“I can’t help you anymore, Roy,” Etta said flatly to his image that was beginning to fade, his hand stretching toward her. “You’ve just gone too far this time, honey.”
Before the image was completely gone, she turned away and went down the stairs.
* * *
Chapter 3
Mr. Alvin Leedy himself, the eldest of the three brothers who owned the Leedy Funeral Home, had brought the limousine and stood holding the door open. Etta went carefully down the brick stairs. She was experiencing a growing light-headedness. It was a disconcerting sensation of suffocation, and also of being in a dream, where all objects possessed a gray aura. It vaguely occurred to her that the layers of black veiling could be contributing to these sensations, but she wasn’t about to lift the veil, as she felt more and more comforted, hidden, by it all the time. It was the closest she could get to being in the bed with the covers over her head.
She slid into the backseat. The limousine was warm and smelled musty, closed like a closet, or a coffin. She rolled down the window, hard and fast.
Latrice, with several heavy breaths, slipped into the seat beside her, glanced quickly around, and made a sound of approval. Etta turned her face to the window, trying to catch the air. It poured in as the limousine took off fast enough to press them back into the seat, cruising over the gravel driveway like it was hardtop, tossing up a good puff of white dust behind.
Etta had never in her life ridden in a limousine. She felt as if she were caught in a surreal dream and would at any moment wake up and turn over and there would be Roy, his head on the pillow that was scrunched the way he liked to make it, his green eyes eating her up and his hand slipping onto her breast in the manner of a man intent on having his way. But then he would say, “Are you gonna go get me some breakfast?” like a little cajoling boy, and she would have to laugh.
She clung to these good pictures. The others, the hours of waiting and looking for Roy to come home, the anger and hurt when he finally did, smelling of another woman’s perfume, passed across her mind, but she pushed them aside. Pull the veil, close her eyes, do not see because she could not bear the hurt right now.
Just then the limousine came to a stop, hard and jarring, causing Etta to put one hand out to catch herself. Latrice let out a “My land!”
A light blue pickup truck, a recent model but well used, with a wooden rack in the back for hauling stock, was stopped right in the entry from the highway. The driver—a cowboy sort wearing a dark hat—stared at them through a dirty windshield, and Mr. Leedy, Etta, and Latrice stared back. Then the driver of the pickup leaned out his window and hollered something that didn’t quite reach them in the backseat of the limousine.
“Who is that?” Latrice asked Etta in an aggravated voice.
“I don’t know.”
Latrice stared at her, and Etta turned her head to gaze out the window, stubbornly willing herself out that window and back to the house and into bed with the covers over her head.
The limousine did not move. Mr. Leedy appeared to have taken the view that his was the bigger and grander vehicle and wasn’t about to budge.
Etta felt Latrice lean forward. “Mr. Leedy,” she said, “it would probably be easier for us to back up than for the pickup to do so. And it seems the gentleman wants to speak to us.”
Mr. Alvin nodded and said, “Yes’m, Miss Latrice,” probably before he realized.
Etta felt the limousine jerk as it was thrown into reverse. She breathed deeply, and the veiling tickled her face. Then the pickup was pulling alongside. Mr. Leedy rolled down his window, so now both windows on that side were down and the wind was whipping in, cold and sharp.
The driver of the pickup again leaned out his window and touched the brim of his hat. Right there in front of her face, Etta had to look at him, although she knew he could not clearly see her through the veiling over her face. He looked familiar. He looked like a thousand other drifter cowboy types Etta had seen in her life, and she saw the battered saddle hanging over the top of the wooden slats of the stock rack in the back of his truck as the damning proof.
“Good mornin’, sir . . . ladies,” he said, peering curiously at Etta for a second before swinging his gaze and grin back to Mr. Leedy. “I’m lookin’ for Mr. Roy Rivers. Is this his place?”
His breezy manner and easy drawl went clear through Etta. He’s from Texas, she thought, suddenly finding that a high offense. His dark hair lit by sunshine, the life of him there framed in that truck window was suddenly intolerable to her, as was his speaking Roy’s name. Roy who was dead, and if this man didn’t know that, he should have.
Mr. Leedy had already started to speak when Etta said, “I’m sorry, but Roy Rivers is dead.” The stranger’s startled eyes returned to her, but she looked forward and said smartly, “Please go on, Mr. Leedy. We’re goin’ to be late.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mr. Leedy was a man set to please. Immediately the limousine started forward, pressing Etta and Latrice back in their seats again and leaving the Texan and his pickup behind in a cloud of dust. Mr. Leedy rolled up his window, but Etta insisted on leaving hers down.
“I can’t breathe,” she said and then sank back into silence and the dark veiling as she would into a dark hole had anyone shown her the courtesy of allowing her to do so.
Etta thought silence was the best way to go. If she held on to silence, she wouldn’t scream at Mr. Leedy for driving like an idiot and making her stomach want to come inside out. She wouldn’t say aloud that the funeral home had a mildewy smell, and that Mrs. Leedy just had to redo Roy’s hair and get that perfectness out of it. Keeping silent, she wouldn’t ask for a comb to do it herself. She furtively used her fingers.
Then she slapped his cold face.
Latrice grabbed her hand, pulled it down, and led her over to sit down. Etta stared at the coffin, thinking that no breath, no life force came from the body. That was not Roy lying there on that satin.
She looked at those around her and wanted to say, “Well, y’all can go home now. Roy isn’t here. He’s over at Corinne Salyer’s . . . or he’s down at Beetle’s playin’ pool . . . or he’s back in his bed, waitin’ for me to bring him a cup of coffee,” which of course would have given everyone a good start. She felt herself coming to pieces, about like a red rose whose velvet petals were drying black and falling one by one.
People came up to her. “My condolences, Miz Rivers.” Or “Fine man . . . we’ll miss him.” Or “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Etta thought that when a person died, he immediately assumed an exalted position. It was true that Roy had aggravated people all the time with his antics, yet they had still loved him. A person could not help but love Roy.
Heloise Gardner, owner of the Style Shop and also Roy’s distant cousin, actually said this when she came over and hugged Etta. “That man could be the devil, but a body couldn’t help but love him.” And then she started crying and seemed to go to pieces, elegantly, but to pieces just the same, before Etta’s eyes. Watching Heloise fumble unsuccessfully for a handkerchief, Etta passed over her own and put her arm around the older woman and helped her to sit down. She was halfway down the aisle to the door after she’d done that, and she might have continued on out and away from the entire business, except Latrice captured her and escorted her back to the front pew.
When Pastor Johnson spoke the funeral service, Etta heard only the first sentence before she took note of his tone and wished she had seen to getting someone else to preach the service. Roy had more than once compared the pastor’s voice to the engine on an oil well pump—steady but with annoying backfires. Roy had made a point of avoiding Pastor Johnson in life, and he likely wouldn’t come to hear the pastor now in death. In her mind she stood up in front of everyone and said that Obie Lee, the tall Negro man who slipped into the back row, ought to give the eulogy, because he had known and fished with Roy for a lifetime, and Roy often commented that he could listen to Obie tell stories for hours. Sh
e was in fact preparing to rise when Latrice’s hand called her back to her senses.
Then people were filing past Roy’s casket. Etta saw Roy’s Aunt Alice—his mother’s sister—was one of the first. As she passed Etta, she gazed down from above the mink fur wrapped around her shoulders. Her face was powdery white and her eyes icy. Then, leaning heavily on her husband Edward’s arm, she walked to the casket and began sobbing over Roy’s face.
Etta sprang to her feet and crossed to the casket. Alice straightened and went at her. “You should have saved him. He counted on you to do that.”
Etta, hands clenched and fury tangled on her tongue, said, “There’s only so much a wife can do for the man his mother made.”
Alice looked like she was about to spring on Etta, but Edward grabbed her and led her away.
“Do not make a scene now,” Latrice said, putting her arm around Etta. “It won’t help anyone.”
Etta looked at Roy, then headed for the door at an amazing rate. Mr. Leedy reached for her, but she did not slow down, and Latrice and Mr. Leedy had to hurry to catch up with her as she went out into the bright sun and took a good, deep breath. Mr. Leedy hurried on his skinny legs to the limousine and whipped open the door, gesturing for Etta and Latrice to enter.
Etta settled again on the musty backseat, and Latrice slipped in beside her with several grunts and a “My land.” Mr. Leedy edged the limousine up to the stoplight, and Etta twisted around to look out the rear window at the procession of cars falling in behind. A second limousine nosed at the one in which Etta and Latrice rode—it bore Alice and Edward Boatwright; they were direct kin, and Edward was also director of the First Citizens Bank. Then Leon Thibodeaux, the Rivers’s family lawyer, and his wife, Betsy, lined up in their stately black Cadillac, and Heloise behind the wheel of her peculiar-looking Crosley, wearing an enormous flamboyant hat, then Beetle Monroe, who owned the roadhouse, in some sort of big, chunky car. The line kept coming out from the chapel. Etta found the number of people who had come somewhat surprising and very gratifying. She hoped Roy knew this.
Mr. Leedy started off across the intersection, and Etta’ s eye fell on a familiar truck. Why, it was the pickup truck of the Texas cowboy who had appeared only hours before in her own driveway. It was parked at the curb, and the cowboy stood outside the driver’s door, holding his hat politely pressed over his chest.
Etta had the confusing sense of a dream again. She noticed the sun glinted on his dark hair . . . and that he stood at an odd angle. She wondered what the cowboy had been to Roy. Wondered what Roy had owed him, for she had no doubt this was the case.
Then he passed from her sight, swallowed up by city buildings that blurred past as the limousine continued smoothly through town, past the street where Corinne Salyer lived, the very corner Roy would have turned the night he had dropped dead. Etta craned her neck and caught a glimpse of the big magnolia in the Salyer front lawn.
Would it have been different if I had confronted them both together? Would that have made a difference? Of course it was easy to ask these questions now, when she could see the road ahead. It was living life and not being able to see the future that was the tricky thing.
Then they were flying down the blacktopped highway to the cemetery. As Etta got out of the car and was led up to the grave, she saw a woman standing far off beside a dark sedan. Corinne Salyer, daring to come, standing there in black. Not close enough for Etta to truly see her face, but Etta knew it was her.
Latrice whispered, “Don’t look at her,” and her fingers dug into Etta’s wrist.
The people gathered in two groups, one large around the waiting hole in the ground, and a second, smaller group of several Negroes. One thing about Roy, he had been color-blind, after his mother had died anyway. Of course Latrice was color-blind, too, and she stood straight and tall beside Etta, her comforting arm around Etta’s shoulders. The sun was bright in a cloudless sky and the breeze high. Roy was buried on the Methodist side of the cemetery, in the big Rivers family plot, next to his brother, Robert, who had drowned at age ten, and at the foot of his mother, which somehow seemed fitting.
Beside Leon, his wife, Betsy, broke out in great noisy sobs, the effect much like a cherry bomb thrown into a church service.
Etta and Latrice looked at each other. Looking again at Betsy’s broken face, seeing a number of people cast curious glances and watching Leon poke his wife with some anger and then put his arm around her, Etta thought of Roy.
From the shelter of her veiling, she looked at different women’s faces, wondering frankly which of them, if any, had enjoyed flirtations with her husband. She began to shake with what others surely took as crying but what was actually rueful laughter at the situation.
“Always laugh at every opportunity,” Roy would say. He had liked to laugh, but more, he had liked to make others laugh. Especially women. His charm was not something he could help, either, any more than he could help breathing. Until now.
The funeral broke up, and people melted away. Miss Heloise stopped to press her moist, paper-thin cheek against Etta’s and said, “He was the last of the Riverses . . . except for that child you’re carryin’. Thank God for that baby.”
Etta heard her words with something of surprise. In her distraught state, she tended to forget the child. She put a hand to her belly, holding it, caressing it.
* * * *
The funeral adjourned to the Rivers house. That was how Etta thought of it—an adjournment. She sat ensconced in the big wingback chair, watching the mourners who came to pay their respects. She watched everyone through the heavy veiling of the sweeping hat. Latrice positioned herself in a straight-backed chair at Etta’s side, and those who came to speak condolence to Etta gave Latrice furtive glances, as if asking permission to approach.
Alice Boatwright was the exception. She saw Latrice, but pretended otherwise. Almost immediately upon entering, she came to Etta and said, “Roy was my nephew, my sister’s child. This was my sister’s house. Lord knows she hated it, but it was hers, and I’d like to speak to you about what we are goin’ to do about her things.”
Latrice leaned forward. “Miz Etta is not available for interviews.”
Alice started in surprise, and then frowned. “You forget your place, Latrice. You always have.”
The two had a staring match, and Latrice won, of course. Alice was not frightened of Latrice, but neither was she a fool. Ignoring Latrice, she said to Etta, “I shall call upon you tomorrow, and we can get things straight.”
Latrice had the last word. “I suggest you telephone first. Miss Etta is carryin' Mr. Roy’s child and needs to rest.”
Alice turned away and went about the room, as if inspecting it.
“She is markin’ the things she wants,” Latrice whispered to Etta without moving her lips.
“She is Roy’s mother’s sister. She’s entitled to those things that were Cynthia’s.”
“Those things belong to the child, the grandmother’s grandchild.”
“Are you so certain it is a girl I’m carryin’?”
“Yes.”
They spoke to each other in whispers, like a game, two sticking together.
The house filled with people who gradually grew relaxed and jovial as they ate and drank and settled into pleasant reminiscing, forgetting the cause of that reminiscing. Etta saw a number of men slip out the door, one after another, to smoke on the porch or to partake of a nip from a bottle in their car or coat. Drew Pierce, who had sent over the cooler full of soft drinks from the bottling company, passed out bottles of the cola and sweetened a number from the pint bottle in his coat pocket. Heloise began helping Maveen serve at the dining room table. China and silverware clinked and snatches of conversation seemed to bounce around the air over Etta’s head.
“Remember what happened at Robert’s funeral? Cynthia liked to have shot Carterroy. Roy managed to get the gun . . ."
“Carterroy wasn’t above runnin’ bootleg, I can tell you . . ."
“After what happened with Robert, Cynthia wouldn’t let up on Roy. She kept him . . .”
“Have y’all seen Alice and Edward’s new color television? Big son-of-a-gun . . ."
Etta remembered how Roy used to say his family provided entertainment for everyone. She used to tell him that his family provided for the upper-class people of the county, and that hers had provided for the lower.
She ran her gaze around the room, from mouth to mouth, watching the lips move but not hearing anything. Or rather hearing what sounded like one big noise. There were a number of strange mouths, those of people she didn’t even know but who seemed to know the house and Roy.
And then her gaze lit on a familiar face. Mercy! It was the Texas cowboy from the blue pickup truck.
Etta’s eyes followed him. She thought to call Latrice’s attention to the man, but remembered that Latrice didn’t know who he was, either. He was bareheaded and close enough for her to see his hair was neatly trimmed but thick and wavy on top, an unruly strand brushing his forehead, which had a faint tan line across it. He wore a coat and string tie at the neck of a white shirt. He carried two plates of food, balancing them carefully as he weaved between people, nodding and saying excuse me, to the front door and out of it.
Etta stared at the door for some seconds and saw him duck back inside and shut it. He was gone.
A crash coming from the dining room jerked Etta’s attention that way. Maveen had dropped something. Latrice swore beneath her breath and got up to go see what it was. Thus abandoned, Etta sat there feeling a strange panic of vulnerability slip up into her breast. She saw Betsy Thibodeaux heading toward her.
Etta rose and said, “Excuse me,” to no one in particular and hurried up the stairs to the bathroom, where she slammed shut the door and leaned against it. Then she fought her way from beneath the layers of veiling, jerked off her hat, and ran to the toilet to throw up. To no avail, as she had not eaten enough to throw up.
If Wishes Were Horses Page 3