LAZ JACKSON
I hear the sound of digging. A sound I know pretty well cause I done heard it so many times. You hear a lot of digging sounds in my line of work. I hear Dill Smiles cursing but I don’t expect to see her digging, but there she is, digging, and Billy is digging too. There’s barely enough light to see. I come out to help. I make sure my shirt is tucked and my pants are buttoned right and my coat’s not too wrinkly. They’ve dug a good bit already. Long way to go still, though.
“Y’all digging?” I says. I’m just making conversation.
Neither of them look at me. Neither of them speak. Like if they broke the stride of what they was doing they might quit. It took so long to get started, if it’s quit now it’ll never get started again. I go to the truck and get two spades. One I stab in the dirt and hang my coat on, then I roll up my sleeves and loosen my collar and get to work.
There’s a certain method to digging a grave. You don’t just pop the spade to the dirt willy-nilly, there’s a certain method to it. You mark your four corners, the boundary of the thing. You line out your plot. Then you dig down in layers. Keeping it smooth and even all the while, not doing like they doing, scrabbling into the dirt like a dog would. Digging’s hard work. Especially out here where the dirt is hot and baked. I dig slow and steady and neat. I toss the dirt over my left shoulder. They see how I’m doing it and follow suit and soon we got a good rhythm.
I don’t get much call to dig peoples up, but when you gotta do it, you dig them up the same way you would dig them down. Walter Little buried his father and his mother within the same week. The next week he come running to us in the middle of the night with a shotgun talking bout how they weren’t really dead and we had buried them alive and me and my daddy was gonna have to get up out the bed and unbury them right now or he was gonna be a orphan and a murderer too. So we dug them up for him. By the time we hit the two boxes he had told us to forget it. We went and opened the boxes anyhow. And the smell was something else. We made him look. Then he went home. But that don’t happen too often.
Billy rests. Dill and me dig without resting, without speaking. We get it almost all dug up by the time the others wake. Each of them, Roosevelt and Homer and Even, help a little. Candy helps too and June moves the dirt with her trowel while Roosevelt helps her stand without her crutch. When we hit the coffin they all get real quiet. They’re hoping for a chest of diamonds from the looks on they faces. I’m just hoping she don’t stink. It’s been six years. She won’t stink.
I start to pry off the coffin lid. Everybody moves back. The lid’s still in good shape. It weren’t expensive, but the dry heat’s helped it hold up. Dill stands frozen and not looking down, but watching me. They all know I know what to do.
The lid comes off in two pieces. Willa Mae Beede’s remains is laying quietly in the box, wound up in a quilt. Everybody is watching me, letting me touch the ragged quilt and move it aside, letting me get the first look at the bones, then they look too, once they see, through me, that Willa Mae’s dead corpse can be looked at and stomached.
There ain’t no treasure. Far as I can tell.
“Motherfucking undertaker stole the jewels,” Dill says. She kicks at the pile of dirt we dug out, speckling Willa’s remains with it.
They all watch me move aside the tattered quilt, showing the bones at their full length.The skull’s got some hair around it, all the flesh is rotted away, but there is a nice pillow of brown hair, good brown hair. Around the neck bones, where Dill said the pearl necklace would be, there ain’t nothing. And on the fingerbones of the hands laid cross the chest, there ain’t no ring of no kind. Suddenly everybody that was crowded around to see the treasure sees what’s really there: just a bunch of brownish-colored bones dressed in rotten scraps of a red dress, wrapped in quilt tatters and laying in a cheap pine box.
“I buried her with her jewels. The motherfucking undertaker stole em somehow,” Dill says again. She curses and kicks more dirt. The others, except Billy, are looking at Willa Mae. Billy is looking at the tractor in the near distance.
“Motherfucking goddamn thieving undertaker,” Dill says.
“All undertakers ain’t honest, I guess,” Teddy says.
“I’d appreciate getting my goddamn keys back,” Dill says and walks away towards her truck.
“Guess someone stole it all,” Teddy says. There’s a strangle sound in his voice, like he will cry but not now. He will cry good and hard, but not now in front of other men and in front of his wife. He will cry later and maybe do something more than cry.
“We did our best,” June says.
“Cover it back up,” Homer says, sounding disgusted.
“We’ll decide where to rebury her a lot better with some breakfast in our stomachs,” Candy says and the promise of food gets them to move inside, all at once, like a herd. They don’t like looking at dead folks but dead folks don’t bother me none.
Billy ain’t said nothing yet and she ain’t moved. She’s sitting at the top of the grave, like a headstone, looking like I think an angel would look, watching the rest of them go inside then, when they’ve gone, looking at where they went, but not down at her mother’s bones.
Even comes back outside. She’s got a newish quilt which she spreads alongside the grave.
“Miz Willa Mae oughta have a new shroud,” Even says.
She helps me lift the bones up out of the coffin. The old quilt underneath Willa Mae holds together just long enough to get her up. When we clear the grave it makes a ripping sound. She makes it out in one piece though. The coffin is wedged too tight in the ground so we just leave it where it’s at. The bones and their old shroud lay on the new quilt in the sun.
“I heard plenty of times when an undertaker would steal a wristwatch or a brooch,” I explain to Even and Billy, but only Even’s listening. “Dill coulda been digging the grave and the undertaker coulda been stealing the jewels while Dill was digging,” I says.
Now Billy’s looking at her mother’s bones. Her eyes flick over them quick. Then she looks at the grave.
I wrap the remains gently up in the quilt, folding the edges carefully in, like I’m tucking in a baby.
“We got a nice cemetery down the road. Miz Willa Mae might like it,” Even says.
“I’d like to take her back to Lincoln and bury her there,” I says. “If it’s all right with Billy.”
Billy don’t speak.
Me and Even look at the bones wrapped in the new quilt. The quilt pattern is called wedding ring. “My mother and dad got one on they bed that looks just like it.” I’m looking at the quilt so Even notices before I do: Billy is crying. Even goes inside and leaves us alone.
I ain’t never seen Billy Beede cry. And I ain’t never seen no one cry like she’s crying now. She may as well be fighting someone, the way her arms move around in the air and the tear-water washing her face like sweat and the stuff coming out her nose. She’s saying things I don’t understand. Words threaded through with a long private string of goddamn yous, the kind of curses that’s said between mother and daughter, I guess. She goes on like that till she can’t breathe. Then she stops and sits there, licking her lips with her tongue and running her arms across her face to dry it.
“I’m gonna take your mother back to Lincoln,” I says. “I’m gonna get her a new coffin, a nice one, and a nice angel headstone. I’ll put her in the ground real good and all at my expense.”
I expect Billy to smile or say thank you or something but she is looking hard at the wrapped quilt, thinking. There’s a part of the dress, just a little bit of the hem down at the bottom edge, that didn’t get tucked in.
“Look where the hem of the dress is at. Sometimes she kept stuff in the hem,” Billy says.
I unpart the quilt down near the bottom. I don’t want to expose the skull again. The shoes still hold the feet. The hem of the dress is a line of fabric folded over twice and still neatly stitched. I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. I am looking for a wife, I am
looking for Billy Beede’s hand in marriage. And there it is. In what’s left of the hem of the dress I find the diamond ring.
WILLA MAE BEEDE
Don’t the Great Wheel keep rolling along
Don’t the Great Wheel keep rolling along
I stopped in yr town this morning,
But tonight, this gal, she’s gotta be gone.
Don’t the Great Wheel keep rolling right along.
BILLY BEEDE
It didn’t turn out like we planned.
We got back to Lincoln all right. Uncle Teddy drove Dill’s truck the whole way with Aunt June sitting beside him. I sat by the window, watching the land go by but looking at Mother’s ring mostly. It was big for my finger which surprised me, but it twinkled good in the light and Laz ran it across a piece of glass showing us all how diamonds could cut.
Laz knew a man in Dallas, a jeweler friend of his daddy’s. When we got back to Lincoln, Laz and his daddy took the ring and came back with sixteen hundred and twenty three dollars and fifty-nine cents. It was enough to give everybody something and Laz had a new ring for me. Not a diamond, just a plain wedding band, but it was nicer than diamonds, I thought.
When we rode back from LaJunta, Dill rode in the truck bed. She didn’t want to drive and she didn’t want to talk. Every once and a while she would take something out of her pocket. She reached up and ran the thing across the back of the truck cab window. It didn’t cut the glass. Teddy and June didn’t see but I seen. It was a diamond-looking ring Dill had. Then I knew Dill had tooked it from Mother and if Dill had tooked that ring then she had tooked the pearls too. Maybe real pearls maybe not real pearls, we never did find no kind of pearls at all, but I wasn’t gonna ask Dill about them while we was riding back home. I wasn’t never gonna ask her. Dill and Mother had something between them and now Dill and me got something between us. If Dill stole things I don’t got a need to talk about it. The truth, whatever it is, is gonna stay secret.
Homer drove his own car back. He had a busted lip from where Dill hit him, but no broken teeth. Next time, he said, when he challenged Dill, he’d be sober and she’d better watch out. When we passed Pecos his car peeled off the road and he shouted goodbye and tooted his horn. I didn’t want to send him nothing but when Laz and Mr. Jackson came back with all that money, Uncle Teddy sent him ten dollars and Aunt June wrote a thank-you note.
We didn’t get all what we thought we’d get. Aunt June got her leg, though. She walked her first steps the same day as her first grandbaby did.
Folks take after they folks. That’s the law of nature. The thing about not watching my mother get old is that I wasn’t never sure what I was gonna get, cause if you don’t got yr folks to look at, if all you got is a little picture of a woman standing beside a cactus, a picture took by a man who weren’t even your daddy, then you don’t got a good idea really of where yr headed. When I seen her bones I knew what we all knew, that we’s all gonna end up in a grave someday, but there’s stops in between there and now. Right now I got my first child running around in the yard and another one on the way. Five years from now Laz gives me Mother’s diamond ring back. He’d never sold it in Dallas. The money he brought back was from his savings. Dill’s hog farm is going pretty good. Uncle Teddy’s got another church. There’s lots of things between now and them bones.
Riding back to Lincoln, looking at my ring, I could feel the baby inside me. I hadn’t never really thought of a name for it, but riding home I felt like I could. Not pick out a name though, just let one come to me without thinking. Like it had a name already, and if it had a name already then it already was. And if it already was then it was always gonna be.
My belly sat in front of me. In front of my belly, beyond the hood of the truck, was the back of Laz’s hearse with Mother’s body riding inside and the road unrolling out ahead.
Going back home we made good time. I think we did all right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUZAN-LORI PARKS is a novelist, playwright, songwriter, and screenwriter. She was the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog, as well as a 2001 MacArthur “genius grant.” Her other plays include Fucking A, In the Blood, The America Play, Venus, and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Her first feature film, Girl 6, was directed by Spike Lee. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she studied with James Baldwin, she has taught creative writing in universities across the country, including at the Yale School of Drama, and she heads the Dramatic Writing Program at CalArts. She is currently writing an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise for Oprah Winfrey, and the musical Hoopz for Disney. She lives in Venice Beach, California, with her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, and their pit bull, Lambchop.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Suzan-Lori Parks
Songs copyright © 2003 by Mama’s Helper Music
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parks, Suzan-Lori.
Getting mother’s body : a novel / Suzan-Lori Parks.
p. cm.
1. African American families—Fiction. 2. Treasure trove—Fiction.
3. Poor families—Fiction. 4. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.A736 G4 2003
813′.54—dc21 2002031762
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-300-8
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