3
THE FUNERAL was held in St. John’s Episcopal Church that Wednesday. There was a large crowd, more than five hundred people, according to the funeral director, a Mr. Soburger, whose suit cuffs, Lily noticed, were threadbare. That seemed so incongruous—a funeral director with signs of wear in his clothing—though he was very quiet and dignified. Roger Gault stayed close to Millicent through it all. Sheri and Nick clung to each other.
The final judgment on the catastrophe was that it was an accident—avoidable, horrible—but an accident nevertheless. Two emergency-room doctors had spoken with the victim before he’d lapsed into unconsciousness, and poor Buddy had explained things exactly as Nick and Tyler had, the bear or whatever it was rustling in the underbrush, Nick falling on the fence and the gun going off. If Millicent was entertaining any ideas of pursuing the case further—a prominent lawyer had sent her a card inviting her to seek relief in a wrongful death suit—she said nothing. She let Nick embrace her, and indeed it looked as though Nick was the one in need of support.
The priest was a small, pale man with black eyes and a thin, bitter expression about the face—narrow lips, hollows in the cheeks, a long nose through which the cartilage showed white, as if the skin were stretched there. He spoke the words of the liturgy in a nearly offhand manner, standing in front of a colossal bank of flowers, one large section of which had been sent, jointly, by Lily’s parents and Peggy. And then he delivered a homily about the salvation that awaits us all, his voice rising with his own satisfaction in the sound of it. Several friends and business associates of the deceased stood up to say something about Buddy. They kept repeating that he himself would never have wanted people eulogizing him. Buddy Galatierre was interested in other people—he had a real interest in you, in whoever the specific someone was that he was with, and while he had a famously bad memory for names, he remembered little details of your life, and wanted to know about them, to talk about them with you. And when you were with him you felt this. You felt more confident in the importance of the matters that concerned you because they concerned him. Lily wept, hearing this. Tyler, sitting next to her, reached over and put his hand on hers.
The eulogies went on. Rosa got up to say that the first day she’d worked for Buddy Galatierre she’d had an argument with him about politics, and that in the middle of it she’d had the amazing realization that he had made her feel that much at ease with him, that quickly. She lost her breath on the last word, weeping again. Two others followed her, with their stories.
The baby stirred in Lily’s womb, like an awful, cruelly pedestrian reminder: life insisting on itself. She rejected the thought, the connection, and even so her mind wandered back in time, imagining the day Buddy Galatierre was born. All his life, this had awaited him. This gross misfiring of sense and expectation. She began to have gloomy thoughts about the baby—its unknown fate. Tyler squeezed her hand, and she realized that she had been moaning low, sobbing. Millicent looked back at her and nodded, her eyes swimming. Lily heard nothing else that was said. She looked at the other faces, and at the ribbed arches in the ceiling, the plain wooden cross above the altar. None of it made any impression on her now.
Everyone filed out into the sun, and the chill. The first truly cold day, windless and bright, a cloudless dark blue sky with a pale sliver of day moon showing in it. There seemed something cruelly fine about it, an intolerable merciless clarity in the air, as if the world were trumpeting at them its own magnificence, its indifference to human pain. They rode in the train of automobiles to the cemetery. Lily and Tyler were in the car behind the hearse, with Millicent, Sheri, Nick, and Rosa. Sheri sniffled, daubing her nose with a handkerchief, looking out the window at the country. Nick kept his arm around her, staring into space. The doctors had given him Xanax, to calm him. Millicent sat erect on the other side of Nick, watching the road ahead. Lily and Tyler were seated across from her with Rosa, who seemed to be holding herself together by tightly clasping her hands in her lap. They were all waiting for anything to do. It felt that way to Lily: a vast, helpless sorrow and futility, mingled with the desire to think of some practical way to be of use. Millicent said nothing. The only sounds were Sheri’s small sighs and sobs. Lily had gained control of herself, and was fighting a battle with her mind to keep it on the matter at hand.
Millicent’s gaze abruptly seemed to take her in, and to Lily’s surprise she stirred, sighed, and then murmured, “I wish I’d said something sweet to him on that last morning.” Her voice faltered.
“You said sweet things to him every day,” Lily told her.
Tyler said, “He knew how you felt about him.”
Millicent sniffled. “Thank you, son.” She looked at Lily. “Thank you both.”
The cemetery was surrounded by tall oaks, spreading their emptying branches to the air. The ground was littered with leaves, and even in this windless cold calm they dropped and fluttered to the ground. The shiny cars pulled into the complicated shadows next to the grave site, which had been covered with a green felt tarp. The mortician and his assistant, along with the pallbearers, including Nick and Tyler, drew the casket out of the back of the hearse and slowly advanced to the grave, where a brace with thick canvas belts had been placed. They set the casket on these belts. The hole in the ground over which it was suspended looked green, the tarp tucked into it, until you got close enough to see the black earth beneath. Lily saw this and felt her heart go. She managed, with great effort and concentration, to keep on her feet. There were chairs arranged along one side, and a few yards away there was a mound of earth, what had been dug from the hole.
“No,” Millicent said. Nick and Tyler held her up. Sheri walked to the edge, looked down, then moved to one of the chairs and sat, holding the handkerchief to her mouth. Nick took the seat to her left, and reached over and took her free hand. Millicent sat to her right; Lily, Tyler, and Rosa took their places on the other side of Millicent. Others were arriving, walking quietly across the grass in their suits and fine dresses and coats, helping each other over the rough places in the ground. They were in the brightness of the sun, and then they drew close, passing into the sparse, leafy, intricate shade, which was faltering away little by little, by pieces. The priest—the same one from the church—stood waiting for them all to get into place. He held the prayer book, and he was shivering a little. The hush over everyone seemed to extend to the world. Lily saw two jet trails, high and far in the distance; no sound came from them. No breeze stirred. No birds sang. She heard only the faintest rustle and scrape of cloth on cloth, the muted thud of footsteps as the others arrived and took their places around the small clutch of people at the center. Lily breathed the odor of the dirt, and the fallen leaves.
“My brethren,” the priest began. There were prayers from the Mass for the dead, final prayers. She heard very little of it. He threw some specks of water from a kind of wand, on the crowd, and on the casket, and he said more. The baby kept kicking her, and moving in her, and she couldn’t help the feeling that there was some connection between it and this ceremony, the silenced, imagined shape of Buddy Galatierre in his casket. She wished for some cessation of thought, attempted to concentrate on the words of the priest, holding her hand over the place where the baby kept moving.
When the last words were said, Millicent and Sheri got up and moved to one side of the grave, and people began filing by to say something to them. Tyler murmured, “We belong there with them, come on.” Rosa followed them. Nick, too, took his place alongside them, eyes fixed on the ground, a broken-down man. That was how he looked. It was hard to imagine that he would ever joke again, or be sardonic. That was all gone out of him and you could see it in his eyes, a desperate pressure to get out from under his own usual perceptions and personality, his own being, as though he now had to find some way to live down every witty thing he had ever said, every joke, every presentation of himself as the cool customer, the one with the acerbic wit and the irony.
They stood there in a row
, in the cold, mottled shade, while the friends of Buddy Galatierre filed by them to express their sorrow, their condolences—the few empty, puny phrases that ten thousand years of human life and civilization have been able to muster for use on the occasion of the extinction of another human being.
4
THE FOLLOWING DAYS in the house were filled with tasks having to do with the arrangement or dispersal of Buddy Galatierre’s personal effects—his clothes, his letters and papers, the records of his life—and Millicent, in a moment of awkward practicality, asked Lily if she thought Tyler would want Buddy’s gun collection. Lily could scarcely muster the voice to say that she couldn’t know, and then, seeing the distress in the other woman’s face, quickly added that she would ask him.
On the Saturday after the funeral, in one of those macabre coincidences surrounding the loss of a loved one, the mounted head of the deer they had killed on the earlier hunt arrived, on its plaque, ready for display. At first they didn’t know what it was, opening the large package and removing the protective Styrofoam pellets. When the nose was revealed, Nick uttered a small desperate sound and walked out of the house, away, toward the road. Sheri went after him. Lily and Tyler took the half-opened box down into the basement room, and then Tyler sat down on the bed and began to cry. Lily stood at his side, one hand lightly on his shoulder. When he looked up at her, she saw the need in his eyes, for just this, just what she could give, this hopeless solace. She sat down and embraced him, rocking slowly with him as if he were a child. They wept, and everywhere about them there was the silence of Buddy Galatierre being gone. A few minutes later, Tyler took the box with the deer’s head in it and went out the sliding doors, to the car. He drove away, and when he returned, a little more than an hour later, he said, “I took care of it.” Lily didn’t ask what he had done, or where he had taken it.
The reading of the will took place in a white-walled room, on the second floor of a very old flagstone house that stood at the end of a blind street in Oxford. The house had been built back in the eighteenth century by a glass merchant named Dodley, and above the front door was a plaque listing the several owners since Dodley had sold it and gone back to England, in 1791. The latest owner of the house was Buddy’s attorney and executor, John West, a ruddy, heavyset man with swollen-looking red eyes and a wild, heavy shock of dyed-black hair.
Millicent had asked everyone to accompany her, including Nick, to whom she had been especially thoughtful and kind. Nick seemed utterly changed. At the Galatierre house, he had spent hours sitting out on the porch, even when the weather turned still colder. He sat with his shoulders hunched, wearing a coat against the chill, smoking one cigarette after another, staring out at the road, the quickly shedding trees. When you spoke to him, he was slow to answer, but his responses indicated that he had heard; his smile was tentative, quite gentle, and marred by the stricken look in his eyes.
Sheri had begun to worry that he might do something to harm himself, and she began to show the strain. “What is he thinking about sitting out there like that?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” said Tyler.
“I have,” she said. “God. You don’t think I have, Tyler?”
Lily had asked him, too. “Can I do anything?” she’d said from the door.
He looked over his shoulder at her, and there came that smile, so downhearted and hollow. “Oh, no, it’s fine.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He had turned back to gazing out at the road and the trees. “Nothing.”
“Nick,” she said.
And now he did turn.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He faced the road again, and took a draw on the cigarette. The last leaves were flying out of the trees, and a chilly rain began to fall, though there was blue sky in the distance. He didn’t move, and finally she closed the door.
Buddy’s will left control of the dealership, the house, all the surrounding land, and the largest percentage of the profits to Millicent and Sheri, and a small percentage of the profits to Millicent’s son, Tyler, to be distributed as Millicent wished. Millicent explained to them all that this provision had been made almost ten years ago, at her request, and that it was all long before Nick had entered the family, or there was any hope that Tyler might actually come to Mississippi. “Now,” she said, her voice choking with emotion, “here you are.”
Tyler kissed her cheek.
When everything was signed and accepted, John West cleared his throat, stood from behind his big desk, and came around it to offer Millicent a hug. Lily stood off to one side, and saw Nick take Sheri’s hand. Sheri absentmindedly took it away, then seemed to realize what she had done and quickly turned to him, offering it back.
They all filed into the car, and Tyler drove them back to the house. He and Nick had some work at the dealership, and they left immediately to take care of that. Millicent went to her room, and closed the door, and for a while Sheri and Lily sat together in the living room with the big window looking out onto the low hills of the country, to the distant river and the highway, all of which was much more clearly visible now through the bare branches of the trees. Neither of them spoke for a long time, and to Lily it seemed that they were both waiting for something to change.
“I’m not seeing him anymore, if that’s crossed your mind,” Sheri broke out.
“Sheri, for God’s sake.”
“Well, I have to tell you.” She sobbed, and held her hands to her face. “Lily, I didn’t sin. Why do I feel like I sinned? It was just a friendship. I keep feeling mad at Nick.”
Rosa arrived from the college, carrying some shopping bags full of books and a few items of clothing she had brought. “You-all ought to put some lights on,” she said, going on through to the kitchen, carrying the bags.
“I’m so scared,” Sheri murmured. “I’m afraid I made it happen. Because I wanted to commit adultery. I wanted to. It’s a sin if you think about it in your heart.”
“Stop thinking of yourself,” Lily said, low. “You didn’t make anything happen.”
“Oh, God,” the other said, beginning to weep again. “It’s true, isn’t it? I’m sorry. My poor father. My father, Lily.”
“You’re hurting,” Lily put her arms around her. “We’re all hurting.”
“I’m—I can’t stand it. I have to blame myself, or Nick.”
The phone rang and startled them. They heard Rosa answer it, and in a moment she came to the entrance of the room. “It’s your mama, Lily.”
On the phone, Doris sounded breathless, her voice trembling. There was no news, everything was fine. She wanted to know how Lily and the baby were doing, how everyone was faring. Lily answered the question about herself and the baby, and left the other. Her mother didn’t pursue it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Lily asked. “You sound like you’re shaking.”
“I guess I am. I wish you were closer.”
For the first time in a very long time, Lily wished it, too. She said, “I know, I feel the same.”
Her mother breathed, the sigh of someone trying hard to imagine a neutral remark to make.
“It’s a desolation here,” Lily said. “I don’t know how it’s going to change.”
“It will. It takes time.”
Lily was silent. Behind her in the big room, Sheri coughed, and seemed to sob. Lily spoke low into the handset: “I’ve got to go now, Mom.”
“Oh,” Doris said with tears in her voice. “It’s been a while since you called me that.”
“I’m sorry,” Lily said.
“Don’t apologize for it. I’m going to come down in February, now—right? I want to be there that first week, after the baby comes.”
“Yes,” she said, although she didn’t know, now, what would happen—what plans anyone would be able to make. She didn’t go on to add that she and Tyler hadn’t found a place to live, yet. She got off the phone and went back to sitting with Sheri.
It was difficult to
put all of it together in her mind—the baby, her own unabated desire for finding a place to live, the worry over the trouble in her marriage, and even the relatively banal question of whether or not Tyler would continue at the dealership. Since the funeral he had been very considerate and kind, and quiet. They had not spoken of the baby except in the minor daily matters of accommodating themselves to her pregnancy; they had made love once, a few days after the funeral, and he had been surprisingly tender, holding her for a long while afterward. She had slept in his arms.
As Thanksgiving came and went, and the colder weather, and Christmas, the pressure for finding a place of their own increased. Lily couldn’t help feeling her condition was a kind of daily affront to the other people in the house: to Tyler for his reasons, and to the others, each for their own—and for the fact that Buddy Galatierre was gone. Everyone was kind. Millicent brought her things for the baby when she went out; Sheri and Nick still were solicitous of her comfort, as was Rosa.
For Christmas, Tyler bought her a padded rocking chair, and a boxed set of delta blues. She got him a new sport coat, and several shirts, and the same boxed set of blues. They laughed about it with the others, and Millicent told of the time she was wrapping a digital clock for Buddy, and Sheri, only four years old, had walked up to her and said, “Mommy, you opened your gift,” and it was then that Millicent realized that Buddy had also bought her a digital clock.
They didn’t decorate the house front as it had always been when Buddy was alive; no one had the heart for it. Nick had bought a small tree, and they put it up and decorated it, with a forced, almost timid jollity. Millicent sat on the sofa, watching them all, and in a little while Lily joined her.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 37