by Lisa Howorth
The jam box played Handel’s “Sarabande,” which Mary Byrd knew Ernest had thought to be the most beautiful song in the whole world ever since he’d heard the Chieftains’ version in one of his top five movies, Barry Lyndon. Who’d put together this mix tape? she wondered. Probably Ernest himself, before he’d gone off to Bosnia, half-hoping to be blown to smithereens and martyrized forever. She’d started on her own funeral playlist on the plane, with her will. We’re all so stuck on ourselves.
The flight back from Richmond, once she’d made up her mind to do it, had gone well. True, she’d had a Bloody Mary and a yellow crumb of Valium, but still. Waiting to board the plane, she saw something you often saw on flights to or from Memphis; a little kid, one with a bald blue head sitting on his or her mother’s sweat-suited lap. A soccer-mom pietà, no doubt on their way to one of the children’s hospitals. What right did Mary Byrd have to be fearful about her own selfish self taking a simple plane ride? She resolved to get a grip. Mann had called her at her mother’s with the bad news about Ernest, so death was even more on her mind, if that was possible. As the plane had climbed on takeoff over the city, she thought she could make out Monument Row—Jeb, Jeff, Stonewall, Bobby Lee—and the construction site where the new Arthur Ashe statue would soon stand facing his stadium. Look away, poor Arthur: you showed us, didn’t you? And somewhere below—they passed over Appomattox, the last dead boys, and the justly inevitable surrender, where, she recalled, Grant had sadly regretted his grungy uniform facing the impeccable and impassive Lee. It wouldn’t have surprised Mary Byrd if the plane had crashed, but at least she hadn’t felt absolutely positive that it would. Instead of putting herself in a coma as she usually would have, she’d stayed awake and used her captivity in the hurtling Delta tin can constructively. On her barf bag she’d jotted down a short will, which gave her a sense of control although of course if she went down, the will would go with her. But if she had to be thinking so much about death, she might as well put the preoccupation to work.
FINAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR ME
1. Bury or cremate—whatever’s cheapest. Make absolutely sure I’m really dead before you do anything. If you bury me (don’t send me to Richmond) pls get Don D to build me a plain pine box, or bury me in the trunk Liddie gave us that we use for the coffee table, unless someone wants it. (Coffintable! Hahaha.) If no room in your family plot, put me in the black section on the hill where the old cedars are. If that’s OK with them. If cremated, throw ashes into my zinnia bed or get one of my bros to dump some in the Ches. Bay where we used to go, or Mann could scatter a pinch in the KGB Bar in NY. Pablo could make a ceramic headstone. A little music would be good—maybe Lucy would play a little. If you or the children want a poem or something, fine. No speakers!
2. No visitation, church, or preacher. Graveside only. Must have a bouncer with a list—no assholes dancing on my grave. You and Mann and Lucy know who I mean.
3. Wish people wouldn’t send flowers unless from their yards, better to donate to Humane Soc, St. Jude or Cntr for Missing & Exploited Children. If winter some cedar with blue berries and magnolia leaves is fine. Pls plant me a little cedar or a dogwood—the old ones in cem. probably clobbered in storm.
4. Give something from my jewelry to cousins Kathy and Susan, Lucy, and Mann and whatever my bros want—I don’t know what. Eliza can help.
5. If there’s a wake at the Bear, play all my favorites! (As much Everly and Neville Bros. as you can stand.)
6. Don’t dance on my grave, either, Chaz! If I die doing something stupid or bad, try to forgive me, and don’t let E &W hate me. Luvyabye! Mary Byrd D’Abruzzi Thornton, from somewhere in the sky with barf bags.
Mary Byrd slipped a hand in her purse to feel the folded bag still tucked there as Ernest’s sad little family trio and cousins trudged up to the coffin to touch him a last time. Pothus worked something into Ernest’s jacket pocket, and spoke out in a quavery voice, “We had us some fine times, didn’t we Jacky-boy? I’m going to be missing you like front teeth, yes sir, I will.” He cried softly and the aunt ladies tended him. Others began filing by the coffin. He was loved. It was nice to know that.
Mary Byrd whispered to Teever, “What do you think his uncle gave him?”
Teever whispered back, rubbing his thumb and fingertips together, “Foldin’ money. Wish I had somethin’ to put in there, too. Crown, Marlboro, somethin’.”
Mary Byrd kept quiet but thought to herself that what she’d have put in, knowing the one thing that Ernest would want from her, would be her underwear. Preferably worn.
Teever rose suddenly from the pew and limped up the aisle to the casket. He brought something out of his pocket and put it in the coffin. When he returned, Mary Byrd cocked her head and widened her eyes.
“You don’t got to know everything, Mudbird,” he said. “He was some dude, whatever he was. I’m not gone see nobody like that again.”
She would miss Ernest. The world wasn’t a better place because of him, but it sure had been more interesting. I should have slept with him, she thought. Who would have been hurt? Where did scruples get you? He was the fuck not taken.
Mary Byrd and Teever sat a little longer, listening to Al Green sing “Amazing Grace” and watching people cluster up around Ernest’s kin. That would be the right thing to do, to go up there and speak to the family, but she wasn’t going to. She wasn’t going to get that close to the body, and she just wasn’t going to anyway, for a million reasons.
There was no point in trying not to think of Stevie’s funeral—his tragic little self was so much on her mind—so Mary Byrd let herself go there. She didn’t think she’d ever, over all these years, tried to remember it, and she didn’t remember much.
It had been a lovely May day. The sun had been shining warmly but she had shivered, and had drawn a deep breath to will her teeth to stop chattering. She had been sick with the fear that it would be raining and they’d have to bury Stevie in the mud and that would make everyone even madder with grief. How did they get to the funeral home? What did she wear? She had no idea, although she thought it would have been important to her at the time. Or maybe not. The babies hadn’t gone, but she wished they had because they’d have given her something real to focus on.
Across the parking lot of the funeral home they’d seen the trucks from the local TV stations. The cameramen had kept a respectful distance but Pop hadn’t cared anyway; he had looked as if he’d never care about anything again. He was taking tons of sedatives and Angelo and her mother had walked with him. Of the service, all she could remember was that the sight of the small white coffin had made her want to cry, but she wouldn’t. She’d shrunk away from her family on the pew. Her mother had cleaved to her stepfather, and Nick had sat fidgeting and craning his neck around, trying to make eye contact with their cousins. At the grave, Mary Byrd had taken off her glasses so that, sitting behind her parents, she wouldn’t see the hopeless, gaping finality of the half-size hole so clearly, or Pop’s face, or the faces of her friends and teachers, and Stevie’s classmates and teachers from Longwood Elementary and so many others spread way up behind them on the hill. Was the boyfriend there? She hadn’t cared.
The boy cousins had been horsing around inappropriately, so they’d been dismissed by the adults. They all had walked to Doc’s for cherry Cokes and candy bars. Neither children nor boys, Mary Byrd and her cousin Kathy had drifted along with the rest of the pack, Kath holding her hand and watching her anxiously. She wasn’t going to cry and she didn’t want to talk, she just wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else. At Doc’s, the boys had broken down in a hysterical, choking giggle fit over nothing, or the usual joking about the Kotex and douche bags in the “ladies’ products” aisle, drawing shocked stares from adults in the store who all knew who they were. Mary Byrd had frozen at one point, thinking she saw Tuttle watching them, peering through the soaps and shampoos in another aisle, but the round moon face had instantly disappeared. How could he be walking around freely, she’d wonder
ed, eating Mars Bars and reading comic books and hanging around as if nothing had happened? Was it even him? Nothing was real anymore. She’d been scared and had hurried back home.
After Stevie’s funeral, their house had been horridly empty, and she and her mother had watched the evening news. There they were on TV. She had been shocked, she recalled, at how unrecognizable and diminished her family had looked without the three littlest boys. Small, hunched, and only the four of them. Her overweight stepfather had seemed to have lost a hundred pounds in the few days since Stevie had died. The notion that she was never really going to have a warm and safe place in the family, or even in the world, had come over Mary Byrd like ice settling into her stomach and chest and bones.
The jam box stopped and Ernest’s family and the church people began moving out to the cold hole where he’d be buried in the deep, red clay. In her head Mary Byrd took the memory of Stevie’s funeral as if it were a bad page of writing off a yellow legal pad, wadded it up, and lobbed it at Ernest’s coffin. The throw was high, but Ernest reached up from the casket and snagged it with one hand, the hand with the diamond signet ring he was so proud of. He winked at her with his right eye, and she blew him a very small kiss with her middle finger. Pallbearers rose, closing and then lifting Ernest’s coffin, and shambled slowly out the door.
The fat lady began singing,
What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near
Leaning on the everlasting arms
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms
Mary Byrd’s heart began thudding and her breathing quickened and she turned to Teever, clutching his arm. “Teever! I’m so, so sad!” she said desperately.
Startled, Teever looked hard into her distraught face for a moment before saying, “It gone be okay, Mudbird. He in a better place now. Like that lady jus’ sung: he got blessed peace and he safe and secure. Don’t somebody in the Bible say, ‘Weep not?’” Teever stood. “I’m gone get a smoke off them guys. It gone be okay, you hear? This life ain’t nothin’ but a bale of tears.” He lurched across the aisle to the posse. “Wassup, spleen? Got a smoke?” she heard him rasp to one of the guys as they slouched out.
One of the goofballs sighed, “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”
Still breathing hard, Mary Byrd watched the men troop outside. The church was empty. She felt powerless to move. She was overcome by a frightful, suffocating urge like a ferocious sneeze or a terrible cough that could not be suppressed and she began weeping big heaving sobs and gushing tears. Head in her lap, she wept and wept, a bale of tears, full-on blubbering like there was no tomorrow. Or like there was.
The drive back from Wallett on I-55 was way too long and more boring than the ride down, when for the first half hour or so they had had all the storm damage to see.
Going back, the day had cleared, the clouds opening up to reveal one of those glorious Mississippi winter sunsets, which seemed an appropriate ending to the day and to Jack Ernest’s time on the planet. It would be hard, Mary Byrd and Teever both knew, to not be expecting to see Ernest up at the Bear, or at the late-nights, or skulking around on the periphery of some literary event. Even if you didn’t see Ernest that often, it was comforting, somehow, to know he was out there, the antidote to too much wholesomeness and small-town charm and polite society. Their dark sides were important and Ernest had nourished that.
Mary Byrd found herself in a strange place. Now the world seemed lighter—still fragile and landmined with the unexpected, but there seemed now to be more space, more navigable paths to choose, and more fortitude for any obstacles or skirmishes or forays ahead. But she newly grieved, or re-grieved, for her lost stepbrother—her brother—and for what he’d endured, small and alone, terrified, in pain and drowning in his own blood. That would always be with her, with all of them, and she knew it would continue in their lives in ways they couldn’t yet imagine. It was like the jagged little bit of grit that got into an oyster and no matter how much the nacre of time smoothed it over, it was still going to be there—a pearl of pain. Now what had happened at last had a definite face and name, and it had nothing to do with her.
It dawned on her that if her mother had ever known about the nonsense about her leading poor Tuttle on, she would certainly have said so, her mom being her mom. Why hadn’t this ever occurred to her before? Why had she clung to that guilt?
If Stith was to be believed, her family was going to have a chance to strike back. But Mary Byrd found it hard to accept that she also grieved for Zepf, another ruined life, and for everybody, for the whole world, which was a place where people did unspeakable things to each other, for reasons that must be a part of whatever it is that makes humans human, but not necessarily humane. Was the real difference between humans and other animals that humans gassed each other and butchered each other or forced sex on each other for reasons other than survival? What a world, what a world.
“Wooo,” she twitched her shoulders. Basta. Time to lighten up. She exhaled loudly. “I’m glad that’s … behind us.”
“Me too,” Teever said. “What we gone do now, Mudbird?” She knew he meant without Ernest.
“Man, I don’t know,” she said. “But I can tell you a lot of things we’re not going to be doing now,” she said wryly. “Did you score any smokes from those guys?”
“Jus’ that one. Sorry,” Teever shook his head. “I had a carton last night,” he lied. “Mexicans cleaned me out. Need to quit, anyway. Clean up my act.”
“Are you serious, Teever?” She thought he wasn’t, but he did have that cough, and maybe even he was worried about it. She hoped it wasn’t contagious. TB cooties would be pinballing around in the car right now. “You’re going to quit smoking and drinking and stuff? ”
“Aw, hell no, Mudbird. Jus’ kiddin’. I’m gone always be a kind of a wretch,” he said. He should have kept his mouth shut. If he said he wasn’t going to straighten up, they’d all be amazed when he did. No point in jumping the gun. He wanted to feel the rush of resolve he’d had that night around the bonfire, but daylight always had a way of sapping things, stealing your nature, like you were a vampire. “I might never get found,” he said to Mary Byrd, wondering if he could get the good feeling back.
The light was nearly gone. Teever squinted, focusing his eyes on the horizon beyond a vast soybean field.
“Hola!” he suddenly yelled, thinking he saw that unearthly green flash as the fiery disk of sun disappeared. “Thought I saw somethin’. N’mind.” But the flash, or flashback, gave him a surge of confidence and well-being. “I do got options.”
Ignoring what seemed just another Teever non sequitur, Mary Byrd asked him, “Where do you think Ernest is?”
“He somewhere,” Teever said.
“Yeah, but like where?”
“Don’t know.” He thought a second. “But I do know that there’s things folks aren’t spozed to know ’til they need to know ’em.”
“You think?”
“I know. We all knew how things gone turn out, where we gone end up, wouldn’t be nothin’ to keep people from acting the fool twenty-four twenty-four.”
Mary Byrd laughed. “Isn’t that what we do anyway?”
“It would be way, way more worser,” he said. “Trust me.”
“For some stupid reason,” she said. “I pretty much do.”
They drove on in the interstate gloam, not talking, finally exiting onto the last annoying stretch of two-lane between Batesville and their town, where new faux chateaux vied for highway frontage with double-wides, Tool Central, Toyota, the Eureka True Vine Church, and 1950s pretend Taras that made the 1980s pretend Taras almost look good in comparison. Once this had all been the beautiful old Riverdale Cattle Ranch, where velvety Limousin cows had stood posing in the emerald fields as if it were Barbizon and they were waiting for Millet to
paint them.
Mary Byrd wanted to take advantage of Teever’s thoughtful, sober mood. It almost never happened. She wanted him to talk seriously about himself, but something told her that his private life was maybe one of those things that he thought “folks aren’t spozed to know.”
Instead she asked, “Well, what about Rod’s funeral? Did his family have trouble getting down here because of the storm?”
“What you think, Mudbird?” Teever said. “You dumber’n a box a mud. Course they had trouble—folks got to drive from way up north. You think everybody got the money to fly around like you and Charles? ”
“Take it easy,” said Mary Byrd. “I didn’t mean it like that.” She felt dumb and white. “But what about Angie? What’s going to happen with her, do you think?”
“Hard to say. Hard to say. She do not need to be in no jail in Memphis, I know that.”
“Yeah, I know. I hope Evagreen and L. Q. are okay. And Rod’s parents. Jesus.”
“Not ever gone be okay for them,” Teever said. “No way.” He coughed wetly into his tweed sleeve. “But I got a feeling something gone happen with Angie.”
“What do you mean by something? Something good or bad?”
“Don’t know, Mudbird. Something. Like I say, there’s shit we ain’t spozed to know. Sometimes, hard to tell when a thing be good and when it be bad.” He shrugged.
“Ha,” she said sarcastically. “Where’s all this coming from? You channeling the Dalai Lama or something?”
“Who she? I’ll channel her anytime,” Teever said, allowing Mary Byrd a second to look over at him to see if he was serious. She couldn’t tell. “No way—I’m channeling the Tolliver Lama, Mudbird.”
“Sounds to me like you’re channeling Amos, or Andy.” So much for serious.
He shrugged again. “Shit happens. Maybe up to us to make it turn out one way or the other.”
“I don’t see how any of Angie’s mess could turn out good for anybody. It’s so awful. Think about Desia, her little girl.”
