Slow Funeral

by Rebecca Ore

He didn’t answer her, just lowered the gun with his trigger finger stretched out along the frame, not curled against the trigger. Maude hoped that meant he’d had some training. Terry smiled at him. Then Maude wondered why she was invited to their first dinner together after a week apart.

  John put the gun in a belt holster, then asked, “So, what do you do?”

  “I take care of my grandmother and sew on a quilt.”

  “What did you do in Berkeley?”

  “Stole from the system and sold plasma.”

  He smiled at Maude as if seeing her as a social bandit straight out of his fantasies. She felt tugs pulling her into that posture, her mood swinging to tough, sexy, and cynical, a shoplifter, a woman who played badger games without a partner, busting middle-class balls. She tried to push his image of her away and found it entangled in her own self-image. Concentrating, she separated the images, pushed his away. He said, “You must be bored here after being a thief in Berkeley. I’ll take you shooting.”

  “I’d rather see the hawk hunt.”

  Terry said, “She didn’t really steal like those black kids you play with in Richmond. Betty said she was on welfare under a fake name. Dinner’s ready.”

  “That’s still stealing from the system,” John said.

  “I’m certainly hungry,” Maude said, slam-changing the subject.

  Maude thought she’d never seen food like Terry’s dinner in Bracken County. A duck lay glazed on a platter, its skin spiced with ginger and Szechwan peppers. Beside the duck, Terry put steamed Chinese rolls and cut scallions, saying, “It’s not precisely authentic, but I like steamed buns better than the pancakes.”

  Without asking, John put a Guinness Stout at each place. Maude sat down as Terry brought over a tureen of hot-and-sour soup. “As good as a salad,” Terry said, ladling soup into Chinese bowls.

  Maude could forgive much weirdness for a meal like this. She said to John, “So you’re a computer tech. I’ve thought about learning how to program.”

  “Not needed these days. Unless you’re an ace. More and more companies are using packaged programs. Soon, a clerk will be able to do most computer work.”

  Maude wondered if he was an ace.

  Terry said, “Luke and Betty are stopping by later.” Maude tried to remember when she’d last seen Luke, Betty’s husband. He’d been a looming terror figure when she visited as a child. “I hardly saw him even though we visited here most summers.”

  “Luke never cared much for children,” Terry said. “But he and Betty were great friends of your grandmother’s.”

  “I don’t know when they got together,” Maude said. “In church,” Terry said.

  Maude felt weird about the sort of Christianity the locals professed. Their God sent poverty and earthquakes to the Nicaraguans and set the local believers in a place where their wishes could make their God come true. The catch was that all the gods came true in Bracken County. Still, she couldn’t imagine Betty at the local church. She asked, “The Baptist Church?”

  “Yes, but they’re not Fundamentalists, you know,” Terry said. “They go socially, to support the community.” She turned to John. “Maude knows all sorts of folkloric things about the county.”

  Maude said, “The local NAACP has a ghost secretary who was described as the widow of a white man when she was arrested for murder in 1910. Progress both pleases her and pisses her off.” She wondered if they were too liberal or too conservative to hear the rest of it. But John had black street contacts, so Maude continued, “Her daddy offered $100 to any of his daughters as could marry a white man.”

  “What did a black man do in the late nineteenth century that he could afford to make such an offer?”

  “He made liquor,” Maude said. “His daughter did, too. That’s why she had to kill a man. He wouldn’t pay her for her liquor.”

  “If the magic was real,” Terry said, “she could have gotten money magically.”

  “Conjuring isn’t always in human interests,” Maude said. “What you deal with has a will of its own. It’s the personalized universe of the ancients. So sometimes, you don’t call, you just do. You use your own will, not an entity working through you with its own purposes.”

  “Just do,” John said. He pulled his pistol and dry-fired it as a punctuation to what Maude had said, then asked, “But how do people know they’re using their own will? Maybe they’re just tricked into thinking they have free will?”

  His question threw Maude back to her terror after her parents died. Accident, design, accident, design. At her mother’s grave, Maude had begged for an answer. Her emotions drew five deal-making entities, old gods, the embodiments of discarded philosophies, the spirit of alchemy, each more seductive than the one before, offering power. But none of them answered her question, not even with a lie.

  At her father’s grave, the universe emptied itself into a blank. She went back to graduate from NYU without parents in the audience.

  College proved to be another magic station charming children into believing the world would consider them special if they finished its programs, Maude realized when she went for job interviews and was asked to take typing tests.

  Perhaps she’d gone truly paranoid then, desperate to know where magic ended, where the universe she’d dearly wished to believe in began, that dream universe of level playing fields and meritocracy and rules that worked the same for everyone.

  “Maude, you’ve taken a long time to think,” Terry said.

  Maude blinked. “Sometimes, you have to trust you’re doing the right thing, know you aren’t overwhelmed by emotion. People here used to be so much more dramatic, more emotional. Times have changed, but the black woman widow of a white man wishes they’d change even more.”

  Terry said, “And thoroughly modern people, modern enough to have an NAACP chapter, believe this?”

  “In this county, it’s not belief,” Maude said. “To not work with the spirit personalities or be used by them, you have to willfully not work with them. You’ve got to force logic on the situations.”

  “It’s an interesting world view,” Terry said. “That you can force logic on a situation.”

  “So maybe this gun has a spirit?” John said.

  Maude nodded, not sure what John wanted to hear.

  Terry said, “But do you believe this?”

  Maude felt the magic around them, but they seemed unconscious of it. “I don’t believe in it,” Maude said, deciding to seem sane at the expense of all the local truth.

  They heard the old Essex coming now, making the even more archaic sound of the fierce, noisy, hill-climbing motor of the World War I era Essex. The car pulled up and two people got out.

  Maude thought she would have remembered Luke more clearly since they’d met before, but realized she’d never dared look directly at him when she was a child. He was huge, like a bull through the shoulders, and had shaggy grey hair, but wasn’t as wrinkled as Betty. Beside him, Betty fussed with her purse. He made her feminine, not the matriarch she was around the women.

  “Our uncle’s pure male essence,” Terry said. Maude wondered if Terry spoke metaphorically or magically.

  “Luke and I are going hunting tomorrow,” John said.

  Terry opened the door before the old couple could knock. “Maude said she hardly remembers you, Uncle Luke.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” Luke said. He looked at her as if he knew all about the men she’d picked up in Berkeley bars. “I didn’t meet much of Partridge’s children when they visited.”

  Maude realized Luke would have aggravated any self-possessed man around him. John could like Luke because John had an entity behind him, was in the magic so unselfconsciously he was oblivious to it.

  Luke sat down, his huge hands curled slightly on his thighs, his legs spread. “John, I hope you move here permanently,” he said.

  Maude looked at Betty. The tensions between Betty and Luke were complex: sexual, reproductive, competitive. Betty seemed smoother, less wrin
kled, sitting beside Luke. She said, “Maude, I hope to come down to see Partridge soon.”

  “Maybe you can help me with Lula. I’ve got to do something about her,” Maude said. “She wants to take off Partridge’s cast so she can sleep better with her.”

  “Partridge still alive?” Luke asked. He seemed more like the farmer then, less like the magic male.

  “She said she’d live until I finished piecing her quilt,” Maude said.

  “Women can do that,” Luke said. “Men would rather die than face an anniversary without their powers.”

  “I’d better get back to her,” Maude said. She looked at a clock and realized she couldn’t get home before midnight.

  “We’ll call you,” Terry said. John nodded over his pistol.

  When Maude got home, Lula sat treadling the sewing machine in a pool of light. Partridge’s white cast showed against the shadowed bed. Partridge looked from the sewing to Maude. Her pupils seemed enormous, almost as though she was in shock.

  Maude touched her grandmother’s hands. They felt clammy. “Lula, it’s late. I think my grannie needs to get some sleep.”

  “Thought I’d help you,” Lula said. She looked at Maude and smiled.

  “You might need to sleep in the other bedroom tonight. Partridge is sweating.”

  Lula treadled and flipped the lever that threw the belt off the pulley. She closed the machine and then said, “Just tonight.”

  Maude sat down on the bed after Lula went to the other room. “I saw Luke,” she said to Partridge. “And I met Terry’s husband, John.”

  “Luke is a power of a man, isn’t he?”

  “He makes Betty look feminine, not matriarchal.”

  “It’s a spell she had to have to catch him.”

  “Who’s the winner?”

  “She thinks she bespelled him, but she had to use the spell to get him, so I think he has her.”

  Maude smoothed down her grandmother’s hair, still not completely grey. “I can’t tell whether Terry or John believe any of it or not.”

  “Maybe you just hallucinated that child screaming from the old school map. Maybe we’re just crazy ladies. Maude, I don’t mind if Lula helps with the quilt.”

  Maude wondered how much Partridge was suffering. “You in any pain?”

  “If I talk about it, it will get worse.” Partridge settled down in the bed and pulled up the covers with her good hand. “Maude, you wonder much about that truck killing your momma and daddy?”

  “All the time. It’s the riddle of my existence. Was it an accident? What does that imply about the universe? Was it a spirit killing? Who did it? What happens to me? Did—”

  “I’d rather die to oblivion than think about it anymore.”

  6

  * * *

  WORKING THROUGH TIME-BOUND MEN

  Sunday morning, Sister Marie prayed over the local radio to a Jesus who made her moan as though he were a fertility god from Dahomey. Maude listened and treadled out squares. Lula was at the Baptist Church, probably praying hurricanes down on sinners, begging God to send sexual plagues to the deviants.

  “That’s not the right kind of black Christian,” Partridge said. “That one’s African. She just calls her god Jesus.”

  “I thought so.”

  Partridge said, “The form of Man coming through time-bound men, oh, Jesus, sweet Je-e-sus. I’m too old for that, now.”

  “Did you worship him earlier?”

  “Too afraid when I was younger. People lost respect for you unless you bound with one man.”

  Sister Marie called for a hymn and the piano that had been playing jazz behind her preaching segued into the European notes.

  “She seems very powerful,” Maude said. “I’ve always liked listening to her.”

  “Funny she does it on the radio,” Partridge said.

  “Terry and John and Luke and Betty are coming over after dinner,” Maude said. “Luke thought you were dead already.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  Maude thought a corpse staying animated to see its grandchild again seemed romantic. Romantic, she realized, because it was, in the great world, unreal. “I’d be glad we got a chance to talk even if you had died before I came back from Berkeley and I had to talk to your ghost. I’ll keep you living on in my mind after you die.”

  “Don’t do that here.”

  “I’ll remember you.”

  “That’s different. I don’t want my soul eaten. I don’t want a semblance of me walking among the living. I don’t want to be trapped inside your mind. I want to go to heaven to see my folks. All the people I cared most about are dead.”

  Maude tried not to resent that, but did. She pulled out the quilt pieces and began sewing.

  “I don’t know you enough to care as much about you,” Partridge said after Maude sewed two hems. “And your youth makes me old.”

  Maude almost said, I need to do something besides wait for you to die. The radio brought them a white preacher, who hysterically breathed on ‘ah’s at the end of every word in a diatribe against the witches and feminists. And evolutionary socialists, too, Maude thought as she cut the radio off.

  Partridge began saying, almost in singsong, “When I was young, I wanted to be a teacher. The men wouldn’t let me. When I was young, I miscarried a baby girl and had all menfolk. When I was young, I wanted to ride sidesaddle, but my daddy didn’t let me. When I was young, my mother hit me with her eyes, mean eyes worse than a blow.” She sat up in the bed. “Maude, I’m still just eighteen inside.”

  “I know, Grandmother.”

  “What do you know? You don’t take care of children. You don’t do a job of work.”

  “I’m going to take care of you.” Maude tried not to be resentful.

  “But there’s nobody coming after, so who takes care of you?”

  Maude finished another seam and tied off the threads in a tailor’s knot, guiding the knot down the two threads with a pin. She wondered how the old women who’d sacrificed years of their youth to take care of their aged felt now. Hi,

  Grandma, we’ve come to take you to the nursing home. Perhaps, Maude thought, she was morally superior because she would do this without expecting anything. Other than for whatever estate was left, the house. She finally said, “I’m going to look into things I could do here, start a small business.”

  “You mean that? I think you should become a teacher.” Partridge sat up in the bed and glared at Maude. “Satisfy my dream.”

  “I don’t like children that much.”

  “I took you in every summer. You brought me an outsider’s view of things, Maude. And you just think you don’t like children. You’re still a child yourself.”

  So neither spoke for a while until the company walked in through the door, Luke and Betty, Terry and John, and Lula coming in behind and stopping to fuss in the kitchen. Maude wondered if she’d cleaned the blender and put it up, or if Lula would come out fussing.

  “Dishes in the sink,” Lula said.

  “We took Lula to dinner,” Betty said. “We thought she needed a break and you are here now, Maude.”

  Meaning, clean up your mess. Maude got up and washed the dishes, listening through the open door while Betty and Lula fussed over Partridge as though she were a baby, not someone eighteen trapped in an eighty-six-year-old body.

  John came to the door and said, “We did good shooting yesterday. We got a deer.”

  “It’s not hunting season yet.”

  “Luke said I could do anything I wanted on my own property. You even said we could keep a gyrfalcon.”

  Maude noticed that John still had his Colt auto holstered on his hip. “So, how did you kill the deer?”

  “I strangled it and bit out his throat.”

  Maude flinched. John laughed. Lula said, “Oh, I heard you shot it with your handgun. Did Maude tell you she found a revolver here?”

  Luke said, “Partridge’s kin-in-law took it off a killer. He died three years later
after a still raid.”

  “Was he shot?” Maude asked.

  “No, he died of pneumonia,” Luke said.

  “He wouldn’t have died these days,” Maude said. She wondered if magic aided the pneumonia. “How old was he?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “The caliber of the gun?” John asked.

  “No, the gun is a 32.06 Colt,” Maude said.

  “I want to see it,” John said.

  Maude felt like this was a bad idea, but Lula went to the desk and pulled it out. John took it in his hands and said, “A real murder weapon.”

  Terry flushed as though he’d said something sexual. Luke put his arm around Betty and nodded down at her. Partridge squeezed her eyes closed.

  “Aren’t you supposed to check to see if a gun is loaded when you pick it up?” Maude asked.

  “With a revolver, you can see the bullets in the cylinder, in back of the charge holes,” John said, but he swung open the cylinder, spun it, pushed the ejection rod, then snapped the cylinder closed again. “Can you get ammunition for it anymore?”

  Lula opened a small drawer above the writing surface and pulled out a change purse with a cross embossed on it. “Here,” she said, squeezing the purse to open the spring closure.

  “Did you go through everything?” Maude asked.

  “I’m kin,” Lula said.

  John opened the cylinder again and put the bullets in the charge holes. “Doesn’t do to have an unloaded gun.”

  Maude said, “You can put the gun up now.” She’d unload it later.

  Betty said, “Maude, let’s go up to your room for a moment.”

  Maude stood up before she realised it. Magic, force of personality, whatever, she walked with Betty to the room on the far side of the house.

  “You can’t fire Lula,” Betty said.

  “She would have let Partridge starve to death.”

  “Partridge is dying. You can only slow her down.” Maude looked at Betty’s grey eyes and wrinkled skin, wondering why Betty needed Lula in at the death. “I want her to be comfortable. She wants to have some sense of an afterlife.”