Starve the Vulture

by Jason Carney

  “I think it’s my father,” he says. “The first time I remember hearing the word fag, he and his friends were beating some gay guy up. They left him in a ditch.”

  “Did that teach you something, mold you somehow?”

  He looks at me as if he is about to say something, pauses, then looks back down, the pen in his hand pressed against the yellow paper. Again, he looks into my face, this time he smiles. He stares at me, content, as if somewhere deep within the core of his being a light switch just flicked on. He begins to write.

  VESSELS AND GONE

  2007

  I SAT ALONE, removed from the woman in the box with her seizures and migraines that withered her into nonexistence. Feelings of regret and remorse brought me to this pseudo-sacred room of cold goodbyes to an empty vessel. Without her spirit to occupy it, her human form makes a mannequin of her flesh. The body only resembles my mother.

  She never liked funerals because everyone sobbed as they played standard church songs about being afraid of God and the heavy weight of crosses. She already knew fear and knew the heft of crosses to bear. My mother wanted a celebration at her funeral, smiles. Deborah knew death removes beauty from the vehicle sustaining life; the way our culture gathers to view the bodies of deceased loved ones made her stomach knot.

  “That’s not my grandmother,” I remembered her saying, standing over Mamaw’s casket, when I was sixteen. “My grandmother was happier than that. It’s morbid to fawn over the dead.”

  I thought the same things about my mother last night. She had not had a lover in eighteen years but her viewing was on Valentine’s Day. Large brown amoeba-shaped spots anointed the backs of her hands from her wrists to her fingers. They were a road map of menopause and twenty years of heavy medication. The coarse wrinkles that surrounded her bad eye have relaxed, no longer straining to keep control. Her skin seemed translucent. Dirty-blond hair, never longer than her shoulders during her life, rested on top of her robust frame. A foreign language of makeup had been applied to her features. Heavier than she would have liked, the blush had slid down the sunken slope of her cheeks and puddled in the folds of her neck.

  This is not my mom.

  This morning the lid is sealed, as she wanted it. The box is a light pecan color, simple in design. Just like her. The faux natural lighting of the chapel provides an artificial serenity. The wood cross, just as artificial, hovers at the head of the room as the focal point of this House of God. It seems to me presumptuous and out of place. The only holy thing in here is the sunlight; the beams angle down through the stained-glass window above her coffin.

  The sliding accordion wall on the right crinkles back. Opened, it reveals rows of folding chairs and benches. The haphazard, mismatched arrangement suggests hurry. They also expected a big crowd. Surrounded by two hundred empty seats, I fear no one else is coming.

  “I’m sorry you died alone.” Guilt runs over me. “I should have been there.” I sit talking as if her spirit lingers around the coffin. “I was not there for you like I should have been.”

  In truth, our whole relationship was a series of missed connections. I think about the loving way Freeda picked my mom up at work after a seizure and took her home. Freeda made the frequent trips to the emergency room. When my mom moved to Ft. Worth, to be closer to TCU where she finally attended college, I never helped. The resentment of my childhood kept me from the role as a helpful son. Early in my life I needed her, but she was too young, too involved in her twenties to see me through the headaches, her friends, and the depression. Later in her life she needed me, but I was too angry to be concerned. She fell silent. I fell short.

  “I wish you would’ve shown up more.” I regret having told her to stop making surprise visits. “You never needed to call, you’re my mom.” I see my selfishness. I was too busy with my own life to give her respect.

  I remember the unhappiness of her life before the surgery. She did not. My resentment didn’t permit second chances. Her memory did not hold onto regrets. I was proud of her accomplishments; the only ill words I spoke about her I spoke to her. Our whole family knew what a bitch Deb could be, and we teased each other at family gatherings. Betty Bitch was her nickname. She boasted of living up to it. Nine times out of ten, she won her arguments. You could never tell her she was wrong.

  “You remember bursting through the bathroom door, the Friday night you had to leave happy hour?” I speak directly to the coffin. A common story for us to share, we traded laughter at our shortcomings, our bonds forged in yelling and pain. Now our bonding is the ghostless air of this sanctuary.

  She had called Ann to pick me up and let me spend the night while she went out. She did not tell me. When Ann came by our home to pick me up, I was not there. Debbie’s plans interrupted, Ann told her it was not her job to hunt for me. She came home in a fury. I was ten, and it was the last time I cried when my mother hit me.

  “I swear you didn’t tell me Ann was picking me up. Why else would I have been at Clark’s house?” I try to justify my position, twenty-seven years and one dead participant after the fact. “I thought you were going to kill me,” I chuckle. “Remember, you told me—you would calm down if I just unlocked the door.” I pause for a moment, drifting back to that day. I stood in the bathroom for over twenty minutes; she tried to break through the door. She lost her mind several times in the process. “All I remember are the hands around my neck the moment I unlocked the door.” The laughter turns to a stutter. “Wh-why did we always f-fight?”

  The echo of my question rings through the beams of the vaulted ceiling. Startled by my own voice, I break my communion with the dead. I hear voices mingling at the entry of the long hallway leading to the chapel. The pallbearers have started to arrive. I hear my uncles shaking hands with them as they receive instructions and red roses for their lapels from the staff. Freeda is asking for me.

  “Anyone seen Jason?”

  The rest of my immediate family, dressed in bright colors, have gathered in a conference room back in the business offices. Expertly, the staff adorned in top-dollar suits and rehearsed sales-pitch smiles, shuffled us into this cramped space as soon as we arrived, two hours before the ceremony. They make me uncomfortable. Condolence muffins and Sam’s Club bottled water in hand, the salespeople told us to just relax.

  “It’s best if the guests don’t see us before we make our entrance into the service,” one of the grief-relief team members suggested.

  “I’m not staying here. I need air,” I said as I left.

  We are not the bride and groom at a wedding, nor the graduating class, nor the champion coming out of the dressing room. They want to parade us as people of note, dressed in nice suits and respectful demeanors. I never liked parades. I never liked salespeople. I like being alone.

  “Anyone seen Jason?” my grandmother continues.

  “He’s not in the bathroom,” one of my cousins offers.

  “He might be outside smoking. He likes to walk around, check his car,” Craig interjects. Over the years, Craig and I have remained close. He is a private investigator, a proper citizen, a homeowner in a good community, and a loving family man to his wife and kid. I never would have survived this life without him. “Tell him I’m here when you find him.”

  I hesitate before joining them. The memories of the four funerals I have already attended in my life come back as I sit in the chapel across from my mother’s remains. It seems like death is the only thing that brings our whole family together these days. I run through the series of greetings and hugs I received upon reconnecting with family members, most of who have become strangers over the years. I dread the platitudes.

  Don’t worry, she is in heaven. She is with Mamaw and Papaw. Deb is not sick anymore. Your mother loved you. She was too young to die. She lived a good life. She is at peace and not struggling.

  Everyone whose hands I will shake today will utter at least two of these statements. I prepare myself for this uncomfortable inevitability, less than half an ho
ur away.

  Funerals are about lessons. What can you take from the story of the deceased’s life? I knew what lessons I had taken from the lives of the dead. I laid to rest my mamaw, her life of hard work and love. Then my mother’s sister, Aunt Barbra, died in 1984. Her death taught me the importance of angels. Every time I step onto a stage to perform, I ask the universe to allow her spirit to be present with me. My grandfather went next; he gave me my ability to see into situations, and the goal of never putting off my dreams. All things can vanish in an instant. Papaw’s death was about going home. Now my mother, her death is about rest and the victory of surrender. The selfishness of my pain blocks the truth those closest to her want to speak.

  “Jason, you okay?” My grandmother Freeda stands at the glass doorway of the chapel. “Honey, you need to come back here now.”

  “Just checking things out.” I shift, uncomfortable, anxious. “You think she would like this?”

  “Hon, it is beautiful. It was her time, Jase.”

  “I have a hard time seeing fifty-four as her time,” I say, standing. “That is being robbed of life.” I stare at the flower arrangement that covers the top of the coffin.

  Freeda buried her youngest daughter twenty-three years ago. This is the second child she has buried. Remarkably, she looks unfazed.

  I was fourteen when we buried Aunt Barbra; an aneurysm in her head burst two days after she gave birth to my cousin Robbie. My grandmother awoke to a strange, muffled cry. She went downstairs to discover the horror of Barbra slouched over, one of her large breasts crushing her newborn son, pinned nursing deep within her lap. Freeda struggled to free him from her seized-up unconscious daughter. Barbra held on for two weeks in the ICU.

  The night we said goodbye, her whole family gathered around her. Her eyes scoured our faces, unable to speak, her blue eyes desperate and pleading for remembrance beyond what brief moments we shared here. Her half smile connected with mine; as a fourteen-year-old I could only wince and look away. I could not ease her pain, and the limitations of this life were too uncomfortable. I did not want to take it on. An inability to face her gaze haunted me for years. I recognize this same pain in my grandmother when we speak of Barbra. Freeda still cries for her with a guilt-riddled mourning, knowing she too looked away.

  “I am sorry Deb’s life ended so early.” Freeda smiles.

  “Mom was blessed,” I say, not believing the words.

  “Sissy and now Deb. With Sis it was so quick; we had no time to prepare . . . We could feel it hanging around with Deb. Your mom lived longer than she . . . We got lucky to keep her.” Tears swell and roll down her face. “She changed after her surgery—more focused and responsible.” She pauses. “Didn’t remember a damn thing, though.” We both laugh just a little as she dries her eyes.

  Freeda wears her Sunday suit, a light top trimmed in blue with a dark blue skirt. A large flower that smells of an old woman’s perfume is pinned to her chest. Her hair has not changed in thirty-five years. Short and a not-so-natural brown, its color and style elevate her smile. Smiling is one of her strengths. Practiced in the art of dignity, she never shows the scars sewn upon her heart.

  “Hey, look there, Jason, what just pulled into the parking lot. Oh my Lord, praise God.”

  A large yellow school bus unloads its passengers in the parking lot. Teachers and students from West Mesquite High School have come to pay final respects to my mom.

  “Look how many kids there are,” she says.

  One after another they file off the bus in nice dresses and button-down shirts, all of them celebrating the life of Mrs. B.

  “She would want you to be honest today, when you speak about her,” she tells me, brushing the side of my head with her hand. “She was proud of you.”

  I grasp her hand, the skin spotted and clammy. Her arms are heavy and fragile. She is shrinking. For the first time, I see her as an old woman. I start to cry.

  The totality of my mother’s life comes over me. She conquered adversity—depression, domestic violence, epilepsy, migraines, asthma, and surgery for an aneurysm—more than most people could face. She went to college, fulfilled her dreams. A high school teacher in the district that made her drop out when she got pregnant. My mother not only taught political science, she also educated people to live to their fullest potential.

  Pride overcame me in joyful tears. What she was unable to give me early in life she made amends for in the lives of other children. This was my mother, a great and awkward woman. She never asked for mercy.

  * * *

  The sky is the brightest blue. The day looks like eighty-five degrees, but the temperature is twenty-seven. Everyone waits in the vehicles for the pallbearers to take their places. Spring a few weeks away, the fierce bite of the wind shakes the leafless branches.

  This act is one of the greatest things you can do for a person, I think, watching the six men I chose to carry my mother’s coffin. A stoic purpose upon their faces, they bring it to the awaiting grave. Everyone steps out into the freezing February blue-sky sun.

  All of the flowers situated around the coffin, under a tent with folding chairs but no walls, fight with the elements. A few potted plants blow over. The large flower wreaths that stand on tripods launch their blooms like colorful rockets into the jet stream of wind, across the tent with its temporary Astroturf carpet. A large branch falls from a fir tree to the right, landing on the car parked beneath it. We all huddle close together, creating a shield, deflecting the wind as we say our goodbyes.

  “Consecrate this body . . .” the pastor speaks. He has never met my mother.

  The simple prayer lasts three minutes and the graveside service ends. The crowd leaves quickly; only the closest of family and friends remain. The conversations turn to catching up on each other’s lives and less about remembrances of Deb. We discuss the proper way to mourn after a funeral—margaritas and Mexican food. My mouth grows dry with the everyday-life feeling that takes over the family members left at the tent; uncomfortable in my suit, I remember the change of clothes I brought for after the service. I fear this uncomfortable-suit sensation will hang on me the rest of my life. I watch as cars filled with students file out of the cemetery, their faces smiling, their heads swaying with the song on the radio.

  She will stay here, I think. I catch myself in the tragic false hope of flesh. She is gone, not here.

  One of the large yellow school buses backfires as it rounds the curve toward the front gate; it startles the birds that scatter off in a frenzy. I think about the ride over from the funeral home. Each automobile had its headlights turned on, and drove slowly, in an unbroken chain, the procession escorted by rent-a-cops on Harley-Davidson motorcycles stretched back as far as I could see. We rolled through all the intersections, headed toward the highway. Total strangers, who normally flip you off for going too slowly or cutting them off, pulled over and patiently waited for the friends and family of the deceased to pass. I found it funny that one of the few times in a person’s life where your race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or class means nothing is at funerals. We lay each other to rest with the respect deserved by all humans.

  The day unfolded beyond my wildest expectations. We celebrated Deborah.

  * * *

  Now I look at the ground around her grave; the markers for family members whom I knew from my youth surround us.

  Grandma and Grandpa Arnold over there, my grandfather’s parents. They died when I was young. He used to do a magic trick where he pulled quarters from my ears.

  Aunt Millie and Uncle Clyde. She was a mean drunk who used to call from Arkansas late at night to cuss out whomever picked up the phone. “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch asshole, put J.W. on the fucking phone, smart-ass kid,” she’d told me one night when I was eight, upon saying hello.

  I thought about Millie’s old age, after J.W. and Clyde had died. All alone and sick, my grandmother helped her move down to Mesquite and took care of this vile woman. The years of drinking and anger withere
d Millie into a feeble and sickly ghost of a person. She proved what you reap is what you sow. She rented an apartment down the street from Freeda and sat at Freeda’s dining table more than her own. I found her one night in the upstairs hall bathroom. She’d defecated all over herself and the floor, sobbing, in another world. “Where is my mommy? I need my mommy,” her voice echoed through my head.

  She thought I was her father. Her whole body caved and flinched away from my arms as I went to help. It took Freeda to convince her I was not going to hit her. I saw the damage that caused her sickness: the birthplace within her mind where hostility formed, her burden expelled all over the white tile and cream grout. My grandmother and I washed that woman. We both found her hard to stomach.

  My mom will rest between Barbra and J.W. Both graves are now covered by dug-up dirt and Astroturf, under where we stand. My mom will not burden anyone, she will not grow old and sick like Millie. For the first time in her life, she is safe.

  Tears driven by the wind are forced across the surface of my eyes. My vision blurs, colder than regret. I take in as much as I can. I resolve not to return here. Some people believe in flowers at gravesides, conversations held with tombstones, thinking that if you cling to flesh it resurrects loved ones. I do not. As my family gathers up the arrangements and plants to take with us, I know I do not need a graveside to speak with my mother.

  She is finally at peace, resting far away in what I choose to call heaven. Far away from this box on the stand, far from the seizures and migraines that drove her flesh into this earth, and far from this feeling of remorse and regret that has brought me to this grim cemetery for a cold, last goodbye with her empty vessel. I grab a handful of roses off the casket and awkwardly walk away.

  SIMPLE MOMENTS

  1981