Graceland

by Bethan Roberts

  ‘You OK, Elvis?’ Billy asks.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  If he finds some stranger in his house, he means to kill them.

  In the kitchen, he spots a crack in the window. It’s small, and runs across the corner of one pane, but the sight of it sets his heart jumping. He wrenches open the back door and his land stretches before him; he can just see the outline of the fence and the tall hands of the trees. He holds his breath, listening to the night. There’s the long wail of the goods train. The rustle and whirr of insects. A dog yelping somewhere. A faint hum from the lights.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he calls.

  Only the dog’s bark comes back at him.

  ‘I got a gun here!’ he yells, touching his hip. ‘I ain’t afraid to use it!’

  The insects carry on singing, regardless.

  Elvis slams the door and calls Billy in.

  ‘You see this?’ he says, pointing to the crack. ‘Looks like somebody’s tried to get in here. We’d better call your daddy. Maybe the police, too.’

  Billy stands by his side, examining the glass.

  ‘Naw,’ he says. ‘Daddy done told me what happened here. Aunt Gladys fell, and cracked the window.’

  ‘She fell?’

  ‘That’s what he said. Went clean over. She was getting up to fix herself a drink and she blacked out.’

  Elvis says nothing.

  ‘Daddy was fixing to get it done, but nobody figured you’d be home so soon,’ Billy adds.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Just before Aunt Gladys and Uncle Vernon went out to Fort Hood, I reckon.’There’s a pause, then Billy says, ‘Didn’t nobody tell you?’

  ‘Billy,’ says Elvis, ‘nobody tells me nothing about what goes on around here no more. Maybe you can be my eyes and ears on the ground, huh?’ He slaps his cousin on the back, making him jolt forward. ‘Could you do that for me?’

  Billy nods, slowly, his young face lighting at the challenge.

  They make up a pallet on the bedroom floor for Billy, then Elvis takes his sleeping pills. He hopes that Jesse will come visit him tonight. He hasn’t heard from his brother in a long time. But, in fact, as soon as he closes his eyes, he’s sucked into an empty, black sleep.

  Once Elvis had left, the nurse gave Gladys something to help her through the night.

  When she begins the climb back into consciousness, the hospital room has darkened, and she has no clue where she is until she hears Vernon’s snores coming from the cot beside her bed. She reaches out for him, but he’s too far away; she has only enough energy to move her arm, and it flaps uselessly in the empty air.

  The effort has her closing her eyes again, and her mind slips back to East Tupelo. She’s running after Elvis, pushing through the thick branches of the pines. The moon is high and yellow and the air is hot on her naked calves as she crashes down the hill. She’s going so fast she can barely breathe; her heart hammers, not only in her chest, but in her ears, her throat, her eyes, and still she can’t reach her boy, even though she can see him sleepwalking through the dark trees, towards the highway. His steps are quick and deliberate, as if he’s fully awake and has chosen this crazy path. All she wants is to bundle him to the ground, drag him into the safety of the ditch, cover his skinny body with her own. Gladys tries to run faster, to call her son’s name. But she hasn’t enough breath, and Elvis keeps on striding away until she has no choice but to watch him disappear through the branches, towards the highway.

  Something presses on her chest. Pain scorches her insides, and she strains to lift her head so she can catch her breath. There must be air up there, somewhere. But her body will not budge one inch, although she can hear the trundle of trolley wheels from the corridor, and Vernon’s cough, and another sound, a sharp rasp, like scissors slicing through thick cloth. That sound comes again, and the pressing on her chest is terrible now, as though she is trapped beneath something cold and heavy. A ploughshare, maybe. A light comes on and Vernon is looming above her, grey stubble in the pits of his cheeks, pink threads in the whites of his eyes. The scissors make another decisive cut and she realises this noise is coming from her. Vernon calls for the nurse and grips her hand. He begs Jesus to help her, to help them both.

  As Vernon hollers, Gladys tries to focus on the pink pitcher on her bedside table, imagining it full of milk for Elvis. His favourite: butch with a little molasses in it. She can almost taste that creamy liquid in her mouth. She’d like to say the words, Here’s your butch, Elvie, but the scissoring is the only sound that comes, and the pressure is so intense now that she cannot move her lips, cannot breathe, cannot tell Vernon to quit yelling for the goddamn nurse and holler for her boy instead.

  He’s woken by the phone. It drills into the quiet house with absolute insistence. Elvis knows it means bad news, even before he’s aware of Billy rushing into his office to pick it up. There can be no other reason for calling at three a.m. He turns on the light and leaps from his bed, meaning to snatch the phone from his cousin. But then Billy dashes back into the room.

  ‘That was the hospital,’ he says, his voice oddly flat. ‘They said you might get over quick as you can. Aunt Gladys is bad.’

  From Billy’s pale face, and the way he’s looking at him as if Elvis is the one who’s sick, Elvis understands it’s useless to ask questions. So he goes to his closet and grabs his mama’s favourite of his shirts: white, with a row of delicate frills running down the centre. He imagines that if he wears this shirt, it might in some way prevent the worst from happening.

  Billy has to help him button it, his hands are shaking so badly.

  From the end of the tiled hospital corridor, he hears his father’s long, high-pitched wail.

  Seeing his son, Vernon bars the door to Gladys’s room with his body. ‘Don’t go in there,’ he says. ‘She’s gone. You can’t go in.’

  Elvis takes his father by the shoulders and throws him aside.

  His mother lies completely still beneath a white sheet. The room is full of grey machinery: metal trolleys holding abandoned pumps and wires and tubes, plastic monitors on wheels, and the large canopy of an oxygen tent, pulled back now from Gladys’s head like a theatre curtain. And everything is switched off. The only sound is Elvis’s own shuddering breath.

  He rushes to his mama’s side.

  ‘Mama,’ he whispers, ‘wake up, baby.’

  Her eyes are closed, her lips fixed in a downturn. He licks a finger and rubs away a crust of saliva from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘I came back,’ he says, ‘I came back for you! Come on, Mama!’

  He unpeels the sheet and gazes at the solid lump of her body. Her nightgown is pink, printed with tiny roses, square at the neck and gathered on the shoulders. It is not one he recognises. He takes her by the upper arms and attempts to shake her, but she will not move for him. So he climbs onto the bed and shoves his arm beneath her back so he can haul her towards him. The weight of her is a shock, and he can clasp her only for a few seconds before he has to let her already stiffening limbs fall back on the bed. He puts his face to her bosom, wanting to bury himself there, to sleep in her arms as he used to, but nothing is as it ought to be. His mama smells sour, her flesh is cold, and he feels only the scratchy cotton of her brand new nightgown against his own cheek.

  Then he begins to holler, and he keeps hollering until Vernon, Billy and several nurses drag him from the room.

  The next day, still in the white frilled shirt, Elvis sits on the steps of Graceland with his daddy, weeping for his dead mother. When they came home from the hospital, he’d tried to walk through his front door, but the journey from car to porch had seemed so long, and the heat was so heavy, that he’d sat on the steps instead.

  The cardinals chatter brightly in the trees. The stone lions look on impassively. From the road comes the sound of cars pulling up to his gates, full of people eager to know the news. Vernon and Elvis clasp each other, and sweat, and cry. His daddy’s breath smells terrible, like a hog�
��s, but Elvis pulls him closer so their pain can become one sound.

  Some men from the press stand in the drive and take photographs. Elvis doesn’t know who let them in, but every time he thinks he must tell them to go, his daddy starts to cry again, and so does he, and he cannot think of any words to say, let alone speak them aloud. So the men get their pictures.

  Two days later, Anita comes.

  ‘Come on,’ Elvis says, taking her by the hand and leading her into the mansion, ‘Come say hi to Mama.’

  When the men from the funeral parlour had carried in Gladys’s copper-and-silver casket, placing it in the opening between the music and living rooms, Elvis had felt almost happy to see her again. Now the air is rich with the headachy stench of lilies, which cover the top of the grand piano. Next to the instrument, the glass lid of the casket is propped open. Gladys is dressed in the lavender-blue crêpe gown he’s chosen, and her hair has been touched up and set nice. No greys in there now. Her lips have been painted pink and the diamond drops he bought are in her ears. He’s aware of Anita drawing a sharp breath as he leans over the casket to kiss his mother’s cold cheek. Gladys’s skin is so hard now against his lips, it’s as if she’s moulded from wax, and instead of her smell there is a chemical aroma.

  ‘Look at her little sooties,’ he says to Anita. ‘Ain’t they pretty? So delicate, just like yours, baby.’

  Anita doesn’t seem to want to look. Instead, she touches his arm and says, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘She’s with God now,’ says Elvis.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘And Jesse, too.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I can’t believe she left me.’

  ‘Elvis,’ says Anita in a soft voice, still clasping his arm, ‘your mama didn’t leave you. She passed on.’

  Elvis steps away from her and clutches the edge of the casket. ‘She’s right here, though, ain’t she?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘She’ll always be right here in this house. Graceland is her house, Little.’

  Anita twists her hands together and gazes at the window. Outside, beyond the trees, hundreds of people are waiting at the gate, murmuring their loss to the policemen guarding the house. In the August heat, the flowers they’ve laid on the sidewalk are turning brown and soft.

  ‘Everything I ever did, I did for her,’ Elvis says.

  The worst thing, the thing that makes his whole body shake with fear now, is that he knows this is a lie. But he keeps saying it, trying to convince himself that his fame was nothing but a joy to Gladys, even though he suspects that it may, in some way he can’t quite fathom, have made her sick.

  Anita rubs his back, and he says it again, through chattering teeth. ‘Everything I ever did, Little. Everything.’

  ‘Everybody knows that,’ she says.

  Later that day, the Colonel comes.

  Elvis rises from the couch and is embraced by his manager’s clammy arms.

  ‘Son,’ says the Colonel, patting him on the back of the head.

  ‘Mama’s gone, Colonel,’ says Elvis. ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘I know, son, I know.’

  When he’s released, Elvis sees that the Colonel is wearing an I LIKE ELVIS button on the breast pocket of his seersucker shirt. Saying that any business was good business, he used to sell those at shows, right along with his I HATE ELVIS ones.

  ‘Mama,’ says Elvis, clasping the lip of the casket, ‘Colonel’s come to pay his respects to you.’

  The Colonel nods, briefly, towards Gladys’s body, then turns to Elvis’s father, who has slipped into the room. Vernon has freshened his pale suit with a silk necktie, and the puffy redness in his face has subsided.

  ‘Colonel,’ he says, shaking Tom Parker’s hand, ‘we just can’t get a hold on any part of this thing.’

  ‘That’s why the Colonel is here,’ says Elvis’s manager, fishing a cigar from his pocket. ‘I’m gonna take care of this for you. You don’t have to worry one bit. The Colonel will fix everything.’

  ‘Well,’ says Vernon, with a long sigh, ‘that would be more than kind.’

  The Colonel holds up a hand. ‘I ain’t doing this out of the goodness of my heart, Mr Presley. The truth is – and it’s hard to say it, but we got to face facts here – the truth is that the newspapers are gonna want a piece of this, and my aim is to protect our boy. That’s always my number-one priority.’

  Elvis sits on the couch and stares at the casket.

  ‘Which is why,’ the Colonel continues, rocking back on his heels, ‘I really think we should make this a public funeral. The members of the press will want to get their pictures of the procession and all, and nothing we can do can stop them, but if the funeral is in a public place it’ll be easier to police the whole event—’

  ‘This ain’t no event,’ says Elvis, looking up. ‘This here’s a funeral.’

  ‘And it will be the best funeral ever seen in Memphis,’ says the Colonel, lighting up his cigar, ‘as befits your mother.’

  Elvis glances at his father. ‘Mama would want the funeral right here at home.’

  Vernon sits next to him and puts his face in his hands. ‘I don’t know, son,’ he mumbles, ‘I just don’t know …’ He’s shaking his head and breathing ragged, but Elvis can tell his daddy is not crying. Not any more.

  The Colonel pats Elvis on the shoulder. ‘I don’t think your father is in any condition to deal with this, Elvis,’ he says. ‘You want your fans to be able to say goodbye to your mother, don’t you? I know they had a special relationship.’

  Elvis blinks at him.

  The Colonel puffs on his cigar and tilts his head. ‘Maybe we can talk about this later.’

  ‘Mr Parker,’ says Elvis, keeping his voice low and his fists balled in his lap. ‘I want you out of my house.’

  ‘Now, son—’ says Vernon.

  ‘Get out!’

  The Colonel sighs, opens his mouth to speak again, then seems to think better of it. Before leaving the room, he pats Vernon’s arm, and Vernon clasps his hand, hard.

  When the Colonel has left, Elvis wanders the house with Gladys’s pink housecoat in his arms. His daddy has gone out, Elvis doesn’t know where. He wonders who Vernon will become, now Gladys isn’t around to remind him who he once was. He sits on the stairs and brings the housecoat to his face, trying to breathe his mama in, terrified he will forget how she smelled, that all he will remember is the chemical whiff of her embalmed body. Sitting there, he buries his nose into the rayon, shuts his eyes, and talks to Jesse.

  Jesse, he says, silently, is she with you now? Are the two of you together?

  The only answer that comes is the hum of the air conditioning.

  Cliff, Lamar, George and Billy, and Red, who has come back to Memphis for the funeral, sit in the dining room, waiting for him to appear. Elvis doesn’t know what to say to them, so he hides in the kitchen, still holding the housecoat. Alberta pours him coffee, butters him some biscuits and stands over him until he eats. She doesn’t say a word but he can see that she’s been crying, too. As he is swallowing his coffee, which is sweet and good, he thinks of asking her to hold him. Although she is small, she looks so solid and comfortable, standing there in her maid’s apron. She doesn’t look like she’d break, if he were to touch her.

  He says, ‘Who’s gonna take care of us now, Alberta?’

  Alberta shakes her head. ‘I’m sure sorry for your loss, Mr Elvis,’ she says, clearing the plates.

  ‘I ain’t letting go of this housecoat,’ he says.

  She piles the dishes in the sink, then looks at him. ‘I ain’t asking you to,’ she replies.

  The Colonel gets his way, and Gladys’s funeral is held in the Memphis Funeral Home. The chapel is crammed with people, though Elvis barely looks at anybody. He hasn’t slept and has hardly eaten for days. It’s so hot he finds it hard to breathe. He keeps pulling at the collar of his funeral suit jacket, fighting the urge to fling the thing to the floor. During the service, Red ho
lds him around the shoulders to keep him upright and whispers to him that it will be all right. Red is the only one who says this. Everybody else, even Vernon, looks at Elvis with fear, as if they no longer know who he is. The Colonel, wearing a crumpled suit, doesn’t look at him at all. So Elvis keeps on passing notes with requests for more songs to the Blackwood Brothers, who are performing Gladys’s favourite hymns for the service. ‘Precious Memories’. ‘The Last Mile of the Way’. ‘Farther Along’. ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. ‘How Great Thou Art’. He’ll keep everybody in here for as long as it takes to get through the music.

  At the cemetery, three thousand fans stand outside in the intense heat, wanting to share something, anything, with Elvis. For the first time, he is not happy to see them. Doing his best to stay on his feet at the mouth of his mama’s grave, he has no wish to have his picture taken, or for his name to be screamed as though it is a plea for life.

  Afterwards, Dixie comes to the house with her husband, to pay her respects.

  In the hallway, the three of them stand together beneath the chandelier. Dixie’s husband is taller than Elvis, with sandy hair and a bushy moustache. His expression is fixed somewhere between terror and awe. Dixie tries to introduce him, but Elvis mumbles an apology and says, ‘Come on upstairs with me, honey. I want you to have something of Mama’s.’

  Dixie’s black dress is too short for a funeral, he thinks. But he lets it go. Her wavy hair, her lifted chin, her way of standing as if she’s about to skate across the rink, are all unchanged. He wants to get her in his room so he can hold her tight and tell her how much he needs her now. With Dixie in his arms, he might even sleep.

  Dixie hesitates, glancing at her husband.

  ‘Come on now,’ says Elvis, grabbing her hand. ‘He don’t mind.’

  She follows him up halfway. Encouraged, he catches her around the waist and whispers in her ear, ‘I know you won’t never love nobody like you love me, baby,’ which makes her wriggle free. They stand staring at each other, and he realises that she’s wearing eye make-up now, which makes her look more like the rest of the girls.