Vesta Lotte, old, rocked on, telling me of huge forest fires that Sherman’s troops had set. She’d watched our town’s first cotton mill burn. She rambled, saying, “Then, right after it surrendered …”
I’d heard other older black people say “After It Surrendered.” They seemed to speak about some octopus “it” that’d once had ahold of them. They never said “after Lee surrendered”—just this “It.” I wanted to explain to my beloved client—Maybe General Lee did finally bow out in ’65, but it, old it, had not surrendered yet. It still held her, still had us all.
Down here, I studied her men’s work boots, the stick-thin black ankles. On she rocked. Her dignity irked me. I’d paid Eventualities Mrs. B’s last nine dollars and fifty cents. I should be in the position of control here, right? But, just by holding still, by aiming her cataracts straight out toward the roadside’s browned sunflowers (were they blurs to her? were they even visible?) she put me through these hoops of bad feelings, gave me moral insomnia.—In my night-school philosophy course, our teacher had read one line from an Eastern religious book: “Seventy-five righteous men carry the world.” Considering what I imagined soon doing to Mrs. B, I muttered under my breath, “Today … marked down to seventy-four.”
“Why?” I asked her now, interrupting. I got up onto my knees beside her chair, I set my cup down. I felt tempted to place my butch-waxed head into her lap beside the sick child panting there. “Why funerals?” Rude as it sounded, I couldn’t help asking. How could anybody so smart sink all her money into last rites? What—I half-hollered—did she imagine for herself after death? Hunh? —The morticians’ perks would get her into the next world; okay—then what? How did she picture this Heaven?
I wondered, did Saturday coins seem installments on some future boat fare? Did VLB think of her own afterlife as a long-awaited china mending, or maybe as Old Africa itself? Waiting for her answer, I imagined a jungle shore of flowers seen from some rocking boat: Home. I sat straighter, readying myself for her answer. Since I was bankrolling this voyage, I felt I had a right to hear. Pumping her for news of after—death kind of thrilled me. I figured, “Hey, if anybody knows the score, it’s Vesta Lotte Battle here.” I was nineteen. I admired her. She owed me.
I almost thought of her as mine.
I KEPT STILL, poised on my knees beside an active rocking chair. This was happening one quiet January Saturday on a side street in Falls, NC’s worst possible neighborhood. The only steady noise: squabbles among the large black-owned dogs moping near my Nash, peeing on its whitewalls, waiting to chase me. “Roses,” Mrs. Battle answered, husky, without hesitation. “Dozens. Roses. Thousands maybe.”
(Somehow I’d pictured her paradise blooming shields, zinnias, spears, sunflowers. The beauty of roses seemed patented as Whitie’s.) “So,” I rushed her. “Roses for starters. What else?”
Time passed as youngsters curled into deeper napping. The baby in Mrs. B’s lap made suckling noises, dreaming.
“And plane tickets for all my grown children so’s they can come on back down here for it. Around-trips, too. A lined red casket be nice. Oh, and some big white town cars … I wouldn’t mind.” Hearing this, I felt sickened some, and slowed. I understood: For her, the funeral itself was a kind of heaven. She hadn’t dared picture anything more glamorous than a decent middle-class send-off. “And marble markers with two rock lambs on top, or, if they out of lambs, maybe a couple baby angels’d do.” Bobbing back and forth, clucking at the sick child, Mrs. Battle kept mulling over her list of funeral needs. She stared out a bright window and finally shrugged. In a voice too resigned to sound bitter, she said nowhere, “I ain’t asking much.”
I wondered aloud how many children would be heading south. “I mean ‘eventually’ of course.” (I’ve always been more tactful than was needed, a disease.)
“Nineteen. Plus them ones what they lives with or be married to. It mount up.”
I nodded. You had to admit: the transportation costs alone could really set a person back.
We just kept still for twenty minutes more. First I felt real gloomy, and next, slow, I got extra mad. Not at her now. But for her. For us. Resting by her creaking rocker, sipping lukewarm tea, it struck me: Vesta Lotte Battle’s former owners still mostly owned my own broken-down wheezing parents. I wanted to kill somebody then, to go kill the people put in charge of us all.
“Okay.” I finally stood, stiff, feeling old myself. I cleared her tea things, brushed at the seat of my pressed pants. “Okay,” I sounded huffy, wronged. “But I warn you I’m only good for one more week. I know you understand how much I think of you. But, look, I’ve carried you, I’ve covered for you. I’m doing this fast-and-loose bookkeeping so my boss won’t nab you. Finally, even for people like us, there are limits, you know. You know?” She gave me one dry shoulder-heave. The dark voice went, “I reckon you’ll do what you wants.” (Sam had told me, “There’s always one that gets you. Really gets you.” Odd, the worse I am at describing the power of Vesta Lotte Battle, the surer I am of it, the deeper I still feel it—right up under the rib cage.)
That very week I sent a telegram to Detroit: “Mother’s funeral in jeopardy STOP of default STOP act quickly please STOP a friend STOP.” I promised myself this’d have to be the final Christian act for soft-headed non-pre-law really un-Princeton Jerry. My sleep was suffering, gone spotty and shallow. I did well in my night-school business courses. I aced Philosophy but started feeling sneaky about my unnatural straight A average. For somebody nineteen, somebody American and intending to be self-made, I was growing pretty cynical pretty early. Funerary Eventualities had started eating me alive. On a night-school pop quiz, one question asked, “Define ‘Business Ethics.’” I wrote, “‘Business Ethics’ is a contradiction in terms.”
Then I erased this.
So I’d pass.
Life DID an article about the heir to the Funerary fortune. Dad saved it for me, “You think this magazine is just pictures but they cover most everything, Jerry, what’ve I been telling you?” The heir, a Shaker Heights resident, was shown wearing his bathing suit. A coffe-and-cream-toned gent, he looked plump and sleek as a neutered seal. He was a millionaire many times over, his daughter sang opera, he’d been photographed beside his Olympic swimming pool. It was shaped like a clock—diving boards at the 12 and 6! Well, that helped me be firm. This week was it.
I rushed off to knock at Vesta Lotte Battle’s door. I’d brought along a jar of my mother’s excellent blackberry jam. I hoped this might sweeten and sort of humanize my bad news. I’d prepared a little speech. It incorporated a quote from Plato—one memorized for my Book of Knowledge spiel.
I planned to tell Mrs. B: her dignity seemed so safe, really, so beyond me or anybody, it was something that Time had given her and nobody could take away. This royal quality of hers consoled me and, in my remarks, I planned to mention it as praiseworthy. I’d add: since she seemed so secure about her long life, why this worry over burial? Why sweat the small stuff? I would point out necessary facts. Superstition seemed to me Vesta Lotte Battle’s single fault. Maybe my nineteen-year-old perspective would finally help the woman see her life more clearly? Maybe it’d help her mind this less—being cut off and so forth.
I pushed open her door. No one had answered. There she stood, poking her own rocking chair idly to and fro. She’d been waiting for me. She’d sent her usual kids home. I grinned. I held out her jar of world-class jam. I’d bought a nice plaid ribbon, I’d tied it around the lid. “I’m afraid,” I started, “I’m afraid this’ll have to be your last free week. I believe we both knew this’d have to happen, right? From the day we met, even with our getting to be friendly and all, we’ve basically known it, right?”
“Word come,” she fixed her ruined eyes on me, she offered me one yellow bit of paper. “Pearl dead.”
Then Mrs. Battle pretended to reread her telegram. She was holding the thing upside down. She was holding the goddamn thing upside down. “No,” I said. “You made
it up. No.”
I rushed over and flopped into her rocker. I clutched the jam against my chest, arms crossed over it, head down, chair bobbling back and forth, panting like my one job was to guard this gift I’d brought, this bribe. “No,” my eyes wouldn’t focus right. “A trick,” I said, “I mean: a trick on both of us.”
I heard Mrs. B step nearer, she touched my shoulder, trying to cheer me. Then her right hand crooked under my arm, she coached me into standing. Her palms pressed the small of my back, leading me toward her overheated kitchen for our usual tea. Her head came no higher than my elbow.
I stood beside her scrubbed oak table. I set down the jam, then leaned here, my hands flat, my full weight tilted forward. On her mending table, somebody’s gold-rimmed fruit bowl dangerous in three hundred pieces.
I listened as, blind, efficient, she filled the teapot at her pump, doing everything so well. I kept staring at the scoured tabletop, saying, “What are we going to do here? Pearl was our only hope. Now I bet we’re going to lose it. Help me, Mrs. Battle. Help me think this out for us. Really. Oh boy, what are we going to do here? God, what are we going to do with you?”
A dry brown hand pushed one mended apple-green cup into my vision, a scrap of steam, a perfect cup of tea.
“SOMETHING’S WRONG,” Sam said. “Black circles creeping under your eyes. You’re not taking this to heart? You are keeping the old heart well out of this, right, Jer?”
“‘Heart’?” I looked up, trying to grin. “What’s a … ‘heart’? I never heard of one of those. ‘Heart’? What, is it something like a flashlight?”
“‘Flashlight’! Got to remember that.” He showed me his kids’ new school photos: the girl wore thick white hair ribbons that made her thin hair look transparent. Sam kissed her picture. “And this boy of mine’s going to set the world on fire. You watch.” Sam needed my opinion about a paint color—he planned improving his office here in maybe two or three years’ time. Nursing the bourbon bottle, he said he only drank during our appointments. He didn’t know, something about me got him. Sam asked how I’d done in organic chem? I sat looking at this man, he might’ve been speaking Latin, his face looked orange, solid orange to me.
Now I see I was in the middle of something like what’s known today as a mini-breakdown. Then we called it the blues. We called it Having Black Circles Under Your Eyes For A While. The Whiteboy-With-Blackness-Under-His-BabyBlues-Blues. (And the whiter the person is, the more deadly his case can be. Cotton starts out white but if you breathe white cotton for years enough, it gives you something called Brown Lung. You figure it.)
Here I’ll hurry what happened next. Sometimes you rush stories because you don’t have sufficient info. In this case, a person’s maybe got too much. You know those memo pads with “While You Were Out …” printed at the top, yellow pages maybe four inches by four? Well, inside my tweed windbreaker’s breast pocket, I’d recently placed just such a piece of paper. Names were written on it in my own admirable forward-tilting Palmer script. I’d arrived at Sam’s office building early. While waiting in the weedy park across the street, I chose a sunny bench. Bored, working from memory, I copied nine offenders’ names (plus their dollar amounts in arrears). To the cent, I knew. I wrote just to soothe myself, I told myself. I’ve always been big into lists.
How carefully I inscribed each name. Lovingly almost. One example, I traced ridges like gutters over the TT in the middle of one name. I extended those crossbars to shelter the whole name LoTTe. That list, now hidden in my jacket pocket, crackled when I fidgeted, talking to Sam. The square of yellow paper burned me like a mustard plaster.
Everybody’s superstitious. About money especially. “If I clear this figure by March, I’ll give X amount to charity, really.” “Like it or not, I’ll only eat what’s in the house till we go out and splurge on Friday.” The folkways of the wallet. Pretty strange. Consider our nervous computerized stock market: It still uses a bull and a bear to explain itself to itself. Animals? Now? See, it’s homemade magic. Where money comes in, we’re all primitives. And, like that, I’d carefully copied a list so I’d prevent myself from saying out loud any name on that list. Got it? Logic, it’s not—heartfelt, it is.
See, even as I made those two T’s spread like a porch roof and guardian umbrella over the name beneath, I was giving myself one teentsy loophole. If, and only if, Sam smelled this list on me, if he asked for it point-blank, then and only then might I consider maybe possibly letting him just peek at it perhaps. And for one sec.
It’s just, I’d been so silent for so long. Nine old people felt they owed me their lives. Once Sam read the thing, I knew I’d feel better, I’d find the stamina to sustain Group Life a little longer.—I was, after all, legally responsible to Sam here and if a person’s boss actually orders that person to hand over an inventory of backsliding wrongdoers, well …
What can I say? I was nineteen years old. I’d been buying my own clothes since I was eleven. Other guys my age and half as smart, a tenth as driven, were already off at college, lounging around, sleeping in till 11:30 a.m.
Early March, Sam’s office overheated, but I couldn’t take my jacket off because the list was in it. He’d see. Paper crackled if I didn’t sit real still. Fiduciary voodoo.
MY WIFE SAYS: for somebody like me, somebody with a strong head for facts, it’s even more important to empty out that head from time to time. So I am, okay? Clearing the books.
“BUDDY? Something’s off, right? College material like you, and with bags down to here. I’m seeing a wear-and-tear beyond the normal wear of raking in their coins come Saturday. Know what Sam here’s starting to think? Somebody’s holding out on you, kid. You definitely got moochers. More’n one, too. Your face gives it away. You’re too young to know how to hide stuff yet. In time, you’ll get that right—but now your kisser is like neon practically, going bloink blink blank. And this particular neon tells Sam, says ‘Sam? Certain moneys are coming directly out of young Jerry’s personal bone marrow.’ You got parasites, Jer. It shows. Draining you.
“You’re shielding them but who’s looking after you? Your folks? Naw, you’re on your own. I’m here for you. You were handsome when I hired you. Now look. Your pantcuffs are frayed, the boy can’t even sit up straight.—Jerry, who you covering for? Let me help, son. I swear it won’t get past this desk. You know their names, you maybe even wrote names down. Yeah—probably got those tucked somewheres on your person. Look, kid, trust me here. You want Sam to step around his desk, ease you against that wall and frisk you, Jer? You’re a good-looking kid, Jerry, but not that good. Spare us both. Pass your uncle the names. I’ll need the exact dollar amount each leech has sucked out of my favorite. Jerry? Tell your Uncle Sam.”
Tears stood in my boss’s eyes. That’s when I knew I had to let him save me. Yellow is such a beautiful positive color, isn’t it? While You Were Out …
I SLEPT so well that night! Why lie about it? I dropped off saying things like “Figures don’t lie.” It was a sleep too deep to let one single dream come tax it—just blackness so pure I woke up sweaty, half-panting. Getting true rest seemed the most exerting thing I’d done in months. One room away, Dad coughed, Mom promised him it’d be all right, she pounded his back, Dad thanked her, he said it’d passed, he choked again.
THE FRIDAY AFTER, I was driving toward the night-school business office to make my overdue payment. I’d got certain bonuses and could again fund my education. I still collected for Windlass but now avoided the two hundred block of Sunflower Street. I called on that block’s paying clients only after dark. It was a gusty March afternoon, dust devils spun along the roadside. Winds rocked even the biggest trees. One wad of cotton, large as a hassock, came tumbling down the center line, rolled up onto my car hood and snagged one windshield wiper. I braked, cussed, got out to yank it off and—two hundred yards away in Baby Africa’s clay cemetery—saw a funeral in progress.
Women were hunched under shawls, men held hats against their chests. Ev
erybody, fighting wind, kept faces turned down and aside. They all looked ashamed and—in my present state—this at once attracted me. An old woman stood surrounded by kids. “It’s Pearl’s,” I said. “They’re burying Pearl.” My voice broke, but, understand I am not asking for credit. Fact is, I slunk back into my Nash, flipped down both sun visors, prepared to roar off. Then unexpectedly my car was pulling over, I was out in the air, was walking toward a familiar group. Like so much I did back then, I hadn’t planned to.
I remember dry weeds snapping under my new loafers. I waited off to one side, hands joined before me. I was the only white person present.
Two weeks back, I made four phone calls to the Detroit morgue; I’d helped get Pearl’s body shipped home in a railroad ice-car. The trip had taken her eleven days. Pearl’s coffin was splintery pine. You could see black nail ends bent crooked under half-moon hammer dents. Must be the crate they packed her home in. Somebody’d tried painting out stenciled instructions: THIS SIDE UP. KEEP REFRIGERATED AT ALL TIMES. Near the coffin’s tapering foot end, a Maxwell House can rested on the ground. It was stuffed with dried hydrangea blooms big as human heads. Alongside the jagged grave, a pile of earth waited. Wind kept flicking dirt off that and onto the mourners. Everybody stood with eyes closed, less in prayer than to protect themselves from the menace of flung grit. (I wondered why this didn’t usually happen. I’d only been to two funerals but remembered that the undertakers usually spread a grass-green groundcloth over such waiting dirt to hide it, and protect the living.)
People lined up looking into the coffin a last time. I’d never seen an open coffin at the graveyard. But, having strolled over here, I felt I couldn’t hold back. When I joined the line, Mrs. B’s neighbor kids saw me. They suddenly closed ranks around her. Only then did she turn in my general direction. Her neck lengthened, the blue-gray head twisting my way. I knew she couldn’t see me at this distance but both VLB’s arms lifted from her sides, wavering noplace. She seemed to be hearing a sound or maybe scented me standing here. I felt so honored I got weak.
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