Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

  The man kept coming, acre-long strides. Listen to the Reverend Springer; she thought at the giant black man. The fury of the arrogant dumb possessed the giant, all the people who wanted to be more than they were, who didn’t realize they’d been happier in the days before education tempted them into media star dreams, threatening civil life with their brutal numbers. That’s how Luke sees him. She tried to see the man as he really was. The giant stopped for a moment. He shrank into a hurt man who’d seen a white man make a thief of his sister’s son.

  John fired at the giant. Maude grabbed john’s gun hand and asked, “What are you seeing?”

  “A nigger with a gun.”

  “Two niggers,” Luke said. “We shouldn’t have let those people escape the Great Chain of Being. Creation put them low.”

  Maude turned and saw the Reverend Springer holding the black man’s arm in a mirror image of her hand on John’s arm. Doug started walking toward the two black men. He was walking very slowly.

  Betty said, “Maude, you can’t delay forever.”

  Maude felt time passing, snow circling in a wind. She felt for her grandmother and found the body empty. “What, no ghost?” She felt alone by the grave. The people around her weren’t human.

  Doug was walking faster toward the black man. This could be how he dies, trying to stop revenge. But we deserve revenge. “Doug, what are you doing?”

  Doug turned, framed by Wart Mountain. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

  The Reverend Springer said, “Let me talk to him.”

  “Doug, stay out of it, please go away.”

  Betty came up and touched Maude’s arm. “Now, dear, this is between the men.”

  Make it stop.

  Betty spoke, very slowly, the words vibrations in Maude’s bones, not movements in air, “Yo…u ca… n’t… st… o… p… ti… me… com… plete… ly.”

  Maude flinched and time jumped forward with a bullet in the air.

  Slowly the bullet crawled through space. Maude saw that it would miss Doug, let go, and watched as it crashed into the blackberry brambles lining the road.

  They were all in a pit, surrounded by mountains. Doug was ducking a sling-propelled stone, a bullet, an arrow. Then the black man turned into the revenge-mad giant again, but Springer hit him with the Bible, hard, one whack to his right shoulder, one to his left, then one directly against his face. Maude wondered if this happened in the real world or the magic one. Springer must have been a giant in those instants, but now both men were life-sized, mortal-sized, and the black kinsman of the dead thief was lying down in the road.

  Springer yelled, “He’s stopped. You don’t have any excuses to kill him now.”

  Luke said, “We don’t need excuses. Come back, Doug.” Doug turned around. Maude wondered if he was worth saving, if doubting his worth was her own thought or a spell inserted into her mind. The black man Springer had knocked down got up slowly. Springer spoke to him, opened the Bible, and read the passage where Jesus said the rich can no more go to heaven than a camel can go through the eye of a needle.

  Luke said, “That’s slave talking.”

  Doug reached Luke and John and turned around to face Springer. He said, “I hate what empowers the weak.”

  That’s it. I don’t really care what happens to him. Maude went back to the graveside—they’d drifted away from it—and said, “Grandmother, I hope you’re at rest now.” The coffin, on a low platform, didn’t answer.

  The sun moved on. The weather had a promise of spring in it, the late winter thaw that led to February snowdrops and daffodils at these latitudes. Maude’s mother hadn’t saved herself and her husband. Maude couldn’t fight to save a voluntary sacrifice. The other witches waited for her. She said, “Okay, Doug, we’ll get on with it.”

  Luke and John lead Doug back. Betty came up and embraced Maude. The men bent Doug over Partridge’s casket, forming a flesh and coffin cross.

  “Come hold him, Maude,” Luke said. “I’ll make the sacrifice.”

  Doug began sweating. Perhaps, Maude thought, whatever drug Luke had given him was beginning to wear off. She put her purse strap around her head, slung the purse across her body, then took Doug’s shoulders. He looked up at her and said, “Aren’t they going to teach me magic?”

  “The hard way, Doug.” Maude moved her hands as John peeled away Doug’s jacket and shirt. Doug began to shiver.

  “They really are going to kill me.”

  “Remember, you volunteered for this.”

  “For what?”

  John said, “Don’t talk to him.”

  “For what?” Doug asked again.

  Luke came up with a stone knife. Terry and Betty grabbed Doug’s hands. “God, he’s slippery,” Terry said. Maude wondered how she could deny magic existed now. Perhaps Terry wouldn’t remember.

  Betty moved in beside Maude and pulled Doug’s arms back. She said, “You’ll hold him firmer if you slump down. Women can’t press down as hard as a man can thrash up.”

  Maude stayed on her feet.

  As Luke raised the knife, Doug begged, “Maude, please stop this.”

  The knife slowed as it rose. Maude said, “But you don’t like things that empower the weak.” Luke brought the knife the rest of the way up. Maude wondered if they could hang on to Doug while that stone blade cut.

  “That will hurt too much. I’ll do it,” Maude said.

  Luke looked down at her. She pulled out her ancestor’s Colt, totally committed to shooting Doug, no other thought at the surface of her mind. Jail would save her from these people.

  Dithering is your strong suit Luke caught that thought from her and raised the knife again, speeding time. The gun, almost with a will of its own, exploded with noise. Luke flinched, but didn’t fall. Maude fired twice more, but he didn’t go down.

  Doug twisted against the other hands still holding him. Maude fired two bullets into Betty’s witch eyes. Luke was still standing. He pressed the knife against Doug’s left nipple. Maude noticed that the nipple, a miniature of a woman’s nipple, was puckered.

  One more bullet. Maude didn’t know whether to shoot Luke again, or John, or Terry.

  A redtail hawk came floating over the hills. Terry looked up at it and said, “Belle.”

  Behind Belle came schools of the rusty-sided suckers, Bracken’s endemic fish, floating out of their creeks in breeding colors despite the season. Out of the water, they still swam toward them, rolling slightly, so huge they seemed life-sized at three hundred yards. Maude wondered who controlled them.

  The floating fish didn’t get larger as they approached. They seemed life-sized no matter the distance.

  Terry said, “Belle, attack.”

  Belle negotiated her way between the fish and circled the graveyard. She turned and landed on a phone pole.

  “Don’t waste your time on that fool hawk,” Luke said. “Like Maude, uncooperative bitch.” He coughed and opened his lips to show a bullet between his teeth. He reached up and took the bullet in his fingers. “Maude, this bullet was completely natural.” He closed his eyes as if needing darkness to feel in his body for the other two bullets. His belly squirmed visibly under his bloody clothes.

  Maude put a spell in the last bullet and shoved the gun barrel against his left eye, then fired both magic and lead.

  The fish attacked.

  Doug rolled off the coffin.

  Maude crouched on the ground, empty gun pressed against her belly, wondering how she could ever explain killing her aunt and uncle. “Get help, Doug,” she said to him.

  Doug looked at the fish swarming around Terry and John. “They were going to kill me.” His chest and arms were covered with goosebumps. “You helped hold me down.”

  “How do I explain killing them? Who’s going to believe me? I’m fucked. Get away.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Leave.” Maude looked up and saw that the gravediggers had disappeared. “I’ll bury Partridge myself.”

  The fis
h left two mangled bodies and swam back to their creeks. Belle flew up from the phone pole, circled the graveyard, and began rising on a thermal.

  “I’ll help you with the coffin,” Doug said.

  “Just the coffin.” But they couldn’t budge it until the Reverend Springer and the other black man came back. The four of them slid the coffin on boards extending over the grave hole. Then, rougher than Maude would have wanted, they lowered the coffin with straps the mortuary crew left behind.

  “Natural world was disgusted with them witches,” the black man said. “Fish rising like that.”

  “Go get the law,” she told Doug. After Doug put his shirt and jacket back on, the Reverend Springer led him away. The other black man stopped and looked at the bodies. Maude noticed the flesh was gone on both Luke’s and Betty’s bones. John and Terry had disappeared. Maude wondered if they were still in the world, or had been eaten completely by the fish, or if they’d been so much Luke’s and Betty’s creatures that they disappeared without their patrons.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, Maude filled the grave. The sky turned opaque. What’s going to happen when I’m finished? The law could wait, she decided. She took off her jacket when it grew warm, put it back on when she was cold. Her stockings shredded, but she didn’t notice.

  I don’t know what to do next, what happens to me next.

  Maude buried her grandmother for five years.

  POSTSCRIPT

  * * *

  Maude put the last shovelful of dirt on her grandmother’s grave. The mound sank, covered with snow. Maude turned and walked toward the old homeplace. It looked abandoned. The grass had been cut regularly, but one of the upstairs windows had been broken out.

  Do they want me for murder? Maude went up to the porch and sat down. Her arms were tired. Nothing to eat here, she realized, noticing her hunger, her thirst. Maybe she should just lie down herself and die.

  Doug drove up in a new car. “Your friend the Reverend Springer said you’d be coming out today. Been here long?”

  “I just finished burying Partridge.”

  “Just?”

  “Coming out today?”

  “You were in a slow time bubble.”

  “Oh.” Maude remembered being worried about what she’d do after she buried her grandmother, but the worry seemed years old. “I’m thirsty. Hungry. What happened to Partridge’s house?”

  “It’s yours, now. I’ve got my own place.”

  “My car?”

  “You can drive my old car until you get settled back. Partridge left some land and some stocks. And you’ve been getting bank statements from Blacksburg.”

  “How long was I gone? By your time.”

  “Five years.”

  Maude stood up and said, “If it had been seven, I guess I’d be legally dead by now.”

  “Come on now,” Doug opened the passenger-side door for her.

  Maude got in the car. Doug handed her a canteen. She drank, then asked, “Who sent the fish? I doubted that nature would have waited this long to rise up against Luke.”

  “Follette, I think. He died about that time.”

  “So, what do they think happened to Luke? What happened to the bodies?”

  “Luke and Betty were shot by renegades, so people remember now, just after the Civil War.”

  “And Terry and John?”

  “They seem to have been more insubstantial. They moved here, then moved away without telling anyone anything. Disappeared after you…”

  “So, nothing happens to me.”

  “I’m married.”

  “Oh.” Maude felt numb again.

  “You almost let them kill me.”

  “You betrayed your calling. You’re supposed to empower weak people, make things out of rules that work the same for everyone.”

  “I know that now. Follette’s institute finally got adequate funding. Once John was gone, I set up a work evaluation system for the assembly company, then another for a window film company, then went to work for the institute. We’re working with the local schools. That’s how I met my wife.”

  “She’s a teacher?”

  “A principal.”

  “The school board didn’t used to appoint women principals. Things have changed, then,” Maude said. Doug drove her to Kobold. At the house, a woman in her thirties came out.

  “Reverend Springer was right then,” the woman said. “We haven’t cleaned the house for nothing.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Doug’s wife. I was Lucinda Crofter, married to a Tate for awhile.”

  “Thank you for cleaning the house.”

  “Perhaps we can see more of each other,” Lucinda said, meaning, Maude understood, perhaps not.

  “Don’t leave me here alone.”

  Doug and Lucinda looked at each other, then Lucinda said, “We can take you out to dinner if you like.”

  Maude opened her purse and pulled out the gun. Lucinda moved toward her as if to take it away, but Doug shook his head. “What, am I a child?” Maude asked. She opened the cylinder and saw that the barrel and charge holes were corroded, the brasses greenish.

  “I have two sets of memories, thanks to you,” Lucinda said. “One of a county where I came home with a graduate degree and got stupid. Another where renegades killed the couple in 1866 who mocked my ambitions in 1967 when I graduated from high school. I guess I owe you something if that fight was more than another struggle between witches.”

  “Doug?” Maude didn’t know what she wanted after she spoke his name.

  “Let’s go eat,” Doug said. “Maude, you’ll want to change.”

  Maude looked down and saw that her wool clothes were stained with clay and mildew—blue mildew, black mildew, white mildew. She asked, “Is anything clean?”

  Lucinda said, “I washed some jeans and your sweaters. There’s a blazer. I didn’t know if it was yours or your grandmother’s but it’s been cleaned.”

  Maude knew this woman had also washed her underclothes, but wouldn’t mention that even in front of her husband, Maude’s former lover. Doug said, “I’ll wait in the living room.”

  Lucinda waited until he was out of the room, then told Maude, “I like a man who’s been through some pain, who’s been hurt by another woman. I trust Doug not to take advantage, even though he does have me wrapped around his cock.”

  “He…” Maude almost told Lucinda that Doug hadn’t been faithful to her.

  “Oh, but he has been faithful to me,” Lucinda said. “And will be.” Maude tried to reach out to see if this woman was a witch, too, but Maude’s powers seemed to extend only to the jacket Lucinda was holding out to her, Partridge’s blazer, cut to fit a dowager’s hump. Maude put on the blazer and it wrinkled around her. “Oh, well, you can buy new things,” Lucinda said. “Doug’s been very good for this county.”

  “He wanted to be a magician.”

  “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a witch, but the witches would have mocked me. Better that I left Bracken.”

  “My family.”

  “Not that I care that much for Fundamentalists, either,” Lucinda said. “Elehu tried to tell me you were damned for what you did.”

  “I didn’t know Doug liked brittle, bossy women,” Maude said.

  “Oh, come on. What do you think you are?”

  Partridge’s jacket, despite its awkward fit, seemed to shush her just as Partridge had done when Maude was a fretful child. “I’ll leave you alone,” Maude said. “I won’t tempt him.”

  “You can’t tempt him. You almost let them kill him.”

  “So not everyone remembers that Luke and Betty were killed by renegades after the Civil War.”

  “No, some of us remember a worse life from time to time.”

  “But I did save him.”

  “I’m grateful. But he didn’t appreciate being played with.”

  Perhaps Lucinda didn’t appreciate Maude’s treatment of Doug, didn’t believe that a witch kin of the master witches couldn
’t have warned him off before he was bent across a coffin. Doug had come to find her.

  “So you’re a principal here now,” Maude said.

  “Yes, a grade school principal. Both the school superintendant and school board are still pretty sexist.”

  Doug called out, “Isn’t she dressed yet?”

  “We’re coming,” Maude said. She touched Lucinda, trying with what little witch powers she had left to see what the woman was. The woman was tough to the bone, a witch hater, a brother lost to witches.

  Maude got in the backseat. Doug kissed Lucinda on the cheek and squeezed her arm, then they drove for pizza. Five years ago, the only pizza in Bracken County had been frozen.

  Lucinda said, “You must see Reverend Springer’s triptych.”

  Maude drove by the modern building built where Luke and Betty’s house had been to the Reverend Julian Springer’s house on the road behind the highway. The little shack was gone, but on the lot was a brick ranch house with an almost incongruous wooden front porch across the whole front of the house.

  No welfare crazy could afford such a place. But the architecture was just slightly odd enough to make her stop to look at it. It wasn’t quite a brick ranch house. The corners were beveled. After looking a few moments more, Maude thought she saw designs in the textures and colors of the brick facing. The Reverend Springer came out on the porch. He was dressed in canvas pants, various colors of paint staining them, and a clean plaid shirt.

  Maude said, “I always remembered you in a suit.”

  “Makes a mess to paint in a suit, just like it ruins a suit to wear to fill a grave,” Springer said. “I heard you came out. Come in.”

  Another man, a mid-thirties black man in jeans and an expensive sweater, came out behind Springer. Maude wondered who he was. The man said, “Julian, do you know this woman?”

  “Been knowing Maude for many a year,” Springer said. “She knew me when I was a street preacher in Berkeley.”

  The other man stiffened. “I’m Dr. Peterson.” The accent was Mid-Adantic, touch of New England.