Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  “Maybe that’s the losers’ excuse,” Doug said.

  “Did we come here to argue?” Maude asked. She felt she’d tried to remind him that she knew more about magic than he did, that she’d been seeing and feeling it all her life.

  Doug began to build a fire. Maude thought he’d gone back into the silence. But, after the match caught the kindling, he said, “I’m always curious about new phenomena. I need to know about it. That’s why I became an engineer.” He squatted by the fire and looked at it.

  Maude wasn’t going to talk more about magic now. Doug wasn’t listening, but other things were. She was angry that he wanted a magic that was just another engineering tool. Because he was smarter than most people, he expected to be able to use magic better. But the entities snuffled around her, not him.

  Be angry with him, good, something sang in her mind.

  Get a grip, Maude told herself. You don’t go off to the woods and pick fights with 170-pound mammals. Trees and the valley walls blurred the sunset. Maude pulled out her campstove and lit it, then went to the spring for water. She knew the trail guide advised treating it, but country people would drink without qualms from a boxed spring, so she drank before filling her water bottles. Doug added more sticks to the fire. The quarrel they might have had faded. She couldn’t argue against certainty loaded with a lack of experience. His quarrel was with his technological world, the dumb people who used his things without a relationship, without even understanding how his tools worked. She found she somewhat sympathized with that quarrel.

  “So here we are,” she said to him.

  He turned his eyes up from the fire to look at her. “Yes.” She could almost see a grown-out beard in the stubble pattern. Female diverts male hostility with a sexual display, she thought as her hips rotated. She blushed.

  He got up and came to her, then sat her down with himself beside her, holding her firmly. His fingers felt half hostile. She waited to see what he did next.

  “You’re trembling,” he said.

  She ducked her chin and brought it up fast, feeling that words might bring back the quarrel.

  As he pushed her back and took off her clothes, she felt lust grab her and deliver her to him. In the middle of the sex act, he asked her, “Too tired?”

  She was too aroused to answer, but aware enough to know how he watched her while she squirmed on his cock. Like an engineer, she thought, humiliated that he could be so calculating while she was lost in their bodies.

  In the morning, he seemed even more remote, as though she’d embarrassed him. She said, “Do you want to hike back the other direction?”

  “What happened in California? It didn’t happen last night.”

  “I was used, then, I suspect, to lure you here.”

  “But you obviously enjoyed it last night. I felt so remote I could have been using someone else’s cock.”

  Maude almost said, You’re like a sexual engineer, but didn’t. “I’m sorry.”

  “We ought to go back.”

  Maude felt a call. She began loading her pack again. Doug said, “I kept wondering if someone was watching.”

  Maude shook her head, then said, “Only by magic.” She wondered now why Betty had sent them away.

  “After you fell asleep,” Doug said, “I felt as though you’d abandoned me in the dark.”

  Maude felt more irritated than sympathetic. She jerked the compression straps on her pack and said, “Magic sent us here. Magic’s calling us back.”

  Doug said, “Someone died.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Maude was furious that the witches told him, not her. “If it’s my grandmother…” What could she threaten to do? The Colt revolver came to mind. Maude tried to fight the image.

  Doug said, “I don’t think it’s your grandmother.”

  John? Lula? Those possibilities were cheery. Maude said, “Well, then we’ve got to get back.” She remembered the chill in her brain last night.

  They retraced their steps by the cabin foundations. “I’m sorry,” Maude said. Doug didn’t say anything.

  They drove down to the interstate and to Roanoke, then got on the double-lane highway back to Bracken County, passing through the rough industrial edges. Maude said, “I always think of Blake when I go through here. People’s lives spent in windowless factories.”

  “Better for cooling them,” Doug said. “And we now have full-spectrum fluorescent lights.”

  “An engineer’s solution to unnatural conditions.”

  He sighed. Maude hated the stretch of ugliness, the utter lack of design, of beauty. Then she wondered if beauty was a magic of its own. “I don’t understand why it has to be so ugly.”

  “There’s no it here. The factories aren’t connected. No relationship between them,” Doug said. “If I loved the purely functional, I’d defend it more, but you saw my house. Yet, I’ve met Japanese who would think this beautiful.”

  Maude felt like her quarrel with magic should ally her with something industrial, but the blank walls depressed her. “I wish you engineers would come up with more beautiful factories.”

  “My Japanese friends would say you need a new culture to see the beauty here.”

  “Doug, what do you think?”

  “I think it’s ugly, except for that old redbrick factory there with the smokestack. That’s beautiful and probably polluting.”

  Maude felt a funeral on her brain, hearse tires rolling a vibration through her to match the real vibrations of the road. Then an old Essex drove into her mind, following the hearse like a predator following lame prey.

  At the house in Kobold, no one was home. A neighbor in a trailer across the street came out and said, “Lula had a stroke. They’re all at the hospital.”

  “Do you want to unload first or go right away?” Doug asked.

  “Let’s get the packs inside, then go,” Maude said. She wanted to add, it’s only Lula. Lula, good riddance, then Maude felt guilty.

  Standing by Aunt Betty at the hospital, Partridge looked more alert than ever. Maude realized how alike they looked. “Grandmother, Aunt Betty.”

  They nodded. Betty said, “She’s dead. Do you want to see her?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Partridge said, “Now Maude can find someone for me. Maude, I’m sorry.”

  “Perhaps it won’t be necessary,” Betty said. “Maude could take care of you all by herself.”

  Doug put his hand on Maude’s waist as though she were a dancer who needed steadying for a tricky move. Maude wondered why her grandmother seemed embarrassed. Then she saw Betty look sideways at Partridge. Partridge smiled, then pulled her shoulders up slightly. Betty’s lips twitched and her eyelids tightened.

  “I think I will go in and see her,” Maude said.

  Lula lay on a gurney by the emergency room doors. Maude looked through them and saw the hearse pull up. The nurse who’d led the way pulled the sheet back from Lula’s corpse. The eyes looked like they’d been closed by force, the eyelid skin rippled downward from finger pressure. The mouth was slack, asymmetrical. The body looked flaccid.

  Maude asked, “Did she die here?”

  “No, she was DOA.”

  “A stroke?”

  “Painless.”

  “We weren’t home. Partridge…”

  “Enough of a shock to get your grannie out of bed.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “She exaggerates. Not that her arm wasn’t broken that time, right, but she could be out of bed more. Obviously, she was able to handle this. Does she look better?”

  “Did she call Betty first?”

  “No, she called the rescue squad. Betty must have been listening to a scanner when the ambulance call went out.” Maude watched the nurse cover Lula again. The hearse driver and his helper came in and looked at Maude as if wondering if it would be indelicate to haul the old woman out now. Maude stepped back and said thank you to the nurse.

  When Maude
came back to the waiting room, Partridge was still on her feet, talking to Doug. Betty was slumped in a chair across the room. She looked both greyer and younger, as if she’d lost some wrinkles. The end of the black cane she held across her knees twitched. Her eyes came up and stared at Maude. “Your grannie could teach you almost as much as I could,” she said. “I thought Lula would be good for her.”

  “I thought she liked Lula,” Maude said, understanding something she didn’t want to put into words about Partridge, Lula’s death, why Betty sent such a worthless woman to take care of her grandmother.

  Betty said, “I thought Partridge was too good.”

  “Maybe Lula just died naturally.”

  “Here, she might have,” Betty said, meaning the rational hospital, “not at Kobold.” She looked across the room at Partridge, who giggled at something Doug said. “But Lula’s things…” Betty didn’t finish the statement. Maude wondered if Lula’s things could speak, get revenge. Old buttonhooks and the tatters and splinters of a slat bonnet chased Partridge in Maude’s mind.

  “You’d be silly to be the only innocent woman in your family,” Betty said. “Especially considering you’re a slut.”

  “Maybe Partridge did it to defend herself,” Maude said. Betty smiled, her eyelids half closed on her steel-colored eyes. “Partridge shouldn’t be left alone.”

  Then, like a calculated distraction, Terry and John came in, dressed as though they’d been going to church, bringing in noise, cold air, and a small country woman between them. The woman blinked and said, “Where’s Lula?”

  “The hearse took her away,” Maude said.

  “She was going to take care of me now that Maude was here.”

  “Were you kin?” Maude asked.

  “Enough,” the woman said. She looked like a smaller, plumper version of Lula and Maude had no use for her.

  Terry said, “We’ll stop by tonight when you’re back home.” John nodded.

  Maude felt Doug’s hand on her waist again. She wondered when she’d be driving him back to the airport. Surely, he’d flee. These demands and people weren’t his responsibility. Maude wished they weren’t hers. Surrounded by suits, dresses, and nurses uniforms, she felt shabby and dirty in second-day hiking clothes. “Let’s go home.”

  “There’s no room for Partridge in your car,” Betty said. “We’ll bring her,” John said quickly. He sounded as though the death made an occasion for a party. Doug stepped away from Maude.

  Betty said, “I think that would be fine.”

  In the car, Doug asked, “Do you want me to go?”

  “I imagine you’d rather.”

  “Some incredible tensions there at the hospital.”

  “Partridge said she’d never work magic.” Maude wondered if Betty could lie about it. “Maybe she didn’t.”

  “You thought Lula was singularly useless.”

  “I’d have fired her, not killed her.”

  “Maybe firing her would have killed her.”

  “She had kin waiting to be taken care of.”

  “Partridge does look unusually well,” Doug said. “Maybe she’s just relieved,” Maude replied. From the stones up, almost all the county laughed at her. The technological pockets were indifferent.

  10

  * * *

  BURIED BY MACHINE

  They buried Lula in driving rain. The relatives she might have gone to take care of stared at the open hole as the undertaker’s assistants pulled the straps out from the grave. The coffin was almost invisible at the bottom in the gloom under the canvas tent. Maude had wondered if Doug would stay long enough for this. He had. He stood back, talking to Aunt Betty.

  Partridge came forward and dropped a handful of earth on the coffin. The other kin also dropped in a flower or two and more of the sticky red clay subsoil from the pile the gravediggers stood beside. From the tool marks in the clay, Maude knew the grave had been dug with a backhoe. Machines settled the dead. The backhoe wasn’t visible now, but when the mourners had gone, the grave crew would bring it back and pull the clay over Lula’s body in the undertaker’s second-cheapest casket.

  Some of the people moved off to the little frame Primitive Baptist church; others ran to their cars. Maude watched the grave crew pack up the straps, then walked through the graveyard to the shelter. She heard a motor start near the graveyard, probably the backhoe, hidden from the mourners. Lula would stay fixed in her grave. For an instant Maude felt guilty. Poor bitch, all her life working for other people and couldn’t roam as she willed as a ghost.

  Doug came up and said, “We’ve got dinner waiting at Luke and Betty’s. Need an umbrella?” He popped one open.

  Maude nodded and followed him to her car. The keys to the MiniCooper were in his pocket. He knew the roads and drove now.

  Luke and Betty’s stone house was in Taylorsville, just beyond where Main Street ended right-angled to the federal highway. Doug parked beside the green Essex with its cream tire covers. A wrinkled mulatto woman came to the front door, saying, “Come on in.” She helped them take off their coats.

  Maude remembered that the woman came from an insane asylum near Richmond, but she’d never seen any signs that the woman was psychotic. Perhaps she’d been a small-scale agitator in the tidewater. Whatever, she’d belonged to Uncle Luke and Aunt Betty for fifteen years. Maude asked, “Sue, how are you doing?”

  “What now, Maude, you bringing folks from Berkeley, California?” To Doug, she said, “I remember Maudie when she was being a difficult girl.” Fifteen years and they put you on the day shift, Maude thought.

  “Folks? Just this one,” Maude said, then she remembered the Reverend Julian Springer.

  “There’s another man followed you. He’s really crazy, but here that don’t matter. But faking mad, that catches up to you.”

  Maude wondered how much the Reverend Julian Springer had talked about her, that white woman faking madness when the witches wanted her. Then she locked eyes with Sue and connected to the woman who wanted out, out of Bracken County, out of being black in Virginia at a time when some blacks were lawyers and others did field work or stole to supplement welfare, out of being half-white and having nobody trust you.

  Doug asked, “Who is the other man?”

  “The Reverend Julian Springer,” Maude answered. “He was in my group in Berkeley.”

  “When she was faking being crazy,” Sue said. She turned and shuffled as though chained. Maude and Doug followed her to the dining room where Partridge sat brighteyed between Luke and Betty. Terry and John weren’t in yet. Sue went on past them into the kitchen and brought back a plate of shelled hardboiled eggs. The eggs rolled on the platter. Doug and Maude waited until Luke picked one up, then Betty. The eggs were cold and slippery. Terry and John came in the front door without ringing the bell. Sue shuffled to help them with their coats.

  Maude said, “Sue’s awfully old now, isn’t she?”

  “Arthritis,” Luke said. “We wonder if she ought to go back to her people.”

  “Have you been paying social security for her?” Maude asked. Sue came back through. John and Terry sat down at the table and took eggs off the platter.

  When Sue’d gone into the kitchen, Betty answered, “We give her room and board and a little spending money.” Luke said, “Her people could take care of her.”

  Maude wanted to say, but she hasn’t seen them in fifteen years.

  “Where was she from?” Doug asked.

  “East of Richmond. One of those counties where they closed the schools over integration,” Luke said.

  Maude wondered if the woman had been a black teacher. She remembered when Sue had come but not much about her. Maude had been a self-centered child then, locked in bitter battles over proper duties and staying up to listen to Radio Moscow on a six-tube Hallicrafter shortwave radio. And setting her watch by the Naval Observatory, not on local time at all. Sue had come in once when Maude was listening to some Eastern European radio station telling her about Patrice
Lumumba’s murder by the CIA. Sue had said, “It’s good to get both sides of the news.”

  Doug said, “What brought her here?”

  “We looked through two state asylums for someone just right,” Luke said.

  “We could have gotten someone out of prison,” Betty said. “But Sue’s better behaved and more docile.”

  As Sue brought in a ham and cornbread, Luke said, “Asylum people are more grateful.” He beamed at Sue as though she’d have no complaints about what he’d said.

  Maude asked, “Could Sue help me with Partridge?” She noticed that the ham was a country-cured ham, flattened and dark skinned. It would be salty.

  “I’m getting too old,” Sue said. “But I have a friend.”

  Please, Maude thought, let her be someone I’d want in the car when I take Partridge to the hospital for the last time.

  “Perhaps… ,” Betty began.

  “I’d like to interview her friend myself,” Maude said.

  “I should have some say in this,” Partridge said.

  “We’ve just buried Lula,” Luke said. “Let’s finish dinner first.” He sliced the ham. As Maude expected, the meat was chewy and salty.

  Doug said, “I love this ham.”

  Luke asked, “How much longer are you staying, Douglas?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like there’s so much more here than I expected.”

  Maude saw Sue looking down at Doug, her eyes hooded. A corner of her mouth twitched. John and Terry tore their ham slices apart with forks, then ate the shreds. Maude asked, “What’s happening with your court case, John?”

  “What are you talking about?” Luke said. He looked over at Sue quickly, meaning, we don’t talk about our problems in front of the help.

  “John’s always had a thing about guns,” Sue said, meaning, I know more than you want me to know. Maude wondered if Sue had enough power to know but not enough to do, half-white, half-witch. Luke put his fork down. Sue’s right eyelid began twitching and she backed out of the room.

  Aunt Betty said, “He shot robbers. They understand that even in Richmond.”