Samuel T. Saxon was now completely stripped away, and Merle and I had stood to watch the huge bulldozer as it took over the old auditorium, the seats already uprooted and tossed aside. With the auditorium went our privacy, our chances to be completely alone, and we had to setde instead for late afternoons in Whispering Pines, his same old sleeping bag, which he now kept rolled up in the little shed, spread out under the low hanging branches, over pine needles thick on the ground. We would lie there, side by side, staring up through the trees, ready to jump at the slightest sound, a person on the path, my mother’s voice calling my name from our porch. Some days we were reminded of Dexter and the night I spied from the tree; it was a thought that could turn our most innocent and inexperienced feelings into something ugly.
Misty had majorette practice every weekday morning in July, and rather than spend those hours at home, I decided to take my mother’s advice and enroll in a typing course in summer school. The air-conditioning of E. A. Poe was finally fixed, and with the limited number of bodies present, I sometimes had to take a sweater in with me; Misty always laughed at my long jeans and long sleeves as she drove us to the high school in the ninety-degree heat. I typed things like Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country, pausing occasionally to touch the keys that spelled Merle’s name, while Misty marched up and down the football field, head thrown back to the full blinding sun, hips moving in rhythm to the band’s latest accomplishment, “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown.”
It was late July, a Wednesday morning, when I was called down to the office at E. A. Poe. It was not uncommon for me to find Misty waiting there, her hair slicked back into a ponytail, nose coated in zinc oxide as she swung her baton back and forth, but that day I stepped from the stairwell to see the principal standing there with Sally Jean, who was wearing her yard-work clothes, purse looped over her freckled arm, eyes red and anxious as she searched the hallway. When she saw me, she lifted her hand nervously and then began the slow walk towards me. It was not hard to look into her eyes and figure out that something very bad had happened, and I think I began feeling numb before she ever even opened her mouth. She ushered me toward the big front double doors. The heat hit us like a ton of bricks, like it had hit my dad just an hour earlier as he stood on a ladder and, with an electrical manual in one hand, tried to figure out how to hook up a light and ceiling fan in my mother’s greenhouse.
“Your mama told him he needed to rest after all that going up and down the ladder,” Sally Jean said, the air and radio coming on full blast as soon as she cranked Mr. Rhodes’s car, Ray Stevens singing “The Streak.” She reached quickly and turned it off. I noticed that Misty was already in her car and following us, Sally Jean glancing in the rearview mirror, and I knew that Sally Jean had gone to Misty first with the news. “I’m so sorry, honey,” she said, and I think I could have handled those words from anyone else on earth, but Sally Jean was so very honestly sincere that it almost hurt me to look at her. “The rescue squad was right there, less than five minutes.” Her voice shook. “But they couldn’t do anything.” I turned towards the window, the trees off to the side a blur, as she patted my knee, the denim burning hot against my skin. She kept her hand there, squeezing, those pale thin fingers twitching with uncertainty.
Everything seemed in slow motion; we passed the little roadside carnival that had been set up in a vacant lot for several weeks, and it all looked so strange to me, the strung blinking bulbs and two Ferris wheels, one big enough to let you view the whole high school in the distance, the other the kind with the little wire cages for children. There were bumper cars and a fun house like what I had expected and wanted from Ferris Beach all those years ago. Now the lights and the rides and the cotton-candy stand looked so garish, so tawdry. I could see tank-topped men swilling from cans wrapped in brown paper, their tattooed arms pushing levers.
Merle and I had been there just the week before, hugging and kissing in front of the crazy mirrors that made me short and fat like I had never been. We did everything we could to avoid discussing the end of the summer and his parents’ plans to move. We threw softballs at bowling pins we were sure were glued to the table, and we tossed rings at crates filled with Coca-Colas, beanbags through the mouths of wooden cut-out figures, each time falling just shy of what it took to win a big stuffed panda, leaving instead with plastic beads and key chains shaped like little sneakers, or, my favorite, the old fashioned monkey on a stick like my father had once won for me. We bought paper cones of cotton candy, air-whipped pink sticky strands, and then we wandered over to the wild animal trailer where, much to our disgust, there was an old mangy bobcat who panted in the heat and didn’t even go near his fly-covered food dish. There was a fox, no bigger than a pomeranian, pacing his glass box, nuzzling the corners each time in hopes of an escape, and there was one ape who sat in a cage not much taller than he was, his hand up to his forehead, fingers rubbing his eyes as if he had a headache.
“Hey, you,” Merle had said, and tapped on the glass; the ape looked up with large sad eyes, briefly, and then put his hand back as it had been, the nails of his fingers like those of a man, lines in the skin of his palm. The ape’s big toe, opposable like a thumb, gripped the skin of a banana that had been dropped to him from a hole in the top of the cage.
• • •
Evolution, my dad had said, and laughed, the night he talked about wisdom teeth and beauty marks. I thought instantly, before my brain had time to connect as I sat beside Sally Jean, that I would run home and ask him what he thought of opposable toes; I could imagine the look on his face, his excitement that I had come to him with such a question, as he reared back in his ink-stained chair and lit a cigarette.
“This gives me the creeps,” Merle had said, and turned away from the cage. “There’s just something not right about looking at him.” He took my hand and I followed him back out into the bright sunlight; he didn’t even realize that the same thing he said could have easily applied to me the night I climbed the tree, curiosity leading me to look, the same curiosity that made people slow down and look at a wreck on the highway, that made photographers catch that single moment of despair, a bullet entering, a bullet exiting, a man suspended from electrical wires. “The stuff the Evening News is made of,” my father had once said as he turned off the set, the piles of Vietnamese bodies fading from view.
Merle had said it was like the “Twilight Zone” episode where the man opens the drapes of his new home, which the people of the planet where he crashed have built for him, only to see people lined up and looking in. He runs to the door and it’s fake; the windows have bars, and out front is a sign saying that he is in his natural habitat. It was all in the eyes, just as Mrs. Landell had said that time, but I could not imagine that look in my father’s eyes; I could not imagine that his brain would suddenly stop, his heart, instantly like pulling a plug.
“Here we are, sweetheart.” Again Sally Jean’s voice made me ache. His car was in the driveway, window rolled down from morning, when he had gone to buy The New York Times; he was so excited that he was finally able to buy the paper in Fulton, instead of having to wait for the Sunday edition that arrived a week later in the mail. Mrs. Poole was holding our front door open for Mrs. Edith Turner, who already had a dish of something or another in her hand. Misty followed me in, her hand light on my arm, her mouth trembling when she tried to say something to me.
It was several hours and casseroles and phone calls later when I asked my mother if anyone had called Angela, and she looked up as if in a trance and shook her head no. Merle was over there then; he was wearing a clean navy T-shirt, his hair still damp from showering. He had brought a big pink geranium in a clay pot, and though Mrs. Poole tried to take it from him, as did Mrs. Edith Turner, the two of them vying for control of the front door, he walked across the hall and into the living room and held it out to my mother.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s very pretty.” And she just sat there holding it until Edith Turner
came and got it and took it to the kitchen, where she was in charge of arranging all of the arrangements.
“It’s like a curse,” Mrs. Poole was whispering to another neighbor. “The worst things have happened in this neighborhood—adultery, murder, fire, and now this.” She shook her head and stared blankly at the floor, bent forward to pick up a piece of lint. “It all started with integration, you know when we began mixing with coloreds.”
“Oh, now, really.” Mrs. Landell had come in with her husband, a pie pan in her hands. “You better cut that talk out, Theresa, or we’ll resign.”
“Well, I don’t mean you two” Mrs. Poole said, and laughed reached out to pat Maralee Landell’s arm. “Why, I never think of you as being colored.”
I went into the hallway and looked in the front of the telephone directory where my father had penciled Angela’s number, her name written in fancy curlicue letters he had doodled while standing in that very spot. Merle followed me, his face right next to mine as the distant phone rang and rang. Misty was in the foyer, her hand on Sally Jean’s arm as she took in the all-too-familiar scene, neighbors gathered for a purpose but all avoiding the topic.
My father had picked out the headstone he wanted way back when he was so interested in epitaphs. A friend of his, Mr. Sey-more Crane, made them and said he’d give him a good discount. The time the two of us had walked around Whispering Pines, he had apparently begun getting his own ideas of what he wanted and drawing them on paper as he always did. I had gone with him several years before to pick out his stone; I sat on a big cool slab of granite while he went in Mr. Crane’s office to describe what he wanted. He had tried countless times to tell my mother about it and about how he had gotten a wonderful big corner lot out at the new cemetery; he said it was “within spitting distance of the statue of Jesus,” but she did not want to hear it. Something about putting the words spit and Jesus into the same sentence made her resist still further. She had told him that she didn’t want to discuss such, and the words monument and grave were never mentioned again until the morning after he died, when we went to the granite place to see the creation and to make arrangements for it to be carried to the cemetery. My father had been planning his own funeral for years, and though neither of us wanted to hear his plans, we both knew where he kept his envelope with all the details. It was in the top drawer of his desk, and along with the information about his tombstone, was the request that he have the song “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and that this song was to be sung by Ethel Waters and no one else—he had it on a record—and if time permitted then by all means Bessie Smith’s “Graveyard Dream Blues” was to be played. Mama just shook her head from side to side and sighed.
“Okay, Seymore,” she said when we drove out to see the monument. “I guess it’s time for me to see this stone and talk about getting it moved.” Seymore just shook his head like he might cry. I was already crying, and Mama started all over again when Seymore took us to the back and uncovered his piece of work. It was shaped like a great big boat with waves lapping at the front and a dove sitting up on the mast with something in its mouth, an olive branch, we presumed, like God’s promise to Noah, but Seymore said no, he believed Mr. Fred meant for it to be a flag of some sort but it was hard to chisel it upright that way; arthritis often had his right arm aching if he held it up for too long.
On the base of the stone it said, “Break, break, break, at the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me,” except that Seymore had misspelled and put grave instead of grace and dad instead of day.
“Just what is this supposed to mean?” Mama asked me, her eyes suddenly dry and wide.
“It’s Tennyson,” I told her, remembering from all the nights my father had sat and quoted poems aloud, over and over until I could guess who had written them.
“And how about this other?” she asked, and waved her hand toward the body of the ship where it had, “Alfred Tennyson Burns, a good husband and a good father, a good provider and a reasonable Christian, a mediocre singer, a good man with a love for nature and literature and an excellent mathematician who never did a damn thing with it—Born to Curtis Junior Burns and Mary Ray Burns in the town of Clayboro, county of Thompson, state of South Carolina on January 4, 1917, and went with light head and heavy heart to meet his maker on July 24, 1974.”
“I just now finished the date,” Seymore said, and shook his head. He looked sad but also was fishing for compliments on his work, so I told him how realistic the waves were as they hit against the boat.
“Break, break, break,” he said and ran his dirty palm over the stone. “That’s what the waves do, caught in the act of breaking.”
“Why didn’t he write a book?” my mother asked, and I could tell she was not far from breaking herself. Her eyes were now fixed on her side of the ship, the narrowed upward slant of the bow, where it said “Cleva O’Conner Burns, wife of Afred Tennyson Burns, May 11, 1924,” and then there were some blanks and Seymore had already filled in the “19” on her death. Seymore saw her looking and explained that he had done the same thing on my father’s, had it all measured out in advance so that when the time came he could fill it in at a moment’s notice.
“And what if I decide to hang on until the year 2000?” she asked, with a look of indignation that caused Seymore to shuffle and stammer.
“Golly, now,” he finally said. “I should’ve known better. Fred sure would’ve known better with his head for numbers.” Seymore ran his fingers over the “19,” forehead furrowed, mouth screwed to one side. I knew he was trying to figure out how he would turn that “19” into a “20” if he had to. “That’s what happens when you try to put the cart ahead of the horse.” He pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped it over his face, blew his nose, shook his head from side to side. “It’ll be hard, but I suspect I can make it work if need be.” He looked at Mama and smiled. “And I won’t charge you at all,” he added, assuming that he would certainly be around for the turn of the century.
“It’s obvious he wasn’t thinking much of me,” she said, waving her arm at her side of the ship. She started crying again after making Seymore promise, vow, declare, and swear on the Bible that he would not have that monstrosity delivered until after the funeral. Seymore looked hurt but agreed before she could start explaining to him again why she did not like the monument, did not want the monument, but since it was in Fred’s will she had no choice about it, at least for the time being, that she hoped it fell off the truck on the way to the cemetery. She was still mumbling all this when we were walking away, and I happened to turn back and see the other side of the ship: Cleva, dear Cleva, mere words cannot express. She rushed back to rub her finger up and over every letter of her name and then knelt there, face pressed against the stone, her neat cream-colored pumps and matching skirt covered in yellow dust. “Fred always said he’d give me the rest of the poem to go on that side but . . .” Mr. Crane stood there helplessly, raised his hands and shrugged as if to ask what he could do. I went and stood beside her, waited until she pulled herself up and dusted the front of her skirt.
I had my temporary permit—my birthday was only a little more than a week away—and was shocked when she handed me the key and said that I had to drive. “Wife of Lord Alfred,” she said as we were driving down Seymore’s bumpy dirt road to the main street, and I couldn’t tell if she was going to laugh or cry. “‘Mere words cannot express’-—well, he is absolutely right about that; there aren’t many women who would have tolerated a man like Fred Burns with all his crazy ways and doodling, doodling on everything from the refrigerator to the arms of his chair, year in and year out, thinking up old rhymes and murders and numbers and nonsense.” She wiped back the wisps of hair that hung around her face, her mascara smudged under her eyes. “It has not been the easiest life, I’ll tell you that.” Her eyebrows were raised like stiff circumflexes as she waited for my answer, my nod. “But, goddamnit” she screamed suddenly, beat her
fists on the dash. I was so shocked that I almost ran a stoplight, causing the driver of the car crossing in front of us to slam on his brakes and blow his horn.
“Is that how they teach you to drive?” she screamed, shoulders shaking as she hunched forward, her forehead pressed into the dash. I sat until I got my own breath and then turned to her.
“Mama, Mama?” I put my hand on her back to try to get her to stop crying, to be that solid, never wavering person I was used to. “Please don’t do this. Please?” I was crying then, too, the person behind us blowing for me to go. Mama rolled down her window and motioned for him to go around, then she straightened up in her seat, pulled a tissue from her purse. “Forgive me,” she said. “I do not like to use the Lord’s name that way. But I am going to miss that fool father of yours more than I can bear.” She looked at me then, surprising me once again, her face grimacing as if she were going to burst into tears and then straightening. “I do hope Theresa Poole is not at our house when we get there,” she said. “If she is I want you to tell her to go home. Fred was right when he said she was starting to get senile. Fred was just about always right, I guess.” She sighed, shook her head. “Fred had one blind spot, that’s all, that one blind spot.” I knew she was referring to Angela, but I didn’t say anything, just started driving again as she sat staring at her hands, at the wedding ring on the left hand and then, on the right one, the mother’s ring. There I was, the only child, a chip of a stone harnessed in gold; that mother’s ring had been all she’d talked about, all she wanted the Christmas when I was eight.
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