by Tim Sandlin
He eased his truck up to the curb next to me, got out, and slammed the door. The three New Yorkers instinctively sensed tension and leaned away. I doubt if Wyoming men would have been that sensitive to the possibility of ugliness.
Dothan’s voice dripped with smugness. He said, “I always knew you’d end up with the fairies.”
I glanced at Pete’s friends to see how they handled being called fairies. Their faces had gone mask. I said, “Who are you trying to insult, Dothan, me or them?”
“I’m not trying to insult anyone. I came to pay my last respects to Maurey’s queer brother.”
I slugged Dothan in the stomach. He doubled over and I hit him in the face, then he was down on the snow and I was kicking him.
I lost control, which is something I’d never done before. A kidney stomp immobilized him long enough for me to go for the head. There was a rush of memories—of Sonny and Ryan beating me up in October; of Dothan beating me up in the seventh grade; of him fucking Maurey when I couldn’t; of Maurey, Shannon, and Lydia dismissing me. I kicked the living bejesus out of that bastard.
Then hands were pulling me off him and the bimbo was screaming. The New Yorkers looked aghast. I guess they weren’t used to personal violence.
Chet was saying, “He’s not worth it, Sam. Back off.”
Maurey was saying, “You split your stitches, tiger.”
She borrowed handkerchiefs from the New Yorkers and wrapped my hand tightly. I watched Dothan’s woman hold his head in her lap and pat his lips with snow. His eyes blinked, but didn’t focus.
As we walked into the church, Maurey said, “I wish you’d let me get to him first.”
“It was my turn.”
***
“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; even so saith the spirit, for they rest from their labors.”
The priest, whose name was Father Jack, held his arms out about sternum high, with the thumbs and forefingers made into Os. Blond beard, thinning hair, thick forearms—Father Jack looked like Edward Abbey in a ghost costume.
“The Lord be with you,” he said.
Chet and a smattering of people at the back said, “And with thy spirit.”
“Let us pray.”
Chet kneeled and after a few false starts, the rest of us followed. Chet was Episcopalian, which was why we were having the funeral service in the Episcopal Church. That, and AA met in the parish hall, so Maurey knew Father Jack. But the rest of us in the family’s pews weren’t Episcopalian, or much of any other denomination, so we were lost when it came time to sit, kneel, or stand. On top of saying good-bye to his partner, Chet must have felt like he was leading a very slow aerobics class.
The church was a dark log building with two lines of pews wide enough for four people or five if they scrunched up. Pud sat against the north window with Roger at his side. Then it went Auburn, Maurey, Chet, the aisle, me, Shannon in her new outfit, and Toinette. Dot Pollard was behind me, with the three friends from New York behind her.
The rest of the church was maybe three-quarters full of Pete’s high school friends and people who go to funerals to prove they’re not dead yet. I heard sniffling from the far back and sneaked a look to see who it was—Ron Mildren, being glared at by his wife, Gloria.
Pete was in the bois d’arc box with ivory inlay on top of a walnut table a few feet in front of Chet. My theory that dead people know what’s going on around them for four days after they die applies just as much to ashes as bodies. Pete knew what I was thinking, so I’d best be careful.
Father Jack announced he was going to read to us from the Book of Job. Not my favorite book. God tests Job by killing his children, then says, “You passed. Here, have some more children.” If God killed Shannon, then said, “That was a test, I’ll replace her,” I would say, “Forget it, you jerk.”
As the Father read, “And though after my skin worms destroy this body,” I leaned forward to check out the front pew’s handle on the grief process. As usual in groups, I felt responsible for everyone’s peace of mind. Roger sat pale and unblinking; Auburn was restless. Chet was tremendously sad, yet he had dignity. He didn’t jump up and bash the priest in the mouth, which is what I probably would have done.
Maurey looked both beautiful and beat up by life. Her eyes were muddy and the scar on her chin seemed whiter, but she was still concerned about the others. One hand touched Chet’s shoulder and the other arm extended over Auburn and rested on Roger’s leg.
Shannon’s shoulder touched mine; I leaned my weight toward her in case she needed support.
Job’s part ended and Toinette went to the front with her viola. She played a wonderfully wistful song I’d never heard before, which she told me later was a “Romanze” by Max Bruch. Toinette’s face was golden and her belly was huge. When she ran her bow across the viola strings, they seemed not so much to weep in the tragic keening of a violin, but to cry out a deeper, more elemental pain. The viola mourned not only Pete, but all loss everywhere. After Toinette finished, she gave Father Jack a shy smile and walked to her pew, and he sat there on his bench, looking poleaxed.
Shannon put her fingers over my good hand.
After that, Father Jack read another Bible verse, this one from Revelations, the book hippies used to quote in North Carolina. I tried to follow, but when he read the part about no more death, sorrow, crying, or pain, I drifted off. I’m not sure a world with no pain at all would be that desirable. The boredom would be debilitating. I could write a novel about it sometime.
When Maurey and Pete were kids their mother drove them into Jackson to the Baptist Church every Sunday while their father went fishing or hunting or read detective stories by the woodstove. If anyone asked Buddy where you go after you die, he always said, “San Francisco.” It was a family proverb: Stick by Mom and spend eternity in heaven or stick with Dad and go to San Francisco. His version made as much sense as heaven. What good are streets of gold?
Shannon jabbed an elbow in my ribs. Everyone was looking at me. Maurey mouthed, “Go on up.”
The eulogy. In the excitement of the last couple of days, I’d forgotten the eulogy.
Father Jack said, “Mr. Callahan.”
***
I was careful not to touch anything because my hand was starting to throb and I was afraid blood might ooze through the handkerchiefs and stain the oiled wood of the pulpit or the cloth that hung over the top. I said, “I met Pete Pierce the day President Kennedy was killed.”
Chet stared at me, unblinking. So did Roger, but his unblinking face sucked in light while Chet’s glowed with emotion. Like the difference between the moon and a black hole.
Nothing to do but plow ahead. “Pete must have been six or seven. He wanted to watch cartoons, but they weren’t on because of the assassination coverage. He and Maurey got into a fight and she smacked him in the nose.”
Maurey was frowning. It seemed awfully important not to disappoint her in this, which meant the story had to go somewhere, mean something.
“I realized then how a family works; the members of a family may fight like cats and dogs, and they almost never understand what the others want or feel, or who they are, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the love that flows without reservation. Without doubt.”
Father Jack shifted his weight on the bench. I wondered what he thought of us behind that beard. Was it just another day’s work for him, like me at the golf cart plant?
“What else do I remember about Pete?” I asked myself and the congregation. Had to be something. “His mother. When Pete’s mother was sick all those years, he took care of her. Pete loved his mother very much.”
The people looked up at me, expecting more. I hadn’t yet said enough to quit. “After she died, he went to New York City and got a job in the theater, managing lights for plays and musicals.”
Chet had stopped watching me and was staring at the box of ashes. His eyes were striking. They showed more than the grief of separation. You could see that he’d receive
d something permanent from Pete, something I had never felt with a woman—friend or lover. It came to me that the funeral wasn’t for Pete; it was for Chet.
“Pete Pierce was gay,” I said.
Maurey moved her hands into her lap. The three guys from New York rustled in their seats. I could tell from some faces farther back that not everyone had known. Instead of addressing the group, I spoke directly to Chet.
“Pete was proud of being gay, and I think that pride is why he chose me to say words about him today. He knew I wouldn’t pretend he was someone he wasn’t. He knew I wouldn’t skip over one of the central elements of his life.”
Almost imperceptibly, Chet nodded. I knew I was going in the right direction.
“We can’t talk about who Pete was without acknowledging his love for Chet, here. They were partners, mates. Lovers in every sense of the word.”
Chet’s lips parted in almost, but not quite, a smile.
I said, “His love for Chet was the truth that made Pete feel unique.”
I looked at Pud over against the window. His face was turned ever so slightly toward Maurey’s, and hers toward him.
“A person would like to think his or her life has significance,” I said.
Shannon’s face was turned to the window, as if she were listening to something outside the rest of us couldn’t hear. She was daydreaming.
“To me, significance means to love, and to be cherished, and to impact creatively the world—large or small—that one occupies. Pete found significance. Through his work and his love he left a legacy that will live into the future with each of us he touched.”
I turned to Father Jack. “Where’s the nearest phone?”
He shifted forward on the bench, confusion in his eyes. “The church offices. Next door.”
I left by the door behind the pulpit. Crossing the snowy yard, I saw that Dothan and the bimbo were gone. Love wasn’t everything. Neither was friendship and family. What I wanted and couldn’t get, even from the three legs of my support stool, was someone to take my dreams seriously.
Gilia answered on the third ring.
“Hello.”
“What do you think of a home for unwed mothers? We could run it. You and I.”
There was a long silence and quiet breathing, then Gilia said, “Where?”
Words After
Social Blunders is the third novel I’ve written about the good folks of GroVont, Wyoming, and several reviewers and letter writers have told me I am misspelling the name of my fictional town. This hardly seems fair since I created the place. There once was a real town named and spelled Gro Vont on almost the same spot where I put my version. The real Gro Vont was settled in 1894 near the Gros Ventre River at the base of the Gros Ventre Mountains, which, together with the Gros Ventre Indian tribe, are pronounced the same as the town. Gros Ventre is a French term meaning Big Belly. A translation more in keeping with the spirit of the tribes who named the Gros Ventre Indians would be the Hippy Derelicts.
One group of old-timers claims the early settlers of GroVont changed the spelling because they were sick and tired of correcting outsiders who pronounced it Gross Ven-tray. Another faction, pointing to various maps that spell it Grovont, Gro Vont, or GroVont, say the early settlers couldn’t spell for squat and painted the post office sign in ignorance. No one but the Postal Service ever called the town GroVont anyway; to the people who lived there and those in the surrounding valley, it was always Mormon Row.
Gro Vont’s population peaked in the mid-1920s at more or less fifty, then when the Depression trickled down to Wyoming, John Rockefeller’s agents bought all the land they could get their hands on for thirty-seven dollars an acre. Rockefeller gave the land to the government so they could form what is now Grand Teton National Park. Those who wouldn’t sell were forced to sign life leases. A life lease means when the current title holder dies, the land goes to the government and the children go elsewhere. As the old-timers died or were run off their ranches by the Park Service, Gro Vont’s numbers dwindled until now only Clark and Veda Moulton are left. The Mormon Church was hauled twenty miles closer to the ski area and made into a pizza parlor, the old school is now the shower house at a yurt village, and the last post office was taken to a nearby dude ranch. Interestingly enough, the Park Service is working on a plan to hire actors and actresses to go out on Mormon Row and pretend to do what the real ranchers were doing before the government chased them off the ranches. Only in America.
After finishing Skipped Parts, I discovered I was the third novelist to set books in a fictional town named GroVont or Gros Ventre—a remarkable coincidence when you think about it. How many Yoknapatawpha Counties sprang up independently of each other? The first Gros Ventre belonged to H. L. Davis, whose book Honey in the Horn won a Pulitzer Prize in 1936. Ivan Doig created Gros Ventre number two—three if the real one counts—for his Montana trilogy. Mr. Doig’s Montanans pronounce it GROVE-on. Don’t ask me why. Even God doesn’t understand native Montanans.
About the Author
Rebecca Stern
Reviewers have variously compared Tim Sandlin to Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Larry McMurtry, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen, and a few other writers you’ve probably heard of. He has published eight novels and a book of columns. He wrote eleven screenplays for hire; two of which have been made into movies. He turned forty with no phone, TV, or flush toilet and spent more time talking to the characters in his head than the people around him. He now has seven phone lines, four TVs he doesn’t watch, three flush toilets, and a two-headed shower. He lives happily (indoors) with his family (wife, Carol; son, Kyle; daughter, Leila) in Jackson, Wyoming.
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