Who Invited the Dead Man?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I could have, but neither Gusta nor Florine ever would.

  “Did she say what Meriwether is shopping for? Is she buying clothes?” If Meriwether was buying a trousseau, my stock would soar in town when I found out first.

  “No’m. Miss Gusta said she’s took some notion of opening a store. She’s buying up things to sell. Miss Gusta said if she wasn’t right there, Meriwether might buy up the whole country.”

  “If they’re in China, it would take her more than a week to buy it all.”

  “Well, Meriwether promised she’ll leave Wednesday. I hope Miss Gusta holds her to it.”

  “I do, too. I don’t want them to miss Joe Riddley’s party.”

  “Oh, they’ll be back for that. Don’t you worry. Miss Gusta won’t disappoint the judge.” I would never be “the judge” to Florine.

  We said all the polite things folks in the south use to oil the pain of parting, and I hung up. Then I propped my elbows on the desk, cupped my cheeks with my hands, and thought over what I’d heard. What on earth had gotten into Meriwether? First she didn’t want to go on the trip because of her house. Now, instead of racing back to it, she was extending her trip. And opening a store? Surely she wasn’t foolish enough to think she could make a go in Hopemore of a shop full of painted fans, cloisonne jewelry, and tea sets. Folks might pick up a pretty flowerpot, or maybe a little screen to set on a table, but a store like that could go broke pretty fast.

  Yet, that’s what folks said when her daddy, Garlon, opened his lawn and garden equipment place. They thought he was trying to compete with Yarbrough’s, and predicted he’d go belly-up. Instead, he’d found a growing niche of the market we weren’t covering, and our businesses helped each other. Garlon did real well. Maybe Meriwether inherited some of his acumen, or got his kind of inspiration. At least she could afford to gamble.

  “There’s no point in worrying about all that until she gets back,” I finally told myself aloud. “You’ve got enough to worry about with Slade and Walker.” When could Walker have ever known Slade? And why on earth had he disliked him so much?

  7

  During his last week on earth, Hiram had run-ins with several people. I personally witnessed two.

  On Tuesday Pooh and Otis stopped by the store to buy some asters. Pooh came back to the office and stayed so long talking, I figured she was lonesome, missing Gusta. I offered to wheel her out to her car while Otis brought the flat of asters. He was fumbling for his keys—which, as usual, he’d left in the ignition—when we heard somebody call, “Hello, everybody!” Hiram sauntered across the parking lot wagging one hand like a frenetic queen.

  Joe squawked from his shoulder and flapped his wings. “Hello, hello, hello.”

  Hiram smelled as bad as ever, and now had a gap where he used to have a tooth. His hair still brushed his shoulders in greasy tails and he’d grown a short, scraggly beard. It carried remnants of his last few meals. He wasn’t much taller than me—maybe five-foot-five—so I had a good view of his squalid red cap. I shuddered to have my own name across its front.

  He stopped smack in front of Pooh and gave her a little bow. “Hey, Granny.”

  Hiram knew as well as anybody that Pooh, who loved children more than anything, would never be a granny. She had volunteered at the hospital pediatric ward so long they gave her a plaque for fifty years of service. Even after her son, Zach, was killed, she kept going over to the hospital to read stories to sick and dying children, and still had Lottie bake cookies each afternoon so she could hand them out to children after school. When people wondered how she could do it, she blinked away tears and confessed, “I do it for Zachary, now. Whenever I hug a child, I pretend it’s him.” Joe Riddley said more than once that any child who came within three feet of Pooh went away a little more loved.

  Pooh wasted no love on Hiram that particular morning. Her round face grew pink with distress. “You dreadful man!” Her lips trembled with indignation. “Otis, help me into the car right now!”

  “I sure will, Miss Winifred. Don’t rile her,” he warned Hiram over his shoulder as he bent to set down the flowers. “She’s taken up shootin’ again. You’d best stay out of her road.”

  “You should have had more sense,” I fussed at Hiram in a low voice. He shrugged and snickered.

  When they got to the car, Pooh hoisted herself from her chair, turned awkwardly, and stood as erect as she was able. “I can’t find my guns right now,” she said while Joe regarded her with one cold white eye, “but if I do, you better watch out. I hit the birds I shoot at.”

  “You better not touch my bird!” Hiram’s shout made Joe screech and hop onto his cap.

  “Sic ’em, boy! Sic ’em!” Red wings flapped in zeal for a fight.

  Otis helped Pooh into her seat and waited for her to draw her legs inside. Then he slammed the door like he wished Hiram’s head was in it.

  “Maggoty pig swill,” Hiram muttered. He turned to me. “Mizzoner, you heard ’em threaten me. If she shoots Joe . . .”

  Otis hurried around to the trunk with the chair. “She ain’t gonna shoot anybody, ’cause the judge and I done confiscated her guns. But stay out of her road. That’s all I gotta say.”

  “Help him get that chair and those flowers in the car,” I commanded Hiram, more testily than I might have done if I’d known he’d be dead in a week.

  Hiram sidled up reluctantly, it being, in his estimation, lowering to the dignity of a no-good white man to help an honor-able old black one with manual labor. But he lifted the chair and lowered it into the trunk without another word.

  When they’d driven away, I turned back to him. “Calling Mrs. DuBose ‘Granny’ was the cruelist thing I’ve ever known you to do.”

  He shrugged. “Not as cruel as Mr. Fayette used to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Helena went over there with Jed one day when she first got back to town. He ordered them off his porch like they was trash. Too big for his britches. He always was.”

  Zach had been killed just a few months before Helena came back with Jed. Had she hoped to offer Pooh and Fayette her baby to raise? Or had Helena and Zachary—?

  I squelched that thought. They’d known each other, and both had been at Warner Robbins at the same time for a few months, but Zachary was far too fastidious to get mixed up with Helena, who washed only slightly more often than her brothers until she came to work for me.

  “Well,” I told Hiram in what our boys called Mama’s Lecture Voice, “Mr. Fayette’s dead, and Pooh would never have hurt Helena’s feelings. Remember how Jed used to love going over there to help her in the yard when he was growing up? You’ve no cause to hurt her.”

  Hiram shrugged. “Got no cause to he’p her, neither.”

  That conversation was going nowhere, so I asked about the only earthly thing we had in common. “How’s Jed doing?”

  “Doin’ real well. Wears three-piece suits and shiny shoes and makes enough money to wipe his bottom with hundred-dollar bills. Makes more in most weeks than I’ll see in a lifetime. But he gives me and Hector a bit now and then.” That probably explained how Hector had managed to keep body and soul together while Hiram was away.

  “Not to worry, not to worry,” Joe assured me.

  I reached over to stroke him, but he jerked back his head. “He don’t like women,” Hiram explained as I backed off.

  “Never did, much, but while I was away Hector left him with some old biddy who kept him in a cage. Since then, he’s never found a woman he could like.” He reached up and stroked the bird fondly. “Hey, Joe, this is Mizzoner. She’s your friend.”

  “Hello. Hello. Hello.” Joe fixed me with that large white eye to make sure I didn’t get too close. I went back to our previous conversation.

  “Jed’s never married, has he?” It was a family of bachelors. Even Helena hadn’t ever married, that I knew of.

  “Nope. Miss Meriwether Wainwright was enough to turn him off women for life.” Hiram spat into the bit
of grass growing along the verge of our lot. “Just you wait. One of these days he’ll come back and wipe his feet on this whole town.”

  Poor Jed, he’d have to come back sooner than either of us suspected.

  The next evening, Wednesday, I stopped by the Bi-Lo grocery store on my way home to do Clarinda’s shopping. I say “Clarinda’s shopping” because I’m not much of a cook—a reputation I take care to maintain. Clarinda feeds us from Monday to Friday, we eat simple on Saturday, and generally go to Ridd and Martha’s on Sundays. That particular week, with the party on Saturday, Clarinda’s list was pretty long. Even though most of the food would be coming from Dad’s Outdoor BarBeQue and I’d ordered a special delivery of drinks brought to the house, she still needed butter and salt for the corn, mixes and stuff to make cakes and icings, plus paper plates, napkins, cups—things like that.

  So, at that time of day when the sun is almost ready to set but hasn’t quite made up its mind to do it, I wheeled a cart piled with Clarinda’s groceries through the parking lot. Somebody shouted, “You needn’t think you can fool me! I know who you are! You get back to where you came from, now! You hear me? Take your”—I don’t repeat that kind of language—“right back to where you came from! We don’t want you around here!”

  “Sic ’em, boy! Sic ’em, boy!” screamed another voice.

  A small crowd was gathering not far from my car. Forgetting that the world is different than it used to be, I abandoned my cart beside my closed trunk and headed in that direction.

  Behind me, I heard a small boy shout, “Hey, that lady left her groceries. Grab ’em!”

  A deeper young male voice replied, “You crazy or some’n? Them’s the judge’s groceries. You mess with them and you’ll spend the rest of your natural life in jail.”

  I turned and saw Leon, a boy who played football on an after-school team Walker coached. “I’ll watch ’em for you, Judge,” he called, balancing on his beat-up bike.

  Satisfied that my food was safe, I elbowed my way through the crowd. Hiram Blaine, cheeks scarlet above his little beard and dark eyes glittering with excitement, was shaking a fist at Darren Hernandez, Joe Riddley’s physical therapist. He was egged on by a crowd of men who were obviously not fond of swarthy young men who prefer black shirts and pants, dyed hair, and earrings. Hopemore is not what you might call uniformly progressive.

  Last week Darren’s short spiked hair had been emerald green. Today it was bishop’s purple. When we’d first met, I had been leery of that bright spiked hair and the silver hoop he wore in one ear. I’d also hated the way he shortened Joe Riddley’s name to J. R. But after weeks of working together to encourage Joe Riddley to walk, I loved Darren almost like a son. His dark eyes twinkled with kindness and fun, his hands were invariably gentle with an obstreperous old man, and his saucy tongue could make Joe Riddley try things he didn’t think he could do.

  I arrived to see one of the men in the crowd poking a finger at Darren, who was trying to back away. Unfortunately, the crowd wasn’t moving to let him through. A ring of men kept Darren where he was while Hiram had a public fit. From Hiram’s right shoulder, Joe contributed his fight song, “Sic ’em, boy!”

  I pushed my way to the front. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t like his kind here, Judge,” one man muttered. “Hiram’s telling him off.”

  Hiram looked around. “Where’d you park that dang thing you came in? Anybody see his spaceship?”

  That’s when the crowd realized Hiram thought he’d caught himself a real live alien. Immediately it switched its target, as Southern crowds are apt to do. We love a good show, and Hiram was suddenly better street theater than Darren.

  “You’re crazy as a coot,” one man called to him.

  “Looks like jail didn’t do you one bitta good,” jeered another.

  I looked around for help, and saw Police Chief Charlie Muggins coming through the lot with two sacks of groceries. Now Chief Muggins might look like a cross between a polecat and a chimpanzee with the least attractive features of each, and he might have on a brown checked shirt with gray slacks, but most folks in that lot knew who he was and what: He was chief of police and mean as a snake. That was one of the few times in my life when I was glad to see him.

  “You all break it up,” I ordered in the same tone I used back when Walker’s football team got a mite rowdy on our porch. “Hiram, if you don’t stop yelling I’m going to ask Chief Muggins over there to arrest you for disturbing the peace. Darren, go on to your car.” I jerked my head in the direction of a sunshine-yellow Volkswagen bug a couple of rows away.

  “He—he—he ain’t got a car. He—he’s one of them—them aliens I been telling you about.” Hiram jigged with excitement. If he didn’t calm down some, he’d wet himself. “See his hair? They got purple hair, due to the lack of oxygen in their atmosphere. You hold him here, Mizzoner, and I’ll run in the store and get some vinegar. That’ll shrivel him in a second!”

  “Somebody better be shrivelin’ you,” taunted somebody from the back of the crowd.

  “Vinegar?” sniggered somebody else.

  “Sic ’em, boy!” contributed Joe with an angry flap of his wings.

  By then Chief Muggins had caught the excitement and bustled over to where we were. Our mutual feelings for one another made him conclude immediately that I was causing the ruckus. “Evenin’, Judge Yarbrough.” If he sounded like the words tasted bitter in his mouth, they probably did. Charlie made no bones about the fact that he’d vociferously opposed my appointment. “What’s all this commotion?”

  The crowd oozed back a little, but stayed to see what would happen.

  “Just a little misunderstanding,” I told Charlie, not about to reveal how glad I was to see him. “Hiram mistook Darren here for an alien.”

  Chief Muggins looked at the purple hair and earring. “Might not be far wrong. What you doin’ around here, feller?”

  I gave Darren a warning look and answered Chief Muggins myself. “He’s a physical therapist in the new rehab center we’re all so proud of.” Since Chief Muggins helped dedicate the rehab center, that cut off his water for a second. “Darren has been working with Joe Riddley and I’ve known him for weeks. He’s from Miami, not Mars.”

  “Same difference,” somebody joked. Several people laughed nervously.

  “Go on home,” Chief Muggins told Darren as curtly as if he, not Hiram, had started the trouble. I’d have to explain to him the next day, and apologize.

  Darren ran one hand over his purple hair. “You are weird, man,” he told Hiram. With a little wave of thanks to me, he walked to his car with the fluid steps of an athlete, acting like he was merely taking a stroll. Once he was in the car, though, he screeched off and drove away a little faster than was legal.

  “Did you see his hair?” Hiram insisted before the crowd of men could all melt away.

  “Same color as your truck,” one man teased, jerking a thumb to a decrepit old pickup not far away. Hiram had had that truck almost as long as I could remember, and it had been purple for twenty years. “Maybe you’re an alien yourself.”

  “In Darren’s case, it’s dye,” I informed Hiram. “It washes out. Since I’ve known him, his hair has also been pink, orange, red, and green. I think he mostly does it to see what other people will say. If he let it grow out, it would be as dark as yours.”

  Hiram shook his head and spat at a nearby tire. “You all just don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it.” He trudged away with the heavy tread of a man who alone in the universe knows the truth.

  Charlie Muggins walked me to my car to make sure I got in it without causing another scene. I greeted Leon and, without thinking, handed him a dollar reward for guarding my car.

  Charlie grabbed my elbow. “You giving that kid a bribe, Judge?”

  “He’s twelve years old, Chief. What am I supposed to be bribing him to do?” But I knew he was right. Public officials can’t hand money to people on the street. In the past J
oe Riddley would have walked on to the car and I’d have slipped Leon a dollar. Once again, the pain of Joe Riddley’s accident sliced clear through me.

  “Sorry, Leon. I can’t give you that now, but it you stop by the store tomorrow and talk to the woman at the register, she’ll have something for you then.”

  “You don’t owe me nothin’, Judge.” Leon gave a flick of his hand. “You keep my folks from hittin’ each other, and we’ll be even.” As he pedaled away, I wondered how many other children in the nation would gladly do a favor to keep their parents from fighting.

  Charlie stood by the car while I loaded groceries in my trunk. I didn’t expect him to set down his groceries and help. Charlie wasn’t known for kindness to women. Ask his former wife, spirited out of town by a preacher after one too many visits to the emergency room.