Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  “The really good thing about asking, ‘Where’s Abel?’ Just after you asked the question Abel always showed up. ‘Where’s Abel?’ ”

  The Texan paused. He gave the gathered mourners a moment to comprehend, as they stared at his face and body, how young forty-five could be. Two heartbeats later, he repeated his refrain, “Where’s Abel?” Gazing about, expectant, awaiting a late arrival—until he let his eyes fall on Abel’s coffin. The Texan shook his head, until he shook a smile back onto his face. It was the big and goofy smile he and Abel had smiled at each other when they had been young and stoned law students. After a long dramatic pause, the Texan looked up toward the ceiling in the direction of evangelical Christian heaven.

  Quiet wailing spread among some of the un-uniformed congregants, while some of the others had to bite the inside of their cheeks to keep from laughing. The uniformed were inscrutable. Abel’s friend walked off the stage.

  Pose struck, the choir (very blond in blue polyester robes or spiky-headed neo-punk in blue polyester robes) started singing another one of those invented praise songs, “Jesus Wonderful Savior,” only this one didn’t sound like a bad power ballad—it sounded like bad teeny bop rock. A screen dropped down and the lyrics were projected.

  Hope, leaning hard into Waycross’s shoulder, missed the hymnals. She wondered if Abel had missed them too. When he was young and transgressive Abel had loved the fact that the hand holding his hymnal Sunday morning had been touching his body Saturday night. A man who thought like that should not belong to a church with a projection screen in the sanctuary. Hope shuddered, despite the Xanax, and started looking for her son in the front pews.

  Ajay was seated to the left of Samantha with her three daughters, his half sisters, between them, in the front row. Samantha’s four sons, the huge stepbrothers, were on Samantha’s right.

  Ajay’s back was straight; his shoulders were not shaking. From where Hope was sitting that was all she could see and there was nothing she could do, not squeeze a hand, not pass a handkerchief. The preggers girlfriend of one of the stepsons was in the row just behind her child’s daddy. She could reach forward and clutch his shoulder. Another reason not to divorce your first husband.

  The second eulogist, another white man, a four-star general if his uniform could be believed, spoke of how restless Abel had always been: how he had always wanted new challenges, new faces, new views from new offices, new goals, new everything— how he was barely in a new job before he started looking for his next. Then shortly before his death this had altered. He had no longer wanted to change jobs; he had just wanted to be where he was, in the Pentagon, counsel general of the army.

  Only he had still wanted to change. Hadn’t it been just six weeks earlier that Hope had undergone the ex-wife interview for Abel’s tryout for a position at the White House?

  Abel had praised Hope for her performance during the inter-view. She had told the factual truth and she had told the thematic truth. To every problematic issue they had raised, Would you say he was reliable? Did he pay the child support he had committed to? Was he good with money?, Hope had responded, “We were very young.”

  He had said he hadn’t been given the job and he’d said he was disappointed. Abel had told Hope he had been made to understand that the president was disappointed as well.

  At the funeral they told it a different way. The general announced that Abel’s achievement had caught the eye of his president and that his president had intended to announce in the very next week that Abel was poised to take on an expanded portfolio of responsibilities as White House special advocate at the Pentagon. The general didn’t announce the reality: the expanded portfolio was a consolation prize. Nor was it acknowledged that before he had tried for the West Wing White House job, Abel had been trolling on Wall Street. It vaguely occurred to Hope that maybe she was the one who had been lied to. Another knot to untie later.

  The third eulogist, a special assistant to the secretary of defense, apparently above the rank of four-star general, another white man, came up to take the stage. This gentleman declared Abel’s funeral to be a marvelous example of church and state coming together.

  Then he promised that church and state would soon stand braided in the public square, raising his revelation to a crescendo, “and when that tomorrow comes it will not be on little cat feet, but on large Republican hooves!”

  Some, who had forgotten where they were, applauded. Some who remembered applauded, certain that Abel, soon to be on a cloud, equipped with a harpsichord and flowing robes, would have applauded too.

  Hope was wondering what kind of special assistant was above the rank of four-star general, why there were so many soldiers in the room, and if elephants can properly be said to have hooves. She was exhausted by lies, omissions, and white men.

  Finally a brown face. Finally a breast. Tess, Abel’s sister, barely five feet tall and mahogany dark, a Stanford graduate, stood to take her turn at the podium.

  As Tess walked to the podium, old black Nashville held its collective breath. Hope heard someone in her row whisper, “Lord only knows what’s going to come out of that child’s mouth.” Then someone said, under their breath, “You got that right!” and someone else said, aloud, “Amen.” Hope and Tess cleared their throats at the exact same moment.

  Tess had come to stake her claim to being chief mourner. She didn’t remember loving Abel; she loved Abel. Loved him enough to make her heroin-snorting jazz-musician husband sit in the back away from family. In life she had pushed the man in her brother’s face and taken pleasure in watching her sibling squirm. On Abel’s burying day Tess sequestered all love that was not for her brother.

  She argued that their childhood had been the most important part of his life; she argued that their childhood had been the greatest challenge of his life; she argued that the hours of his childhood contained his most heroic moments. Then she told a story about a dog named Dog.

  Abel and Tess had had a pet, a German shepherd called Dog. After Tess had seen a picture of two shepherds attacking a boy wearing a pretty sweater while policemen watched, Tess said, she had started to scream every time Dog had come into the room.

  If their parents were gone or they just took too long to arrive and rescue Tess, her brother, who was also afraid of Dog, who had been afraid of Dog from before she was afraid of Dog, would put that fear aside and grab a thick section of newspaper. He would roll that section into a paper baton and he would hold that baton over Dog’s head until Dog slunk down on the floor and his sister stopped crying. Abel had tried to teach Tess the trick. He had said it was magic. He had said that as long as you never touched the dog with the paper, and let him discover how much it didn’t hurt, you could control the dog with the paper. As long as you didn’t hit Dog the rolled-up paper would stay magic.

  “Abel always came running, when he came to save me. Always.” Tess talked about a dog named Dog, then she walked off the stage and back to her seat in the second row beside the stepson’s pregnant girlfriend.

  And the congregation forgot Tess. Abel seemed so far beyond his days as the king of colored kids that Tess’s declarations that their childhood had been the defining time in their lives seemed foolish.

  Before Tess could get settled back in her seat good, Pinigree Pinagrew started for the front of the church. Another white man, except this one had silver hair that grazed his shoulders instead of dark hair cut up above his ears, and instead of wearing a dark suit or a crisp uniform, he wore a three-piece white suit, complete with gold watch and gold chain hanging out of his vest pocket. Pinagrew was the self-proclaimed “last of the southern fabulists.”

  It was a challenging distance to traverse for someone who was almost falling-down drunk. Pinagrew was falling-down drunk.

  He never made it to the microphones. Overlooking the fact that Hope was the ex-wife, Pinagrew spoke directly to the first Mrs. Abel Jones the third.

  “I might could’a made it,” Pinagrew would say later, “but you don�
��t get to be a old cat without knowing when you’re outnumbered, or a old pol without knowing how to pick your audience.”

  Pinagrew, a near-ancient, still-tom-catting pol, knew how to pick his audience. He stopped near where Hope sat because he had forgotten, in a senior flash, that she was no longer married to Abel. And he wanted to find John Hope Franklin and thought he might be sitting near Hope. Then Pinagrew wondered if maybe Franklin was dead and he, Pinagrew, was really wanting to see Frazier. E. Franklin Frazier. Or maybe it was the other way around, the way he’d first thought it was. All he knew for sure was he was surrounded by a lot of black people he didn’t know and who didn’t know him; black people and white soldiers. Pinagrew rambled for a long time. Then he got to the point.

  “I wanted him to be like me. Or like Martin. Like we were when we walked together over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I wanted him to like me. But Abel’s not like me, he’s like Aria Reese.

  “Just like Ari, Abel was raised in a time and place of terror, a place of bombings and shootings, a place of funerals and wakes, a place of police dogs and fire hoses turned toward children, a land red with the blood of the recently slaughtered, a place where wedding bells didn’t ring. My South in the sixties.

  “Ari stood outside the White House, a little girl from Birmingham, a little girl who probably knew some of the girls who were in the church the day the bomb went off. That’s the child Aria Reese’s parents took on a trip to the nation’s capital. She was not an innocent. If there was no smoke in the kinky braids of their daughter as she stood outside the whitewashed pillars of the president’s home, there was smoke in her mind. Smoke in her mind. The story is told that she said to her parents, standing outside of that white plantation house where the chief executive of this great nation sleeps: one day I will work in there. How safe the green lawn must have looked just the other side of the black wrought iron gate.

  “How could she know she would carry her fear with her? Or perhaps she did know. I would prefer to believe that Ari consciously chose to infect a nation with the anxieties of black children who came of age in a time of terror when the war at home rocked their churches.

  “However that was, the anxieties of Abel and Ari have become the anxieties of a nation. She took her fear inside the White House, then inside the State Department. He took his fear inside the Pentagon.

  “The president, smug fraternity boy he might be, had the good sense to choose worried Negroes to watch dog his world. God save us all!”

  With that Pinigree Pinagrew stopped talking and started making his way back to his seat.

  Pinigree Pinagrew was a fortunate man. None of the northern army men heard a word he said. When they asked the black people who had been sitting near where Pinagrew had stood, all they got out of them was he had been hard to follow.

  Waycross shrugged; Hope shuddered; they both agreed with Pinagrew. Abel had been lucky about not getting the job on Wall Street, lucky about not getting the job in the West Wing of the White House. It was only within the walls of the Pentagon that Abel had felt safe. The old white Southerner had told it true. Then they were hit with another one of those lying, pleading, crying praise songs and the truth got sugared over. “Your Grace Is Enough.”

  Hope watched Sammie take the folded flag from the soldier, saw her be presented with a letter from the president and a medal from the Congress. Finally the obvious struck Hope: there were too many soldiers in the room. The thought passed as Hope watched Tess watching Sammie. Tess looked like she was damning Sammie to hell for suggesting Thanksgiving in the mountains. And Waycross was looking at some woman Hope didn’t really know. Ruby, she thought the woman’s name was, but she didn’t know why she knew it. She’d have to ask him about it later. Hope glanced toward Sammie and noticed that she looked like someone who might rise to the occasion.

  Hope imagined Sammie eventually telling herself that things would be easier, that it was almost like when Abel was away in Washington, that things could work out, that she could run a house with seven kids and no man if she had insurance money.

  Maybe now Sammie’s son’s girlfriend would get an abortion or put the baby up for adoption. Maybe now that Abel wasn’t preaching fire and brimstone at their passion, the older twins wouldn’t be thinking about getting married before they turned eighteen.

  Holding the flag in her hands, the raven-headed woman in the first row of mourners was thinking about things altogether else. Sammie had come to wonder about Abel’s relation to two of his closest male friends. They had made three babies but she would not swear he wasn’t gay. There was an intensity of feeling he felt for some men that she knew he didn’t feel for her. And she was wondering, as many people in Washington had wondered, if Abel hadn’t had something going on with Ms. Reese. She didn’t have to wonder anymore.

  The words ended. The music stopped. The casket was lifted by a military guard accompanied by civilian pallbearers through a phalanx of white children waving posters to hail the deceased as his casket left the sanctuary.

  WE LOVE YOU ABEL, read one of the posters drawn by a child forced into servitude to celebrate the passing of an American lawyer dedicated to the cause of freedom.

  Drawn and colored by children who did not know Abel but who had been instructed, nay, ordered, to create kinder-care laurels for him, these bright little paintings that, so far from Beijing, so long after the Chairman, achieved what Abel would have called a Maoist Moment.

  Or perhaps he would have said Leninist. Hope wasn’t sure which, but she knew if Abel were alive and had attended this service on the occasion of someone else’s death, he would have contrived a cutting phrase—at least inside his head— perhaps “puerile grandiosity,” to describe the display.

  Though the irony of the moment was utterly lost on Abel’s last parson, a man who translated sacrament into spectacle, a man who knew, for certain, what the children should be doing, and how church and state should be braided. Singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” the parson led the parade as they all left the building.

  The funeral was over.

  FOUR

  THE LINE OF cars carrying mourners to Abel’s graveside was escorted by state troopers, in sedans and on motor-cycles, as it snaked its way back, from suburbia, toward the center of the city. Saying that she loved her husband too much to take the short way home, the widow had requested a path that circled Nashville, before heading across the Alabama border.

  In the last of the black limousines that followed the hearse, Abel’s only son and Abel’s last parson had a perfect view of the cortege. Dark green government-issue SUVs with tinted black windows were followed by a motley collection of cheap and fancy cars and trucks. By the parson’s silent calculation the procession was more than half a mile long.

  Some drivers not only pulled to a complete stop at the green light, as directed by the uniformed officers; they exited their cars and stood, baseball caps in hand, or hands over hearts, or eyes cast down, sometimes longer than a quarter hour, waiting for the procession to pass, waiting to salute the unknown soldier, compelled by the sight of immense and martially choreographed grief.

  Military protocol coupled with small-town southern burial customs birthed dizzying display. The parson breathed deeply to take it all in. It was something he might never see again—even if he buried one of the big country stars who worshipped with him. New tears sprang to the parson’s eyes. He regretted not having known how important Abel was while Abel was still alive. If he had more fully understood Abel’s rank, he would have made a pilgrimage to the Pentagon to pray with his congregant. Incertaesedis. He didn’t say this out loud. Out loud he said, “I’m sorry your father did not, in the end, choose to be buried in Arlington.”

  “Arlington wouldn’t have punished my side of the family enough,” said Ajay.

  “Your side of the family?” asked the parson, who was surprised that the solemn boy had said anything at all.

  “The black side,” said Ajay.

  “Let us pray,” sa
id the parson, efficiently ending the conversation.

  The parson closed his eyes and silently prayed that Abel would be raised from his coffin and this boy with preternaturally gray hair would disappear. Aloud the parson recited the Lord’s Prayer. As he kept his eyes tight shut, he didn’t see Ajay’s wide rolling eyes so like Abel’s own.

  The last family car passed the cemetery where the pillars of old black Nashville were buried. Its clovered-through grass near the center of the city where hymns of mourning were sung from memory was where many of Abel’s oldest friends thought Abel should be buried. Many cars peeled off there, but the limousine carrying Ajay rolled on.

  After a long drive that would have taken twice as long stopping for red lights, the procession slid through the gates of a not-so-fancy farm. A mile up a road with cows grazing on either side was the all-white cemetery, where Abel would be buried.

  As he rolled toward Abel’s final resting place, the parson was grateful he and Abel had ridden up to Washington on the same bus to participate in the Sacred Assembly of Promise Keepers in October of 1997.

  Remembering Abel calling the rally “the white boys’ Million Man March,” the parson shed a sincere tear.

  Cars were pulled over to both sides of the road and parked, most of them half in a ditch, half on the green that flanked the burying grounds.

  Though considerably smaller than the immense group that had gathered at the church, the crowd at the graveside was still sizable. All the people in dark clothes shared one thing and one thing only, a sense of exhaustion.

  The family acknowledged as immediate was seated beneath the little square open-sided tent the funeral parlor’s people had erected for the occasion. Carpeted with rollout acrylic grass and furnished with six short rows of folding chairs, the little canopy sheltered the trench that had been dug for the coffin.