“You got that right,” Pudding took his white meat and headed for the kitchen.
“It has been a long time,” I tried to ameliorate the tension. “But it’s good to see you-all. And Lonnie Hines, look at you! What have you been up to?”
“Got a store over in Live Oak. Auto parts, tires and batteries.”
“Much business?”
He shrugged modestly. “Depends. Got a county contract now that’s good.”
“‘Till they take it away from us,” Shirley Lee joined.
So they are married. Something else I did not know.
“So what you been up to, Cilla?” Johnny Boy Masters joined Lonnie and Shirley Lee to pose that question, or challenge. He seemed diminished, shrunken, with terrible pallor, but I was too embarrassed in the moment to inquire after his health, unwilling to present yet another piece of evidence that I had lost touch, a delicate euphemism, with my Kerbo classmates.
“Johnny Boy.”
I offered my hand like a politician. He regarded it a moment. “You been up to?” he asked again, pumping me once, briefly.
“Just working. Just like you-all.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
I don’t know what I expected. Not effusion, certainly. Not a party. Not the nodding adoration of fans or sycophants. I certainly did not expect things to be the same as when I left; you cannot go to that home again and should not want to. But I suppose I had imagined or hoped that years of absence would be seen in light of the success I had enjoyed. Had earned. I supposed I imagined that my life away from Colored Town would at least kindle curiosity. I am after all a cause célèbre in Paris and Rome and Manila. Toast of the town on rainy Tuesdays in New York and Milan and Berlin. But not here. The hero known in these quarters lies somewhere beyond the smell of pot roast and pilau and pound cake.
“Seem like you kind of petered out.” Pudding returned with a beer. “What somebody tole me. Say you ain’t put out nothing new in a while.”
“I’m working on something.”
“Not what I heard.”
“Pudding, show some manners.” A voice got old still carried authority. I turned to find my first and best teacher at my shoulder.
“Miss Chandler!”
“Come here.”
She wrapped me up in her arms and for a moment I would give anything to be a girl again, to be a maid and innocent, sitting by my mama at church before an upright piano. Content to hear the music my mother plays.
Content to turn the pages.
“He’s out back,” Miss Chandler released me and I followed her, past whispered comment, to Mr. Raymond’s back porch.
“Fancy, isn’t it?”
The rear-facing veranda was now screened in. I saw Mr. Raymond’s ancient pickup rusting on blocks out back. A satellite dish was anchored with cement blocks alongside.
“Raymond calls it a ‘Florida room’,” Miss Chandler drew my attention back to the altered porch. “It’s the only room big enough for a casket, really.”
I saw a set of blinds erected near to hand. They reminded me of the curtains pulled on rings around the beds in hospital rooms. But these flimsy screens were framed in wood, screened in silk, some indefinite sylvan pattern.
“Is that him?”
“Behind them, yes.”
I felt Miss Chandler’s hand squeeze my arm.
How many times had she done that? Urged me on with that strong hand?
“Go on. Go to him.”
I edged past the silk-rendered forest to find Joe Billy waiting. I had admonished Edward to put JayBee in the most expensive suit he could obtain and found myself irritated, even there, even as I should have been feeling grief for my brother, to see a half-inch of Joe Billy’s wrists protruding like pods of okra from a cheap Arrow shirt and off-the-rack jacket.
“Joe Billy.”
The stitch was fixed, that sloppy repair about his glass eye now invisible to mourners. His hair was combed back just like when he was a teenager. Just like Sammy Davis, Jr.
“He’s still got his hair,” I remarked to the air.
He appeared to have all his teeth, too, though I later learned that this was the mortician’s compensation. Joe Billy lost a number of teeth over the years fighting guards or other prisoners.
“It’s all right,” Miss Chandler stood beside me. I don’t even know how she got there. “You can touch him,” she said.
She always could read my mind.
I followed the lapel of his suit to timidly reconnoiter the terrain of his chest, his throat, his cheek, face.
His lips.
They were not entirely closed. I imagined he was trying to speak. Trying to tell me something.
I leaned forward. “…Yes?”
There was nothing.
Then it came. The thing I feel so often, that knot in my chest, like a pair of socks? Working its way up, up, up.
It was to my throat. To my voice box. And then it swelled in my mouth. Gorging it. Forcing it. My mouth opened as if pried with tongs and I bayed to the faltering moon. I howled, I slobbered over my brother. My poor brother.
“JOE BILLY! JOE BILLY—”
I squalled over and over.
“I’M SORRY!!”
My wiry head sank to his white-shirted chest.
“I AM SO SORRY!!”
The ritual that helps my people cross their river Jordan normally serves as well to comfort those remaining. A wife or husband, brother or sister, can expect to be enveloped in the moments after lamentation, physically wrapped in the arms of her community once the grief has rent her garment or heart. That is the ritual. You let them alone. You hear the awful imprecations against chance or death or agony. Then when they come stumbling from the kist you wrap them up, as in a blanket, or swaddling clothes, as if the grieving sister, say, were being received fresh from the womb, which in a real sense she was, the swaddling and unwashed flesh of neighbors and friends, their arms, their lips and legs and buttocks pressing, suffocating nearly—and then released so that the living kin experience a sudden lightness, a sudden sensation of light, a baptism, the kitchen then offering succor like a mother’s tit, the chatter of children signifying hope, their selfish and carefree play once an irritation now a sign like God’s rainbow reminding us of His promise.
There will be no more flood.
There will be no more Death.
Only a passing.
A passing from the entrapment of flesh to weightless immortality. That is how the ritual works, that is its power, but when I returned composed from behind Joe Billy’s casket there were no arms save Miss Chandler’s to comfort me. My schoolmates remained occupied with their potluck. They turn to the coffee pot, the pilau, or the mindless situation comedy all but black-faced that drones on Raymond’s television. No one came to me. No one spoke my name.
The voices of children in the yard remained distant and disinterested, a nuisance, no more.
“Why don’t you stay?” Miss Chandler, again, reading me like a book. “Stay and eat.”
“No,” I declined bravely. “I can’t take the time.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Miss Chandler’s assent, coming quickly, confirmed what I did not want to believe.
Which was that while I was acknowledged as Joe Billy’s surviving sister, I was not welcome here. Mr. Raymond did not rise from his primitive chair. Shirley Lee offered a sorority-girl smile. Lonnie’s sympathy was genuine, if restrained.
He opened the door for me. “So sorry for your loss, Cilla.”
“Thank you.”
“Take care of yourself.”
Well, I had learned to do that. Hadn’t I?
Out the door, onto the porch. The yard beyond glowed white and bare beneath a wont of clouds and a full moon. I saw in the sand the footprints of children who disappeared like elves.
“I’m sorry about Chicken Swamp; I didn’t know.”
I offered that apology to my old mentor.
“People want to be remembered, Cilla. Bu
t that’s only partly it.”
My stomach wrenched. “What’s the rest, then? Is it because I have a life they don’t? Is it resentment? Jealousy?”
“Those exacerbate, I believe,” Miss Chandler sighed. “But the biggest thing they resent, Cilla, is that when it counted, you did not trust them. You did not trust me. Not any of us.”
I swallowed. “Trust you with what?”
“Cilla, don’t you think it’s about time you laid this burden down?”
I leaned heavily on the roof of my borrowed car. Miss Chandler’s nostrils widened, detecting some pleasant aroma. The hyacinth, probably.
“When you left for Tallahassee I had no doubt that you were blameless, baby. But then you quit communicating. The letters stopped. The phone calls. You never came home, Cilla, not even on holidays. Joe Billy called me from prison asking me why his letters to your dormitory were being returned. You had not even told your own brother that you’d be finishing school in New York. Why this withdrawal, I wondered? Why were you pulling away from Joe Billy? From me? From all of us? There had to be a reason. Had to be.”
The yard behind me was white and bare. “What was I supposed to do, Miss Chandler? Put yourself in my position. What would you have done?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the same as you. But then I would have come to my people and told them to pray for me. For I had sinned. I would have told my preacher and my teacher the truth of what I had done, and by so doing I would give my neighbors and friends and classmates the opportunity to understand my hard choice, to show grace, to forgive.”
“They wouldn’t have forgiven me,” I shook my burly head. “I know they wouldn’t.”
“Oh, Cilla.” I could see the moon in my teacher’s eyes. “That is where you are so, so wrong.”
Joe Billy was laid to rest in a twelve thousand dollar casket a little before noon in a yard of sand. The blossoms of dogwood trees wreathed the coffin, those white blossoms also strewed around the gravesite, spilling even into the loamy maw that received my brother’s box. It was a humble resting place, segregated entirely by race, just a swell of topsoil set off beneath clumps of cypress by a green picket fence badly in need of painting. The graves, all for black people, reflected their origins in an impoverished population. Most of Colored Town’s interred could not even afford tombstones. I saw many crosses carved of wood. Sometimes a metal marker.
The graves were scattered between stands of cypress. Joe Billy would be buried next to his mother. His mother and mine. Next to Corrie Jean. A stump away from Grandma’s grave. I didn’t handle the arrangements for Grandmother Handsom. I was away when she died. I was away when mother died too, for that matter, but I did make arrangements for their markers.
Joe Billy’s headstone was cut from pink granite. I wasn’t sure what to inscribe for my brother’s surname. We never knew who our father was. In the end I decided to leave Joe Billy the same nomen for perpetuity that he joyfully and tenaciously used during the run of his life:
—JOSEPH WILLIAM KING—
There had been some hesitation over the selection of the stone’s attending inscription and iconography. For the former, Ed Tunney suggested a variety of aphorisms precut into polished slabs, “Rest In Peace,” say, or, particularly apposite, “Greater Love Hath No Man.”
“Something along those lines is always nice.” Him smiling like a midway barker. “Or how ’bout some Scripture? Scripture’s always popular. I like Corinthians.”
“And will there be a design to go with it?” I asked. “Some kind of etching on the stone?”
“Oh, yes,” he nodded enthusiastically. “We have a wide selection. Doves, angels. Angels’ wings. Or olive branches. Those are symbolic.”
It’s a hell of a thing trying to decide what symbols to risk on a dead man’s stone. In the end, I just did what I thought Joe Billy might like.
“Engrave a guitar,” I directed.
“A guitar? On the headstone?”
“Yes. Two of them. To frame his birth and death. Find me some paper, I’ll make you a sketch.”
“And the inscription?”
“Let’s go with this.”
I took out my Mont Blanc pen. The epitaph was quickly rendered:
—JOSEPH WILLIAM KING—
October 31, 1945–April 17, 1993
Born in Dowling Park
Buried in Colored Town
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”
It was a graveside funeral. I endured a sonorous sermon rendered by an anonymous cleric whose spliced assurances of salvation and succor were for me tiresome, if not meaningless. But others believed them, I reminded myself, or wanted to believe. Finally, Joseph William was interred. The sun was high and hot by the time I kneeled at the jaws of the pulleys and spars spanning my brother’s damp pit.
“You can rest, now, Joe Billy.”
I dropped a single pearly blossom onto the lid of his coffin. It landed with a plop that seemed comical. Time, then, to stand and accept the mumbled condolences of the perhaps twenty or so persons attending. The same schoolmates and one-time neighbors who frostily greeted me the evening before now filed past my brother’s open grave, paying their respects in genuine coin to Joe Billy, offering counterfeit consolations to me. Which was fine. As it should be, probably.
Finally, it was finished. Miss Chandler accompanied me as I left the yard.
“Could you use a ride?” I asked her.
“Thank you, I could.”
I drove Miss Chandler home in silence. I got out to help her from the car. I didn’t walk her inside. Just to the gate.
“There is no way to thank you, is there, Miss Chandler, for all the things you did for me? For Joe Billy?”
She squeezed my arm. “It’s good seeing you, Cilla.”
That was it. No parting speech or pearls of wisdom. It wasn’t until her gate opened on protesting hinges and Miss Chandler stiffly mounted the still-wooden steps to enter her home that I fully appreciated how old my teacher had become. How near to the grave she herself had to be. How much she had spent on my behalf. How much could possibly remain?
I waited for the front door to close before I climbed back into my air-conditioned car. Then I drove as if making for the railroad station, but then turned back to my brother’s grave. I wanted to be alone with Joe Billy for awhile with no one to see me. No prying eye to judge or censure my expression of grief, or lack thereof.
I wanted to say goodbye properly.
By the time I returned to the cypress-shrouded yard, Joe Billy’s grave was covered, his marble monument looking over a mound of sand and the flowers offered at the site by those attending, day lilies being the dominant addition to the blooms of dogwood. Both fruits signifying in varying ways the agony or hope of resurrection.
The diggers were already gone. They use tractors, now, you know, to score the earth and then to fill it. Makes for quick work, especially in the soft loam near the coast of northern Florida. I parked my car and angled for the gap in the cemetery’s badly painted perimeter. “Tunney’s Mortuary”; the reminder was stitched in white over the green canopy that rippled as the sail of a boat. I didn’t see any automobiles other than my own at the cemetery, but as I approached the fresh grave I saw someone seated in a folding chair outside Tunney’s canopy. A white man, I could tell that, though his back was to me and his torso was shielded by a tangled trunk of cypress. He was dressed in a suit that must have been bought in the fifties. The trousers bagged about what I could only imagine were bony legs. The jacket was faded gray and rumpled as a pillow. The shoes by contrast appeared newly purchased, Fieldings, probably, plain-toed Oxfords, black, low-quarter. Spit-shined as if for military inspection.
I smelled something acrid and familiar. It was borne on the wilting breeze, twining up through the branches of the shielding trees. Tobacco? A cigarette? What was this, a white man smoking at my brother’s grave?!
The short heels of my shoes sank into the sand as I marched straight over.
“Sir,” I challenged him as I approached the canopy. “Sir, do you have business here?”
He rose with my tone and turned and then I saw that the man with the shoes and cigarette was Sheriff Collard Jackson.
“Cilla,” he leaned against the flimsy chair. “Ain’t you somethin’?”
His face was by now deeply etched and cratered, a lunar landscape. The eyes recessed deeply into sockets that now seemed frail in the large cranium. The hair thinning. The frame bereft of muscle, gone nearly to bone. Flesh hanging loosely in his sleeves, in his trousers.
The King of Colored Town Page 36