All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  Here came my mother, running down the aisle. “It’s too late now, you sonuvabitch!” she screamed as she jumped on his back. She pounded on him, and they came rolling down the wheelchair ramp.

  As vengeance against him for whatever he had done, my mother then, very casually, oh so quietly, used what little money we had, to purchase every single available plot in Files Cemetery. Two hundred and sixty-two spaces, to be exact. She put a C marker for Coker on each plot, so everyone would know they were hers. When she was done, she spoke to Uncle Fred one final time. “You will never rest with your kin,” she told him. “You will be alone for eternity.”

  My uncle had to buy spaces at Memorial Gardens, among what he considered the common folk in town. He died when I was sixteen, and I drove my aunts to the cemetery because I was the only one who was still talking to all of them. Mama said she wasn’t going, but someone hid behind the pillars at the entrance and shot off Roman candles over the hearse as it entered. High in the sky so they would fall over all of us. She wasn’t missing that moment.

  So, it would be kind to call my mother eccentric. I’m told she was nice once, before she was sent to the Booneville Tuberculosis Sanatorium when I was six months old. She was a nurse, and she didn’t have tuberculosis, but she did have some rare lung disease. They didn’t believe she didn’t have TB and picked her up in handcuffs to take her up the dirt roads to Booneville. The sanatorium was built so people with TB would never have to leave. It was a village, with its own chapel, grocery, and fire department—and endless rules about contact with the outside world. They put her up on top of that mountain, sleeping on a screened-in porch, and whatever happened to her up there made her lose her mind. They finally let her come home when I was four, just in time for my father to get sick with lung trouble of his own. He died in front of me on Thanksgiving Day when I was five.

  In my teens, my mother and I would walk by the graves after church on Sunday. I would stop at my daddy’s grave, still missing him so much. He was nearly sixty when I was born, and I nursed the memories I had of him to keep them fresh in my mind. The times he took me to his parents’ homestead in Florida, where we would float in a tiny boat down the Peace River. He taught me not to be afraid of the alligators we passed or the snakes that hung from the trees. Or at home in Hot Springs, a singular moment I held onto, of me crawling to the TV, racing to the jingle of a Maxwell House coffee percolator commercial, and him putting his finger right in the top back of my diaper to hold me in place. His laugh as he picked me up to tickle me and love on me. That feeling of being lifted and held.

  My mother was not the sentimental type, and each time we visited his grave, she would take a deep breath and make a sweeping motion with her arms. “Someday all this will be yours,” she would say with this sarcastic laugh. Even as a kid, I would think, Couldn’t I just inherit a ring? I was an only child. What was I going to do with a cemetery?

  Now, I had Jimmy’s ashes, and I felt like his soul couldn’t really rest until he was safely returned to the earth. I knew I would have to do it at night. If word got out that I had buried an AIDS patient, much less taken care of one in a room for hours, there was not a judge in the state of Arkansas—or in America, for that matter—who would not have taken my daughter away from me and given full custody to her father. This was a state with a sodomy law that made consensual sex between two men punishable with up to a year in prison.

  I couldn’t afford anything nice to put Jimmy’s remains in for burial, so I went to a friend, Kimbo Dryden, who worked at Dryden Pottery over in Whittington Park. He was a hippie, with long brown hair that made him look like the picture of Jesus that everybody’s grandma has up in her house. But with a patch of snow-white eyelashes that I couldn’t help but stare at. I asked Kimbo if he had anything he could spare. I didn’t tell him what I needed it for. He had a chipped cookie jar he was willing to part with. I got home and poured Jimmy’s ashes in it. Now I had to do it.

  I waited for a full moon. Files Cemetery sits up on a hill covered with pines and oaks, plus one magnolia tree. It’s right next to Files Road, so I had to be quick. The ground was covered all year in a carpet of brown pine needles that crunched with every step you took. The sound competed with the caws of mockingbirds, our state bird. The males will sing all night for love, sounding like a mess of porch swings in need of oil, creaking over and over again. I was strangely calm. I know there are people who are afraid of cemeteries, but I have always found them comforting. Especially Files. Maybe because I missed my daddy so much. He was a kind man. I knew that he would like what I did for Jimmy, so I decided to put the hole in the very center of Daddy’s grave. This way I would remember where Jimmy was if Hot Springs found out and I had to get him.

  I placed Jimmy by my daddy’s marker to sort of introduce them. I ran my fingers along the raised letters reading “James Isham Coker” and “World War I & World War II.” Born in 1900, he’d just made it into the Navy for the first one and then went back for the second one. When the legion of young veterans returned from World War II to kick out the Mob and run Hot Springs the right way, he was one of the older guys they treated as a respected elder. They were all good men.

  “My daddy’s going to look after you, Jimmy,” I said. It’s hard work digging in a cemetery, because they’re always full of rocks. Cemetery land is never worth a damn. If you could grow something on it, it would never have been set aside for the dead.

  I managed to pull out a neat circle of red Arkansas dirt. “I’m sorry we only had a short time together. But you’re safe now, okay?”

  I placed him in the grave, and I said a prayer for him. I rearranged the pine needles to hide what I’d done, and I looked around as a wind moved through the trees in the cemetery. Once he was safely buried, the magnitude of what I had done hit me. It felt like I was harboring a fugitive. A fear took hold of me that this secret would be my undoing. I thought: What have you gotten yourself into?

  Chapter Two

  It was spring, so the dogwoods were in bloom. White flowers filled the hills, which were dotted with lavender and pink dots of redbuds. That’s when the white bass start running. They’re mating, and everyone else in Hot Springs is too. If you find a creek where they’re at, you can literally dip-net them. The fish, I mean, but that was also my friend Sandy’s approach to men. In 1986, she was on a mission from God to get a husband. She was so fun, and she was the one who taught me how to be blond.

  “I saw Richard last night,” Sandy told me, adjusting her bikini straps for the sixteenth time to avoid tan lines and ensure a little attention. We were lying out on lounge chairs by the pool, sunning ourselves at work and not knowing how lucky we had it. We sold time-shares on the weekend at the Lake View Resort on Lake Hamilton. We did a two-hour tour of the condos at nine in the morning and then another at two. The middle of the day was ours to do with as we pleased at the resort, and we were encouraged by our bosses to sunbathe and get beautiful. Two blonds in bikinis, coming attractions for what you’d see here every day if you rented for a week.

  “How’s Richard doing?” I asked. He was a merchant marine bringing supplies from one ship to another in the Gulf, so he would be gone for weeks at a time. He’d arrive at Sandy’s door, a man just out of prison.

  “Good as always,” Sandy said, sighing out the always and throwing her hands back.

  “I like Richard,” I said, which was true. It was hard to find a man worth a damn, and he was nice. Good-looking and funny, like Sandy.

  “Ruthie, when are we gonna get you a man?”

  “Aren’t you the one who says I can’t see any man you dated?” I asked. “You’re not leaving me many to pick from.”

  “I can’t help it if I’m popular.”

  “You can’t help it, is right.”

  She would think I was stealing her man, and with the type of men Sandy dated, that would be petty theft. Not worth losing a friend like Sandy over. She was the
only one I’d found as outdoorsy as me, and we could go on twenty-mile hikes in the hills and not run out of people to talk about.

  “You gotta go where the men are,” said Sandy.

  “The only men interested in me have wedding rings,” I said. If Sandy’s was the I-saw-him-first rule, mine was no married men. “I didn’t even like my husband, why on earth would I want someone else’s?”

  “How is that bastard?” she asked. We never said his name. It was a sort of superstition, and you’re still not gonna hear it from me. It’s like inviting the devil. “He’s late on Allison’s money again,” I said. He was supposed to pay a hundred dollars a month, but the only thing reliable about him was that he wasn’t going to come through. I married him when I was a month shy of twenty, because he was the first person that asked. He was thirty-five then. My mother had done a good job of convincing me I was born ugly and would die ugly, so I thought I wouldn’t get another chance at saying yes to any man. My mother’s plan for me was to marry the retread-tire man’s son, because he would always have a job. On top of being just evil, Allison’s daddy couldn’t keep a job, so maybe I should have listened to her.

  “Well, we need real men,” she said. “Get Allison a better daddy than the one she got.”

  I shrugged. And there he was, right in my head. Jimmy. I pulled my hair back, trying to distract myself. I’d done this all week, ever since I buried him on Daddy’s grave. I was so close to him in that hospital for all those hours. My hand still felt like his skin was on it. The look on the nurses’ faces . . .

  “Sandy, tell me again you’d take Allison if something happens to me.”

  “I do so swear,” she said. “I’d raise Allison as my own . . . maid.” She laughed, and I gave her a chuckle even though I didn’t want to.

  “I just don’t want her daddy’s family involved if . . . You know. Not that they would want her.” One time, when Allison was a year old, we were out eating with her daddy’s parents. They were taking a break from watching Pat Robertson on the TV. Their friend stopped by the table and oohed at Allison. “Oh, where’d she get that pretty red hair?” she asked. My mother-in-law didn’t wait a beat: “That’s what we wanna know.”

  Sandy sat up and lowered her sunglasses, but I wouldn’t look back at her for fear she’d see I was really scared. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Ruthie.”

  A husband and wife walked by us, so Sandy and I got quiet. He was doing that thing men do when they’re trying to face front and not get in trouble with the wife, but they’re straining their eyes to see you. The wife grabbed that hand of his real quick, so I made sure to say, “Hi there,” just to her. People came here to look at the time-shares for the free lunch and use of the pool, and my job was to sell them something they didn’t need. A week cost sixteen thousand dollars in the summer red week, but I was good at selling. Hot Springs actually had five seasons when you counted the racing season, and those were red weeks too. You could get a blue winter week for five thousand dollars, but I would always work to upgrade the renter and then get the sale from that too. Blue weeks were all Sandy really sold, but it was only because she thought she couldn’t sell higher. “Sandy, you think that’s a lot of money,” I’d tell her every time she lowballed herself. “You need to quit thinking like that. They don’t think it’s a lot of money.”

  Larry swung by behind the couple and winked at us. “Ladies,” he said. Larry Nelson was our boss, and he was a good one. One of the few I’d ever had who let me work and left me alone. I’d get a job, and they’d expect sex on top of my other work, so I’d have to quit. From the start with Larry, I had that “I’m not sleeping with you” air about me, so he didn’t bother asking. I knew Larry’s wife, and I also knew she thought I was sleeping with him, but I never was.

  “Well, we should get moving,” I said. There was an empty condo where we could shower and change back into our “let me sell you a time-share” clothes.

  “Let’s go make some more money,” said Sandy. “Put on our lucky selling dresses.”

  Larry had us all up in this great big room we called the office. There were about sixty of us working selling time-shares, each at a little table, side by side. You could hear everybody’s conversation; it was kind of like a circus. You took whomever came to your table, but if the people looked like they were going to be a waste of time, there were ways some sales people had to deflect them, like looking busy or suddenly having to run to the bathroom.

  One time there was this little old man who came in wearing a stained T-shirt and overalls that were frayed at the bottom where he’d cut them. You could practically hear people saying, “I don’t want him. All yours.” Well, I didn’t care what you looked like. He had come over from the Delta, and as he walked toward me I saw he had on these steel-toe boots that he had cut the toes out of.

  He caught me looking. “Diabetes,” he said.

  “Well, it is a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Ruth.”

  The guy didn’t look like he had a penny to his name, but I gave him the same tour I gave everyone else. At the end, he reached into his overalls and pulled a snuff bag from behind the bib. And from that he pulled out sixteen thousand dollars in cash and put it on the table.

  “I think I want one of these,” he said. Everybody was just gobsmacked. So I had a reputation.

  This couple I had that afternoon was more the usual type. They were in their thirties, he in a dark blue polo and she in a summer dress that looked new. They had a little money, I could tell, but these ones had their arms crossed tight, so I knew I had to warm them up. The tighter the buyers’ arms were crossed, the tougher they were to crack. You knew they’d made a pact that morning that they weren’t turning loose any money and they weren’t listening to you. So you would sit with your arms crossed exactly the way they had theirs crossed. And you would just eventually, throughout the conversation, uncross your arms. A little bit at a time. And they would uncross their arms, a little bit at a time. Then, sometimes, they would pull them back up, and you had to start all over again. You had to keep breaking that pact, and it was always about the money.

  I put my right hand over my left and leaned in. “Look,” I said, lowering my voice as if I was leveling with them, even though I was about to tell one heck of a little white lie. “I bet you did the same thing my husband and I did when we first came here. ‘Honey, we’re not buying a thing today. We’re not making a decision today, I don’t care how great it is or how much we like it. We’re not buying today.’”

  They looked at each other and laughed, their bodies relaxing. It was always the same.

  “I get it,” I said. “Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s do the tour.”

  As we walked over to the model condo, I talked up Hot Springs. I know a lot of people who love Hot Springs as much as I do but nobody who loves her more. My grandmother’s grandfather, Grandpa Gardiner, came here from England in 1836 and opened the first general store and saloon. Well, one of the first. Everybody says theirs was the first. He owned the land from Central Avenue to Mount Riante, and he was always having somebody at his homestead digging a grave. “He lost another slave,” the locals would say. “That boy from England, he doesn’t know how to keep a slave. He buys ’em, and then they die on him.”

  They didn’t know his slaves weren’t dead. He was secretly putting them on the wagon train to the Indian Territory and freeing them. He hated slavery, didn’t understand it at all. He would get the slaves when they came up the river, and he would buy them through his store, and then he’d help them escape.

  “This used to be known as the Valley of the Vapors,” I told the couple as we walked up a hill. “The warring Indian chiefs, way back about five hundred years or more, they would come into the valley where the hot springs were. It was the healing valley, so they couldn’t bring their weapons in.”

  I paused for effect. “They would divert the water. I
think there are forty-seven springs coming down from Hot Springs mountain, about a million gallons a day. It’s hot, 147 degrees Fahrenheit, and they would divert the creek so that the hot water would come down and mix with the cool water. That way the chiefs just had their own little bath. They would soak out the problems and talk out what they needed and wanted. Instead of fighting about it. It was a sacred valley. It still is to me.”

  That was for her. I saw her put her arm in his as I continued. “You probably know Hot Springs was the original home of spring training for baseball. Babe Ruth loved it, but did you know Al Capone loved Hot Springs too?”

  “No shi—” he said, and the wife pulled his arm but good. “Really?”

  “Oh sure. He used to stay at the Arlington Hotel, and he even had his worst enemy living here at the same time: Bugsy Siegel. Hot Springs was neutral territory.” Here came the trump card. “And Owney Madden, of course.”

  “Who?”

  “Owney Madden? They called him ‘The Killer.’ The Mob sent him down to Hot Springs to cool off after he killed someone he shouldn’t have. That was the thirties, and by then Hot Springs was the place to be in the South for organized crime. Wide open.”

  My grandfather was Owney Madden’s doorman. I remember when Papa had his leg amputated and was recovering out at our house, and Owney used to visit him. This big black Cadillac would pull up, and a man would be standing by the car at all times. Owney always gave me graham crackers. I thought he brought them because he liked me, but when I got older I realized it was because I would just sit and be quiet because I had a mouth full of crackers.