A simple fellow, he was nonetheless engaging for a cemetarian, even in this part of the world, where the departed are still recalled and often addressed personally, where death is regarded as little different from life, so long as you have a good view. The dead ones don’t actually partake in the tea and scotch and talk, but then they have much less fuss to deal with too. He said it wasn’t easy, adjusting to cemetery life, which phrase in itself reflected massive adaptation, but he did adjust, even to the browning. That is, everything in and around Magnolia turned brown, which he accepted as reminiscent of the old sepia tone movies he saw as a child. He called it old Tarzan brown, and said take a look; it covers everything in time, from the tombs and trees, even out to their leaves, to the little wrought iron fences the families put up between themselves, all brown. He’d grown accustomed to the brown and didn’t mind the smell, since it too recalled old photographs from his youth just back from the druggist. “But the smoke and yellow stuff’ll like to choke you.”
He said he read the newspaper from his former home, one home or another, because he’d had quite a few homes, any one of which was better for newspapers than this home, where you couldn’t count on the local newspaper but for bad news. That or old news. He’d read that the process was called inversion, whereby pollutants are discharged into the air, where they remain trapped by the cloud cover, so the yellow grit rolls from one end of the county to the other—“Like a big old turd won’t flush.”
“Well put,” I said.
He said, “Howdy. Walter Snole’s my name. U.S. Navy retired.”
“Arthur Covingdale. My pleasure.”
He looked at his dirty hands as compensation to the gentlemanly thing to do and shrugged instead of shaking. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “These people don’t care. They’re dead. But you wait till their cousins come out in a while; by God you’ll see some grunting and snorting. You a Waring?”
“No. Covingdale.”
“That’s right. You’re in here. This is a strange one, though.” He nodded at the headstone over the hole and called it a rare marker. “First off, no epitaph. Most all of them have epitaphs, even if they’re little short ones like, Loving Father or something. Secondly, wife put her name on the other side already. You won’t see that too often when he dies first. They usually wait to put their names on till they die too. I figure they don’t want to get out of the running before they have to, you know what I mean? Guess this gal must be old. I’d bet you she’s old.”
“You’d win,” I said. “She’s old, and she’s been out of the running a long time. She can run her mouth though. I’m certain you’ll get a whiff of that too, if you stay for the funeral.”
“Oh, I’ll be here,” he said. “This fellow was a judge, pretty high up.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We got twenty governors of South Carolina here and a good many senators too. Robert E. Lee’s grandson is here. I like to sit in on the famous ones. I don’t know much of what this fellow did, except he was famous for helping the Negroes one way or another. I guess that’s rare too, around here. Maybe you know.”
“I know,” I said. “He’s not fondly remembered here. He made a few decisions as a judge that were controversial to the point of violence, and he lived the last fifteen years in New York because of it. The thing was, he never was a liberal, you know, he was only getting revenge on Charleston and South Carolina for the condemnation that came his way after his divorce and remarriage.”
“Well,” Walter Snole said. “I don’t know nothing about all that.”
“No. It’s a long story. Most people don’t.”
“I never had a bone to pick with those people. The Negroes, I mean. Colored preacher come out here this morning to tell me his people would be here for the funeral. He told me and just stood there gawking at me like a child knew he was in for a beating, like I was supposed to slap him with my shovel or something. I told him I didn’t care if he brought a whole damn fleet of Negroes and stayed all night. He says to me, ‘No. Call us black. Not Negro, black.’ Used to be they didn’t like that. ’Course they like it better than nigger, but there wasn’t much difference between black and darky. I don’t suppose you could call them darkies now without they’d get real excited. I don’t believe they like colored anymore either, but black is all right. He asked for black.” He leaned on the spade, pondering the grave. “Next thing you know they’ll be wanting us to call them shines or rugheads. I don’t care. I’ll call them anything they damn well want. I got no bone to pick with those people. I just don’t want trouble. That’s all.”
“There won’t be any trouble.”
He looked at me, as if to ask how I could be so sure, unless I had ties to trouble. As I composed my safe response, his gaze went over my shoulder. “Well, here they come. You didn’t go to the service in town?”
“No. This is plenty for me.”
“Me too,” he said, shutting down the pump and pulling the siphon from under the catafalque as the generator backfired, slurped a last swallow, belched and stopped before giving up its last two gallons of drivel back to the water still in the hole.
They arrived in single file, parked and moved in a strained, hesitant manner toward the grave, five white people, maybe twenty-five blacks. I knew them all and exchanged pleasantries briefly till the colored preacher grew restless and loud-voiced over the tardiness of a designated pallbearer, Jim Cohen. The next few minutes were given over to speculation on where he be and whether a man might make better time in crossing the River Jordan by getting an early start, even if it meant crossing with only five pallbearers.
The tardy party finally arrived, sputtering and smoking like North Charleston in a Fleetwood Brougham with no trunk lid and no back seat, and looking, as we were wont to say on many a sad and sorry Sunday morning, shot at and missed and shit at and hit. He carried a huge and handsome load of produce looking ready to sell on the road if it didn’t fall out before he got to his place of commerce, which I hoped he planned to do rather than announce specials there at the funeral. He parked next to my car, which I’d parked forty paces down to avoid the traffic. Then he opened his door into mine, carefully, so the ding wouldn’t be too big. He emerged slowly, taking time as required for what had to be two hundred fifty pounds of him, or maybe three hundred. Once out and more or less stable on his own two feet, he straightened what was supposed to be a black sport coat over his bib overalls with a tie apparently knotted by a child. He brushed the crumbs from the front of it and smoothed his gray-flecked temples before looking up like a seasoned thespian to grin for all the folks waiting and watching. But this was no act; I knew Jim Cohen from way back when and from regular stops out on Savannah Highway too, where I bought his corn and root relish, and maybe bought into his repartee as well, calling him Mr. Jim as he called me Mist Aht. Just so, we paid homage to our common source, odd peers meeting as if randomly.
Glancing here and there like a creature of instinct taking stock, his alert eyes eased down to the natural fatigue of a man his age facing yet another task. The grin shrank to a smile of hope, and he said, “Ey! Ey you be?”
“Awright. Awright,” the blacks refrained.
Jim Cohen re-adjusted his tie as a matter of onerous process, ending with a headshake indicating certainty that this uptown clothing would never adjust as it should. So he waddled to the hearse, where he grasped the remaining unmanned handle and looked around, more sanguine now, to pronounce, “Awright.”
The six pallbearers hefted the soul-departed burden never before borne by those of African descent in Magnolia, and so the book of history creaked slowly open as the procession proceeded post haste.
II
The River Jordan
The Reverend Mr. Whitehead read his funeral passage verbatim and with dispatch from the page marked Funeral Reading in a leather-bound, gilt-rimmed, flawlessly maintained edition of the King James, extemporizing only at the end to tell us the judge was a loving father. I saw Walter Sn
ole nod behind the crowd where he rested both hands on top of his spade handle and his chin on top of that, pumping his head as if his itch was scratched, and now he could shovel the dirt. The Reverend Mr. Whitehead paused like a preacher at a wedding, waiting for anyone to speak now or forever hold his peace. Then he was finished, so he stooped for a few clods and tossed them on the casket, and it was over.
Except that the Reverend Mr. Washington, the colored preacher, stepped up to announce that Jedus be telling him to preach some too, to which the vast majority of attendees agreed as one,
Yeah!
Pray, Jedus!
He’p me now!
Riding the crest of affirmation and allowing no time for dissent, Reverend Washington then imprinted the book of history indelibly, his falsetto preaching voice rising over the thousands upon thousands of white graves having yet in their hundreds of years of repose to hear a black man preaching Magnolia, and for all we knew still waiting to hear. Never mind, on that day the shrill voice assured all those living and dead in hearing range that we are on our way to Jordan on the same path trodden ever since when. Reverend Washington exhorted that the souls know where they want to go, and there come a time when the going is suddenly free of earthly burden for heavenly taking, and this be such a time for our dearly departed judge.
He’p me Jedus!
His dog-eared paperback Bible looked soaked down and dried out, and in a minute he shook it in the air, picking up the pace and finding his stride. The man had heart, ranting down the road to Jordan, surmounting obstacles on the way with further pleas. He’p me, Jedus! Or Walk! wid me, the other blacks and one or two of the whites repeating those lines and otherwise affirming, Yeah!
A light rain started not halfway to Jordan, but most of the blacks didn’t open their eyes. When the drizzle picked up, the Reverend Mr. Whitehead touched the Reverend Mr. Washington on the arm and looked up, to God and the dirty rain. Reverend Washington grinned and fast-forwarded his exhortation directly to the riverbank just across from Jordan.
He’p me, Jedus!
He prepared to cross quickly and actually began the crossing when the torrent gushed from the sky. Reverend Washington was already knee deep in the river and deigned to turn back but had to wade on alone since everybody else took to their cars, until finally he did too. It poured ten minutes or so, and when it stopped no clods remained for Reverend Washington to toss on the box. Just mud.
I waited through the rain and came out again into the mud since I wanted to hear firsthand and not the second- or third- or fourth-hand accounts, soon to circulate in town, of the judge’s wife’s eulogy. I knew she’d start up sooner or later; the New York Times called her a lively, talkative woman, but we didn’t see that as emulation of our euphemistic custom, because we knew her to be loud and hateful and mad as a hatter. I wanted a moment with Anne too, the judge’s daughter. I reasoned my motivation here clearly; we literally shared childhood, spending every day together for years, but hadn’t seen each other since she moved north to live with her father and his new wife. It seemed an odd move and an odd arrangement and most odd that she left her mother alone here, especially since that was just before her mother died, but then the whole topsy-turvy world around here was past reckoning and just wanted to get back to its old self, and maybe she did too. I can only speculate. With the principals removed from the arena, the tension died down directly and the cruel memories faded, till they were disinterred for the old man’s funeral. I thought we’d go for coffee or something.
She saw me when she arrived but didn’t acknowledge. It’d been fifteen years, so maybe she didn’t recognize me, though I doubted that. She looked good, plain but healthy, like her mother had looked. Her short dark hair and black tweed suit and plain white blouse highlighted her cheeks, rosy with life, not rouge, or maybe she’d only chilled on a permanent basis up there in New York. She looked fit and strong and kept a proud posture, and I concede a flicker of hope rose in me. My moorings had loosened long ago, so maybe a coffee date seemed easy, one more step on an old, familiar path.
She hovered protectively over her stepmother, who didn’t utter a sound that day and hardly looked like the femme fatale who stood this town on its ear. I remembered the mongered accounts swirling around town like dust devils then. You had one story of the bed sheets found at the beach on Sullivan’s Island not too far from Henry and Heloise Middleton’s beach house. Whether imagined or real didn’t matter since those bloodstained sheets spawned the most recorded history of any single skirmish since The War. One Mrs. Gervais Grimble (née Pringle {née Grumble}) said a spot of blood was found near the end of one sheet. She was certain it was the bottom sheet, which sleuthing was deemed significant then, in those historic times prior to fitted bottom sheets. She was certain too that the stain was at the foot of the bed. Pressed on her certainty, she said, “I swear it was!” She knew because Mary Green told her so. Mary Green was the Warings’ housemaid then and heard about the sheets from Flo Manigo, the Middletons’ housemaid, whose beach house was a trysting place for the judge and the Yankee spitfire. Mrs. Gervais Grimble had that disarming ability to raise one eyebrow. It implied something devious, like sodomy or pedophilia or worse, the devil’s curse. Devious potential lurked everywhere, counterbalancing what she strove so diligently to make nice, like tea and cookies and a little visit. She was remembered for her debutante years, when she once asserted with characteristic vigor that she did so know about the fallopian tubes; they were a small island chain off the coast of Maine, and indeed they could get cold, which anybody could plainly know without having to visit Maine, because all you had to do was look at those pictures in those books, and you could practically feel the cold. “I don’t know why anybody would want to live there!”
Some years later, at the crux of the scandal, she asked, “Don’t you see? At the foot of the bed!” She’d pieced it together, and though nobody needed to get ugly about it, and this was obviously not in need of further analysis, it most certainly did not appear to be nice. So whoever tolerated that rant was left to picture the blood, the bottom sheet, the foot of the bed and the obvious scene transpiring. Trouble was, the scene wasn’t obvious but obscure, leaving nothing to be seen or conjured or by any sane or stable means fantasized.
I gave it my best nonetheless, venturing that the blood could have been from a razor cut; the judge was such a stickler for personal appearance, and it reopened under duress as he knelt at the foot of the bed in passionate abandon to suck the Yankee spitfire’s toes, which is just the sort of thing that kind of woman wants, and if that bottom sheet with the blood at the foot wasn’t proof, then what?
The theory was laughable, but nobody laughed, nor was humor intended. Oh, yes, I was dead serious in my effort to sleuth any component of this scandalous crime against morality; I made myself blush. Mrs. Grimble raised the other eyebrow on the case made by the prosecution, also more amazed, frankly, than she cared to be. Toe sucking was simply not discussed, though astonishment was general and pervasive in town those days, all sourcing back to this new wife, this font of sadism and perversion, this Svengali, this siren, this Eve come to spoil our garden with easy pussy, which, if you think about it at all, would be the logical next stop after the feet.
Hunched, short-winded, sexless and old beyond her years, the new wife only mourned in silence.
I approached Anne and her stepmother as the crowd dispersed. Half the cars started and rolled out while the other half tried to start and failed, the drivers finally raising their hoods and asking each other who had a decent set of cables.
“Anne.”
“Hello, Arthur. How’ve you been?” She responded well enough but wouldn’t look at me, rendering the air between us colder than the fallopian tubes.
“Good.” I touched her arm, warming things up, I thought. She looked up, so I smiled and opened our new discourse warmly, “I’ve been good. Very busy …”
“Like a set of jumper cables at a nigger funeral?”
What? What cause did she have to talk to me like that or to use that language here? “Anne. I want you to know how … good it is to see you. I’m sorry about your father. I want you to know that too. You know I …”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I do. You know I visited him last year. I was sorry I missed you. Your … stepmother can tell you. We had quite a chat. He …”
“Arthur.”
“Yes.”
“I know.” She turned away from me and guided her stepmother slowly toward the parking area. I walked along, thinking her bitterness nurtured and aggressive, but I hardly suspected the arrow waiting in her quiver.
“In town long?” I asked.
“Too long, I’m afraid. We arrived last night, and we’re not leaving till this afternoon.”
“I see.”
Finally she stopped to look at me directly in the eyes. “I do too,” she said.
“Anne …”
“Arthur.” She parked her stepmother on a sound footing, then turned to me. “Arthur. I know what you did. I saw you. I’ll never forgive you. I can’t. If my father chose to, that’s his business. He was always fond of you. He … loved you. Thank God he was crazy by the time you started throwing brickbats through the window. We’re leaving now. Goodbye, Arthur.”
She knew. But how could she? Never mind. I’d have time to sort that out. In the meantime, she was getting away, leaving me nothing for it but to tighten my drag. What was I thinking, as I lashed back? That she would commiserate at last and come for coffee? “Do you think he ever got as crazy as your mother?” They both turned back to face me. The old lady’s eyes opened wide. Anne said, “Leave my mother out of this, Arthur. She’s no more of your business than any of this ever was.”
“She was everybody’s business, as I recall.”
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 2