Mercy Me

by Margaret A. Graham

  I ate my breakfast and then went out on the porch to watch the sunrise. The faint rose color was barely inching its way above the town dump. I was feeling good about the way the Lord had worked everything out—the red tape and all. And to think, now the Osbornes had not one but three children.

  With daylight coming on, I went back in the house and called Pastor Osborne. He wanted to know when Maria died, all the like of that, and he asked me what he could do to help. There were a few things. I asked him to send someone to tell Elijah that Maria had died.

  “Okay,” he said. “And I’ll ask Betty to pass the word to the W.W.s. Esmeralda, I’ll need Lucy here when I talk to the children. Do you think that can be arranged?”

  “Oh, sure. She’s sleeping right now, but when she wakes up, I’ll tell her.”

  “Good. Now when can I get with you to talk about the service?”

  “Pastor, you can just take care of that. Whatever the Lord gives you to say. . . . But there’s one thing you can do for me. Write up a little something for the Journal’s obituary column.”

  He said he would.

  When we hung up, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the house was swarming with people. I had promised Beatrice I would call her when Maria died, so I dialed her number.

  She didn’t ask a lot of questions, but I went through the details anyway. She wanted to know when the service would be and if she should send flowers. Of course, I didn’t know about the service, and I told her she could do what she wanted about sending flowers. As for myself, I like flowers at a funeral. I’m never stingy when it comes to sending flowers.

  Beatrice was quiet for a minute, and I was about to hang up when she said, “Esmeralda, guess who’s here?”

  I heaved a big sigh so she would hear it. “Not Percy Poteat, I hope.”

  “Yes, it’s Percy. He came on his bike.”

  “Well, I hope he’s on his way to some other place by now.”

  “No, he’s still here. He’s staying with Sadie and Jim because he said he wants to be near me. He comes down here for breakfast and supper. For lunch I leave sandwiches in the fridge.”

  “Beatrice, don’t have nothing to do with that man. He is just looking for somebody to take advantage of.”

  “Esmeralda, he looks awful.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I saw him. He came here to my house a week ago.”

  “He said you were rude to him.”

  “Beatrice, rude is too good for Percy Poteat!”

  “But, Esmeralda, can’t you see he needs help?”

  “Beatrice, this is not the time nor the place for me to be discussing that good-for-nothing, low-down, no ’count, rotten, trashy, common creep. This is a house of mourning.”

  “I’m sorry, Esmeralda. It’s just that I want to help him if I can. . . . You don’t like him, do you?”

  I heaved another sigh. “All right, Beatrice. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You hold off on saying or doing anything that will involve you with that creep, and after things settle down here, I’ll hop a bus and come up there.”

  “Would you?” she said.

  “I said I would, didn’t I? In the meantime, try to get rid of him.”

  I don’t think I have ever been so mad at anybody in my life as I was with Percy Poteat. I was sure the first thing he’d do would be to turn her against Carl and cut off the competition.

  Still stewing about him, I got busy straightening up the house. It wouldn’t do for a bunch of women to come in here and see it looking like a disaster area. I got out the vacuum and was about to plug it in when the Apostolic van pulled up in the driveway. There must’ve been twenty young people piled out and come in the door, ready to go to work.

  The vacuum woke up Lucy. I hated that it did, but if the pastor was going to break the news to the children, she would have to be there.

  “Lucy,” I said as she emerged from the bedroom, rubbing her eyes, “I’m putting your breakfast in the microwave. After you eat, you go on to Osbornes’ and help the pastor break the news to the children. Then you can get home and to bed. You look pooped.”

  Lucy nodded sleepily and sat down at the table for breakfast. I heated up her plate and then pitched in to help with the cleaning.

  By the time the W.W.s arrived with more casseroles, the house was looking pretty decent. We hadn’t done anything in Maria’s room, so I turned Thelma loose in there. She got on the phone right away and called the people to come get the hospital bed and the other sickroom equipment we had rented. I unloaded the washer and was about to take the sheets outside to hang on the line when Clara said she’d do it for me. And Mabel Elmwood had sent her maid along with the W.W.s, so they put her to cleaning out the refrigerator.

  With so many hands to take care of things, there was nothing left for me to do except answer questions and tell them where things were, so I decided to take a quick bath and change my clothes.

  I was pulling up my panty hose when a girl knocked on the door and said somebody wanted to see me.

  The funeral director, Boyd Jones, looking like warmedover death himself, had come with a white spray for the front door—artificial flowers that could’ve stood a washing. He wanted a dress for Maria. I gave him the pink gown, which somebody had washed and ironed. In his hushed funeral voice, he sounded like a recorded message offering sympathy. Then he asked when I would come down and pick out the casket. I told him I did not rightly know, since I was very busy.

  That didn’t set well. “As you know, we have those accident victims from the train wreck, so if you don’t mind—”

  “Mr. Jones, if you don’t have time to funeralize my friend, let it be known here and now that there’s other funeral parlors in this county we can hire.”

  “Oh, I’ll be glad to funeralize this lady. Come anytime you want and pick out the casket. We have quite a selection.”

  I thought he was done then, but he didn’t leave; he stood there with his hand on the doorknob. As if it were an afterthought, he said, “I understand this lady has no family. As much as I would like to handle charity cases, I can’t. The funeral business is my only means of income, and we do well if we have one funeral a month in Live Oaks. I have to ask you, who’s going to pay this bill?”

  His greedy little eyes looked over his glasses, waiting expectantly. I was in no mood to be nice. “Aren’t you jumping the gun, Mr. Jones?”

  “Oh, forgive me. You’re upset and I understand.” He was fishing in his breast pocket for a paper. “If you’ll just sign this paper for me, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Mr. Jones, I am not signing no paper! When we come to pick out a casket, I will come in your office and go over the charges. If what you charge is in my price range, you’ll get the business. If not, we’ll pay you for what services you have rendered, but we’ll make other arrangements.”

  I all but pushed him out the door and closed it behind him. When he was about halfway to his car, he turned around, came back to the door, and knocked.

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Esmeralda, there will be a viewing tomorrow night.”

  “No, there won’t be. Didn’t I tell you that we’ll come to your office, and after that we’ll decide about the arrangements? Besides, this will be a closed-casket funeral. There will be no gawking at this poor corpse, with people lying about how good she looks.”

  Of course, after he left, I realized I had made all these decisions on my own. The more I thought about it, the more I knew it would be a good idea to ask the W.W.s to go with me when I went to the funeral home. I told Clara how that man had scalped me when Bud died, and she had a story or two to add to the case.

  So she passed the word to all the ladies in the house and called up those who weren’t there. She told me that every single one of the W.W.s would go—that they would be ready whenever I was.

  Horace Thigpen parked the cruiser on the street and was coming up the driveway when Elmer’s truck turned in. Together the two of them lifted out the tiller and took it to
the shed in back. Elmer, seeing the house full of people, left without coming inside, but Horace came in the back door.

  “Esmeralda, you got a nice tiller there,” he said, taking off his hat. “What’re you going to do with it?”

  “I bought it for Elijah,” I said. “I’m keeping it here until we find a way for him to haul it around town.”

  “I see,” he said. “Do you mind if I hang around a while?”

  “No. Everybody else is. Looks like the whole town of Live Oaks is here.”

  He twisted his hat in his hands. “Ain’t there something I can do? I just need to be around people right now.”

  He was one whipped puppy.

  “How’s your sleeping?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s off and on.”

  “Does Dr. Elsie know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You need to tell her, Horace.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on. I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  There were three kinds of potato salad, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, okra and tomatoes—no end to the stuff people had brought. I wasn’t hungry, but I figured it might encourage him to eat if I fixed me a plate.

  At first he just nibbled, sipped his drink, and said I made good ice tea. I got him to talking about other things, and little by little he cleaned his plate.

  After lunch I asked Clara to tell the women I was on my way to the funeral home and that they could meet me there. Thelma rode with me, and the others came in their cars. We all got there about the same time and piled out to gather in the parking lot. Boyd Jones looked out the door at us and his mouth dropped open. You’d think the Russians were coming!

  With Jones in the lead, we trooped into the casket room and stayed in a group, examining all the big ones he wanted us to see. Mercy me, those fancy ones were decked out with chrome enough for a fifties Cadillac. Boyd Jones wore gloves to impress us with how grand they were and opened the lids so carefully you’d think royalty lay inside.

  After we all had a good look at everything displayed, we huddled and made a unanimous decision. Not one of them was what we wanted, so we headed for the door.

  Seeing we were leaving, Jones got very excited. “Wait!” he yelled. “I got something in the back room you may be interested in.”

  We trooped to the back room, where smaller, wooden caskets were lined up in a row. “These are the models we use when there’s a cremation.”

  Well, they looked fine to me. I checked the prices and saw they were much less expensive. I looked around at the ladies, and without exception they approved of the model I liked.

  “We’ll take this one,” I said, pointing to the casket that had the nicest grain to it. “That is, if your other charges are agreeable.”

  We followed Boyd Jones into his office, and he scrounged up enough chairs for all of us to sit around his desk. He punched his calculator and read out prices. Beads of perspiration wet his forehead, and it was not a hot day. Thelma knew just what to say to get him to change his figures and bring them down to a reasonable price. We must’ve spent an hour in there, telling him what we would pay and what we would not pay. Before I signed the papers, I made eye contact with each W.W. to make sure I had the support of every one of them.

  I must say, we left that man dripping with sweat. But as we came out of that place, we were smiling.

  I put the key in the ignition. “Thelma,” I said, “Boyd Jones is one crook we have got the best of. Splurgeon had men like him in mind when he said, ‘A white glove often hides a dirty hand.’”

  By late afternoon, Pastor Osborne came to the house. He showed me the bulletin to make sure it was okay. “I figured we wouldn’t have a viewing, right?”

  I nodded and read on. The service would be at eleven o’clock the next morning. The Apostolic deacons were listed as pallbearers.

  Pastor Osborne said he and Lucy had talked to the children about their mother going to heaven and that Carlos had seemed to be upset. “Lucy said he was asking for Elijah, so we took him down there. Elijah held him on his lap, petted him, gave him a buckeye to put in his pocket. After a while Carlos slipped off Elijah’s lap, took him by the hand, and led him down to the creek. They watched the minnows darting in the water and tried to catch one. Before long, he was okay.”

  After Pastor Osborne left, I was plum dizzy with so many people coming in and going out, cars parked up and down the street. I went in my room and closed the door.

  I didn’t wake up until the next morning.

  21

  It was such a sweet service. The church was full when I arrived with Betty, Lucy, Elijah, and the children in my car. (Me and the W.W.s had saved money by cutting out the limo service Boyd Jones had insisted was necessary for a first-class funeral.) Those three little ones were dressed in new outfits and new shoes, and Angelica’s hair was curled in ringlets framing her precious face.

  As we stood waiting in the vestibule, I noticed that the ceiling fan was stirring the air and all the windows were open. But with so many people packed in there, it was still humid. Angelica, sucking her thumb, was clinging to Betty’s skirt, so Betty picked her up and held her.

  Clara’s granddaughter was up front in the church playing something sad on her violin. When she finished, Mabel did her best to get something going on the organ, but it didn’t sound like the organ was cooperating. Mabel never took organ lessons, and playing by ear don’t always work good.

  Elmer ushered Betty, the children, Lucy, Elijah, and me to our pew up front. Then Boyd Jones, dressed in a swallowtail coat, ruffled shirt, and string tie, escorted the deacons in, and they filed into the front pew on the other side. Soon the pastor came down the aisle, carrying the cross and calling out the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

  Those words always stir my soul; that day, they made me so glad, I felt like shouting.

  Boyd was too cheap to hire an assistant to help bring in the casket. Or maybe an assistant was one of the corners Thelma had cut when we were haggling with the man. Anyway, Boris helped him bring in the casket and arrange the spray on top.

  The spray of pink roses was from the W.W.s, and Beatrice’s basket of gladiolus was at one end of the casket. At the other end was a big bunch of my hydrangeas some of the women had arranged. There were other arrangements too—mostly from whatever was blooming in backyards and on fences. I had ordered four red roses, and they were in a florist vase setting on the piano. Roses are not cheap. I had arranged with Boris to use them in the service as a nice final touch.

  Pastor Osborne opened the service with a short prayer thanking the Lord for making it possible for people in Live Oaks to go to heaven. Then he had us sing “Amazing Grace.” Nowadays you don’t have to be a Christian to know the song by heart. People in Apostolic Bible love to harmonize on that one, and poor Mabel got so confused she couldn’t keep up. In the middle of the third verse she quit trying.

  Pastor Osborne never gives us one of those mail-order funerals—the cut-and-dried kind that preachers read out of a black book. For Maria’s service he read the words of Jesus: “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father, who is in heaven.”

  He closed the Bible and talked about Maria’s devotion to her children, how she did everything she could to care for Carlos, Rios, and Angelica. Then he paused, looked down at Elijah sitting with the boys on either side of him, and smiled. “When this little family was living in a boxcar, the Lord used his servant Elijah. When Maria and the children needed food, he went to the store for them. Since Maude died, Elijah has had to walk everywhere he goes, so a trip to the store meant walking to and from town.

  “But I reckon the most important help he gave was watching over the children when Maria couldn’t. And when she got so sick it looked like she might die, Elijah went for help. It’s no wonder that Maria’s children are devoted to him. As you can see, Carlos and Rios have bond
ed with Elijah.” Then, speaking directly to Elijah, he said, “Elijah, Betty and I want you to know that you will always be a member of our little family.”

  The awesome truth in back of Maria’s coming to Live Oaks was probably something new for most of the people listening, but I had thought of it many times. Pastor Osborne explained that the Lord, in his providence, had brought Maria and the children to Live Oaks and to the Lord’s people of Apostolic Bible because he trusted us.

  The pastor’s face just lit up as he talked on. “What a wonderful thing it is to know that the Lord is trusting us with three of his little lambs. Let us covenant together—those of us who are officers and workers in this church, grandparents, parents, and young people—to live holy lives before these children, that they might see Jesus in us and come to love him as we do.

  “We are not perfect people, but gross sin in my life or yours can keep a child from coming to the Lord. Jesus said, ‘It is impossible but that offenses will come; but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.’”

  I could hear snifflings in back of us, and I figured that was a good thing. Maybe folks were ashamed of the way they’d been living.

  The pastor then read a pretty poem about stepping onshore and finding it heaven, and I liked hearing him say he was confident that Maria had stepped on that shore, because she was trusting Christ as her Savior from sin. “We were all praying for Maria,” he said, “but were frustrated because we didn’t speak Spanish and couldn’t talk to her about the Lord. But God had gone before as he always does, and Lucy was here to speak her language and tell Maria about Jesus.”

  Lucy tucked her head and looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

  Well, the pastor knows me well enough not to mention my name from the pulpit, and he didn’t this time either, although he thanked the W.W.s and all those who had helped to love Maria into the kingdom.