Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

Betty laughed. “Now?”

  “She doesn’t want to be made mock of.”

  “We’re going to put her in our family cemetery so she can be comfortable around her people.”

  “She wants to be buried in the Baptist Church graveyard.”

  “I think not. She isn’t even a church member. Besides, we’ve got her daughter buried with our people. But I’m not here to argue that. I’m saying you can’t fire Lula.”

  “Lula is sleeping in the bed with her. She says the cast makes her uncomfortable and she’s threatened to take it off. Lula is also putting together quilt squares on a quilt Partridge wants to be buried in. She’s planning to live until it’s finished.”

  “If Partridge is clinging to life until we get this quilt made, I think you ought to let me have some of the pieces.”

  “I want to make the quilt for her.”

  “She must be in pain.”

  Maude wondered if she was keeping Partridge alive for her own needs, but saw Betty lean forward, wrinkles deepening on her lips, smiling. Maude said, “I’ll take care of the quilt.”

  “Lula will call me when Partridge is finally dying. We’ll be with her.”

  Maude felt that was ominous. “She’ll die in the hospital. It’s more comfortable.”

  “I wonder if California would want you on welfare fraud charges.”

  Maude didn’t speak, but she didn’t make any promises, either. She picked up the postcard from Douglas and rubbed it between her index finger and thumb. Betty said, “Luke likes John.”

  “I think he’s a bit nuts. And what is this hunting out of season? I thought you had to have damage control permits to take deer that were destroying crops.”

  “Not on the old farm,” Betty said. “It’s enough on Wart Mountain that game wardens would get lost on it.”

  “He’s a computer programmer. Logic circuits should keep him safe.”

  “He can imagine living forever as a program. I’d say that was as magic a thought as any in Bracken County. What’s a logic circuit compared to silicone immortality?”

  “So death doesn’t bother him. Is that why he can play with guns and killing?”

  “It bothers him that the interfacing and transfer methods might not be invented in time. But he thinks magic into machines. He may even be able to do something with the helicopters.”

  “But even if a computer thought it was him, he’d be dead.”

  “That’s why he has to work in Bracken County.”

  And die here, too. “And then Terry can access him forever.”

  “Even join him.”

  Maude wondered what Doug would say to this. “I wonder what would happen if the computer program realized it was deluded into thinking it was an engineer.”

  “The county can deal with a computer if it’s not aware of its internal logic. Who among us knows how our brains process information? Thinking is magic.”

  Maude said, “What about the logic pools around technical equipment even here?”

  “Perhaps people choose world operating systems. I find the machine one cruel, so I erase it and boot up magic.” Betty smiled, as though pleased that even she could use computer jargon. “Some people depersonalize the universe into something generated by vibrating strings and quantum averages. Others say God doesn’t play dice with the universe. Machines don’t kill magic. People do.”

  “You’re quite pleased to be on top of the magic.”

  “Maude, we’re offering our system to you. Partridge rejected us. Now you can join us, maybe even change Partridge’s mind. You and your father’s people weakened her in the first place.”

  A professor told Maude once that the numbers and laws men found in the universe were the numbers and laws inside their own heads. If that’s true, then logic is a smaller projection of the human into the universe than magic. “I’m tempted,” Maude said before she realized that she was truly tempted.

  “Come by tomorrow and I’ll begin teaching you.”

  “And leave Grandmom alone with Lula?”

  “I told Lula not to touch the cast. She listens to me.” When they went back to rejoin the group, John said, “Lula, if your daddy said black snakes were poisonous, then they must be.” Maude noticed that Partridge was asleep, or listened with her eyes closed.

  Lula pointed at Maude. “She tried to argue with me otherwise and my daddy said it.”

  “Perhaps in this county, the black snakes are deadly,” Maude said.

  Lula said, “If I’d had magic…” She didn’t finish. Maude wondered what Lula would have wished for: a house of her own, a castle, great clothes, youth, a husband, a job that paid money, not food, a bed, and cast-off clothes.

  Youth didn’t seem possible for Lula. Youth didn’t seem to be possible even for Betty. Or maybe Betty preferred age’s self-containment to beauty’s impersonal lure. Luke pulled out a flask. “It won’t make you young, but it will make you feel pretty good.”

  Lula stared at John. “If I can’t help around here, will you take me in? I don’t think Maude would take care of me.”

  “Sure, we’ll take you in,” John said. Terry looked at him, her eyelids opening and half closing, lips pulled back. Not quite her idea. “Terry may have to take me in, too. If I get tired of being alone in Richmond.”

  “I think we’d better go now,” Terry said. “We don’t want to tire Partridge.”

  Lula stayed in the room with Maude as the others left. The old woman said, “Did Aunt Betty tell you to mind your manners?”

  Maude said, “No, she said you wouldn’t touch Grannie’s cast. I’m glad someone can take you in if this becomes too much for you.” She waited by Partridge’s bed until Lula went off into the middle bedroom, then she went around through the kitchen to the front of the house and her own bedroom.

  As Maude undressed for bed, she wondered if she was being too mean about Lula. As she put on her nightdress, she thought her life in Berkeley seemed like another incarnation, connected to this life only by a car. Tomorrow, I’ll go walking, Maude thought as her body jerked around sleep.

  When the conjurors become hereditary, Maude’s dream told her, then they are a problem. They become cruel people, rapists, think they’re a different species and that most folk are their dogs and cattle. Other people killed the conjurors while a woman beside her explained.

  The two dream figures, one Maude, the other not-Maude, walked in the dream to see a stone man with Luke’s face dying, telling his killers, the real human beings, about tunneling electrons in silicon.

  And a woman led her aside to a small house in the country, 750 square feet, built in ovals, room enough for one. Maude wrote down the information on how to get the plans for this house, then went outside to see Lula young again. She felt guilty, not sure why.

  When Maude woke up, she realized she’d told Betty she’d come for her first magic lesson, but instead planned to go hiking. A woman in Maude’s Berkeley other life once said, “Hey, get into your people’s magical systems, learn more about them. Magical systems are metaphors for underlying social truths.”

  Maude wondered if she preferred her parents accidentally killed or murdered? If they were murdered and she chose the universe of accidents, she couldn’t get justice. If they died by accident… The magic universe could trap a child in a map, but Maude felt the universe of physics and engineering principles made a void where questions about morality and the value and meaning of a particular life could hardly be asked, much less answered with any authority.

  Maude put on a dress to show respect for Betty.

  “I sent the maid out so we won’t be interrupted. Here are the cards,” Betty told Maude, fanning the tarot on the kitchen table at the old stone house in Taylorsville. “We stole them from the hippies, but they work as well as witch stones.”

  A circular fluorescent tube lit the table. Maude wondered if that tube was full of foxfire. No, probably even Betty used real electricity. If helicopter rotors could whip magic away, below had to be a metap
hysic more real than what Betty could teach her. Suddenly, magic seemed nonsense. “Tarot cards,” she said to Betty, “are a structured Rorschach test using Western cultural archetypes.”

  Betty’s fingers, nails glazed with clear polish, laid down the Major Arcana and tapped each one. “Call them archetypes if it helps you.”

  “They’re just cultural impressions of mental patterning systems.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you’d rather be walking on Wart Mountain.”

  Maude saw the Juggler and didn’t know if the character was male or female. Trickster archetype. Betty tapped that card twice. Pay attention. The card was a surface over something more real.

  Then Maude watched as Betty shuffled the cards and laid three down for a quick reading—House of God, the Moon, and the Wheel of Fortune. Maude winced.

  “You recognize these… archetypes?” Betty asked, drawling out the word archetypes.

  Maude knew she was the watery thing between God and the Wheel of Fortune. Betty said, “I didn’t need cards to tell me you were indecisive.”

  “I didn’t either. If you were really powerful, couldn’t you just sweep away my wavering?”

  “Even when you reject your entities, magic makes you strong. You’re born to it. Focusing techniques make you stronger.” Betty got up and turned on a gas burner under a teakettle. “If not for magic and my entities, I’d have been dead years ago. I’m Time’s repository.”

  Feeling irreverent, wanting to break the spell, Maude said, “And your car, too. So you coerce the universe to keep you healthy.”

  “Coax the universe or bend metal around its rules, subvert it or pollute it—ultimately, what is the difference? The universe of regular rules is doofus sometimes… sometimes.” Betty stared at the teakettle as if she’d speed the boiling that way. “Oh, Maude, why do you want to throw away being special?”

  The water boiled, a shrill whistle in the kettle spout. As Betty poured, Maude got a sudden image of Jake with his claw hand, clicking his hook.

  “You think we exploit people like Jake,” Betty asked. Maude felt a presence behind Betty, who now seemed an entity’s flesh puppet. “What’s inhuman doesn’t have to be bad,” the thing behind Aunt Betty said.

  “What’s inhuman isn’t my kind.”

  “But you’re family,” Aunt Betty said.

  Maude didn’t want to look at Le Chariot or LeDiable, felt pulled to La Roue de Fortune, like car wheels turning, bearings colliding in their races. There’s no God qua God in the tarot deck. Tarot signified a universe of deals.

  “Magic made Jake run his hand into a feed auger, tripping on acid,” Maude said.

  “What did Jake need a hand for?” Betty asked. “To inject drugs? He’s saved from much grief by not having a dexterous hand.”

  Maude fled. The MiniCooper sputtered and knocked, strained from the elevation and denser magic at the Bracken County fault zone. Over the mountains, Maude went to the Tech library, looking at the hierarchy of information on a computer screen. In Bracken, she thought, the right hemisphere, conscious, perceives gods and deals and timeless patterns. The left half of the human mind, Bracken’s unconscious, dreams logic and an end to everything.

  A truck, driven by a drunk, alcohol doing medically understood things to his neurons, crashes into no one in particular. An accident. The universe of quantum physics doesn’t take life personally.

  Maude shuddered and blanked the screen full of neurological references. She closed her eyes and saw Jake’s hook reaching from the old school map. Her father’s voice from memory said, “My people trust in Jesus but Jesus doesn’t pay out in this lifetime, so I went for engineering.”

  Her mother spoke from another time. “Life, basically, is a nightmare until you learn to control the dream.”

  7

  * * *

  STONE PATH

  Maude went walking on Wart Mountain carrying the old revolver—loaded, unlicensed, no handgun carry permit. She felt like she was tempting evil, up by a creek filled with fish who stared at her and ran through the water. Trout or the endemic rusty-sided sucker or generic scared fish, she didn’t know what.

  She put a paper plate against the mountain, in a road cut, and fired at it, the gun bouncing in her hand. I am dangerous.

  Back in Taylorsville, she felt everyone smelled the gunpowder and lead on her hands. She went into the Clerk of Court’s office and got the form for a handgun carry permit and then just stared at it.

  The black man from Berkeley who wore suits to his group therapy and psychiatric drugging stood across the street. Maude thought she finally had gone crazy, but it was him.

  “See you went home,” he said. “They missed you out of group, but hippies drift.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I’m here to block the way.”

  “What way?” Maude asked. She realized she’d completely forgotten about the gun for a moment.

  “The crazy way. The welfare way. Maybe more than one way I’ll be blocking.”

  “So you’re going to tell them I used a fake name in Berkeley.” Maude felt Betty brought this man here, or the jadeite pebbles, though thinking that was crazy.

  “I followed the stones,” he said. “I fight the stones.”

  Meaning he followed the stones, or he read the address when Susan mailed the package and asked her what she was mailing.

  For a crazy minute, Maude thought about gunning him down and removing the evidence, but Betty already knew about her welfare fraud. “Man, your paranoia will be real here.”

  He looked at her, the whites of his eyes yellow and lumpy. “Better attacked by real demons than being crazy,” he said. “I am the Reverend Julian Springer.” He moved in the fine jerks of the permanently drug-damaged as he turned and walked into the art store at the head of Main Street.

  Maude went back to the Austin MiniCooper and sat in it with her heels on the dash. The unmagical reality was the man was here, a witness, however insane, to what she was in Berkeley. Her family wouldn’t talk about it unless she defied them, but he could. She thought about the implications: no welfare here, no sliding around the system feeling martyred. But then Maude remembered how the insane also drifted. Perhaps this man wouldn’t be here long.

  He’s my conscience. As soon as Maude thought that, she laughed, but stopped very quickly. Live a long time, Grandma, ‘cause after you die, I don’t know what I’ll do.

  Her legs began to quiver so she pulled them down. So, Maude thought, what’s next? She remembered she had to buy groceries. Then she wondered whether the stones from Point Reyes did lead the Reverend Springer to her and what magic would be like to a dignified psychotic in Salvation Army suits.

  When Maude brought the groceries home, Lula said, “John has been arrested in Richmond. You’ve got to go over to see Terry right now.”

  As Lula put up the groceries, Maude pulled the revolver out of her purse and cleaned it using the cleaning kit she’d bought before she went shooting. She really wanted to leave it dirty, with spent brass in the charge holes, let the thing corrode. Partridge watched from her bed. Maude asked, “What was he arrested for?”

  “He was working at home and some black boys tried to rob him. Justifiable homicide. They were after his guns.” Maude didn’t want to know if this happened exactly when she fired the old revolver, then was sure of the connection. Did she make it happen or did its happening draw her to the revolver? She looked over at Partridge and saw that her grandmother looked worse. “Grannie, you worried about John?”

  “You’re going to go to Richmond, bring him back?” Lula said from the kitchen, “Your Aunt Betty says you ought to go.”

  “Why is he coming here? He’s got a job in Richmond.”

  Lula said, “He’s got death threats in Richmond.”

  Partridge said, “Maude, come back quickly.”

  “You have to wait until after Thanksgiving, Grandma. I want you to meet Douglas.”

  “A man you picked up in a bar,
” Lula said.

  “Bars in California are different,” Maude said. The Reverend Springer has a big mouth.

  “Where’s he gonna sleep?” Lula asked.

  Maude almost said, with me, but thought she ought not to shock her grandmother. “On the couch in the living room.”

  The telephone rang, her cousin Terry on the line. Terry said, “I’m sure that John just wanted to frighten the boy.”

  Maude said, “He shouldn’t talk about his guns so much.”

  “You’re not saying he tempted those boys into breaking into our house, are you? I’d like you to bring him back. I can’t leave the animals.”

  “Why can’t he drive himself?”

  “He’s afraid the black boy’s family will try to kill him.”

  “I’m not a bodyguard. I could take care of your animals while you go.”

  “They’d recognize my car, but they might not know the truck. They know me, but not you. I’ll take Lula off your hands if you do this for me,” Terry said.

  “What is the catch?” Maude asked.

  “You’ve got to get his guns out of the house before they’re stolen or the police confiscate them.”

  “Oh.” Nothing magical, just illegal. “I’ll need you to pay for my gas and expenses.”

  “Thanks a lot. I’ll drive the truck over and give you directions to the house. It’s near the Fan, the old part of Richmond.”

  Maude looked at Lula and wondered if getting rid of her would be worth bringing John back from Richmond.

  By the time Maude got to Richmond in Terry’s pickup, John was back in the house, freed, a justifiable mankiller. He came to the door with a gun in his hand and said, “I’ve got seven death threats on my answering machine.”

  “When do you have to go to court?”

  “I told the police where I’d be. They’ll let me know.” He went into the house and dragged out a footlocker. Maude knew it contained guns. “They’ve suspended my federal firearms dealer license until the case is officially cleared, but the assistant commonwealth’s attorney said he doubted they’d press charges. I didn’t even have to post bail.”