As startled as her stepmother and as hateful as I’d seen her stepmother in the past, as though the hatred was learned, Anne nearly snarled. “Goodbye, Arthur. You take my mother and make her your business and keep her your business. Just don’t bother me with it. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I think I do.”
“She’s right over there.” She pointed. “This cemetery has a special deal on three-grave odd lots, you see. When my mother died they had to put her over there, because she wasn’t a Waring anymore. That’s how much business she was for everybody. They buried her with the transients. Right over there, in case you brought flowers.”
“I’m sorry, Anne.”
“You certainly are. Goodbye, Arthur.” Abruptly departing, they left me standing alone to find a vacant hole of my own I might slip into. I would replay that scene many times in the days ahead, determining my best retort, which would have been to ask how a mother could be buried with transients, if a daughter gave a good goddamn. Of course perfect retorts composed in hindsight are better left unsaid. Why pour gasoline on the fire? No reason at all, except to fan the flames, and frankly, we were all a bit parched from the heat of the thing, though the coffee idea suddenly felt like cold coffee, and the loosened moorings felt as suddenly rusted and rotted through, leaving me to drift alone on the deep blue sea, speechless, with mixed and convoluted imagery competing to illustrate the forlorn solitude and regret I’d come to. Beyond that, my most heartfelt retort would have challenged her to love me still.
Anne walked away, resolute and erect as a few minutes prior but wholly changed, her demeanor still precise but now smooth and sparse as granite. I pondered a coffee date with myself, in which I would pour the cold stuff over my head, so I could douse the fire and drift on out to sea.
Yet the prevailing image was the one most physically apparent, of myself as another statue, one with slumped shoulders and a head hung low and covered in bird shit. So I stood, frozen, as it were, marking another milestone in history, in which the Covingdales were denuded of their sanctity and social grace in a fell swoop. How could she have known? How could she have seen? But then what could she be doing, bluffing? Among that crowd of statues guarding the graves and paying tribute to monumental greatness, I looked up to ponder life and wonder what might come next.
I couldn’t return to the office. Nor could I imagine where to bear the afternoon. I considered the yacht club, but it was two already, so the first wave would be there, cheering each other on, any port in a storm, hoo yeah! We’d survived the downpour, requiring the dredge of the great hurricane parties of the past, which any thunderstorm warranted, sloshing up to a beachhead, so we could get this thing established for once and for all.
I watched Anne and the old lady walk toward the parking area past the raised hoods of the several stalled cars with passengers inside, waiting their turn for the jumper cables.
“Anne,” I called.
She turned meanly and strained her voice to cover the distance. “A man who hurts his own …” She glared at me, then slipped into her car and left.
I pursued her to the point of reaching my car, where Jim Cohen stood by, brushing away the ding in the door with one hand, holding a set of jumper cables in the other. “Op’mup dem hood, Mist Aht,” he said, oblivious to the tragedy playing out around him. I watched Anne as I mustered a call, a plea, a shout, then swallowed it back down and stooped to pull the hood latch under the dash as instructed. Jim Cohen worked the first release under the hood and struggled against the second as I watched the ruins of a happy childhood shrink down the flooded, rutted and pot-holed cemetery drive. Doubt and trepidation compounded on hearing the second latch give way with shrill complaint and feeling no strength left for a response other than to start my engine as instructed and wait.
Surely a waterman like Jim Cohen knew the consequence of wrong terminals. He must have graduated from a bateau with oars to one with an outboard and a battery. He waddled around to the side of my car, scraping himself along the paint and doggedly testing cables to terminals in a shower of sparks and a disconcerting buzz, then scratching his head and changing them. I yelled out that red is negative. He mumbled something to the effect that dem red be’s de one wid de yidda … ’n d’other he’s … yeah. Aw right … He waddled to his own car, got in and wound his starter, but got only smoke with sparks and a small fire on the plastic sleeves of his charred cables. So he got out with greater speed if not alacrity and yanked them off, threw them on the ground, shook his head and grumbled more vehemently at the sorry state of affairs over at the Cadillac Motor Company and more or less said, “You be’s gwine on a Wadmalaw?”
“Come on,” I said. “Why not?” I spoke evenly and dispassionately, amazed that nature’s power could enable my voice to sound as if one moment led to the next with no repercussion, as if a terrible loss had not just occurred.
It was 1968, and we were keeping up with the times. Forty-three dead in the Watts riots, thirty-eight in Detroit, Martin Luther King, Jr. gunned down in Memphis. In Charleston the brick thrower was consenting to give the black pallbearer a ride home, so perhaps a continuing buffer assuaged the terrible loss. Yet we served as whipping boy to the world on the issue called racism, which was more specifically the so-called cause of my terrible loss. I’d suspected a nigger in the woodpile all along and lived to prove it. But that insight too would remain unshared.
Except of course by brethren of differing hues. Each of us knew that a black man asking for something and a white man giving something often as not are two different things. This difference is not a disjunction in communication; oh, we understood each other. No, it was more a practicality of commerce between the two. Jim Cohen wanted the ride and more; he wanted a tow, not so much for the car, which he admitted might be ready for a graveyard, and here we were, so why bother? Except of course you can’t leave a Cadillac in a graveyard but have to tow it home to your own yard where you can jack it up onto cinderblocks where the wheels used to be, again in tribute to former greatness. Then again, we do be’s ratchere, right now. Then again, he needed a tow on account of the produce in back, “Datuh be’s de grocery load fum dem Promise Land,” meaning his usual roadside spot out on Savannah Highway, Promise Land Produce & Root Relish. He also meant that he was bound for the Promise Land and not from the Promise Land as he’d said. Why would he haul produce away from the stand? He wouldn’t. This load was his best of the year to date and would bring in some good money fuh true and looked to him like I be’s de bestess man fuh hauling him fuh true. I didn’t feel qualified to correct his modifiers and wasn’t in the mood anyway.
I could have done without the glib rhetoric threatening allegory with profound meaning, and didn’t mind letting him know that I was not a renewable resource, nor did a favor requested and then granted lead to carte blanche on his personal list of errands for the day, meaning no, he could not give me an itinerary of stops. More to the point, I wasn’t about to tow Jim Cohen’s produce Cadillac, vintage mid-50’s and looking round the bend of Pork Chop Hill and bottomed out on a fresh load from the gleaning fields, with my Mercedes Benz of a very recent year. He pointed out the tow ball behind my back bumper in case I forgot it was there, so I reminded him it was for my boat, so he reminded me that many people refer to Cadillacs as boats, so I reminded him there wasn’t no way in hell I was about to tow that boat down to Wadmalaw on a rope, because the power brakes on that battleship won’t work without the engine be running, which it wan’t, and for that matter, neither do the power steering. “So if you want a ride home, Mister Jim, get in the car. Otherwise, I’ll be wishing you all the best.” I did not say These niggers but I’ll admit to thinking it—but only thinking it with an open mind, open and glib, don’t you know. That is, we are a nation whose strength derives from self-effacement, I thought, including ethnic humor based on pratfall as pungent as a good point or punch line might warrant. If you care to snidely remark or tell a joke about Tories or snooty snoots or bluebloods, I’d
laugh loudest, especially if a vital nerve were touched, I thought. This latter contention was also theory, formulated with data as yet lacking in firsthand experience. Oh yes, I had not felt the vitality or voltage of certain nerves, even at my age, which was only fifty-eight at that time. Who’d a thunk you could live that long and still have so much to learn? Not me, not with my evident success in life.
Jim Cohen ignored my logical position on power brakes, power steering and the general idiocy of towing a junker with a Mercedes by means of a rope. Did I need to explain this? As his kind were wont to do, he waddled on back to the produce load where he rummaged under the corn till he found about a twelve-foot steel pole with tow cups welded at either end. One end went obviously enough on my tow ball and the other fit over the tow ball welded to his front bumper. I didn’t bother telling him we’d pull the damn bumper off, because he was so obstinate you couldn’t tell him a thing. Besides that, the tow ball on his front bumper looked well-worn, so he must’ve welded it through the grill to the chassis with steel bars or something, which might take care of having no brakes, but not no steering. He grinned as if reading my thoughts and pulled out an old frayed rope maybe a foot and a half long and looped at both ends. One loop went around a hook on his transmission behind the engine, accessible through a hole in the floor, and the other slipped easily over the niggerknocker on his steering wheel. I know you’re not supposed to call them that, and I don’t anymore, except here, because I don’t believe they have any other name. This one showed a woman in a bathing suit, and the bathing suit went down on hard right or hard left turns to reveal her breasts and vaginal triangle. She was a white woman with a black triangle and red nipples, but I expect Jim would have got one with an all black woman if anybody bothered to make one, but nobody did. Besides, it was a cartoon woman, and nobody ever cared a snitch around here about things like that, though the fantasized jungle lust for white women was so fervently portrayed in the northern media, as if a black man might actually fulfill his sexual need over the cartoon white woman on his niggerknocker going naked every time he made a turn. Hell, he’d have to run into the ditch to get a good look at her anyway.
Well, I can tell you it was a day of reckoning and reflection, not to mention gumption and conviction on my part, even attending the judge’s funeral. It went from bad to worse with Anne’s display of unbridled contempt. I won’t say I didn’t deserve it, but that didn’t make it hurt less. And in fact I’d spent so much of myself regretting my behavior since that ill-advised night, I fairly felt rehabilitated and repaid in my debt to society. I could have made a case, in fact, for those bricks flying through my own window of opportunity; they so forcefully made me look at the moment between past and future and see how futile my ambition had been. We worked every day, nine to five, or put in those hours at any rate, jockeying for position, making our moves, hail fellows getting along by going along, ever mindful of opportunity’s ephemeral nature. We live and die in the blissful delusion that gainful endeavor will deliver us from tedium, some of us, unless we are blessedly transposed, unless catharsis of our own making turns the window into a mirror. Just so, only by looking inward can we see what is what, perhaps not instantly; in my case it took years until I realized who I was and what would come of it, which was this: I was a lawyer in Charleston. The end.
That I had loved Anne Waring in many ways for many years felt as natural as loving a parent or a sibling or, as I can only imagine it might have been, a loving wife. I won’t say that I lost sight of her in those years since she’d grasped my fervent boyhood under the covers, perhaps thinking she merely grasped a forearm of equal muscularity, but she hadn’t grasped anything of mine since, not that she should have; she’d been a tomboy of sorts, which is far different than a male boy at the age of hormonal challenge. It was a phase for her, leading late to the femininity still evident years later.
It was a phase for me too. They say the male of our species has a penile instinct with a mind of its own. Meanwhile, in those tender, desperate years, the ineffable Eudora did latch on, not her idea, mind, but in utter, disgusted acquiescence after so much pleading, dry humping and urgency. We lie in queasy resignation to the awful demands of romance, her flogging the bologna with pneumatic insistence, me chafing worse than a baby’s butt. I nearly reminded her to breathe, till she squealed in horror as I soiled my pants and, alas, got some on her hand. Such was the nature of radical perversion where I came of age. We were engaged directly and then married. In only a decade I loathed her. That Anne Waring seemed so much more worthwhile only compounded my discomfort. Then I stayed married another two decades, beginning with a cross burning and brick throwing at the house of my supposed true love. That my life was sacrificed for a hand job is simplistic and inaccurate, except in those times that it all felt worthless as those few minutes of a debutante jacking me off on her parents’ Queen Anne sofa, no pun intended, and please, no spunk on the Jacquard.
That Anne and I reunited on a cold, wet and stillborn day felt tragically similar, though this small death was awash in her certain hatred for me that burned no less than acid on flesh. I went to the judge’s funeral as an act of humility. I went as a humble man, a man humbled by knowledge and contrition. I wanted to see if the love between us had been the real thing, or illusory as all else.
And like an old fool, not one looking in all the wrong places but one who looked in the worst possible place, I got stuck in the mud, as it were, on humiliation. From there things went from worse to worse yet on mortification, pulling out of the judge’s funeral with Jim Cohen riding shotgun and the produce Cadillac in tow. Who looks for love at a funeral? Who tows a jalopy out to the boonies with his Mercedes? These and other rhetorical questions are the stuff jokes are made of, jokes that make people laugh and keep on laughing on account of the imagery so freely conjured; can you picture it? And the laughter sticks, displacing humor with ridicule and undermining everything you ever worked for until you’re no longer a landed, bred and born gentry of original stock who’s moved up in society according to its unwritten laws and the dictates of history and the generations begetting the generations that paved the way no less than the cobblestones offloaded from the original ships where they served as ballast, albeit in the bilges, which is where you now reside, figuratively speaking of course, but thrust back and just as far below the waterline, for all the respect you can muster.
We eased over the potholes near the grave as Jim Cohen said goodbye to his friend, the judge, with assurance that Mr. Art be doing fine, that a Mercedes might be small but that don’t mean nothing because it really just a different kind of Cadillac is all it is. “Mist Aht, e awright. Mist Aht awright.”
On the other side of the grave Walter Snole straddled the siphon as he hand-over-handed it back into the grave, then took two giant steps back in the mud, losing a boot and not going forward for it but proceeding to tease death on the pump pull-rope, pulling and gasping till he and the pump looked and sounded ready to bust a gasket or two. The pump started just shy of beet red and coronary thrombosis, and he stood there living and breathing and hardly seeming to mind the mud splatter flecking him head to toe. He took note of us, looking up forlornly to confide his assessment of his lot in life: “I’ll tell you the truth now, a cemetarian’s work is never done.”
III
An Up and Comer, Don’t You Know
It was a day marked with change, the old man’s burial heading the list. Our traditional complacency got a judicial reprieve, so it could live free and thrive again with its nemesis safely underground. As if the flesh and blood of a man are all he is, and gone is gone. Which he commonly is around here, unless he left a house in town so his heirs could move up in the world a block or two closer to the hub of the hubbub of memories revered, with a portrait over the mantel and some fine old tales of wisdom and self-deprecation, which humorous anecdotes could best bring out the spirit of the man. They soon remember precious little of the man, settling in to existence once again, rendered l
ovelier with each passing year in this wonderful old house, thanks be to the forbears.
Such was not the case for the Waring clan, or that branch of it stemming from Waties. Waties Waring sold his house in town before moving north, and when he died the money stayed north, as if he took it with him forever. Still, you could hear the collective sigh of relief, and nobody begrudged him the Waring plot, so long as he kept his mouth shut. He’d often made reference to “our little circle of friends,” meaning the great social family comprising life in town, which was widely held to be the Promised Land, or the last bastion, or snug harbor, especially after the Great Misunderstanding, when good manners and polite society were largely ignored and left with hardly decent refuge to hole up in. Our little circle of friends felt an awkward ambivalence when the judge finally died; we’d won at last, but then we lost as well. It wasn’t your standard issue glorious victory for folks in town, cut and dried to gloat over and recall play by play like a Clemson homecoming game. Yet they had somehow prevailed, with him forever mum in a whites-only cemetery, and them carrying on as usual, as if to prove their point.
I suppose a part of me died too. For fifteen years my cross to bear was the one I lit before throwing a brick through the window. I don’t know how the other fellows along for the outing that night felt, because the topic was unmentionable among accomplices. Even that word, accomplice, seems so ill-fitted to a seersucker suit, a blissful smile and a scotch over. Of course that word fit as well as any word ever had in any kind of suit or bib overalls. But we enjoyed a certain convenience, calling rednecks from the North responsible for such a tasteless, possibly heinous demonstration. Rednecks did it; that was the word on the street. From that industrial ash pit came the hooligans and rough-house rabble who thrived on such demonstration, and that made sense, those half-wits got so reactionary, and besides, everyone knew we’d have no qualm with integration, given the proper time for adjustment. We simply didn’t want it crammed down our throats, and we surely couldn’t abide the judge’s brutality toward his first wife—he kicked her out, more or less into the street, and Bubba don’t play that way. You hear?
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 3