Not one person at that funeral, including Jim Cohen or any of the white people, would attend my funeral if I had dropped dead that day. Some things you just know. You wonder who might turn out for you, telling yourself that it makes no difference. I believe it doesn’t, once you’re dead. But I’d wondered for a while who would interrupt their lives to pay respects, because I wasn’t yet dead and sensed that very few people would muster more than a sigh and brief eulogy, something like, Oh, old Arthur; well, I wonder what’s for supper. It made me think twice about the social motions I went through every day. That contemplation was not what drove me to drink that evening, but it contributed to the cause.
One thought led to another, and I wondered what might happen on the day I die—that notion got stuck in my craw. Nobody wants to think about it, as if not imagining it makes it less certain. I don’t want to bog down on verbalization over strained meaning when it makes no difference to a thing if it’s spoken or not. Nor do I dwell on the world’s willingness to get along so well without me. Why shouldn’t it? What got me wondering were the deaths of friends who passed day or night, and I knew they’d died, just plain knew it before anybody told me. I don’t think psychic phenomena are extraordinary, but I had other friends who died and nobody told me for a day or two, and I was surprised to hear the news.
So I wondered if my death ripple would find a shore to roll up on where someone would sense my transit, or if the wave would roll eternally out to sea, unlanded, unbroken, unfelt. A dream recurred about that time; it was morning, same as all mornings, but standing in front of my dresser where I put on my watch and rings, I didn’t bother, because I was dead. As a matter of fact I wasn’t going to the office, because dead people don’t do that, starting with no watches or rings or claim to any material possession. I was clothed in that dream, which ought to have told me it was a dream, because you go out like you came in, buck naked, but I didn’t see it logically because I was dreaming, and dreams don’t always add up sensible. It was knowing not to bother with my watch and rings that got me stuck there in front of the dresser all night, realizing I was dead.
My aunt gave me that watch thirty years prior on the occasion of my first promotion to associate partner. One ring is a gold horseshoe with diamonds around the top, and the other is a signet with a star sapphire. Eudora called those rings tacky as a Vegas card sharp, but she was like that, rendering all things either tacky or lovely in direct correlation to her view of creation. If something made her look good, it was lovely. If it didn’t, it was tacky. She taught me my deep distrust of Southern women accusing any being, object or event of being tacky. She wouldn’t castigate the watch for fear of my Aunt Florence’s disapproval, which she and God knew could lead to the outside, where a woman can only look in, which is commonly viewed as tacky. I always felt better wearing my horseshoe, call it lucky if you want to, and I loved star sapphires since the first time I saw one. Moreover, Eudora never went to Vegas. Hell, she never made it down to Disney World, what with the overwhelming situation in Florida, which is full of nothing but crackers, don’t you know.
Anyway, every night I had this dream of standing in front of my dresser realizing I was dead till morning, when it was time to get up and go to work, which felt about the same. It wasn’t a nightmare, where you bolt up in a sweat, breathing hard, but it was no walk in the park either, knowing it was all over but the crying, only to wake up to a more somber reality, another day of statutes, precedents, political stratagem, social talk, obligatory chuckles over the same old jokes and a cocktail hour stretching way into sundown as necessary to even the scales between life and the other, whatever it might have been, which nobody really knew, except that it was passing by on a daily basis.
I stopped drinking so I could attain the healthful benefits of sobriety, which benefits I had to look at and review every afternoon like one last precedent or statute, because I forgot.
I got that dream to stop easy enough by going a few days without wearing either ring or watch. Oftentimes you can accept a thing for what it is and let it go, and a certain healthful benefit accrues to life. You let a thing go and life proceeds on a simpler basis. Maybe I did die in the small way the French view as integral to living, as marking life from day to day, but the French usually die small after sexual relations, and all I got was a fitful night followed by another day at the office. Once I got the dream to stop I slept better and maybe gained my first acceptance of giving up a thing or two, though from there I began to wonder with each conversation I engaged in: would you feel my passing?
Well, the road to knowing what the hell is up is full of detours. At least my spiritual path was elevated to worries over soulful vibrations instead of who’d show up at the funeral. Funerals are social, and though you don’t have to be alive to count socially around here, the funeral is mostly folks showing up to see each other and tally your score as much as to say goodbye to you, so you want a good turnout. Hell, I didn’t care, though I wanted to count a few close friends while I still showed a pulse.
The other worry over vibrations or whatever you want to call it went away too, mostly, and that’s another good thing, leaving me more mindful of the day I’ll die. That’s a figure of speech, and I suppose passing on between the witch and the cock is preferable to the daylight struggle. I feared my reckoning and caused the dream myself, and feared as well that I’d be served up as one more doughy centerpiece for a few hours of chitchat.
Now I hope the dream and mindfulness are components of my personal liberation, starting with my jewelry, or maybe continuing with my jewelry after starting with scotch. Few people alive or dead would have believed what I would come to give up.
I read so much about alcoholism and feelings of well being, and the judge’s funeral turned out to be a milestone and certain death of me too when it warped exponentially on the reckoning issue. The truth had festered in me fifteen years, my secret, even as everybody knew what I’d done, and I needed a drink, a long one, just to chase myself down the road. Things got worse as they will do after a good self-loathing, making my obsolescence as a professional man as plain as the nose on my face.
You got to die to get to heaven, and I did, hitting purgatory like a boar in a wallow. I thought I was cured of the sauce. Feelings of well being did not derive from that bottle of cheap sherry. The edge of a most peculiar anxiety was dulled, and for that I was grateful, but that’s all it was. More importantly, I felt fine the next morning with no need of a bit o’ the hair of the dog what bit me so I could ease on up to the table with manners and a stable disposition. I felt sober and strong and nowhere near falling down the rabbit hole, but another bone stuck in my craw and wouldn’t swallow and needed something to wash it down. My embarrassment was invigorated on so many levels, and in a town so narcissistic as this one, one level can do you in.
For starters, I was guilty of vandalism. Next, I’d turned on my friend, presumed guilty by circumstance and consensus. These infractions of the moral code were acceptable as long as nobody knew. Or at least manageable.
Third, my spurious invitation to Jim Cohen wasn’t really an invitation but an empty sentiment of reciprocal hospitality when we both knew I was blowing smoke. That didn’t matter, because it was the courtesy of the language and the manner that counted. It’s never been important for white folks and black folks to mix like kin the way Yankees insist we should. Hell, we mix better than they do every day. The blacks have their way, and it’s enviable in some ways just as our way is enviable in some ways. You mix everything together and you lose the character and charm and flavor of the delicate spices. It’s risky. Take the time Jim Cohen came to town for sit-down dinner with white folks back in that phase of the judge’s conflict where sit-down groceries with the help in the formal dining room was supposed to show the whole damn world what for. Hell, everyone saw that dog and pony for what it was, Jim Cohen most of all. What could he say, no? You put old Jim in a suit with a collared shirt; he’ll squirm like a late baby, sweat like
a mule and shake his head over groceries that would otherwise draw him in two-handed.
No, I didn’t mean that showy hospitality, where country blacks dress up like white people and come to my house and sit at my table, as if that’s what they wanted to do all along, as if they and I would have had drinks and dinner years ago if not for our demanding schedules. I meant the real hospitality that’s anywhere for the giving and taking, like I had out at his place on a night of personal confusion clearly visible as a time of need, into which he stepped like one of those friends I’d hoped to count one day. I didn’t mean to suggest that he should come over in his time of need, but that the door was open, and it was different at my place, clean and nice.
Maybe it was that notion of cleanliness that stuck the whole empty day in my craw, and nice for that matter. Never mind; I could kill two birds with one stone, shrinking the liquor stock I’d walked past three years now and repaying a social debt at the same time by carrying a bottle of the so-called good stuff out to Wadmalaw to share with Jim Cohen. I believed he’d like that, and I’d be a bottle closer to clean.
Sitting in the Library Society all morning was good for historical perspective but left a man hungry for some fresh air, and if a thirst could be quenched with a social call, we’d both fit in, which tends to be a daily objective here. How else can you hold a show like this together? Besides that, I viewed my number of days without a drink as one more thing to let go of, lest it get a swelled head of its own and suffer the local ailment of self-righteousness. No, I took initiative on this phase of realignment. Besides all that, it was mid-afternoon when the breeze slacks up like time standing still, and the recollections come out like gnats. The old gals at the Library Society damn near twiddled their britches with me nosing into Annie’s letters all day. I needed out before they closed in. Annie Gammell’s poor performance as a heterosexual wife may have been the original source of integration in the South. He was insatiable. She felt bothered. He went elsewhere for the hootchie cootchie, and another Civil War started on a local scale, just like the last one, except this time it was Yankee snatch lobbed at the heart of old Charleston instead of cannonballs, and this time nobody outside of town paid much attention. Annie could have been a spinster deluded on passion and lost love. Waties saved her, and then he dumped her after thirty years of marriage, filling his last days with the stuff that justice is made of; his words, not mine.
You can’t approach a man of Jim Cohen’s experience, removed from, shall we say, the nuance and subtlety of town, for an opinion on history or affairs of the heart. I mean, you can; I did. What you get is an answer removed from polite society. He smiled on one side of his face, leaving the other side noncommittal, or maybe committed to a further knowing as he summed up the country version of what happened and the result, that it didn’t make a shit.
Well, of course you could dismiss anything in the world with that same glib brevity. The brevity too was justifiably dismissible; hell, you could lie down and die if that’s all you thought things amounted to. But the situation was different, driving out from town on a weekday with a bottle of Teacher’s aged three years extra and worth that much more in inflation too, not that I’d checked the price lately or that the price ever mattered. The critical point of my dialogue with Jim Cohen that day was the incumbency thrust upon me, of making his glib summary a simple pause rather than the end of the exchange. Ankle deep in marsh mud, I waited. He waddled up the bank for supper, mullet again, after ruling on my motion, that it didn’t mean shit. I wondered how many mullet he’d eaten. He was seventy-three, so I’d reckoned a few even then.
Pro bono work is not required and is rather frowned upon for a lawyer of stature, stature here measured by the years spent in the same office, especially if said office dates back with appreciable depth in proportion to all else in the preserved part of town. But I took some pro bono the last few years; God and I knew why, and a few other people must have known why too. Nothing dramatic; I provided counsel on a few juvenile delinquency cases and a domestic abuse case.
What I’m coming to long way around, which is the general route in this region, is a report I read about that time, ’69 or ’72 or so, on the health and well being of the blacks in the rural South, in particular the sea island blacks. They get more protein than the urban blacks, oysters, shrimp and mullet mostly, right there for the netting. They get less cancer too, with less cash money for Slim Jims, pork rinds and lunchmeat, which they fairly subsist on in town. Jim Cohen looked fair to middling in spite of the fat for a man of seventy-three, which age I could only hope to be before too long. My father died pushing ninety, which felt like it might could be another challenge, one way or another, the easy way being to croak and the hard way figuring how to keep things realigning for another thirty years. I thought of those years remaining as the stretch, which I’d entered with new characteristics, physically, mentally, emotionally and financially, which characteristics would grow brighter if I liquidated a few more of those things I needed to let go of. The future should loom different from the past, but around here that’s not often the case.
I figured Jim might not even know his father, much less how long he lived; I don’t say that in a pejorative sense but speak from the way it was. The blacks got born and died every day casual as you or I might scratch an itch. I felt foolish standing there, suspecting his answer might hinge on a bottle of scotch. Maybe I came out for more, for something to ease the discomfort welling up over too many years of wandering in the great, gossipy desert a few miles to the north. Relief seemed worthwhile, because if I learned anything those days it was the ability to leave a qualm or two in the ditch and get on while I could. Or maybe I approached a new maturity, in which siblings come to recognize each other for the lasting bond between them. Maybe not. Maybe it was too soon for that. I asked about his father.
Who knew? Maybe he had a yarn to spin, and that’s why I was there, to listen, because whatever Jim Cohen lacked in physical fitness he compensated in well being. He seemed unflappable, till I got the rise. Even then, he moved slow to an itch. He seemed testy but wanted to help drink those bottles but waddled on up like I wasn’t even there. I brought two, because nobody likes to run out. They were the last of the Mohicans and the very best of the good stuff. Maybe saving those two for last was prima facie damnation of the accused, Your Honor, except that a nolo-contendre preempts adjudication for the party of the first part and the parties of the second part sticking their noses out of the water just then as the tide went slack.
Years I had to suffer the uninformed babble of a bush league society of very heavy drinkers on what was the best scotch to drink and what might be better, like we were discussing high protein feed for our thoroughbred race horses, all serious and concerned. The best was Dewar’s to most of them, because Dewar’s spent more money on advertising, and those fancy ads out of New York conveyed a worldly sophistication by osmosis or saturation to those who drank Dewar’s. That might sound simple, and it was; to a man and a woman the lot of them could have thought for themselves but declined the effort if it required thinking further than an oyster can spit.
Dewar’s is to scotch what Old MacDonald is to rib eye steak. You got your snooty toot toots who’ll swear by Glenlivet, because Glenlivet doesn’t advertise as much, and advertising is so public, and Glenlivet is so discreetly top drawer and a certain cut above Dewar’s. But it wasn’t Glenlivet either. I could go on till you yawn, which I’ve done plenty, believe you me, making a case in court or out as authority on something or other, till excusing myself to top my toddy with Teacher’s, which is, to make a long story short, the best scotch God ever made.
Didn’t much matter once it was nothing but whiskey on the mud, which was a might different than the rocks. I took a long last pull as requiem for a maritime lawyer undermined by progress, and as farewell to the sauce. Didn’t need it, could live free and easy without it, didn’t even matter, and there in the guzzle was my proof. I could feel all the goodness and sens
e of well being that bottle had to offer, because I knew by then it was best to see the good in things. I could see the good in sharing with Jim Cohen and more good in scotch being gone forever.
It flowed forth in a blood offering, if you will, in another sharing with my very best bubbas on the marsh, the oysters, who gave me so much over the years, sacrificing kith and kin so I might enjoy the bounties of nature. I poured that first bottle over those thirsty devils, and don’t you know they drank every last drop till they died. Better them than me, except for some of them who went tight-lipped, most likely minded to start an association of clean and sober oysters down the road, where they’d step to the podium for a tentative look up at the others who’d know damn good and well who they were and what they’d done and say, “I’m Oyster, bivalve filter feeder. And alcoholic.”
Well, you can’t blame them, living the life they do, ebb and flood every day the same and nothing for it but to sift what flows by for something to feed on. You get perspective out here without the clutter and distraction that blinds you in town. I think about what happened, not so much historically or in relevance to a few key personalities in our pickled society but more focused on what every human considers sooner or later. That’s the difference your life will make and what you’ll leave behind. What happened in town was no different than a dream of death, fading when the dreamer finally figured out how to leave his jewelry behind.
Time and its segregation of hearts unto themselves simply sent each player to personal resolve. We record our births and deaths in town with as much detail as possible, though the vast stretches in between summarily condense to gossip. I wonder if self-assessment is a requirement of evolution, an innate burden we chew on like an irrepressible cud. Or if Jim Cohen was nature’s metaphor, dying and regenerating with the seasons, while sleep deepened in the little village to the north, rooting even as the sleeper reached blindly for the light. There is no new South and hardly an old one, just white people continually reconstructing their sense of defeat. You could see it and feel it in town and out here too. The blacks didn’t shuffle and scratch nearly as much by then; didn’t need to.
In a Sweet Magnolia Time Page 12