Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  Doug put a piece of ham in between halves of a cornpone. Sue came back with gravy. Her eyelid still twitched. She looked at Luke and bowed her head. He smiled at her and the eyelid stopped twitching. Maude wondered if Doug had noticed Luke’s petty meanness. He’d probably either side with Luke or say that the woman felt guilty or nervous about her attitude. When she felt contrite, Luke smiled and her eyelid relaxed.

  That was the normal explanation. Maude didn’t believe it.

  “So, Doug, you and I could go into business here,” John said. “You’re a computer engineer and I’m a programmer.”

  “I’m an engineer. I didn’t specialize in computers.”

  “It’s the image that counts,” John said.

  Doug rolled his uneaten egg on his plate and didn’t answer. Maude felt Doug’s only hope was his dislike of John. Doug said, “I could stay until Christmas. Maybe later.”

  He’s been laid off, Maude realized. Something’s wrong in California.

  Luke said, “Good, we need you here.”

  Doug looked at John, then back at Luke. “I have to leave by the first of the year.”

  Aunt Betty said, “That will be time enough.”

  They ate without conversation. Sue brought out a sheet cake and sherry at the end of the meal. Maude sipped the sherry and realized Partridge couldn’t fit in the MiniCooper if she and Doug were going to leave together. “Perhaps I should take Partridge home, then one of you can bring Doug.”

  Partridge said, “I’ll ride home with you, Maude. They want to talk further to Douglas.”

  Doug dipped his right shoulder and turned to look at Maude as though he hadn’t heard about this before. Maude realized that the magic in the county had been unobtrusive recently, other than the fairystone waving its stone arms at Doug. A charming thing, a fairystone.

  “Okay,” Maude said. She wanted Partridge to tell her whether Lula’s death had been natural or not. From the time she and Doug got back, she hadn’t been alone with Partridge.

  “We’ll bring him home later,” John said. Doug straightened up and sipped his sherry. Sue stood waiting to clear off the last of the dishes.

  When Partridge got in the car, she said, “Sue got away and read the Richmond paper.”

  “Got away?”

  “She walks down to the library when Betty and Luke aren’t there.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  Partridge didn’t answer. She looked more like Betty than she had before, and Maude hoped this wasn’t magically significant. When they drove by the abandoned weaving and spinning shop, Partridge said, “I’m going to fight the bitch in there.”

  The Norn. The old Norse goddess who’d come to live among us when she found a woman mad enough to conjure her up, Maude realized. “There are worse gods.” The Norn at least spun as well as cut.

  “You’re against me. Sewing on my death quilt. Betty’s against me. Wants me fat to eat. The Norn bitch wants to weave me off into one of her patterns. The old Colt revolver whispers to me at night. I crave soul meat.”

  “Like Lula?”

  “What about Lula? She died.”

  “Was she crippling you?”

  “Old woman with hardly any powers like that?”

  “And you have them?”

  “Maude, don’t you understand?”

  Maude nodded. “Yeah, I understand. I guess I should ask, what have I gotten from fighting the magic?”

  “Precisely. Except that the magic pits its people against each other sometimes.”

  “If Betty gets Doug, will she leave you alone?”

  “Betty? Luke’s the one who gets Doug.”

  Maude didn’t quite know what Partridge meant by that, whether Luke was the power behind Betty, which she’d always sensed, or whether Luke was the one concerned with Doug. Maude said, “If I take lessons from Betty, can I help you?”

  In a suddenly frail voice, Partridge said, “‘Deliver me from temptation.’ I surrendered to temptation, Maude. I promised your mother. Maude, when you screamed with that child lost in the map, I began to doubt. But now I’m old.”

  “Should I take you to Duke Hospital? They might have a gerontology department.”

  “I can’t leave now,” Partridge said. “Lula would give me my death back. I panicked.”

  “Oh, Partridge.”

  “You want me dead?”

  “I didn’t like Lula, but…”

  “She gave me scurvy. She was the sorriest woman.”

  One had control of the food; the other of magic. “Did you use my dislike of her?”

  “I balled up any emotion I could.” Saving hate like string. Partridge seemed to age as she talked. “I panicked when I realized my guts were rotting. Peritonitis. Old people pick up words like that.”

  “Lula died of a stroke.” Please, grandmother, lie to me and say you didn’t steal Lula’s life.

  “But I’m not hurting in the guts now.”

  Maybe we’re all nuts here, Maude hoped. A small insane county that draws others like it: the Reverend Springer, Sue, Doug, John. “I don’t want to believe you’re a witch.”

  Partridge said, “I think you’ll have to. And you’ve got to admit what you can do, too.”

  “It’s evil.”

  “What? Living on so long like Betty?”

  “Grandmother, how old is she? She was old in photographs taken before I was born.”

  “I panicked.” Partridge pulled her lips into a thin line and didn’t say any more. Maude helped her out of the car. She’d lost whatever vitality she’d gotten from Lula’s death.

  When Maude got her grandmother through the house to the back room, she saw the bed and then saw back in time. Before she had her stroke, Lula lay down beside Partridge. Partridge rose up on an elbow and bent over Lula, sucking her soul with a kiss. Old ladies in a death embrace—the image was so obscene Maude flinched back into the present. Maude felt Partridge’s intestines, like snakes, squirm as though in her own body. She sat Partridge down in a rocking chair and stripped the sheets off the bed. Under the bed was a plastic bag. Maude pulled it out from under the bed and looked in. The quilt top Maude had been piecing was in the bag. Maude put it on the sewing machine and got fresh sheets and quilts for the bed. “You’re not going to work on that,” Partridge said. Maude didn’t answer, but remade the bed. She helped Partridge back into it and covered her with the sheets and another quilt from the closet.

  “Does it have to be a quilt to die for?” Maude asked. “It’s committed,” Partridge said.

  Maude opened the bag and pulled out pieces of a square that had been unstitched. “Maybe if we cut a new square out of uncommitted cloth.”

  “I sometimes hated quilting. Whole women stitched away in cloth.”

  “Tell me what they plan to do to Doug.”

  Partridge said, “Enslave the engineer part, kill the body, the soul. Use the engineer part to ward off the wrong sorts of development. It’s homeopathic magic.”

  “If I warned him, would he believe me?”

  Partridge said, “You could try. But if he doesn’t listen, will you still try to save him?”

  Maude didn’t know. “We need to talk about you, now. I can’t take care of you all by myself,” Maude said.

  “I’d be okay enough now if you weren’t so disapproving,” Partridge said.

  Maude fingered the unstitched pieces of the quilt square, the edge of the cloth distorted too much for an even seam. “What do we do now?”

  “I sure don’t want to be food for Betty. Betty’s a formidable opponent, but you’ve got talent.”

  “How can we work magic? It’s always hurting someone else.”

  “If they had something worth saving, they’d have power, too,” Partridge said.

  “John showed his guns to the kids who broke into his house, didn’t he?”

  “Tempted them to steal? So what?”

  “You were ready to die before. Resigned to it.”

  “Dying’s pretty abstr
act until it’s right on you.”

  Maude remembered watching vampire films when she was a child. Of course, the vampire would bite. Who would volunteer to die if they didn’t have to? “I understand.”

  “You may understand, but you don’t know yet,” Partridge said. She seemed stronger, as if Maude’s understanding gave her back the energy she’d stolen from Lula.

  They heard a car pulling in the driveway and Maude went to the door. Doug came in alone, and the car, not Betty’s Essex but Terry and John’s car, pulled out again. “John’s crazy,” he said.

  “A lot of crazy people end up here,” Maude said.

  “Sue isn’t really crazy. You aren’t, either. But John…” Maude said. “I suspect he showed his gun to the neighborhood kids.”

  “He took them shooting. Including the one he killed.”

  “Magic can be bad,” Maude said. If you the magician

  eating power, then magic was good, at least for you. If you were eaten, however, not so good. Doug looked at her, his face muscles tense.

  Partridge said, “John reinterprets what he does.”

  “The Reverend Julian Springer really is crazy,” Maude said. She felt a connection building between Springer and some power. Hers? Some black conjuror? The murderess’s ghost who worked with her descendants in the NAACP?

  “You drew the Reverend Springer here,” Partridge told her.

  Doug said, “Tomorrow, I’d like to see what technical work might be available.” He seemed to shy away from the magic building in the room. Maude wondered how long it would take him to discover he couldn’t work magic himself. She almost told him then.

  “Did Betty say more about me?” Partridge asked Doug.

  “She told Sue not to give you her friend’s name.”

  Partridge closed her eyes and pulled the covers up over her shoulders. “Did they bury Lula with a machine?”

  Maude knew Sue’s church, a Black Primitive Baptist one that had built a school for its children back before the Commonwealth of Virginia had schools for the children of exslaves. Predestination—the Presbyterians may have given it up, but here it saved the Primitive Baptists, because if man or woman was saved, they were born to be saved and nothing in time could change that. Predestination defended against magic, denied its powers. What was was willed by one power, decided before birth. God’s mercy didn’t grant exemptions from his physics and biology. Rain fell on the just and the unjust. The rich could not go to heaven any more than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. Blessed are the meek. People who live off suffering are damned. There is no male or female in heaven. All pocket universes are delusions that collapse into hell. But nothing in this life could be changed without God’s willing it to change.

  But God willed the blacks a brush arbor church in 1870, then a building in 1889, and a school in 1904.

  The black minister knew which woman was Sue’s friend who needed the work. “You need someone truly saved in that house,” he said. “This woman is good, but not quite one of us.”

  “I didn’t ask Sue about the woman. You tell my aunt that if she comes asking.”

  “Pray to the Lord your grannie doesn’t get where she can’t afford to die,” the minister said.

  The whole county’s crazy, Maude thought. She wondered why she left California.

  When she got back to the car, Doug asked, “Did you find someone to help?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the point of having a Christian? Do you believe?”

  “Here, what you believe is real. If that doesn’t sound crazy.”

  “I didn’t believe in magic fairystones until I saw one move.”

  “You didn’t believe in what you were doing.” Maude thought Doug’s disbelief in his work’s value had hollowed him out and left him available for other people’s dreams.

  “Luke told me about a cockfight,” Doug said. “He wants me to go with him.”

  Maude said, “I’ll go, too.”

  “He said it was for men.”

  “And rough women. I can stand the gossip.” You don’t need to get excited over cockfights, Maude thought.

  “Is it as much a ritual as a sport?” Doug asked.

  “Yes,” Maude said. “Will John be there?”

  “Luke didn’t mention that.”

  Maude said, “I haven’t seen a chicken fight in years.”

  11

  * * *

  CHICKEN FIGHTING

  Luke sat in a crewel upholstered wing chair, resting his back on hours of painstaking stitches, wool tulips on cream linen. “You didn’t understand me,” Luke said to Doug. “I’m sending you to a chicken fight. I won’t be going myself.”

  Maude asked, “But you don’t mind me going?”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt your reputation, Maudie,” Luke said. He pulled a drawer out in a small table sitting beside the chair and handed Doug a piece of paper. “Here’s how to get there.”

  “Why aren’t you going?” Doug asked Luke.

  “I’ve seen chicken fights,” Luke said.

  “The birds don’t understand they’ve got razor sharp steel strapped to their spurs,” Maude said.

  Doug pocketed the paper and asked, “What are the chances we’d be busted on site?”

  “None at all,” Luke said. “Deputies keep order.”

  They drove east following Luke’s instructions into choppy country filled with second-growth forest, scrub fields grown up in red cedar. “They’re black,” Doug said, seeing men sitting on plywood porches attached to house trailers. “Is this arena in a black neighborhood?”

  “It’s all right. They hate the law too much to inform even on white people,” Maude said.

  “Will they be at the cockfight, too?”

  “No,” Maude said. “The industry has two audiences here.”

  “I want to learn about magic. Why is Luke sending me to a cockfight?”

  “If Luke wants you to go to this, there’s magic in it,” Maude said. She wondered if the fight would be in a barn, the pit marked off with plywood and oil drums, the cocks brought to the fight in wood-barred coops, perhaps.

  “I think we’ve come to a school,” Doug said.

  The building looked like a small coliseum. For gladiator chickens. Maude looked at Luke’s map. “No, we’re here.”

  “I thought cockfighting was illegal in Virginia,” Doug said. “This place is obvious.”

  “Fighting chickens is a misdemeanor,” Maude said. “Betting is the felony. And don’t call it cockfighting. Locals don’t say ‘cock’ in public.”

  A chainlink fence surrounded the place. Doug pulled up to the gate, where a man wearing a sweater over an orange jumpsuit checked first to see if anyone knew Doug then took their admission money. The man was shackled at the ankles.

  “Prisoner,” Maude said. “That’s how tight the local laws are with this thing.”

  The man nodded at Doug and pushed a button to open the gate. A man wearing a rescue squad jacket waved them to a parking place. The man asked, “You need anything special?”

  “What can you get me?” Doug asked.

  “Luke knows you?”

  “Luke sent us,” Maude said. “I’m his niece, some times removed.”

  “The one who got followed back from California by the mad black preacher, right?” the man said. “Come on in. Grit’s covering us tonight.” He handed them mimeographed programs.

  “Grit?” Doug asked.

  “Chicken fighting magazine,” Maude said.

  “Hispanics fight cocks in the Bay Area,” Doug said. “I know something about it.” He sounded dazed, trying hard to pretend he wasn’t culture-shocked.

  “I’ve heard when the folks from Grit cover fights that you get a lot of interesting sales booths,” Maude said. “Come on.”

  “But this is wide open,” Doug said.

  “Just a misdemeanor,” Maude said. Men pushed handtrucks loaded with cat carriers. She and Doug went in the arena and saw bleacher
s surrounding a large central pit dug into the clay and lined around with cinderblocks. To each side of the main pit were smaller arenas with wire sides.

  “Literally a pit,” Doug said.

  Maude explained, “They call them arenas. But the arenas need walls. Chickens would fall off a platform.”

  “I can’t believe this.” Doug looked up at the ceiling overhead—fiberglass panels on steel beams with stadium lights hanging from them.

  Maude saw that the arena was filling up with men from every social spectrum in the county. Men who normally wore Italian suits came dressed in jeans with shirts no mill hand could afford, mill hands came dressed in polyester riverboat, cancer farmers wore overalls and the grim patience of their profession. One man came dressed like an Australian wrangler, his mustaches waxed, his overcoat almost to his ankles. He looked like he should be the pit boss, but Maude knew he was a dentist. Pseudo-Doc Holliday.

  Doug was sweating. Bodies heat the place, Maude thought. She saw a man dressed in a suit moving through the crowd, his suit jacket slung back over his shoulder. He looked familiar, photographically so. She felt nervous about even recognizing him here. The only other man wearing a suit seemed to be taking and holding bets.

  Doug looked down at his program and said to Maude, “I wouldn’t begin to know how to bet.”

  Maude wanted to see the equipment dealers. She saw some of the men leave piles of the cat crates and walk toward the back of the building. She said, “Perhaps we could go this way.”

  Doug followed her as though he’d been drugged, stumbling over electrical conduit laid across the ground. There was a concession area behind the south-facing bleachers—a couple of men selling spurs and sparring mits.

  Maude always loved well-made things. She picked up one of the spurs carefully by the socket. The socket fitted over the bird’s natural spur. The metal spur was over two inches long, like a miniature saber perhaps, not as thin proportionately as a sword would have been, thicker so as not to break if it hit bone, sharpened like a sword, though, from the tip down to the socket. The handlers wedged the steel on the nonlethal spur halfway up a cock’s leg.

  Maude asked, “How much?”