Weedeater

by Robert Gipe

  Houston said, “We better go, sweetheart.” He slid past me, went first, said,

  I did. My grandfather and grandmother passed out of Sand Cave in the light I held, the picture their crossed bodies made broken behind a veil of tears.

  * * *

  HOUSTON TOOK Mamaw’s body back to her house. He lifted her out of the car and packed her inside. The house was piled with stacks of mail, stacks of magazines, stacks of things telling everything going wrong everywhere in the world. The sofa was stacked, the coffee table and the fireplace stacked. The only place clear was a spot on the kitchen table where Mamaw did her letter writing. Around the edges of the clear spot there was a coffee mug full of pens and xeroxed phone call lists, her pipe tobacco next to her pipe in a glass funeral home ashtray, her cordless phone base blinking red and green with calls, phone books out of date from Canard and Lexington and Frankfort, kept cause they had all kinds of numbers written on them with different ballpoint pens, numbers of lawyers and government offices and people getting screwed over. There were paper maps with place-names circled and creek names gone over in highlighter. It was all stuff that wouldn’t get written on anymore, ashtrays and phone book covers that wouldn’t get no fuller from Mamaw being busy trying to save the world.

  Houston cried a little packing Mamaw upstairs to where she slept. He called for me when he got up there, and asked me to turn down the covers. Mamaw’s bedroom was as put together and shipshape as the downstairs had been unruly.

  I turned the covers back. I pulled the sheet and the velvet crazy quilt stitched with songbirds and chickens, flowers and stars, back down to the foot of the bed, and Houston laid her down, brushed the cave sand from her face, got it all over the bed, her jean legs still wet from where she’d been messing in the cave water. He laid her there and smoothed her hair and put her hands to her side. It was hot and he looked at the fan which wasn’t turned on, and he looked around the room, I imagined, for some sign of himself, some sign of the time he had been there, but he didn’t find it, cause Mamaw had got rid of every sign of him, like he was a catching disease. I’d been there when she done it.

  Nicolette stared at Mamaw. I stared at Houston. Houston stared at the door and then went back down the stairs, walked out the back door, and got in his car and started backing down the driveway. I ran out after him, caught him before he got to the end of the drive, got ahold of his arm through the open window, said,

  He said, “Got to go to the apartment.”

  I said, “What for?” Said, “What are we supposed to do with her?

  Houston said, “I got to go, honey. You can leave her here. She’ll be all right. You can follow me. If you want. Get the baby and follow.”

  I took my hand from around his arm. Nicolette ran up to me and asked could she ride with Houston. I looked at him and he looked at her and I nodded my head, goofy with what the day had become. Houston and Nicolette backed out the driveway and I went back and turned the air condition on and locked the house. I caught up quick to slow-ass Houston creeping down the mountain, and we all went to the High-Rise, to the apartment where Houston stayed.

  GENE

  But I was dry. The sun come angling in the side of the little house. Sister had paper blinds on the windows, turned the light yellow, made you feel like you was floating in a bottle of pine cleaner.

  My head was swimmy and I needed to wash my mouth out. Felt like I’d been eating them chunks of grass that pack in on top of the blade of your mower. It occurred to me that brick of grass’d taste good to a cow. Be like one of them power bars That Woman give me to eat. Power bar for a cow. Never thought of that.

  Sister blowed her head off again in my dream. Just like she did in the kitchen in the big house. Back Easter. I pushed my feet down to the floor. The recliner folded back up. That Woman’s dog slept on the rug beside me. Her paws twitched. I hoped she fared better in her dream than I had in mine.

  They was two Walmart bags in the chair with me. One was full of dog food That Woman give me to feed her dog till she got back. The other had a stuffed gorilla you squeezed to make a gorilla noise. That dog would chase that thing long as you’d throw it.

  They was also a dog brush in the bag. I seen That Woman use that brush on Pharoah one time. That Woman sat up on the edge of a rocking chair, leaned over, a sprig of hair trailing over her eye like a pea vine. She run that brush across Pharoah’s back with one hand, caught up the fur in the other. That Woman had a shirt on made her look like a lady slipper. It come down low in the front and even through the screen door I could see how peaceful it was down inside that shirt, darkness real soft, a little night place you could go to dream right.

  When Pharoah woke up, I brushed her like That Woman had. The hair come off in wads, come off like dog hair cotton candy, piled up enough there on the rug to make another Pharoah.

  It had got hot in Sister’s little house, and even though Pharoah’d took a chunk out of my hand the day before, she seemed to like that brushing. She panted till her tongue dripped and finally lay down at my feet, went to sleep. I picked the fur out of the brush, brush wiry in its bristles, a red felt bottom to it.

  My daddy had a hairbrush, hard brown plastic brush, plastic bristles. He didn’t care to take the bristles to you. Or the back neither, if you didn’t get what he said the first time. But what I thought of was the bristle side, side Sister used to slick back my hair even after I was grown, Daddy’s dandruff down under mine, same hair, same coming-off skin.

  A train come through down by the river, empty and squealing. I held That Woman’s dog brush, tried to imagine it in her hand, imagined her fingers on it, and then imagined me a dog brush, me riding through Pharoah’s fur, me with That Woman’s hand around my neck, and then me turning back into me, her still there, her still having ahold of me.

  Brother come knocking at the door. I was supposed to have met him an hour earlier over at the High-Rise where we was weedeating. He come in the house and the train’s squeal got louder. Brother said, “What the hell you doing?”

  The dog went to barking at him, barking so loud you couldn’t hear the train for it. I give Brother the brush. Brother took off his hat and run that dog brush through his thistly hair. Three times he pulled it through. Then he smiled like he thought he ought to be on TV, paying no mind to the dog barking. I got my thumb in that dog’s collar, pulled her back to me. She quieted.

  I said in her ear where she’s the only one could hear,

  Brother said, “You coming?”

  I said I hated to leave the dog in that hot house and Brother said to turn her out and I said I couldn’t do that and Brother said, “Well, chain her to the porch,” and I didn’t have no chain, so I just told Pharoah I’d be back soon and not to worry and put two big bowls of water out.

  We went over to the High-Rise and started weedeating, it the evening, the cooling of the day, hateful High-Rise boss not there to tell us it was too late to weedeat. It felt good to be there with Brother, not so hot, able to remember him and then Sister, all of us when we lived together with my granny, the closest thing to me ever having a family. I remember Sister and Granny showing me and Brother how to play Rook, and me taking the longest to get the hang of it, but finally getting it, finally understanding what it meant for the red two to be worth twenty points, same as the rook, which is boss, but for the red two being able to take a ten card but not an eleven nor nothing bigger, me finally understanding the difference between power and value. Got all that and pop in a bottle, two pops for the four of us, Granny not drinking but a sip, and it not high summer yet, the baby frogs peeping out, excited about growing out legs and being able to jump.

  I was thinking on all that, my weedeater rolling back and forth, hypnotizing me, not so many vehicles in the parking lot, me edging beside the pavement, me daydreaming about card playing and pop drinking when I heard this woman saying, “Hey! Hey!” When I looked up, she was hollering at me, telling me not to throw grass on her vehicle, which was a great big black Taho
e, which I had already done where it was parked, and hadn’t gotten a speck of grass on her vehicle. She was pointing a painty nail finger at me and I knew what she was telling me not to do and I knew she was threatening to have me fired if I didn’t do what she said and so I didn’t turn off my weedeater and in fact kind of thumbed up the gas so it run a little louder, and then there was some kind of ruckus behind her—I didn’t hear what it was—and she jerked her head around and looked up like stuff was falling out of the sky and I went back to weedeating, thanking Jesus for whatever it was took the Tahoe woman’s mind off me.

  DAWN

  When we got back to the High-Rise, Houston and Nicolette went straight upstairs, left me sitting in the car. I seen Gene and his brother walking towards me, both packing weedeaters, and Gene a can of gas. I got out and got inside so I wouldn’t have to fool with him and by the time I got inside I’d worked myself up, agitated at how Houston wasn’t talking to me about Mamaw’s body, about what to do, which I felt like he should be the one, not me, figuring out how to do for her. I thought, if he doesn’t say anything about it when I went in there, I would just call her family out on Drop Creek, her brother and them, even though they didn’t much fool with Mamaw, and let them deal with it. So when I walked in Houston’s apartment and he had his music turned up loud and was at his shelves messing with his boxes of cassettes, it flew all over me. I said,

  Houston did not look up. He kept rooting through a case held twelve cassettes looking for the one Nicolette wanted. The one had the song Mamaw called for when she died. “Darlin’ Cory.”

  Papaw set down the box, looked at Nicolette sitting cross-legged on the floor. He had a cassette in his hand. “I got two versions, sweetheart. One by Roscoe Holcomb. One by Doc Watson. Which you want?”

  “Nicolette,” I said. “Don’t do that. God Amighty.” She was picking chewing gum off the bottom of her tennis shoe.

  “Roscoe,” Nicolette said.

  A little brown bird landed on the windowsill. Houston took the cassette from the case and put it in the player. He fast-forwarded and reversed till he found the spot. The bird on the sill tweeted and Nicolette turned to it. Houston held the cassette case close to his face, read the single-space cap-lock typing on the handcut slip of paper. He pushed play. He fast-forwarded and reversed. He pushed play.

  I said, “Houston, I need you to talk to me.”

  Houston hummed.

  I said, “What did Mamaw want us to do with her body?”

  The brown bird’s tweets turned into more like a song. Houston pushed pause on the player and started to sing: “Little Birdie, little birdie. What makes you fly so high?”

  Nicolette joined him singing. I snatched the box of cassettes off the table and threw it out the window. It crashed on the parking lot two floors down. The bird was gone. The singing and music stopped. Nicolette looked at me like she wondered if she could throw stuff out the window, too. Houston looked like I stuck a knife in his ribs.

  I said, “What’s the matter with yall?”

  Houston took a deep breath through his nose. His hair stood on end like silver grass. His shoulders were drawn high and stooped. “Your grandmother and I,” he said, “were not supposed to court. Her father thought I wouldn’t be able to provide. He thought me too tender to shoulder a man’s burden.” Houston lay his hand on the table, his fingers spread like a colt’s legs. “So we had to sneak. We would plunder through the mountain, all up and down Blue Bear. She would name the plants and trees, copy the calls of birds and name them too. For a boy from town, it was a revelation.” Houston sat down at his table with its boomerang top. “Then,” he said, “I didn’t listen to any music but what was on the radio. Popular music. Knowing all this,” he said, waving his hands towards shelf after shelf of cassette boxes of old-timey music, “came from knowing her.” Houston turned his head to where the bird had been. “One time me and her were in a cave, found a human skeleton on a rock shelf. I wanted to tell someone about it. Your grandmother wouldn’t have it, said, ‘leave it lay.’ I always suspected she had an idea who it was. But what she said was, ‘We don’t know but what it was a choice to be left here.’ She said she wished she could die her body left aboveground, go to bone in open air. ‘Just the bones,’ she said, ‘the rest carried away or rotted down.’”

  Houston stood and walked to the open window. “She didn’t speak of me, of where I was to be. Did she want me, when it was my time, to come lie down next to her?” Nicolette moved to her knees. Houston said, “We will put her with her people, on Blue Bear.” Houston put his hand on the window sash. “I can’t do what she wanted,” he said.

  Nicolette came and stood at Houston’s side. She hooked her finger in one of his belt loops.

  I called Mamaw’s brother and told him what had happened and he was sorry and we talked and it felt like family and I told him to go ahead and dig Mamaw’s grave at the family cemetery on Tallow Creek, deep on Blue Bear Mountain. He said he would. Houston wiped his face and we went outside and picked his cassettes up off the parking lot and all were fine except for one got run over by a woman in a black Tahoe and Houston said it was OK, the cassette was mostly the Blue Sky Boys, who he said he never much cared for anyway.

  I said, “Houston, I’m gonna go.”

  And he said, “You got it worked out with Denny and them?” I said I did and he said, “They’re gonna call and get somebody to fetch her body?” I said they were and he said, “I better get back up there.”

  About then Weedeater come up behind me, said, “This yall’s?” and it was one of Houston’s cassettes, the one had “Darlin’ Cory” on it. Houston took the cassette from Weedeater, looked at it, and give it to Nicolette, who took the cassette, which looked big in her little hand, and Weedeater said, “Nice night” or something like that and Nicolette said, “My granny died in a cave today.”

  Weedeater said, “Cora?”

  Nicolette nodded and Weedeater said, “I’m sorry,” and said she was a real good woman, and I said thank you. And Houston told Weedeater who he was, and Weedeater went back to weedeating and me and Nicolette went to Tennessee and didn’t come back till the day of Mamaw’s funeral.

  GENE

  Me and Brother finished the High-Rise right after dark. I come back to the house and sat and wished I had a bowl of ice cream. Sister’s husband come in my little house without knocking on the door. His hair wadn’t setting where it usually set. His face was flush, red in places a face aint usually red. He’d had him a pill. I was in my drawers, washing a plate at the sink. He come around the counter and up behind me before I could get turned around.

  He said, “Gene, I got to have some rent. Five hundred a month if you’re gonna stay here.” He said it fast and gravelly to the back of my head.

  Me and Brother got fifteen dollars each for the High-Rise. That Woman paid me sixty dollars to mow her yard. She was my best-paying customer. I was already into one of them payday loan places for I believe it was twenty-four hundred dollars. Only way I was keeping my head out of water was not having to pay rent. I asked Sister’s husband when he thought the rent-paying would start. He said him and Sister talked about it before she died. He hadn’t said nothing before, he said, on account of us both grieving.

  I stopped wiping my plate. I didn’t say nothing, but turned to face him.

  He said, “I was thinking we’d start with May. So for May and June,” he said, “you owe a thousand. And then July be due by the middle of the month. Next Friday. So,” he said, never stopping staring me down, “fifteen hundred by next Friday.” He unwrapped him a piece of chewing gum and put it in his mouth without taking his eyes off me. He said, “That make sense to you?”

  It didn’t make no sense to me at all. Sister had had that house before she’d married this man. It was what she’d got when she divorced her first husband. She’d had to fight tooth and toenail to get this new man to let her stay. He’d wanted a fancy new house. She’d had to bow down to him pretty heavy to get him to m
ove in there.

  I said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying.”

  And he said, “All right then. I’m glad you going to be a man about this anyway.”

  He said it like they was other things I wadn’t being a man about. I reckon where I wouldn’t work for him in the coal mine.

  He give me one more good hard look and then he left, his feet on the floor like a horse’s, his big old dress-up work boots like an army going through your country, eating people’s food, burning down their places, doing ugly things to the women and livestock.

  DAWN

  The drive to the cemetery was hot and bright. The sun bounced off a string of empty coal cars standing on the siding below the road like angel coffins. A black dog chased a yellow dog in and out of a field of corn. A boy with the sleeves cut out of his four-X black T-shirt stuck his burrcut bullethead out of a mostly white Corsica. He looked at me like he’d give anything for me to be an ice cream cone.

  Blue-headed flowers strung on long stems down the side of the road as me and Nicolette and Houston in his Caprice, Albert and Hubert in Albert’s yellow truck, a stout, silverheaded man and his wife in a Camry, and two of the organizer girls in June’s red Honda passed. Mamaw didn’t want church in her funeral, so there wasn’t.

  At the funeral tent, a beat-to-shit Subaru pulled up and Willett and Kenny got out. I dried my tears on my shirtsleeve. Nicolette ran to her father. Willett’s mother come out in a blue dress, dark and quiet, with little white buttons down her leg. Mamaw’s brother Fred and his family rolled up in a blue Durango, and Fred’s son Denny came in a Silverado I stole once when I was fifteen. All them come and stood with us under the tent. They didn’t say a thing, just nodded.

  A short man in scuffed brown shoes come smiling and stood by Mamaw’s coffin, which was decked in country-looking flowers June and Houston had picked out on Blue Bear. I should have gone with them. Nicolette did. There was no reason for me not to. When they went I set at Mamaw’s house and would have till they come back but I got afraid Momma would show up, so I walked out behind the house past the pile of poison ivy not yet withered down and headed up the hill.