by Janis Owens
Between that and the smell of the hothouse flowers, I could feel the pressure in my chest again as the ushers began herding the congregation forward for their final glimpse of Daddy, who was lying there not six feet in front of me, looking weirdly unlike himself in the big old coffin, I couldn’t have told you why. Maybe it was something in the color and plushness of the velvet lining that brought out the awful pallor in his skin—or maybe I’d forgotten how thin he’d become, after not seeing him in a week.
In any case, it was nothing I cared to ruminate on, then or ever, and just stood there in my new black suit, trying to keep my eyes on the carpet or the ceiling or anywhere but the coffin, when the muted funeral hush was cut with a sharp little gasp of surprise. We all looked up at the same time, at Missy, who was standing at the other end of the family row, staring at Daddy’s coffin with this red-eyed, red-nosed face of absolute wonder. I didn’t know what to think—thought maybe he’d moved or something—had glanced back at the coffin when Grannie by gosh took off after one of the mourners, a short, broad man in a big winter coat that she hit in an embrace so hard that it would have sent a smaller man over backwards.
He didn’t recoil, just caught her evenly in a tight embrace, then turned and hugged Missy, of all people, long and sincerely, before he began making his way down the family row, offering his hand to Sim—his left one, the wrong one for shaking. It finally came to me then that my gosh, it was Uncle Gabe, though I was too shocked to make much of it, just stood there next to Mama as he came upon me next, not offering his hand, but just standing there in that big coat, returning my stare with one of his own, and I swear to God, it was like I knew him.
It wasn’t just a family resemblance, either, for he didn’t favor Daddy at all, but was fairer in coloring and a tiny bit taller and altogether stockier—but something in the way he looked out of his eyes, piercing and concerned. Why, they weren’t a stranger’s eyes at all, but immediately close and familiar, as if he’d lived around us all his life. I almost said: “Hey,” right there in front of Daddy’s casket, right at his funeral, but he’d glanced aside to Mama by then, to stare at her with that same potent concern. Five seconds passed, then ten, and I don’t know what would have happened if Grannie hadn’t have been there to grip the sleeve of his coat and turn him back to Daddy, who was lying there in the splendor of his shining cherry coffin, oddly shrunken in death, just a small man in a big suit, dwarfed by all those stinking flowers.
I still didn’t want to look at him, much preferred concentrating on the slumped back of his Mysterious Brother, who stood a long moment posed over the coffin before he finally spoke in a clear, carrying voice: “God, he looks like Daddy.”
Standing there, not four feet behind him, I misunderstood him at first and almost answered aloud: “He is Daddy.” Then I realized what he meant: that he looked like their daddy, Granddaddy Catts, who I never knew except through Grannie’s pictures and all the stories Mama told about him; about how kind he was to her when she was a little girl; how she wanted me and Sim to grow up and be just like him.
So I understood he was paying Daddy a compliment with his flat, heartfelt comparison, but couldn’t make much of it, too distracted by Mama, who’d dropped noiselessly to the pew at the sound of his voice, like her legs had gone out from under her. It happened so quickly that I didn’t know what to do, just glanced around, a little panicked, catching Carlym’s eye on the platform, who jerked his head toward Mama, motioned for me to sit down next to her and wait.
I did as he instructed, sat down next to her and waited till Gabe finally turned and led Grannie to the side door, to the pale December sun. Once they were gone, the line of mourners began moving again, an endless, weeping stream, Miss Susan and her brood among them, all emotional and Italian, as if they’d been crying for a hundred years, that doofus Kenneth even giving me a hug. I mean, I’m sure it was well intended, but it just made a weird day seem weirder, and I was doggoned stinking glad when the sanctuary finally emptied and I could get the heck out of there and into the waiting limousine.
Mama rode with us to the graveyard, though she didn’t say a word, just stared at the white winter sky with vacant eyes that never looked away, never blinked, throughout the graveside service that was really just a rehash of the church one. This time, only Brother Sloan spoke, then there were more prayers and a lot of hugs and handshaking and a return to Grannie’s house, where the after-funeral crowd went for dinner.
Compared to the haste and hurry of the morning, this gathering was kind of tired and jaded, the atmosphere not made any cheerier by a cold, gray rain that began to fall around four, or the fact that the Wonderful Uncle Gabe had chosen to snub us all and leave without a word. At first there had been great hopes he’d show up at Grannie’s, everyone, even Aunt Candace, looking up at the door at the sound of every car.
But as the short winter afternoon drew on to a wet, chill dusk, they finally gave up and admitted the naysayers had won the day, the women making light of it for Missy’s sake, all of them offering different explanations on why he should leave so abruptly (maybe he was sick, or had a plane to catch). At one point, Missy even accused me of unnecessary staring, that I hotly denied.
“I didn’t even see his stinking hand,” I lied.
But in the end, no one could really explain why he left so abruptly, his dismissal just deepening the mystery and making a dreary day even drearier, Mama’s people all leaving that afternoon for funner destinations than our own, Grannie’s kin likewise scattering, a few of them offering to stay the night, though Mama turned them down.
“We’ll be fine,” she assured them, and we were, getting through the coming weeks in much the same way we’d come this far, with the support of the church and all our friends, who kept the good times rolling through Christmas and the New Year and the cold January nights that followed. They took us shopping, took us to dinner, took us (or Sim, anyway) to the Super Bowl, and I’d be a liar if I said I really suffered much those first few months Daddy was gone, for there was so much to do, so much to see.
I don’t think the reality of his death really sank in for a long time—two months, at least—till sometime in February, on one of those iron-gray winter afternoons that we don’t often see in Florida, the house cold and drafty, me home from school with a sore throat that had turned out to be strep. When the throat swab had come back positive, I had naturally rejoiced as it meant I’d miss a whole week of school, though once home, I was quickly bored, because Mama was so drugged out that she seemed to sleep around the clock.
I mean, she’d get up in the morning and send Sim and Missy off to school and set me up with my medicine and Gatorade, but then she’d go back to bed, and there she’d stay, all day long. By Friday afternoon, I was sure enough stir-crazy, tired of TV and wandering around the house, bored and restless, looking for something to do. I pulled out Matchbox cars and tried Legos, but nothing distracted me, the house filled with this hollow, stuffy smell, the rooms dusty and unused, the pool full of dead leaves.
If Daddy had been there, it was a state that wouldn’t have lasted long, for he’d have had us jumping, shouting, “Myra! Thet pool’s full of leaves! It’ll ruin the pump! Git Sim out to skim it! Melissa Anne? Is thet your uniform on the floor? D’you remember how to use a washing machine? Were you raised in a barn?” And so on, as for all Daddy’s many undeniable virtues, anyone who knew him understood that at the center of his obsessive little soul there beat the heart of an unrepentant nagger who would go after you like a wild dog about cleaning your bedroom, taking care of your bike, even clipping your toenails.
Under his energizing influence, Mama had kept things pumping, but now that he was gone, we had sunk into an unkempt decline, our old house smells of Pine-Sol and oil soap gradually replaced by the musty stuffiness of piled laundry and old garbage, and still, faintly, the cursed smell of Lysol that had creeped in the curtains and rugs to reassert itself on humid days. It was a sad little reminder of his illness that didn�
�t do much to cheer me up, and for some reason, when dusk finally fell that afternoon, Mama never got up at all, and Missy and Sim didn’t come home either.
At six, I tried to call Kenneth, but he’d gone to the skating rink, and when I called Lori’s to see how Ryan was doing (he was the one who’d given me strep), no one was home. I finally gave up then and began wandering around again, room to room, till full dark, when I found myself at one of the French doors downstairs, the one closest to the kitchen that we used for a back door.
I stood there listlessly, watching the wet pool, the scatter of leaves, till it suddenly came to me, why I was standing there: because this was Friday night, the night Daddy always came home from Waycross. That’s why I’d spent the afternoon circling the house so restlessly: I was waiting for the shine of his headlights, for the run across the cold deck to the garage, and his exasperated greeting: “Claybird? Thet your bicycle I nearly ran over in the drive? Run out and git it, baby. You got to take care of things—”
Once I realized what I was doing, I gave it up and returned to the television, where I spent the rest of the evening watching Miami Vice as I had every other Friday night of the year. Except this time, when that lively little theme song came on, instead of the perky lighting of Lori and Curtis’s little trailer and the roar of the big-screen TV, I found myself alone, curled up on an overstuffed couch in a moss-hung haunted house, wondering how it could be that my father had died.
Could it really be so? Could it really be that I’d never see him again?
The idea was just preposterous, beyond comprehension, and I shrugged it off, didn’t shed a tear, didn’t tell a soul, though after that night I knew in my heart that Daddy was dead; that he wasn’t coming back, ever again. I also knew that no matter how vampire Mama might become, or how many disembodied slaves might rattle our stairs at midnight, the ghost that would haunt me for the rest of my days would be a kindlier one, even closer to home: the ghost of my father Michael.
PART TWO
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
CHAPTER SIX
When I look back over that long, boring year between Daddy’s death and the Great Second Coming, I can think of no single event that stands out as meaningful or historic: nothing but a lifeless gray winter that was short but unusually bitter, with ice storms and temperatures so low that Mama lost a couple of her phoenix palms and a few roses, frozen root to tip on one cold night. Even the pipes froze before it was over, flooding the laundry room and cracking a section of the pool, so that we woke up one morning in early March to the bizarre sight of a smoking, empty marble hole in our backyard, ice-glazed and weirdly beautiful, like a gigantic inverted mausoleum.
I guess you might call 1988 the year I learned to hate winter, though living in Florida, it wasn’t as bitter a hate as it might have been, there wasn’t enough time. Before I could work up any true resentment, April was upon us, and once the danger of frost had passed, life immediately improved, Mama rallying as she usually does in the spring, emerging like a bear to stand on the front porch every evening, trowel in hand, to survey the winter’s damage. This year was no different, though as the weeks passed, the close humidity giving way to real, stinging heat, there were no grand projects begun, no new roses to be imported and painstakingly dug, no corner of the woods transformed into tropical bowers or perennial beds. This year was a holding action, the roses cut back on time and the Osmocote spread, but nothing added or subtracted inside or out, the pool filling with leaves, the laundry piling up so high that Missy told everyone at church about it, christened it Mount Myra.
When Mama heard of it, she was not so pleased that Missy was (literally) airing our dirty laundry, and worked for two straight days sorting and bleaching and folding, covering every table in the house with stacks of laundry and making many promises. But without Daddy’s energizing influence, she couldn’t stay on top of it, and as the weeks creeped into summer, Mount Myra reappeared in all its glory, and the last time I looked, there it remained.
But we survived, and that was the main thing, all of us adjusting to Daddy’s absence in different ways: Sim and Missy spending a lot of time with friends in town, me mostly hanging out with Mama, for her comfort or mine, I really don’t know. I even took to going to the cemetery with her on Saturday mornings—the only morning she went after dawn—to visit Daddy’s grave that was situated very pleasantly beneath a grove of old gray-green cedars, his tombstone kind of plain, I thought, though I’d come up with the inscription myself: He Walks With God.
Everyone was always telling me what a stroke of genius it was, how touching, though to be honest, there was nothing genius about it at all: I’d swiped the line from Witness, the movie me and Sim saw the night Daddy went back in the hospital. It was what the Amish guy told Kelly McGillis at her husband’s funeral, and as soon as I heard it, I knew that’s what I’d tell Mama to put on Daddy’s marker, because it was so fitting, so true.
She agreed, and it looked very nice there, though not as impressive as some of his neighbors’, for the Riverside is one of those old antebellum cemeteries with live oaks even older than our own, and ornate monuments and marble statues, all ancient and crumbly and weather-stained. True to her vampire origins, Mama seemed very much at home there, not so gray-eyed and listless, but oddly comforted, even cheerful as we strolled along the winding paths.
She was never in much of a hurry to leave; after we finished visiting Daddy, she’d take me around like a tour guide and show me all the various points of interest: the crumbling, scrolled plaques of the slave section, the low hills where the Confederate soldiers were buried; even the paupers’ ground, a deep green vale sided by a drainage ditch and the river where poor people were buried at the county’s expense. It was maybe the saddest part of the whole cemetery, treeless and bare, only a few of the graves marked with these temporary metal things the county provided, the paper inscriptions turned to pulp by the weather, unreadable and forsaken. I didn’t much like going down there, though Mama surprised me one morning by casually mentioning that she’d almost been buried there, once.
“When?” I asked, as Mama was popularly believed to be the richest woman in town, with her Mercedes, her factories, her big old house. Even her kindly aloofness added to the myth, for she acted just like you’d expect a moneyed old heiress to act: distant and artsy, kind of eccentric.
“When I was twelve,” she said, scanning the lowlands through a pair of dark sunglasses, “the last winter I lived in Florida—you know, next door to your grannie. I almost died that winter and Mama didn’t have any money. She’d have had to turn me over to the county, and there I’d be to this day, unmarked and forgotten, but just down the hill from your father—which is ironic, when you think of it.”
It sure didn’t sound too ironic to me; it sounded sadder than heck. For a moment, we just stood there squinting into the morning sun, then I tried to tie it up with a happy ending: “Grannie would have bought you a tombstone,” I told her, my stout sureness making her smile.
“And so she would have,” she agreed with a kiss to the top of my head, “and she’d have told everybody about it, too: that poor little Sims girl what died next door. Bless her heart, she was only twelve.”
She even laughed when she said it, she and I both did, because that’s exactly what Grannie would have said. Or at least I thought that’s what Grannie would have said, though when I asked her about it after church the next Sunday, her face took on that same clouded foreboding it had when I mentioned Uncle Gabe. “Your mama told you thet?” she asked. Then, before I could answer, “Good Lord, what a thang to tell a chile.”
“I told her you’d have put a marker there,” I inserted quickly, afraid Grannie would go after Mama like she’d gone after Sim.
But Grannie just gave one of her little snorts. “Well, I don’t know about thet,” she said. “And I don’t know about you two spendin’ sa much tim
e at the Riverside, neither. It’s in a bad part of town, and it ain’t safe, and it needs to stop.”
“It’s all right,” I offered nervously, “it ain’t haunted or anything.” (Which was what I was always telling Kenneth, who wouldn’t go within a mile of the place without a priest and a crucifix in hand.) And though I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to appease her, even describing her own funeral, and what a blowout we’d have when her time came, nothing I said seemed to hit the mark, Grannie’s face protracted and drawn, clearly worried.
I had a feeling that me and Mama’s pleasant little graveyard jaunts would soon be a thing of the past and I was right. Bright and early the next morning, Aunt Candace dropped by the house and passed along Grannie’s concern with considerable relish, for Aunt Candace has never cared much for Mama’s vampire ways, had never visited Daddy’s grave as far as I knew.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, just that Aunt Candace is one of those forward thinkers, always moving, who has never planned a funeral or stripped a floor or worried herself too much with gardening, twilight or otherwise. I guess you could describe her as a career woman, who lived with Uncle Ed in a sparkling tract house in a neat little neighborhood three blocks from the high school, her color schemes all pastel, her house plants all silk. Though in addition to being her sister-in-law she is Mama’s best friend, in that and in most things, she is her opposite in every way: petite and fair-haired and energetic, only alike in their devotion to the Lord, though Mama is very open and accepting of diverse beliefs, while Aunt Candace is a fire-breathing charismatic who basically thinks all of us Baptist Catts are going to hell in a handbasket for our trifling, uncommitted ways.
She’s always been after Mama to (and this is just a sampling): fire Dr. Williams; make Sim quit driving so fast; put Missy in private school; put me in private school; quit Welcome Baptist and join her at Living Water Assembly. In short, become just like her.