Graceland

by Bethan Roberts

  Now she drifts in and out of a light slumber, just as she did when Elvis was an infant, her body waking her at twenty-minute intervals.

  At three in the morning Gladys snaps fully awake. She gropes for her baby, realises there is no baby, and knows there is something more urgently missing. Her son is missing not just from her arms, but from the house. She understands this without looking at Elvis’s bed, because the air is cooler now and the sounds of the night – a cat mewing for shelter, the bullfrogs pumping out groans – are louder. The front door must be open.

  She springs to her feet. Elvis’s collection of funny papers is neatly stacked by the pallet on which he sleeps, but there is no Elvis. There is just his sheet, crumpled on the floor.

  Gladys does not waste time by waking Vernon. She pulls on her housecoat, stuffs her bare feet into her shoes, and goes outside.

  The weeds in their square of yard are wet with dew and she breathes in the scent of fresh earth. She heads down the track between the handful of other houses which surround hers and towards the road, praying her instinct hasn’t failed her and that she has woken before he’s gone too far. The first time he sleepwalked out of the house, a neighbour found him wandering down the highway in his nightshirt. She’s never asked Mr Vanderholm what he was doing on that stretch of road at two in the morning. Instead she darned the hole in the shoulder of Elvis’s nightshirt and vowed to stay half-awake through the night from then on.

  Once she’s on the gravel road she looks both ways. Faced with the emptiness stretching ahead, her body weakens for a second, but the panic comes again, propelling her down the hill, towards the highway. He has gone way too far. She hears herself muttering it as she runs: This is way too far! Way too far! and in some dim part of her mind there is the hope that tomorrow she will be glad she was alone on this road, glad there was nobody else to see her sweating in her housecoat, her shoes gaping from the backs of her naked feet.

  She cuts through a small pine wood, calculating that this is the way he came before, and his sleeping legs will somehow remember. The trees’ darkness seems absolute and she considers turning back for Vernon, but that would cost her too much time. Her boy may be sleepwalking down the middle of the highway while some truck barrels towards him. So she plunges on, calling his name, stumbling on the rough ground, trying not to picture the snakes that might be slithering towards her feet, scratching her arm on a branch but managing to make her way through the trees to where the streetlamps glow along the empty road.

  Then she sees him. He’s crouching on the shoulder of the road, swaying back and forth on his haunches. If he were mumbling, folks might take him for feeble-minded. The relief of it almost has her falling to her knees in the ditch, but she must reach her son and remove him from danger before allowing herself any such foolishness. And so Gladys sprints along the concrete, yelling for him. But he does not look up, or quit rocking. When she reaches him she kneels down, small stones gritting her knees. She takes his face gently in her hands and says, ‘Baby, it’s Mama. Get up, now.’

  His eyes fall on her without the remotest spark of recognition. She hauls his sleeping body to its feet and drags him down into the wet slipperiness of the ditch, where they collapse against one another. Lord knows what trash is down here – she can smell something rotten, and her feet skid on paper packets reduced to slime. She feels some insect nibbling her bare calf. But they are safe, lying together on the soft dirt. She holds him against her, pressing his face into her shoulder, and she feels the change in him as he wakes. First his fingers clasp her waist, then his breath shortens and he raises his face to hers. ‘Mama?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t you worry, baby. You was sleepwalking again. Mama’s gonna take you home now.’

  His eyes go round. ‘Where we at?’

  She sits up and brushes off her housecoat. Above them, a truck rumbles by, making him cover his ears in fright.

  ‘In a ditch by the highway. We gotta walk back through them trees, OK?’ She stands and pulls him upright. He looks around, biting his lip.

  ‘Come on, now. You gotta walk for me.’ She scrambles up the bank and holds out a hand. ‘It ain’t far.’

  He hesitates, scanning her face for clues about exactly how and why they have ended up here, and whether this is all right or not. On taking her hand, though, he seems, suddenly, to accept the situation wholly. ‘All right,’ he says, and he lets his mother guide him.

  All the way back to the house, he holds her hand. A tree frog starts up, and another answers. The moon is bright and the black sky swirls above, scattered with stars, and Elvis begins to chatter. ‘What time is it?’ he asks. ‘Is it the very middle of the night?’ He looks up at her, his face glowing, and she can’t help a smile. ‘Look at the stars, Mama!’ he says, and she nods. She worries, though, that her husband will have been woken by her absence, and will be wandering the streets, searching for them.

  But when they reach home, Vernon is still sleeping. They tiptoe to Elvis’s bed. Gladys picks the crumpled sheet from the floor and tucks it around his body. Then she sits beside him. ‘You OK, baby?’ she whispers.

  He nods.

  ‘Now give me your best smile.’

  He obliges, stretching his full lips wide and creasing his eyes. Her son has eyes like her, heavy-lidded, slightly slanted. She hopes it won’t hold him back to have such foreign-looking eyes.

  ‘Nose squash,’ he commands, and she leans in to his face, her nose pressed to his. They stay like this for a few minutes, breathing the same air, whispering to one another.

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘Mm-hmm?’

  ‘I won’t do it again.’

  ‘I know, honey.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry none.’

  ‘I know, honey.’

  ‘Baby’s gonna be all right.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘You can sleep now, Mama.’

  ‘You too, baby.’

  Back in her own bed, she decides they will go to the cemetery tomorrow.

  Thirty-five minutes. On that January night, seven years ago, it had taken thirty-five minutes between death and life.

  The dead one came first. His silence, when the midwife lifted and slapped him, seemed to make the world stop. Minnie Mae had to shout at Gladys to make her listen. ‘There’s another one coming, Glad, you gotta get on with it, gal!’

  But Gladys was looking at her dead child, trying to see something other than the blueness around his slack lips, the pallor of his washed-out body. He looked like something pickled. She could hardly breathe, let alone push. She wanted nothing other than sleep.

  ‘Give the other one a chance!’ cried Minnie Mae, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her. ‘Get on with it!’

  As if she had any control over this thing.

  Frost on the glass. Her breath and flesh misting the air. She thought of cows in a barn, helpless against the cold, but still steaming. Vernon and his daddy and uncle had built this two-room place for them, right next to her father-in-law’s house, and it had felt so homely, with the smell of the new wood and the bright drapes she’d run up on Minnie Mae’s machine. Even the oil lamps had seemed quaint. They’d gathered wild roses and honeysuckle from the woods behind and planted them around the place. But now it smelled of blood and urine and fear.

  ‘Glad, I ain’t gonna tell you again, gal. Push!’

  She’d hollered only twice during the whole thing. Minnie Mae had thought to wrap the dead child – they’d already called him Jesse, after Vernon’s father – in a dishcloth and pass him to Vernon, who was in the next room, not in the bar, which is where Gladys wished he was, so he wouldn’t have to lay eyes on his dead son. When she imagined Vernon holding the grey lump, she hollered. Then she raised herself from the bed and crouched over the rug for the next contraction, thinking she wanted it over, now, for this baby to be out and done with. It might as well fall to the floor if it was going to be wrapped in a dishcloth and buried in the earth. Minnie Mae hurried to protec
t the rug with an old sheet, and as she did so Gladys hollered again, so loud and raw that Vernon was knocking on the door to come in and Minnie Mae was yelling, ‘She’s all right! It’s just the other one coming. Don’t you dare come in here, Vernon Presley!’

  Minnie Mae caught the second child and Gladys collapsed on the rug. And then his sound filled the place, and the door was opening, and Vernon was coming over, pushing his wiry mama out of the way – which Gladys had never seen him do before – but she couldn’t look at her husband for long because she was gazing at her boy, who was alive. Minnie Mae cut the cord with a deft snick. When Gladys had the child in her arms, he quietened and looked at her as if she were the only light in the room. He was, as Minnie Mae said, no bigger than a minute.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ Vernon said, his hand trembling on her shoulder.

  A spike of rage rose in her. Was that all he’d thought about, in all this? His own loss?

  She handed him his son. ‘Take him,’ she said, ‘and quit your crying. We got a son. There ain’t nothing to cry about now.’

  There was no money for a gravestone, plaque or marker, but still they know exactly where to go. Or, at least, Mama says she knows where her other baby is buried. But sometimes Elvis wonders. Leaves fall, frost covers the ground, new stones are erected every week at Priceville cemetery. The place changes, and all he knows for sure is that his brother lies somewhere between the large tree with the crooked trunk and the line of small, plain graves at the back.

  Usually they go on the last Sunday of every month, after church. But today Mama had appeared at the gates after school and said, ‘Let’s go visit your brother.’ Recognising the urgency in her voice, he knew better than to say that he needed to pee. He also knew better than to question the logic of visiting a dead person. In a way, he thinks, Jesse isn’t even dead, not truly, because you need to have been alive to be dead. And his brother took not one breath on this earth. His brother was born dead.

  Not long ago, as his mama was readying herself for one of their Sunday visits, his daddy said, ‘Ain’t no need to keep on going there, Glad. Everybody knows you won’t forget.’

  ‘I don’t go for nobody but my own self,’ she’d said, pushing past him and grabbing Elvis’s hand.

  Vernon caught her arm and said, ‘Why’s Elvis got to go, every time? He’s just a boy.’

  Gladys’s face softened, a little, and she released her grip on her son.

  At the loss of his mama’s touch, Elvis panicked. ‘But I wanna go, Daddy!’ he insisted.

  After that, it was impossible to say otherwise.

  This morning his daddy left for Japtown, almost two hundred miles away. He is to help build a camp for Japanese prisoners of war. They had all cried, but Elvis was glad it was his father, not his mother, who was leaving, and that his father was doing something for the war. Many East Tupelo men have joined the military, but his daddy cannot become a soldier, because he was in the pen. Elvis knows he must never mention this fact, although sometimes he feels it is not a fact at all, merely a memory. When the other boys ask him what his daddy is doing for the war, Elvis can now say Vernon has special and important work, constructing a prison for the enemy.

  The cemetery is a couple of miles from school, and Gladys takes it slow in the July heat. Elvis’s limbs prickle with frustration as they make their stately way along the hot highway in silence, past Johnnie’s Drive-In, where older boys go for burgers, and, after he got a job with the WPA a few years back, his daddy once took him for the most delicious meal of his life: a dough burger, fries and a cola. There were coloured plates and a bright metal rim around the table. His mama does not suggest they stop, though.

  Eventually they turn off and walk up the hill, through the welcome shade of the woods. The dust road which takes them past a few wooden shacks is cool beneath Elvis’s bare feet. The leaves of the yellow poplars tick-tick-tick above their heads. He stops for a minute to pick some ox-eye daisies from the bank and gives them to his mama to add to the small bunch she has collected for Jesse’s grave. She tells him to keep them – he can place them there himself.

  It takes them an hour to reach the black gates to the cemetery. He follows his mama beyond the marked family plots to the patch of grass at the back, beneath which Jesse is buried. The grass here is regularly watered and always a vivid green. Gently, he places the flowers down and wipes his hands on his pants. His bladder is now uncomfortably full. They stand side by side in silence, and his mama drops his hand, clasps her own together and bows her head. He stares at the ground and tries to imagine his twin brother, but sees only his own shadow stretching away. He likes to think that Jesse was his identical twin. Mama has said she doesn’t know this to be true, but she feels it to be so. If there was another Elvis, would that make him less himself? Or more?

  Jesse, he says, in his head. Jesse, can you hear me?

  No reply.

  We’re here again, and every time I’m sure you gonna say something! Or give Mama a sign. You make her so sad.

  No reply.

  Ain’t my fault you died, you know.

  No reply.

  After letting a decent time pass, he wanders off. Maybe he can pee over by the woods. Nobody will see – there’s nobody here save him and Mama. He reaches his favourite headstone, the one with the white marble angel on top. Most of the stones are plain, but this one is different. The angel wears fancy armour like the Roman soldier Elvis has seen in a schoolbook; his hair is feathered around his face, his bow pulled taut. His sandals curl around the top of the grave as if he’s balancing there, and, when he’s sure nobody else is around, Elvis often gives the angel a little shove, as if he could push him from the stone. Below the angel’s feet, a sculpted scroll reads, Let us put on the breastplate of love. Elvis likes this idea; it reminds him of his favourite superhero, the Phantom, fighting for justice, peace and love.

  He glances across to make sure his mama hasn’t moved, and, forgetting his bladder, clambers onto the gravestone and pulls himself to where the angel stands. Holding on to the stone legs, he looks over the cemetery and imagines himself flying like the Phantom, shot from the angel’s bow into the sky. He closes his eyes.

  Jesse. I’m thanking this angel for taking you and not me. Do you hear?

  No reply.

  You don’t do a lot of talking but I know you’re listening. And watching, too. Do you see me, putting on the breastplate of love?

  Wobbling a little, he stretches his arms to the sky and shoots an imaginary arrow in his brother’s direction.

  Then, swamped with guilt, Elvis jumps down and hurries back to his mama. She’s kneeling now, arranging the daisies on the ground, tidying up her imaginary marker. She’s brought a pair of small scissors with her and is snipping the grass so it’s even. He watches her for a while, then he starts to rub her back, in case she cries this time. She never cries at the cemetery, although he always expects her to. Would she weep over his grave? He’s sure she would. It’s impossible to hold his body still enough to do the stroking, though, because if he relaxes his muscles he’ll pee his pants. So he hops from leg to leg and pats her shoulder. He realises that it’s been twenty minutes, at least, since she even looked at him, and he wants her back.

  She fusses with the flowers. It won’t be long before she’ll turn to him, her face set in a blank stare, and say, ‘Let’s go home, baby.’ On the way she will hold him tightly and say things like, ‘I got you, ain’t I?’ and, ‘God gave you all of Jesse’s strength, you know that?’

  He’s tempted to try to wrench the flowers and scissors away from her and yell that none of this does any good. Just for a second, he imagines pulling out his peter and pissing right there on the grave.

  Take that, Jesse. You won’t never know what it’s like to grab your peter in your hand and take a long, hard pee.

  He backs away from the grave and waits for it to be over, praying for greater muscle control or for some other way to rid himself of this irresistible urg
e. Eventually, though, he has no choice. Closing his eyes, he releases the pee in a joyous stream down his leg. The liquid settles and glistens on the hot, dry ground, and immediately starts to stink.

  When Gladys turns, she gives the puddle a long look. He studies her face for signs of change and a sob rises in his chest, because he knows from her narrowed black eyes, the way her lips are set in a terrifying line, what she will do. It is what his daddy does, sometimes, and what she does, too, on even rarer occasions. But this is one of those occasions for sure. She takes a breath and swats him, hard, on the side of his head.

  Pain thrums through his skull, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the time his daddy went for him with the dishtowel. Elvis had stolen a strip of chicken from his mama’s plate and his daddy called him a long hungry, twisted the cloth into a thick rope, and thrashed him about the head, yelling that he should never steal food from his own kin.

  Gingerly, Elvis touches the spot that Gladys swiped. There’s no blood, just a burning soreness.

  Gladys stands, flexing the fingers of the hand that struck her son. She opens her mouth and shuts it again, her face red as a blister. Then she puts the offending hand in her pocket and walks away without looking over her shoulder.

  He swallows his tears. She’ll look back, soon. In the meantime, he’ll just walk on Jesse’s grave, see how she likes that. His toes, damp with urine, rub together as he moves in small circles over the grass.

  Damn you, undead brother. Damn you, you long hungry. You stole from your own kin. You took her love from me and there ain’t one thing you can do with it.

  He kicks the flowers that his mother positioned, scattering them. A few land in his pee. With his heel, he grinds them further in, then glances across to see if she is looking. But she is still walking towards the road.