by Newman,James
They seemed to be watching me, throughout it all. But I couldn’t be sure.
Because their eyes were missing.
Mom was there. Danny, too. Mom’s hair was wet, as if she had just stepped out of the shower, but there were dark bags under her eyes and the fancy red dress she wore appeared more appropriate for a wild night on the town than the morbid show at hand. In her right hand she gripped a bottle of Jack Daniels, but it was broken in half. She brought it to her mouth every few seconds, sipped thirstily at nothing but the cold night air.
Beside Mom, Dan looked resplendent in his black suit and Florida Seminoles letter jacket. His hair was wet too, slicked back. His tie clip was shaped like an airplane. He held a basketball under one arm.
The word GONE was written on my brother’s forehead in something that resembled dried mud or shit.
Dan smiled at me, winked at me, but I did not smile back.
Cassie Rourke’s family was present too, of course, their bodies hitching with sobs and their faces glistening masks of wet sorrow in the night. They leaned over the open black chasm of the Well in the middle of the Snake River Woods as if expecting their daughter to rise from its depths at any moment, laughing and proclaiming the whole thing had been one big, malicious joke. Standing just outside of the gathering, inspecting his fingernails and occasionally trimming one with his bright white teeth as he waited for his cue, was chubby Malcolm Vaughn, owner of the Vaughn Funeral Home on Monge Street. Bernadine Fallon-Hyuck was there, too, editor-in-chief of the Midnight Sun. Also present were Hiram Bentley, Midnight’s esteemed Mayor…Dr. Sarah Ling, my hometown’s resident optometrist…not to mention old Miss Shit-Bird and her daughter Prudence Schifford, who taught English and creative writing classes up at the community college. Somewhere in the crowd I even spotted Steven Doyle, a young man who had left Midnight to join the Air Force the previous winter but had been killed during his first visit back home when a drunk driver plowed into him on I-85.
Sheriff Burt Baker showed up as well, which was no big surprise. And Henry. Their heads were bowed, but I couldn’t help but notice the way their mouths were upturned in hateful, knowing grins. Every so often, as the services progressed, they would nudge one another, snickering obscenely as if sharing some hilarious private joke.
Father McKinney’s eulogy was barely audible. His skin looked eerily bluish in the night. His hands shook as he stood before the Well, his Bible open before him.
Then I noticed it wasn’t a Bible he read from, as he laid Cassie Rourke to rest. It was a fat white tome titled the Joy of Sex.
Finally Father McKinney took a step back, closing his sacrilegious substitute for the Good Book with a THWAP of cold finality, and gestured for the mortician to do his thing.
There was no coffin. Instead, Cassie Rourke’s nude corpse was propped up on Burner in the doorway of the Old Shack. An off-white sheet speckled with dark blotches of rust-colored blood enshrouded them both. One of the dead girl’s arms flopped out when Malcolm Vaughn and two shadowy volunteers from the trees hefted her body, Burner and all, and carried her to the middle of the grove beside Father McKinney. A rust-colored maple leaf was stuck to her wrist.
Burt and Henry Baker started clapping when the men threw her down inside the Well. Up and over she went, Cassandra Belle Rourke and my bicycle as one.
The whole town followed Baker’s lead, began to applaud when they heard the splash at the bottom.
Everyone but me.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” said Father McKinney. “Welcome to the Hotel California.”
****
My pajamas were so drenched with sweat once I woke from my nightmare, several minutes passed before I realized I had pissed in my bed.
I listened for the forlorn tapping of the midnight rain against my window, but the storm had slacked off at least for the time being. The only sounds in the house were the soft tick-tick of the heating ducts beneath my bedroom window and Mom’s deep, masculine snore across the hall.
Then I smelled it. That pungent ammonia stench. My nose scrunched up. I realized I lay on a cushion of warm dampness.
I rolled over, saw the yellow discoloration of my bedspread beneath me.
“Great,” I whispered. I jumped out of bed, instantly ashamed. “Shit!”
I felt so low. Mom was going to be pissed. I could hear her already, despite how well we had gotten along earlier that night: “Jesus Christ, Kyle, didn’t you outgrow that bedwetting crap years ago?”
I rolled my eyes, sighed.
I pulled all the sheets off my bed, stripped off my pajamas, and took everything to the utility room on the other side of the house, where I threw that big ball of stinking wet cloth into our washing machine. I dumped a big scoop of detergent on top of my mess, then turned on the washer, realizing by the time it started to rumble and shake as if it were about to explode that I did not care at all if the noisy thing woke my mother this early in the morning.
Let her bitch, I figured.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Nor the last.
AUGUST 10
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The weatherman had been right. It was a beautiful day for a funeral.
On the day the people of Midnight, North Carolina laid Cassandra Belle Rourke to rest, the rain went away for a while. Of course, it came back like a bad rash later that night, after the funeral was over, but how uncanny it seemed, the way Mother Nature appeared to have planned it all out so perfectly. The clouds above Midnight had drifted away by ten or eleven a.m. that morning like curious bystanders at the scene of a violent crime, onlookers who disperse when they are convinced there really is nothing to see, and on an afternoon that should have been gloomy and gray, the sun came forth to shine upon my hometown like a heartless tormentor whose happiness mocked those gathered to mourn.
It just didn’t seem right. I almost wished the rain would return. Funerals should be held in foggy, overcast weather, days suited for black umbrellas and somber moods drenched with a constant drizzle smelling of mildew, mud, and sorrow. Yet the day we buried Cassie Rourke would have been perfect for family picnics in Washington Park. I should have been riding Burner through the streets of Midnight that afternoon, should have made my way to Bobby Wisdah’s house where we would spend all day laughing and splashing one another in his parents’ Olympic-size pool.
Instead, the citizens of Midnight had congregated beneath the clear blue skies to cover a sixteen-year-old girl with dirt…as the killer himself looked on…
****
Once again I cursed myself for leaving Burner in the woods that night as I walked across town to the Trinity Baptist Church on Tenth Street. I wondered where he was at that very moment, how long before his captor came looking for me.
It wasn’t a long walk to the church—Trinity First Baptist was less than a mile and a half from my front door, in fact—and considering the day had turned out so warm, I didn’t even wear a jacket. Every color in the town seemed twice as vivid, more alive than ever before, as the sun came out for a while and the dampness went away. I felt as if I could see into forever as I walked through town to that grand building where the majority of Midnight’s population was already gathered.
I arrived about ten minutes after the funeral began. The church doors were open, and I could hear the low drone of the preacher’s voice as I approached the building’s white brick steps. Occasional sniffles, sobs, and whimpers drifted out of there as well on the day’s warm breeze, like sorrow itself escaping from the church to spread its spores of melancholia elsewhere.
The place was packed. The pews were full, and everywhere I looked people were lined up elbow-to-elbow along the walls and against the church’s massive stained glass windows like an overdressed crowd at a Standing Room Only rock show. I blushed, my cheeks burning as I searched for a place to stand. I felt as if everyone were watching me. Finally I found an empty spot along the back wall of the church, and I squeezed in between two old ladies who smelled like tal
cum powder and butterscotch candy.
Up front, Cassandra Belle Rourke’s casket was already closed. It looked so small, I couldn’t help but think, so much shorter and oddly compact than I had imagined it would be. It was the color of marble, with the slightest hint of a girlish pink hue.
I felt claustrophobic just looking at it. Many years would pass before I understood why we spend so much money on something that will soon be covered with dirt and grass and worms.
Above and behind the coffin stood Pastor James Brady, a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair cut so short he resembled a square-headed Marine as opposed to a man of God. He wore large wire-rimmed glasses and a dark gray suit, a tie the color of dried blood. In a voice more soft and soothing than any I had ever heard he explained how death should not be a time for sadness, but a time for rejoicing. We should all be happy for Ms. Cassandra Belle Rourke, he insisted, for she now lives in a place where pain and suffering and death do not exist and never will.
Maybe I had arrived too late, and missed too much of his sermon to appreciate the context, but I could not agree with the reverend. I wanted to believe that today should be a happy day, a day in which Cassie Rourke did not cease to be but instead passed on to the most perfect place imaginable, but then Pastor Brady had not seen the things I’d seen. He had only witnessed how peaceful she looked before they closed her up forever and her soul went to be with Jesus…he had not watched, mortified, as my town’s own Judas Iscariot snapped her skinny neck like a stick…he had not seen the terrible yellow-black bruises left upon her by a frustrated young man whose mutilated member restricted him from doing the things he really wanted to do to her…
It took me only a minute or so, despite the hundreds of people gathered in that single room, to spot him. The person I hated more than anything on this Earth. He sat in the fifth pew to the right of Pastor Brady’s pulpit, beside an obese redheaded lady in a dark green dress.
Sheriff Burt Baker was not in uniform, on the day in question. He wore a bulky navy blue suit. His hair was slicked back, for once not greasy-looking but recently washed. His head was bowed as he listened to Pastor Brady’s message of hope, and every so often he nodded solemnly as if agreeing with the holy man’s words.
I glared at him, wondering how he could ever show his face at this funeral. I clenched my fists, and they turned the mottled pinkish marble color of Cassandra Belle Rourke’s casket.
It should have been him up there, I thought, lying in that cold metal box. Baker and his good-for-nothing son, locked up together in the darkness for eternity.
It wasn’t fair.
It shouldn’t have been that innocent sixteen-year-old, whose mother rocked back and forth in the front pew like a woman in the throes of a violent seizure. It shouldn’t have been the sister of that little boy in his tiny black suit and miniature blue tie, a child who did not cry but buried his face in his father’s chest and tried like hell to understand everything transpiring around him (I know where you’re coming from, kid, I wanted to say to him). It should have been Sheriff Burt Baker we committed to the earth that day…not the daughter of that sour-faced man who sat listening to pastor James Brady’s sermon with a look of unbridled rage upon his face, an expression of vengeance so out of place in a house of worship Clinton Rourke frightened me more during that moment than a million Burt Bakers combined.
None of it was right.
We shouldn’t have been there. She shouldn’t have been in that coffin.
Calvin Mooney should not have been sitting in jail, awaiting indictment for a crime he did not commit.
We all should have been at home. Happy. Enjoying the weather.
Everything was wrong.
****
After Pastor Brady’s sermon we all filed outside to the two acres of cemetery behind Trinity First Baptist. I remember how massive the whole scene appeared to my twelve-year-old eyes, how that multitude of tombstones scattered over the rolling hillside brought to mind some clever trick-with-mirrors God had performed for us in hopes of lifting our spirits on that sad, sad day. If I hadn’t known any better I might have suspected the resting places of my hometown’s dead stretched on and on into infinity, beyond the borders of my hometown. Only when I shielded my eyes from the sun did I see the rickety wooden fence beyond the rear row of graves, the immense pasture in the distance where a number of fat brown cows grazed like tiny alien figures cruelly apathetic to the rituals of humans mourning lost loved ones.
Birds chirped gaily in the treetops to our right, where the Snake River Woods flanked the eastern side of the church property about two hundred yards away. The cemetery’s grass had been mown recently, and that strong summery smell reminded me of backyard barbecues and carefree sprints through the icy spray of neighborhood sprinklers.
Cassie Rourke’s grave waited like a hungry black maw in the middle of the cemetery, in the slender shadow of a large white tombstone. Twelve folding chairs were arranged to the left of it in two neat rows, for the decedent’s immediate family, and a thick blanket of faux grass discreetly covered the pile of dirt that would soon cover Cassie Belle Rourke.
PRECIOUS DAUGHTER, TAKEN TOO SOON, AWAITS US IN GOD’S ARMS, read the fancy cursive text upon the dead girl’s shiny new headstone. CASSANDRA BELLE ROURKE: SEPT. 9, 1961- AUG. 5, 1977.
Four young men in matching black suits carried her casket out to the cemetery. They moved so slowly, it seemed as if hours passed between the time they came through the church’s doors and when they eased Cassie Rourke’s pinkish coffin onto that rusty-looking contraption which would eventually lower it into the Earth.
Around the time Pastor Brady began to say a few more words I did not really hear, his voice sounding tired and his forehead looking sweatier than ever as he stood over Cassie Rourke’s small casket, I began to think of my father’s funeral. I turned, and I could see the square gray shape of Dad’s tombstone toward the top of the hill. It was located in the last row of graves closest to that cow pasture, silhouetted by the too-bright sun. I envisioned the bronze and silver stars engraved upon that fat gray marker beneath my father’s name and rank, could see in my mind’s eye the single cheap bouquet of plastic flowers Mom left there when she visited Dad’s grave the previous Father’s Day.
I felt a hard pang of guilt when I realized this was the closest I had come to my father’s grave in over a year.
That hit me hard.
I was ashamed.
Crazy as it sounds, I remembered more about the terrible day we buried my father than I remembered the way Dad looked and smelled and talked. I could recall every minute detail of the day I said good-bye to him forever though I had only been five years old when he died. As I watched Cassie Rourke’s body being interred into the ground behind Trinity First Baptist Church I could almost hear the phantom melody of “Taps” drifting over the cemetery on the day’s cool breeze. I remembered that short, stocky man in the Military Policeman’s uniform who had played the tune in memory of my father, recalled the way his cheeks pooched out as if in morbid imitation of some blond-haired, blue-eyed Louis Armstrong.
I remembered how Dan and Mom had handled the whole thing.
Dan was thirteen years old the day we buried my father. I remember how tall he seemed to me even then, and how he did not look like himself as he stood above Dad’s grave with tears running down his face. Yet at the same time my big brother had displayed an odd sort of dignity through it all. He just kept dabbing at his eyes with his crooked black tie, his moist stare never leaving that big brown star-spangled-banner-draped box in which our father lay. Meanwhile, our friends and family had been forced to restrain Mom several times, when she tried to throw herself upon Dad’s coffin, refusing to let him go. Throughout the funeral she fell to her knees and clutched at the bright green grass as if she might fall off the world should she lose her grip upon it, and once Dan placed his small, pale hand over her mouth when she started cursing my father for leaving us behind when we needed him so badly.
; “Mom, don’t do this,” he’d said. His face was red as he pulled her away from Dad’s grave and spoke to her as if their roles had been reversed. “Please…it’s gonna be okay…”
That was the moment, I believe, when I realized Dan would get us through this. Not Mom. Not that chubby preacher who could only maintain eye contact with any of us for a second or two before he quickly looked away as if our sorrow were somehow contagious. Not the condescending sympathy offered by so many well-meaning but oblivious neighbors. But Dan. Even at thirteen years old, he had been my rock. My role model. My portrait of strength when I had nowhere else to turn.
My big brother was the closest thing to Dad I had left.
April 17, 1970 is a day I will never forget, yet more often than not it is the minutiae of our forever-altered lives before and after Dad’s funeral that I remember most vividly. The little things that made up that dark day, the trivialities of Life we would never again perform in the same way. From that morning when we all got up to get dressed, putting on our best for Dad one last time though neither Mom nor Dan nor I mentioned exactly what we were dressing for…to that evening, when Mom did not know we saw her sneak outside and shove the folded-up flag she’d been given at Dad’s funeral deep into the bottom of our overflowing garbage can at the end of the drive…to later that night, when it was all over and we laid down knowing our father would never again reprimand us for staying up too late, knowing we would never again hear him laughing at Johnny Carson in the living room, would never hear his deep snore across the hallway or his deep voice on the phone, calling to check in on us when he was away on a tour of duty.
