The longest they’ve ever gone without a death was thirty-seven months, and everyone agrees that was a blessed era in the town’s history. However, when death finally returned to Emlyn Springs to claim Mrs. Gladys Hurd Jones (1883–1985) and it was time to bring her Gymanfa to a close, folks were horrified to discover that in the interim some of the young people had forgotten the Welsh lyrics to the national anthem and the Nebraska fight song. The community council quickly enacted a measure mandating the singing of those two songs at all town gatherings.
That familiar tourist-enticing phrase, a bustling small town—a phrase implying successful commerce, a booming economy, and an energized population—would not be applicable to Emlyn Springs on any day but this, the first day after the last bell is tolled. And even then, “bustling” would be stretching things. A sauntering small town would be nearer the truth.
True: YES, WE’RE OPEN signs are going back up all over town, but at a lackadaisical pace and with guarded enthusiasm. After all, somebody else could die at any moment and it would be SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED all over again.
The dead fathers are taking up their notebooks and paintbrushes with caution. The dead mothers—usually so eager to take flight—are circling the premises, as if awaiting a go-ahead from the traffic controller.
If anyone could be said to be bustling today, it is the youngest daughter of Emlyn Springs’ most recently deceased citizen, Bonnie Jones.
She should be exhausted—the oppositional energies excited by unearthing the Artifact and then arguing with her sister kept her awake all night—but instead she is vibrating, possessed of the glassy-eyed, lunatic resolve one sees in the faces of the sleep-deprived.
Bonnie made productive use of her nocturnal hours. First she opened her current scrapbook to an empty page and wrote the heading POSSIBLE CANDIDATES.
She then made a list of every man she knows (“man” in this case being defined as any unmarried male over the age of eighteen excluding her brother). It was a depressingly short and uninspiring list.
This prompted her to turn to another scrapbook page and write, HOW TO INCREASE LIST OF POSSIBLE CANDIDATES. She drew a bubble around this phrase and stared at it. As soon as a response came to mind, she drew a line from the first bubble, attached a second bubble to it, and wrote the phrase MEET MORE MEN inside.
She went on like this, tethering bubbles together, forming a genealogy of logical responses and questions: the MEET MORE MEN bubble led to the HOW? bubble, which produced ATTEND MORE SOCIAL EVENTS, which gave birth to ICE CREAM SOCIALS? ELKS PANCAKE FEED? SING IN CHURCH CHOIR? THURSDAY NIGHT CONTRA DANCING IN BEATRICE? GO TO BARS? and then, triumphantly: JUICE BAR! Bonnie has no idea why this technique works, but she swears by it.
JUICE BAR! begat MORE CUSTOMERS = MORE MEN!, which begat INCREASE ADVERTISING!, which begat numerous generations of ideas, so that by the time the page was full, Bonnie had resolved to make sandwich boards and place them outside strategic locations with reliably high-density male populations (Grumpy’s Sports Grill, W.W. Seed Sales, Grell’s Ford dealership, Schlake’s Hardware, Burke’s Auto Supplies, the Farmer’s Co-op), put an ad in the Beatrice newspaper, and rename several items on the menu. For example, “Bugs’ Favorite” will be henceforth known as “Yang Stimulator,” “Orange Crush Medley” will go by the name “Turbo Charger,” and “Spring Bee Cleanser” will change to “Man of Steel Tonic.”
Bonnie tends to the avocado plants and makes her breakfast smoothie and then sets out for the juice stand. She’ll skip her usual trip to the cemetery; Miss Elfyn can’t reveal anything more significant than what Bonnie has learned in the past twenty-four hours.
And there’s no need to go looking for artifacts either; Bonnie has found the artifact of all artifacts. She’s cleaned and polished it at least; it’s hanging on a large nail at the head of her bed: an aluminum and rubber star with sunbeam spokes rising over a twin-sized Posturpedic. In time, a plan and a purpose for the Artifact will be revealed. Till then, she’ll keep it close. Maybe its proximity will exert a guiding influence on her dreams.
At the mayor’s house, Viney too is back at work. She puts in a load of laundry—kitchen towels, bath towels, the plethora of unmatched socks. (Viney’s mispronunciation of this word conjures visions of a female Welsh wood sprite: Pleh-THOR-a.) She vacuums and scours and dusts.
She calls the food bank in Beatrice, asking if they’d be interested in a donation. They’ll take it happily if she’s willing to drive it up.
Viney considers. She can’t bear the thought of donating junk food to people who are already nutritionally deprived; she’ll cart it all back to her house until she decides what to do with it.
As for the meat, besides being a symbolic reminder of the mayor’s men-DICK-can-see, Viney feels repulsed by the idea of spending an hour in a car with thawing animal flesh. “I’ll send it by taxi,” she says, taking hold of a pen. “What’s your address?”
She heads upstairs to the bedroom and starts going through drawers and closets, bundling up Welly’s clothes for the Goodwill. She shakes out each item, assessing it thoroughly before refolding it carefully and putting it into a box. She expects at any moment to be moved to sadness by a belt loop or a button. But she feels fine. This isn’t difficult. The mayor certainly prided himself on his appearance, but Viney realizes that she’s never associated the man with fashion. For years, whenever she’s pictured Welly in abstentia he’s been dressed simply, informally, either in his boxer shorts or his birthday suit. On his feet: Romeo slippers or Lee Trevino golf shoes.
She’s been thinking off and on about a conversation she had with Welly years ago. Or maybe it’s many conversations all mashed together. Memory works that way sometimes, condensing time so that one distinct recollection is distilled from many diffuse ones. It’s an invention of course, this memory, a kind of lie, but through the passage of time this designed memory acquires authority. It becomes true. It’s put into a container and shelved until its relevance becomes apparent. So often, Viney has noticed, certain memories insist on being preserved without letting the rememberer know for the longest time why.
This conversation—in its distilled and designed form—takes place in November of 1980. It revolves around—of all things—city government.
“‘Mayor-strong,’” Welly was saying. “That’s the form of government we’ve got here. It means that the mayor has the right to hire and fire city employees without the approval of the city council.”
The year suggests at least some of the memory’s significance; she and Welly were finding their way, slowly learning to speak of subjects that did not include Hope.
They were at Viney’s house, postcoitus, in the early afternoon—this was the setting for most of their significant conversations, no matter what the subject—and Welly was studying the Emlyn Springs charter.
“We’re a second-class city,” he continued. “In a first-class city like Lincoln they have a mayor-weak system. Everything up there has to be approved by the council.”
Viney didn’t know a thing about city government. She wasn’t really that interested. She’d never run for office—presiding over her own unruly life took all the governing skills she possessed—and she generally found community meetings to be an exercise in frustration. All in all she’d rather spend her time watching a good science program or one of those British comedies on PBS.
But on this day it was so good to see Welly excited about something, enlivened in a way he hadn’t been for years, that Viney did what all good women do when the significant men in their lives are earnestly explaining something (the complex mechanism by which disk brakes operate, for example, or the grossly unfair system of ranking college football teams): She pretended to be interested.
“Huh,” Viney said in a perky, that’s-sooo-interesting inflection.
Welly had surprised everyone in town—no one more than Viney—by running for city council. His passions had always been medicine and music. He certainly hadn’t demonstrated any i
nclination toward community activism; that was Hope’s domain. Harlan Beck, a retired dentist, also came out of the woodwork that year and got himself elected as mayor. Emlyn Springs hadn’t seen that much change in city government for decades. The always-reliable naysayers in town were making it sound like a coup d’etat instead of a democratic election.
“I’d never have guessed that,” Viney went on, “about the mayor having that kind of power, I mean. It seems to me that the city council rules the roost around here.”
“Exactly. That’s the problem.”
“Estella mostly,” Viney added tersely, “and whoever she can bully into going along with her.” I never could stand that woman, she thought. Neither could Hope.
“Estella is in for a surprise. Harlan is going to change things. Get this town running the way it’s supposed to.”
“Well, I say, good for him for trying. And good for you for getting in there with him.”
“I’ve got a lot of ideas, you know,” Welly continued. “Things I’d like to see happen.”
“Of course you do.”
Viney felt the conversation finally coming to a close. She snuggled closer to Welly. She was ready to move on to another topic, talk about going over to Branson next weekend to see Burt Reynolds doing the Walter Matthau part in Hello, Dolly! at the dinner theater. That would be fun.
“She’d be proud of you, you know,” Viney added quietly. “Really proud.”
Welly gave her a pinched look. “I’m not doing it for her,” he said.
The hell you’re not, Viney thought, but chose not to share this insight. Welly still sometimes lapsed into treating her like a mistress instead of his dead wife’s best friend, like an intruder instead of a co-conspirator—as if their lives weren’t entwined by choice, part of a long-standing agreement between the three of them.
“So. What ideas are you referring to?”
“Nothing specific,” he grumbled, “and probably nothing I could make happen anyway.”
“Don’t be so down. You never know.”
“It just that, if anybody proposes anything big, anything that takes … not work, it’s not that, people here aren’t afraid of work … It’s vision, I guess. Farsightedness. Risk. God forbid anything in this town should change for the better. God forbid we should try to succeed, make ourselves into something else.”
I’ve made myself into something else, Viney wanted to say, and so have you, but instead she remarked, “I know you’re excited about being on the council, and it’s a wonderful thing, but you’re going to have to be realistic or you’ll make yourself crazy. Not everybody here has your drive, Welly. Most people here are fine with the way things are.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” he said, flinging off the covers and getting out of bed. “That’s small-town life in a nutshell.” And then he clamped his mouth shut in a way that made it look like he had a dozen aspirins lodged behind his wisdom teeth and started to get dressed. “We should get back to the office.”
He could be that way sometimes, at least in private. Pessimistic. Bitter. A damned pain in the ass, frankly, when he succumbed to that Sad Sack mentality. He seemed to save this side of his personality exclusively for the women in his life; it was something Hope and Viney talked about frequently. In public, he was charming, suave, a real bridge-builder. Everybody loved Llewellyn Jones. But when he was alone with Viney—and even sometimes the kids, she’d seen it—he could turn sour and hurtful, without any warning. Mercurial was a word Alvina Closs learned years ago.
“If you hate it here so goddamn much, why don’t you just leave?” she sometimes said when he got like this, and then regretted it. Why don’t you just leave? was one question they both knew the answer to.
Moving on to the study—where Viney has divided the contents of one old file into two new ones (labeled respectively “Sister City Business” and “Nobody’s Goddamn Business but Yours and Mine HOW COULD YOU DO THIS??!!”) Viney calmly examines the contents of the business file a second time, then a third.
Realizing that this set of letters and that single distilled, twenty-three-year-old memory is as close to a divine directive as she’s likely to get, Viney sighs, picks up the phone, calls the country club, and gets Bud Humphries on the line.
“Is there much on the agenda for the meeting tonight?” Viney asks. “Besides formally electing you as the interim mayor, I mean?”
“Gosh, Viney,” Bud says. “I don’t think so.”
Viney hears the light, chiming sound of drinking glasses being put away. Like the rest of Emlyn Springs, Bud has gone back to work. He retired from his contracting business a decade ago, but soon after that his wife died, his unmarried sister moved in, and staying at home wasn’t to his liking, so now he tends bar part-time at the country club.
“Sorry to bother you your first day back.”
“It’s no bother. Things are moving pretty slow. How’re you doing?”
“I’m fine, Bud. So, the agenda?”
“Hold on a minute. I was just working on it. I’ve got it here somewhere.”
Mayor-strong, Viney thinks. Shit. Bud’s a sweetheart, but he’d fall over if you so much as blew on him.
“Oh, heck, Viney. I can’t find it. Can you stay on the line? I mighta left it back in the kitchen.”
“Sure, Bud. I’ll hold.”
A family death leaves so many emotions in its wake; sadness isn’t the only thing. It’s not even the most dominant one. All those TV movies about people dying: Viney hates them. They bear no relationship to the way things really are: the dying speaking poetically about their feelings, photographed so that they’re all soft around the edges, their suffering accompanied by a musical score that’s so corny it’s comical. The words of the dying in movies are always significant, too, clearly enunciated, and profound. Viney doesn’t buy this for a minute. Who in their right mind would be inclined to speak when they’re at death’s door?—much less speak with eloquence. If they do have something to say, Viney is sure it would be something like oh shit or Jesus Christ or oops.
And the living! In the movies they are stoically silent and still. They are … complacent, that’s the word—not pissed off and confused and hurt and overflowing with questions that take up so much real estate in the mind that there’s hardly room for anything else, not making grocery lists or paying bills or even brushing your teeth. That’s how it really is.
Viney has learned that there’s nothing for it after the death of a loved one: Doing is what’s called for, early on when one is still capable of doing, before the real face of grief reveals itself and you’re knocked to your knees with a particular and uncurable kind of fatigue. Grief bacon. That’s what the Germans call it.
“Are you still there, Viney?” Bud says, coming back on the line.
“Yes, Bud,” Viney answers. In the background, Tennessee Ernie Ford sings about loading sixteen tons and owing your soul to the company store. Viney hasn’t heard that song for years. She didn’t remember it as being so upbeat, so bouncy. “I’m still here.”
“Just had a coupla customers come in. I’m still looking. I just can’t think where I put it …”
Hurry hurry hurry, Viney thinks, because already she is feeling as though the effort is too much, what she is initiating with this simple phone call is a lost cause. “I’ll hold,” she says, sinking into the mayor’s desk chair with a sudden weariness that makes her feel as though she’ll never stand up again.
* * *
Bonnie arrives at work earlier than usual. The Texaco isn’t even open yet. After letting herself into the juice stand, she heads for the cash register, making sure she has enough change for the day.
On the wall overhead is a calendar; as Bonnie starts to flip the calendar forward to September, she realizes that there’s something else she must do in response to recent revelations.
Turning back to August, she examines the squares occupied by her scrawled handwriting: birthdays, holidays, community meetings, reminders to pay
bills, buy groceries, mow the lawn for the Williams girls, volunteer at St. David’s Home for the Elderly. She is looking for a different kind of notation, one related to this mechanical mess called her body.
Because of the damage done to her reproductive system during the tornado of 1978, Flying Girl’s menstrual cycle is hardly cyclical; it’s not even a reliable monthly occurrence. When she does menstruate, she bleeds weakly and the blood itself is pale and watery, as if her body is just going through the motions.
Up to now, Bonnie has had a perfunctory attitude when it comes to the tickings of her biological clock, only occasionally remembering to note significant bodily occurrences on her calendar. She does this through the use of stickers.
On the day her period begins, she affixes Cinderella’s broom to the calendar. Gold stars ranging in number from one to five indicate her period’s heaviness. Sometimes Bonnie feels an unusual sensation at the presumed location of her ovaries, a kind of arrhythmic twinging, like a bowstring being inexpertly and hesitantly drawn; on these days she decorates the calendar with Easter eggs—and occasionally a GOOD JOB! sticker.
But she’s not been diligent about this kind of record-keeping. She will be now. Now that she’s unearthed the Artifact and deciphered its clear directive, she’ll have to pay scrupulous attention to her reproductive system—such as it is—and note its stirrings with precision.
Sadly, the month of August is devoid of brooms, stars, or eggs.
As is July.
Well, no matter. Today is a new day. Maybe bodies respond the way dreams do, becoming more prolific once they know the dreamer is paying attention.
Bonnie turns on her five-inch portable TV/radio and watches Gaelan give the morning forecast. He looks tired. Bonnie is sorry about fighting with her siblings, but she’s still furious at them, especially Larken. She’ll show them. They’ll see.
She starts slicing fruits and veggies at a brisk pace. After arranging all the prepped ingredients just so—Oh, there’s nothing prettier than an array of fresh produce!—she adds the phrase, “LOOK FOR NEW MENU ITEMS SOON!” to the dry erase board. Vowing to consider all comers in an unbiased manner, Bonnie takes a deep breath and un-latches the shutters.
Sing Them Home Page 24