared, and he wiped a hand across his eyes. In an instant he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him, and my heart sank.

  Cletus and I just looked at each other.

  The first thing Ob did when the afterlife antenna came around again was to take him out into May’s empty garden. It was a pitiful sight, the three of us in our overcoats and boots, standing among the dead stalks of winter, hoping for a sign of life from the woman who once had kept everything alive on that soil. Including some of us.

  I really didn’t expect May to show up, but Ob’s enthusiasm was so desperate, so sincere in its belief in miracles, that a part of me held out just a little hope that she might fly her soft spirit over us and come gently into our midst. May had never let us down when she was alive, she’d never not shown up when she was supposed to be somewhere, and it was the memory of her reliableness, I guess, that fueled our wide-eyed optimism.

  What Cletus thought about it all I can’t imagine. For once he was quiet, let Ob do all the talking and explaining, and like a little child let himself be led among the dead beans and broccoli toward the heart of a woman he never even met.

  Ob must have thought that by talking about
May there in that place, painting her before Cletus’s ignorant eyes, he could flood the garden with the vibrations needed to draw her to us. Like that old joke of talking about someone till his ears burn.

  So there we stood, hands dug deep in our pockets, Ob looking at Cletus, Cletus looking up at the sky, and me looking down at the ground. Ob talked about what a good wife May was and all the sweet things she’d done for him — for us — while she was living. I was kind of surprised at the things Ob picked to talk about. I figured he’d choose the big ones — like her secretly saving up for three years in a row to buy him that expensive plane saw he was coveting over at Sears. Or the year she stayed awake thirty-two hours straight when fever from the chicken pox had me full of delirium, so sick I wanted to die.

  But these heroic gestures of hers were ignored, and he chose instead to mention the simpler things: how she had rubbed down his ailing knee with Ben-Gay every single night, not missing a one, so he might be able to stand on that leg when he got out of bed the next morning. The way she had called to me through the window when I was little and playing on the swing set, saying, “Summer honey, you are the best little girl I ever did know,” then going back to whatever she was doing. (I had not remembered this about her until that moment.) And a series of other sweetnesses that Ob had obviously cradled in his memory, looking for some way to bring them to life.

  Cletus watched the sky and glanced at Ob now and then, nodding his head to let Ob know he was listening. Cletus was wearing his hat with the fake fur earflaps, and once I got a crazy urge to giggle when I thought of those flaps flapping and Cletus rising up like Charlie Brown’s Snoopy and flying across the garden and away.

  But his hat behaved itself, and he stood patiently, allowing Ob to say all he needed to say. It almost felt like a funeral, like we’d just buried some beloved pet in the cold ground of the garden, and in some ways, it was more comfort, more real, to me than May’s true funeral had been. Seems once people bring in outsiders who make a career of bereavement — undertakers, preachers — their grieving gets turned into a kind of system, like the way everybody lines up the same way to go in to a movie or sits the same way in a doctor’s office. All Ob and me wanted to do when we lost May was hold on to each other and wail in that trailer for days and days. But we never got the chance, because just like there are certain ways people expect you to get married, or go to church, or raise kids, there are certain ways people expect you to grieve. When May died, Ob and me had to talk business with the funeral parlor, religion with the preacher, and make small talk with dozens of relatives and people we’d hardly ever seen before. We had to eat their food. We had to let them hug us. We had to see them watching our faces for any sign of a nervous breakdown.