by Kim Powers
“Just feelin’ guilty ‘cause I’ve been neglectin’ the graves. Let’s get on with it.”
They continued walking, Nelle on the lookout, Tom on the lookout at her, their shoes sucking at the mud. He’d buried half the people in here, and knew the secrets they’d taken with them to their graves. Even though he wasn’t a Catholic priest, he’d been their father confessor. He wanted to tell Nelle it wasn’t too late for her to tell him her secrets, especially the secret of what was scaring her so much on this hallowed ground, but he couldn’t find the words.
Neither could she.
Words: they were the things both of them knew best, and now neither one of them could find the right ones.
Nelle’s first trip to the cemetery had come long before her family started being buried there, when six-year-old Truman dragged her there by the hand. It was to the funeral of the man who’d been pulled out of Hatter’s Mill Pond after drowning and being chomped on by water snakes. (The “chomped on” part—that was something else Truman had dreamed up.) The dead man had been a worker at the mill; his demise was said to be an accident, although Truman and Nelle, having read one too many police gazettes at the barbershop, never saw anything as a straightforward accident. It was so much more exciting to imagine everything was a murder, or a conspiracy.
They used the word without knowing what it meant.
They didn’t know the “Snake Man,” as they’d taken to calling him; his burial was just something to do, a way to pass a hot Saturday afternoon when there weren’t enough nickels for the movies. It would be Nelle’s first funeral, something her parents would have skinned her alive for doing if they’d ever found out. She almost got caught when she conceded to the solemnity of the occasion by wearing a clean T-shirt under her overalls; that set off so many suspicions she almost spilled the beans. Truman wore a starched, all-white linen outfit; nobody was suspicious of him because that’s what he always wore.
By the time they got to the ceremony, the minister was in full swing, his oration having taken him just inside the Pearly Gates but not yet to the feet of the Heavenly Throne. Truman and Nelle were forced to stand at the back of the crowd that was gathered around the coffin, but they wouldn’t stay there for long: Truman was desperate to see what the Snake Man looked like, and what the mortician—another one of his newfound favorite words—had done to reduce the swelling Truman imagined had overtaken the body, and hopefully the face.
“I want to see his eyes; see if they froze up looking into the Jaws of Death, or if they’re just puffy from all the venom. I know I can tell the difference.”
“. . . and just how you gonna do that? They’ll know we’re not kin.”
Indeed. The Snake Man was black, and the assembled mourners were shunted off to a small, enclosed parcel of the cemetery just for colored people.
This time, Truman and Nelle were even more of a minority than they usually were.
Of course, Truman already had the whole thing planned out.
“There’s a part at the end where everybody files past the coffin to pay their last respects, before they cover it up. Just follow the crowd; everybody’ll be wailing away so much they won’t notice two more bodies, even if they are lily white like us.”
They waited for the final lines of “The Old Rugged Cross” to be sung, then made their way up front. The victim’s face and eyes were indeed puffy; it hadn’t been just Truman’s runaway imagination. Snake Man was even a little bit green, underneath the already dark skin, or maybe that was Nelle’s runaway imagination, looking at her first dead body.
Truman immediately began ruminating on how it must have felt: that first puncture bite from the snake’s fangs, the chomp the old mill hand must have felt at the same time he was gulping water, trying to bat the snake away and swallowing even more water, and thrashing, and even after he went unconscious, what it was like in his cells and skin as they absorbed water and began expanding like sponges . . .
(And they wondered how Truman could have written something like In Cold Blood. Nelle laughed to herself, thinking back to that first funeral. He’d been writing it since he was six years old.)
The singing over, the crying in its last throes, people soon began drifting away, but Truman wanted to see the ritual through to the bitter end: the coffin lowered into the open grave, the dirt shoveled on top. He and Nelle waited until everyone was gone, even the family, and the field hands had started dumping in the dark, loamy earth on top of the plain wooden coffin. What a dead, dull sound it made, like heavy, muddy raindrops about to burst; Truman scooped up a handful and tossed it in himself, closing his eyes so he could remember how to describe the sound later, in the little reporter’s pad he always carried with him.
“Swear on it,” he said, in a passion, to Nelle. “Swear you’ll never tell another soul about our being here, our very first funeral. I want it to be just ours, forever and ever . . .”
“I swear.” Somehow, even at that young age, Nelle understood the importance of keeping promises.
They touched together the fingers that had already shed blood. Their pact was done, but Nelle wasn’t.
“What if he wakes up inside, and starts scratchin’ on the lid of the coffin to get out?”
“That’s impossible. They drained all his blood out and pumped him full of something that would kill him outright, even if he wasn’t already dead.”
“I hope they do that to me.”
“They do it to everybody.”
“I don’t wanna wake up in no coffin, tryin’ to scratch my way out. I’d rather scratch my eyeballs out, so I couldn’t see how dark and scary it was.”
Then and there, Nelle decided she wanted no part of being put in a coffin and buried in the ground; she wanted to be set on fire and turned into glistening white ash, to be scattered all over town. She wanted everything about her to be returned to the earth, and the ashes of every page she’d ever write incinerated as well, indistinguishable from her very remains. Her letters to Brother, the books the world never saw. All of her, scattered to the four winds, instead of trapped in a prison of pink-lined satin.
It would feel good to be set so free.
Almost undone by the sensation of memory, of flight, of being transformed into a hundred million snowflakes of bone and ash, Nelle lost her balance and reached out to the Snake Man’s tombstone to keep from falling.
Tom rushed over. “You still taking that vertigo medicine?” he said, as he took her free arm and guided her to sit on top of the tall stone.
“I’m fine. P.S. Just remind Alice I wanna be cremated, no matter what kind of fuss she makes.”
Tom watched as she closed her eyes and rubbed the Snake Man’s marker, the marble so worn over by verdant green moss it was almost hidden from view. She always sought out the grave and offered a prayer of contrition whenever she was there. All these years later, she was still making up for that first petty crime, of being an interloper at a stranger’s funeral. Now, she knew how sacred funerals were, having attended so many; they weren’t to be taken lightly.
She opened her eyes and made a quick sweep over the area, looking for—she still didn’t know what. It wasn’t easy being a detective with a man of the cloth looking on, but she couldn’t let Tom know what she was up to. She had to find whatever she was looking for on her own, and with that in mind, she patted the Snake Man good-bye and moved on to her own family plot.
She could find it blindfolded, and with every sense gone: take away her sight, she’d smell her way there. Take away sight and smell, she’d listen to the particular whistle of the wind as it zigzagged through the tombstones and find the right place. Take away her ability to hear and taste and smell, and even walk, and she’d be able to crawl her way there, bearing gifts of remembrance: a jelly jar filled with wildflowers, a piece of candy or caramel cake, even a simple, polished stone she’d pick up on her way there. It wasn’t insanity, to her mind, but pure Southern manners: you never went empty-handed when you went calling. Today, she�
�d brought the letter she had just written to Ed; she’d put it on top of the marker for a while, let it soak up his presence, then take it back, to her own file cabinet burial plot at home.
Maybe she’d take more of him back with it.
Nelle and Tom arrived in front of the row of three: Mother, Brother, Father, in that order.There were spaces next to them for the other sisters, but Nelle would be declining that invitation, thank you very much. Let them scatter her ashes over the golf course. They kept begging for an invitational named in her honor; her ashes would be as close as they got.
Tom stood next to her, his fingers intertwined with hers for an appropriate interval of silent prayer, then he walked away, allowing Nelle her privacy—although not before he saw her glance nervously around yet again. Even as he wandered off, looking for inspiration for a new sermon in God’s natural wonders, he kept a watchful eye on his old friend, who in turn kept a watchful, nervous eye on everything around her.
If somebody was going to shoot her, with a gun or a camera, there was little she could do about it. She’d made the decision on her own to come to this place; now, she’d let go and let the place take her wherever it wanted to. Inevitably, it was back to the darkest time of her life, when she buried her family one by one.
Her mother played piano and organ at the local church, so it was strange not to hear her playing one of them at her very own funeral. (Of course she couldn’t; she was dead. It took Nelle a beat to remember that.) Some other woman, someone Nelle didn’t know, was doing it, pumping out “The Old Rugged Cross” yet again.
It was a very popular song.
Nelle was twenty-five, but it was only the second funeral she had ever attended, after the Snake Man’s.
Her mother lay in a rosewood coffin lined with pink satin, her white powdered skin and hair glowing almost red-orange from all the lights focused on her. The air seemed to get warmer the closer Nelle got to the coffin; when she finally reached it, she stared at the face, praying for the lips to move, or the eyes to twitch, one last time.
Five impossible weeks later, Nelle would be asked to repeat the same procession, step by step, this time to bury her brother. He had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm when he was just thirty, and Nelle five years younger.
Coming back, to plan the funeral of the one who had planned the funeral.
It was unimaginable.
Inside that viewing room, the very same place her mother had lain, Nelle had to work her courage up slowly, in increments, before she could look at him. Moving flower arrangement by arrangement, and there were many, for her brother had been very beloved, she got nearer and nearer the coffin, all the while wondering if his brain had hurt when it exploded. Still not able to take in the coffin, she instead took in the elements of the formal mourning room, to calm herself. Breathing slowly, forcing herself to breathe at all, she studied the walls, then the artwork on them, then the damask-covered couches and chairs, and only after she had completed a thorough inspection of those did she even allow her gaze to move to the closed lower half of Ed’s coffin, and only then to her brother’s body inside: his hands resting by his sides, his stomach, his torso, his neck, and then, finally, his face.
How still, how completely unlike her brother it was, no trace remaining of anything that had once been alive. The difference between that, and this . . . nothing—a body that looked as if it had never moved in the world at all, never played with her as a child, never had children himself—was staggering.
This body was so dead it didn’t even know its soul was missing.
On an impulse—something to do with her hands, to keep them from tearing out her hair and shoving handfuls of it at Heaven in fury—Nelle put her hands in the pocket of her suit jacket and found a dusty peppermint that had come out of its wrapping. (Where had that come from? Probably her mother’s funeral, just five weeks earlier. It was the last time Nelle had worn the suit.) She put that lonely peppermint in the coffin, next to her brother; it had been their favorite candy as children, and it would sustain him on his next journey.
It was all she could do not to crawl into the coffin herself.
“Flights of angels, sing thee to thy rest.”
Those were her final words to him.
She’d never known what they meant until then.
Mother, Father, Brother.
Three graves, three unbearable sets of memories, one set of plastic flowers, in front of Ed’s tombstone.
Who put those there?
Not her, not Alice.
Having nothing at all there was better than plastic flowers.
Nelle bent down to pull them out, the same pose she had been in when that last picture was taken, and pulled up clumps of mud along with the plastic stems. They came realistically complete with their own molded thorns.
She jerked her hand away, pricked.
But it wasn’t just the thorns: it was another box, hidden behind the plastic flowers, just like the one that had been left on her porch, wrapped in the same blank brown paper.
She couldn’t have been any more shaken if Ed’s very arm had shot up through the earth and grabbed her by the throat.
She grabbed at the package like a dog at a bone, a bone with meat on it, and ripped the paper off. Underneath was another cardboard shell, this one covered with a different assortment of pictures, all in miniature: blades of grass, a tree in the distance, a horse rearing up, and one long, rectangular tombstone of granite with four mounds of earth in front of it.
Something flickered in her brain—her racing, skyrocketing brain—but she didn’t stop to think what it was before she pulled open the top.
Inside, as before, a tiny, hand-carved coffin.
She didn’t even take the time to look inside, for what other pictures might be awaiting her, but struggled to get up and yell to Tom that they had to go.
“Now.”
These were the graves of people she loved.
Somebody had transgressed here.
Somebody had transgressed them.
“Get me outta here. Quick.”
As Nelle tried to hide the sin in her purse, Tom came rushing. “Dear precious Lord, what in the heavens is wrong? You don’t look at all well. I turn my back for a second, and . . .”
“Just take me home. Please. I can’t stay here. I don’t know if I can ever come back here again.”
She hated whoever had made her feel that way.
Alice had to hurry, while her sister was digging up graves.
On the front porch, Alice had seen her sister hide something behind her back, something else that had come in that package from Hell. This was too small a house for secrets, secrets between two sisters. There had been far too many secrets for the last umpteen years.
Alice Lee didn’t miss anything; she deserved her own book for everything she had witnessed.
“Old Women and Their Tennis Shoes,” that would be a good title for the autobiography of Alice, the great author’s sister.
No, “Old Women in Their Tennis Shoes, Who Sneak Around Where They Shouldn’t,” that would be an even better title—a more honest title—because that’s exactly what Alice was doing right now, sneaking around in her sister’s attic lair, the moment she was gone. Alice, who as a lawyer had sworn on more oaths and documents than anyone standing, had just broken the ultimate oath she’d made to her sister years ago, by violating the private space she said she’d never enter.
And it wasn’t her first time.
She could pretend she was searching for some long-lost document, or Christmas ornaments that had been stuck up in the attic (even though Christmas was months away). Alice, who could rationalize anything with her lawyer’s mind, could even persuade herself she was there for her sister’s safety, and her own: if some crazy person was running around sending them even crazier things, then Alice had a right to know, and protect them accordingly. She wanted to know if she was about to be murdered in her sleep, or if somebody was going to send her a coffin with her name on it.
But she wouldn’t take it, she would tell you that right now. She’d march it right back to the post office—after giving the postman who’d delivered it a tongue lashing—and say, “You can ship this right on back to wherever it came from, and I shudder to think where, because I am not at home now or ever to receive any such thing.”
Oh, yes, Alice Lee could play like she was protecting her family and looking at tiny coffins that had come unsolicited in the mail, but she knew the real reason she was here: to see what her sister had been up to for the last twenty-five years.
Was there another book up here or not?
She was as curious as the rest of the world, hand-carved coffin be damned.
Even she didn’t know what her sister got up to when she came up here, and they lived under the same roof. Alice would hear the peck peck peck of the same typewriter Nelle had had all these years and wonder, was that the new book, or just the same old answers to the same old fan letters? Had she ever written another one, after the first? She’d told plenty of people she was working on one, and even had an idea for a third one.
Were they all lies?
No.
It wasn’t her business what her sister did—or didn’t do.
She was ashamed of herself for even thinking such a thing.
Get on with what she had come for: what had Nelle Harper hidden behind her back, down there on the porch?
The little coffin, now resting on Nelle’s desk.
She picked it up, then immediately dropped it, thinking what if the police wanted to fingerprint it, and found her fingerprints on it, then hauled her off. (She didn’t watch TV, but she heard the stories; she knew anything was possible.)
But from underneath the coffin, she’d seen it, what she guessed Nelle Harper had hidden from her: two photographs, torn in half and then Scotch-taped back together. She picked them up, too curious to remember the issue of fingerprints: had they come in the mail torn up like that? She knew what they were, at least what the pictures were of: her sister Nelle, down in Kansas with that Truman, and Nelle out at the graves.
