Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  The next day, Maude was in Nebraska, a country like an old chronic simple schizophrenic, all flattened affect, corn along I-80 through the entire state. Maude drove into the night rather than stop there. The heartland bothered her worse than Berkeley’s hectic social and botanical landscape, exotics transplanted out of their homelands to make bold stands. Midwesterners either rebelled or acquiesced under that huge blank sky whose only clouds threatened tornados.

  Maude stopped in Iowa near Davenport. The car needed oil. As she arranged with the gas station to change the oil and check the fluids, she felt dislocated, compelled to get back in the car and drive forever. Road grip.

  After Maude walked down to the river and up by Sears, the road grip eased. Back at the gas station, she watched the mechanic pull the MiniCooper out of the service bay. He looked at her oddly as he handed her the keys. Going home seemed stupid now, crazy. “Where’s a good motel?” she asked him.

  “Howard Johnson, up near the highway. You going camping?”

  “No, home.”

  “We used to get lots more road people through here,” he said. “It’s the main point to cross west.”

  Maude remembered Douglas’s comments about the kids reviving the sixties. No, only the kids of the communards, and she’d seen one short-haired child at a hippie wedding look at the older people as though he planned to execute his parents and all their friends when he became president. She paid the gas station attendant and said, “Well, I’m not searching for America, myself.” She looked down at her jeans with Susan’s rainbow embroidery and sighed. Forgot what I was wearing. She paid the man out of the fifty she kept in the visible part of her wallet.

  By now, Social Services would have called her at Karmachila. Gone? Oh, hope she lands in a jurisdiction that won’t just give her carfare and send her on to the next county. Some crazies got organized about their camping equipment even if otherwise completely disorganized. They had tents and sleeping bags and little cookstoves, and camped in people’s yards. Maude noticed that the insane had no special word for the sane, not like drug users and criminals and straights. She thought this lacking word was the pitiful thing about the insane—that they accepted the others as normal, themselves as deviant.

  Maude remembered how the younger black guy told the group how Social Services in various jurisdictions gave him bus fare to leave. He’d seen Yosemite before the rangers sent him out for illegal camping, had seen Washington before the cops drove him into Virginia, had actually spent time in Phoenix House in New York taking job training in sales clerking before he left there on his own. “That was my most difficult move,” he’d told the group. “But I really wanted to come back to Berkeley. I had family here.”

  So, too, Maude thought, I must go home. She felt like a drifter even in the motel, watching the pay movie so she wouldn’t feel too broke, wouldn’t seem so much like another fool on the road a decade too late. California seemed as remote as Cockaigne, a particularly vivid dream.

  In the morning, Maude walked down to the water again and saw the sun rise over the Mississippi. She loaded herself back in the car and drove to the bridge. The West was behind her. She’d meant to shower and wash her hair in Davenport, but forgot. Her eyes were bloodshot. Maybe I am crazy.

  Her car seemed stronger, as though the Davenport mechanic had done more than change the oil. Home to a universe that works on personal deals—so much like a paranoid’s fantasy. Maude covered her eyes with dark glasses.

  Then there was Zanesville, Ohio, in rolling country, not like the industrial cities to the north. Maude thought the southern Ohio farmland looked like an innocent version of southside Virginia. She imagined a Quaker family on the Underground Railroad feeding a mulatto woman running from the father who owned her. For the first time since leaving Berkeley, Maude felt sane, focused. I’m going to help my grandmother. We’re going to fight the magic. Doug will see magic is cruel.

  She passed through West Virginia with its place names like War, Route 460 going east, the East River Tunnel. Maude stopped in Blacksburg and drove by the logic-binding Virginia Tech campus. Anyone with a Virginia driver’s license could access Tech’s discourse universe. Maude went to the visitor’s office and got a parking permit. Blacksburg had always been reason’s outpost, the country child’s exit to the outer world. Maude had $2750 left. She went to a bank on Main Street and opened an account under her real name, with her real social security number. Here I am. She kept $250 for the drive home, her new driver’s license under her true name, and a couple of days to reconnoiter.

  Maude sat in a bar, listening to Bob Dylan. And what will I do now? Her grandmother needed her. Her grandmother’s rich kin wanted her. Bob Dylan converted to Christianity. Maude could convert to magic, let the entities speak though her, perhaps stay alive centuries on other people’s energies. Trap children in maps.

  Run, Maude thought. Do no evil. Maude saw herself ten years from now, rolling across the country in buses paid for by various social services, her pack and tent tattered, the Ferragamos moldy leather shreds to prove she’d had rich kin once. Is this a real fear or is this Bracken County’s vision of me? She found a pay phone and called her grandmother.

  “Hello?” her grandmother, Partridge, said. She sounded more tentative than ever. Perhaps Partridge should have left Bracken County when her daughter died. Perhaps she should have just relaxed and become the witch she was supposed to be.

  “Grandmother, it’s Maude. Would it be okay if I came home?”

  Her grandmother didn’t speak for a while. Maude felt rejected, crazy to cross the country before she knew whether she was welcome or not.

  “Aunt Lula’s helping. I don’t know if I need you, too, or not. Maybe you ought to stay out of it.”

  Lula was a homeless woman who tended her sick relatives. So I’m reduced to that, Maude thought. “If there’s room.”

  “Maude, Aunt Betty was asking about you just last week. You still in school?”

  “No, Grandma, I was in Berkeley but I wasn’t in school.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Blacksburg.”

  “Oh, you are just about home. Your momma went to school there, knew a woman majored in mining engineering. We couldn’t talk your momma into Sweet Briar.”

  “Grandma, do you need me to help?”

  “Lula’s doing fine. My mouth hurts, though. Can’t wear my teeth, can’t eat.”

  Shit. “I’ll be down in a couple hours.”

  “Lula’s sleeping in the bed with me, so you can have the guest bedroom.”

  “And I bet you’re…” Maude couldn’t finish with using pee rags not toilet paper. Old women went back to their childhoods, using outhouse customs and saving jars just to look at.

  “You did finish college. Betty can get you a teaching job.”

  “I’ll see you in a bit,” Maude said. She hung up the phone and went back to her car. Well, all the way, little Cooper.

  Mud Pike to Route 8. Magic begins here, with churches full of people admiring God for the earthquakes he uses to punish the Californicators.

  Maude saw a computer consulting firm just outside Christiansburg. The landscape seemed ruptured between the building and the cow pasture behind it.

  A slice of alien geology, a microplate, the whole Blue Ridge province came from elsewhere. And, below the Blue Ridge, the Bracken County allochthon, an even smaller microplate, started moving 600 million years ago. About 500 million to 400 million years ago, it slithered over the Sauratown Mountains. Trapped in place by normal faults in a 300-million-year-old downdrop, the allochthon screamed in iron-alumina-silicate crystals, a billion stone X’s, cursing as it ground against the Blue Ridge, trapped in place, its reverse overriding done. The Blue Ridge formed quartz crystals on its parallel edge, but the staurolite crystals were opaque.

  Maude remembered how impressed she’d been when Aunt Betty told her Bracken County wasn’t rooted in America, but instead floated, stalled, between an ocean that didn’t hap
pen and very ancient earthquakes. What is human life to a thing embedded in deep time?

  Old, senile rock. Maude found out in Berkeley’s geology library that what Betty told her was essentially true, not that geologists attributed personality and intentions to even the strangest rocks. Maude knew better, but wished her version of the allochthon’s history had been a fable.

  Bracken County developed over the allochthon, fought its battle to stay still and different, both the county and the squeezed rock. The ocean formed anyway from a different spreading rift.

  But the old rock holds its people and its one endemic fish, Maude thought as she looked down from the parkway. What happens down there happens because something or someone intended it to happen. She remembered how snappish her parents got with each other when they drove up for family vacations. Each time, Bracken County separated them, her mother to her witch kin, her father to his Christian people.

  Maude had preferred her mother’s people until she heard the child crying from the map.

  Driving back to Atlanta after those summer visits, neither parent looked at the other until they’d passed Greensboro. Then her mother would always say, “I always forget what it’s like,” and her father would laugh and say something about superstitions on both sides being excuses for Marxist class war.

  I’m doomed to it Maude got in the car and drove. Small logic-bound spaces pocked the landscape—machine design shops, small factories—then Maude passed Annie’s Laundrette and Family Nautilus, a juxtaposition bred of poverty and a craving for pleasures advertised in magazines. A collage economy, nothing quite able to pay the rent on its own. Strange semiotic combinations—grocery and sporting good store, deli and tax service. I’m almost back.

  Then, at the ancient fracture line between the Blue Ridge and Bracken County, she hit fog and couldn’t see much beyond her. I’m not supposed to see. Maude wondered if she could accommodate herself to the county, at least until she decided where to go next, but not focus on the magic interconnections, much less get involved with them. The fog lifted just before the Taylorsville boundary.

  The car seemed to have gained two additional cylinders and a new carburetor. Maude slowed it down to pass through Taylorsville. The town could have looked like San Francisco with its hills and wooden houses, but didn’t. The little wooden houses up steep stairs overlooked a trailer court.

  Maude turned through Shuff Spring to go the back way to Kobold. She passed the Shuff Pool Hall, which wavered in its magic between the actual wreck—the one intact room set up with a soft drink machine, wood stove, and pool table—and the virtual pool hall, with chrome, asphalt parking lot, and players coming in with $1000 custom pool cues. Shim’s magic must be getting weak.

  Maude was amazed at how quickly the magic seemed normal here while the telling of it got her declared insane in Berkeley. Wart Mountain behind her, she went over Little Dragon’s lowest ridge and then across Gold Pan Creek, full of rusty-sided suckers, Bracken’s endemic fish.

  The trees wavered between green and autumn’s red and gold. Sourwood was already purple. Maude felt the real car stutter, as though being made magic stressed it.

  Maude drove down to the store to buy some gas before she went to her grandmother’s house. The car was knocking now.

  Aunt Betty pulled up in an old Essex. Betty was older than the Essex, had been old as long as Maude could remember. Her hair was grizzled gray, not one shade but many, and Aunt Betty fastened it back in a bun secured with a turquoise clip. Her eyelids lay hooded over her grey eyes, the flesh standing off from the eyeballs, not adhering to it. Betty’s eyes always scared Maude when she was a child. The irises were solid grey, no darker rim, and stared out like steel punches with the pupils as black central pits. Your soul goes down there. “Maude, I’ll see you down at your grandmother’s. You need some additive for your car, and don’t let the boys fool with it.”

  “I’ll see you there,” Maude said. Betty seemed to have been expecting her.

  “Afraid of me, still? You’ve always been so imaginative, Maude,” Aunt Betty said.

  “Are you chastising me or praising me?”

  “It depends on what you use it for.” The Essex moved away from Maude’s car. Maude knew she’d be distracted by waiting for Betty if Betty didn’t come soon to her grandmother’s. Betty held Maude’s time until Betty chose to arrive.

  The house was almost in the road, just a small hedge and yard in front. Other than mowing, no one had worked outside in years and the plants had grown together in a tangle. Maude parked to the side of the house by a blue and white Buick.

  A woman Maude hadn’t seen before came out. She was scrawny, slightly bent, with a narrow face all wrinkles over bone. “Lula?” She looked like she needed care herself, not like someone who should be taking care of Maude’s grandmother.

  “You’re Maude. You didn’t need to come.”

  “I wanted to see about my grandmother.”

  “I’m taking care of her.”

  “Well, let me come in and visit.” Maude picked up one of her suitcases.

  Lula looked suspicious, but unlocked the door for Maude.

  “Grandma?”

  The room Maude remembered as a dining room in back of the house had a double bed in it. Her grandmother, thinner than ever, looked up at her from the bed. Maude saw blood around a crack on her grandmother’s lip. She turned to find Lula, but Lula was right behind her.

  “What has she been eating?”

  “I can’t eat,” her grandmother said.

  “I fix her potato water and milk. I’m really economical.”

  Maude knew that wasn’t enough. “Has a doctor seen her lately?”

  “No,” Lula said. “Doctor would just waste her money.”

  So I came back for a battle with this hag. “Are you comfortable, Grandmother?”

  “I don’t expect to be at my age. Maude, I’ve been very good, but I’m so tempted.”

  Vitamin C. Her grandmother wasn’t getting enough vitamin C, so her gums hurt, her lips cracked. Maude realized she wasn’t waiting for Betty, but as soon as she realized it, she wondered who sent Lula to her grandmother.

  “I think if we had a blender, you could eat more comfortably.”

  “She doesn’t need a blender,” Lula said. “And I ain’t gonna use one.”

  “Oh, I’ll take care of it.”

  “Who sent for you?”

  Her grandmother said, “I didn’t know whether I should have or not.”

  Lula looked down at Maude’s grandmother. “Pa’tridge, you owe your cousin Betty.” Lula pronounced her grandmother’s name, Partridge, in the Southern way, without the r after the first a.

  “Aunt Betty seemed to have been expecting me, too,” Maude said.

  “Betty wants you one way,” Lula said. “Pa’tridge doesn’t know what she wants. She’s always been a bit crazy, haven’t you, Pa’tridge?”

  Maude remembered hearing about her grandmother’s depressions, both medicine and magic proof. She’d wondered if they’d actually happened or if Partridge simply hated, for good reason, the world she was trapped in. “Looks to me like you need help yourself,” Maude said to Lula.

  Lula said, “I’m what she needs.”

  Maude waited for Aunt Betty to arrive. She sat down in a chair beside her grandmother’s bed. Lula went into the kitchen and came back with cold cornpone that she gnawed on with plastic teeth. The message was we eat leftovers and I’m not feeding you.

  Then, without knocking, Betty came in, smiling at Lula, nodding at Maude and her grandmother.

  “Partridge, isn’t it good we have Maude home again? I’m sure I can help her get a teaching job.”

  “Grannie Partridge isn’t getting enough to eat. We need a blender.”

  “You’ve never understood dying, Maude,” Betty said.

  “She isn’t going to become a spirit. She doesn’t believe in that, so it won’t happen.”

  “I’m not sure,” her grandmother said.
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  “No,” Maude said as her head ducked reflexively. But then, if her grandmother called her, she’d made some accommodation to the magic. “And we don’t know if the spirits are the people they claim to be. I’ve heard enough about spirits to have my doubts about them.”

  “The alternative is believing in your own final oblivion,” Betty said. “Perhaps the afterlife we imagine says more about us than it does about any final reality.”

  “There are so many things to believe in,” Maude said.

  “History, central planning,” Betty said. She looked at Lula and smiled. “Your daddy thought we lived in a political democracy, but an economic dictatorship. He was always full of little sayings like that.”

  Maude said, “All I’m concerned about now is that my grandmother, your cousin, isn’t getting enough to eat. I’ve heard the spirit is made from the person’s last moments, what mood they’re in when they die.”

  “A nice compromise,” Betty said.

  “Too much fuss,” Lula said. “Where is this person going to stay?”

  “Here,” her grandmother said. “She’s my granddaughter.”

  “Oh, I was thinking she’ll rent one of my houses,” Betty said. “After she starts teaching.”

  “I don’t want to teach,” Maude said. “I barely finished college.”

  “What do you want to do?” Betty asked. “Stay on welfare? Embarrass the family?”

  Maude didn’t wonder how Betty knew about the welfare. Instead, she hoped Douglas would come visit, bring her technology to counter the magic deals. “I don’t want to charm children into accepting their witch-determined fates.”

  “Oh, you’re very silly to think that’s all teaching is,” Betty said as though she were one of Maude’s Berkeley social workers. “We believe in an afterlife. We offer hope. If that did no more than ease dying, I’d say it was useful. You want us to be bad, maybe you should ask yourself what’s so bad about yourself that you anticipate oblivion.”