by Tayari Jones
The three of us—Roy Senior, Celestial, and me—rode in a limousine driven by the undertaker’s son, who asked if we wanted air-conditioning. “No, Reggie,” Roy Senior said. “I prefer fresh air.” And he lowered the window, letting in a humid breeze, as thick as blood. I sat still, concentrating on breathing. Celestial was wearing a perfume that smelled like romance. Roy Senior sucked on peppermint, strong and sweet. On my left side, Celestial took my hand, and I enjoyed the cool feel of it.
“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t do that,” Roy Senior said. She pulled her fingers away, leaving me with a vacant palm.
After a few miles, the hearse led the small processional down a bumpy, unpaved road. The jostling unlocked something in Roy Senior, who said, “I love Olive in ways you young people can’t even picture. I was the best husband I knew how to be and the best father I could manage. She showed me how to join with a woman. She taught me to take care of a little boy.”
I flexed my hand. “Yes, sir,” I said, and Celestial hummed a tune I recognized but didn’t know the title of. She was like a different person, deeper and broader, like she perceived something about life and death and love that I had the luxury of not knowing yet.
At the cemetery, we hefted the coffin again. As we made our way to the grave, I marveled at how a town so small had accumulated so many dead. Near the front were the modern headstones, polished granite, but in the distance stood timeworn markers, limestone probably. For this leg of Olive’s journey, we were allowed to use our hands to steady her, and then we set her down on the straps stretched across the gaping hole in the earth.
The minister was behind us, chanting as he took his place. He spoke about the corruptible body that worms would destroy and the immaculate, untouchable spirit. We all said dust to dust. The small crowd of mourners pulled apart the floral arrangements, tossing the bright flowers into the hole as workers loosened the straps and lowered Olive into the ground.
Under the green tent, Celestial sat next to Roy Senior, soothing him as the top of the cement vault was thumped into place. She dabbed at her eyes with wadded tissue while the workers unrolled the AstroTurf from the pile. They hung back, not wanting to start up the earth-mover tractor while the family was still there. It troubled me a little to think that Celestial, Roy Senior, and I constituted “the family,” but there we were.
I stood up. “I think it’s time for us to go, sir. People will be waiting for us at the church.”
Celestial stood, too. “Everyone will be there.”
“Who is everybody? Ain’t no everybody without my wife.”
Behind us, the grave diggers were antsy and ready to do what they had been hired to do. I could smell the grave, fertile and musty, like fishing bait. Finally Roy Senior stood and went over like he was going to grab a handful of soil and toss it over the coffin, already settled six feet down. Celestial and I walked close behind and were surprised when he sat down on the mound in a deliberate way, almost like a protest.
Celestial said, “Sir?”
And Roy Senior didn’t say anything. Celestial followed him and sat, too. I swiveled my head looking for someone to help us out here, but the few mourners had gone, likely heading back for the repast supper. Taking her lead, I joined them. The dirt was wet and the moisture seeped in through the seat of my trousers as the grave diggers spoke to each other in hushed Spanish.
Although I was close on his right flank, Roy Senior spoke only to Celestial, explaining to her that she was the one responsible now. “Olive went to see Little Roy every week right up until she was too sick to make the journey. She stays on top of Mr. Banks. She calls him every Wednesday around lunchtime. I can’t say what he has done so far, but she kept on him. She’s gone now, so it’s up to you, Celestial. I’ll do what I can,” he explained, “but a man needs a woman to care after him.”
Celestial nodded with wet eyes. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I understand.”
“Do you?” he said, regarding her with wary eyes. “You think you know everything, but you’re too young, girl.”
I stood up and brushed the back of my clothes. I held out a hand to Celestial and she pulled herself up. Then I extended my hand to Big Roy. “Sir, let’s go and let these men do their work.”
Roy Senior got up, but he didn’t use my arm for support. He is a big man, and beside him I felt narrow as a switch.
“It ain’t their work,” he said. “It’s mine.” Then he strode over to a tree and picked up the shovel resting against the bark. Though not a young man, Roy Senior moved the earth in heaping shovelfuls and heaved it onto Olive’s vault. I’ll never forget the sound of the landing dirt.
I picked up the other shovel, thinking of Roy and that I should be his understudy here. Roy Senior barked that I should put the shovel down, but then, kinder, he said, “This isn’t your job. I know you call yourself stepping in for Little Roy, but even if he was here, this wouldn’t be none of his work either. This is personal. Just me and my wife. I need to cover her with my own hands. You and Celestial take the Cadillac; I’ll meet you when I’m done with what I need to do.”
We obeyed him like he was our own father. We walked away, weaving through the headstones until we reached the sedan idling on the path. When we opened the door, we surprised the driver, who hastily shut off the dance music bumping through the speakers. As we pulled away, like children, we twisted to look through the back windshield, watching Roy Senior John Henry his wife’s grave.
Celestial sighed. “You’ll never see anything like that again, no matter how long you live.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Roy has been away so long,” she whispered. “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. I haven’t thought about any other man, let alone touched one. But when I look at Mr. Roy out there, at his wife’s grave, I feel like I’ve been playing at marriage. That I don’t know what it is to be committed.” And then she sobbed a wet spot onto my dirty white shirt. “I don’t want to go to the church. I just want to go home.”
I shushed her and tilted my head in the direction of the driver and made my voice low. “This is a small town. No need broadcasting anything that could get misinterpreted.”
A quarter of an hour later, we walked into Christ the King Baptist Church, as filthy as coal miners, and ate a meal fit for royalty. People talked about us; I know they did, but to our faces they were polite and kept pouring more fruit punch. I looked Celestial in the eye and knew that, like me, what she wanted was a vodka martini, extra dry, but we made our way through the soul-food dinner, and we didn’t leave until it was clear that Roy Senior wasn’t going to show.
It took us a while, but we found a bar where we could crash. It would have been quicker to drive thirty miles up the road to the casino, where the drinks were cheap and the bartenders heavy-handed. When I steered the car in that direction, Celestial stopped me. “Don’t go that way,” she said. “I don’t want to pass the prison.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“Is it?” Celestial said. “It’s shameful that I can’t even look at the barbed-wire fence while he has to live behind it. Do I love him, Dre?”
I couldn’t answer her. “You married him.”
She turned toward the window, tapping her forehead against the glass. I reached in my jacket pocket and gave her my handkerchief, driving one-handed, on the lookout for a bar we could belly up to.
It’s not like there was any shortage of booze in Eloe. There were package stores and churches every hundred feet. Men stood on corners, tipping brown bags. If I didn’t find something soon, we would buy a bottle and pass it back and forth like winos.
Finally we ended up at Earl Picard’s Saturday Nighter, a joint that looked like it had been a 7-Eleven in its last incarnation. We chose two wobbly barstools and watched hot dogs ride around a red lightbulb. The windows were painted over, so although it was only two o’clock in the afternoon on the streets, it was perpetually 2 a.m. inside. Hardly anyone was there, but I guess that people
with jobs were at work, and the unemployed weren’t wasting their money on liquor by the glass. When we sat down, the bartender looked up from the book she was reading with the help of a pocket flashlight.
“What can I get you?” she asked, setting down the flashlight and sending a circle of light to the ceiling.
This was not exactly a martini sort of establishment, so Celestial asked for a screwdriver and the bartender poured a good four fingers of Smirnoff into a flimsy cup before opening a can of juice. She rummaged under the counter and produced a jar of cherries, spearing them with a plastic sword.
We drank without tapping our cups together; we were so dirty that I tasted grit in my drink. “Do you think that Roy Senior is still out there with his shovel, or do you think he let the machines take over after we left?”
“He’s out there,” Celestial said. “He’s not going to let a tractor bury her.” Shaking her drink to chill it, she asked, “What about Roy? How’s he holding up?”
“He was okay, I guess. He said to tell you that he misses you.”
“You know that I love him, right, Dre? His mother never believed me.”
“Well, she didn’t know you, did she? Maybe she didn’t think anybody was good enough for her son. You know how black mamas are.”
“I want another round,” she said, and the bartender mixed more vodka and orange juice. I rooted in my pocket, fishing out some quarters. “Slow your roll, cowboy,” I told her. “Go put something on the jukebox.”
She took the money and walked to the back, unsteady, like she was walking on someone else’s legs. Her hair responded to the humidity, losing that funeral lankness and drawing up around her ears. The men sitting at the other end of the bar noticed her figure as she bent at the waist to peer into the jukebox.
“That’s your wife?” the bartender asked me, with what might have been a flirtatious flicker in her eye.
“No,” I said. “We’re old friends. We drove up from Atlanta for a funeral.”
“Oh,” she said. “Olive Hamilton?”
I nodded.
“So sad. Is she the daughter-in-law?”
I had a feeling she already knew. That little glint wasn’t anything more than small-town nosiness.
As Celestial made her way back to me, the bartender retreated like she was embarrassed. Suddenly Prince sang out of the jukebox, “I wanna be your lover.” I said to her, “Remember in the eighth grade? When we thought Prince was saying ‘I want to be the only one you cook for’?”
Celestial said, “I never thought that.”
“You knew what ‘come’ was? In the eighth grade?”
“I guess I knew it was something.”
We didn’t talk for a while. She pounded cheap vodka and I switched to beer and then to Sprite.
“She hit me,” Celestial said, rattling the ice in her cup. “Roy’s mother. When I stayed away too long. Next time she saw me, she slapped the tar out of me. We were having dinner at the casino and she waited until Gloria got up to go to the bathroom and she reached over and pow.” Celestial clapped her hands. “Right across my face. Tears came to my eyes and she said, ‘Listen here, little girl, if I don’t get to cry, nobody cries. I have suffered more just this morning than you have in your whole life.’ ”
“What?” I said, touching her cheek. “What the hell was that all about?”
“It was about everything. Olive slapped all the tears right out of me.” Then she covered my hand on her cheek with her own. “All through the services, except when I was singing, my face was on fire. Right here.” She rubbed my hand over the soft place. Then she turned her head and kissed my palm.
“Celestial,” I said. “You are so drunk, baby girl.”
“I’m not,” she said, reaching again for my hand. “Well, I am. But I’m still me.”
“Stop it.” I pulled my hand back. “People in here have figured out who we are.” I gave her a stern look with my head cocked to the side.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Small town.”
I nodded as her face fell a little. “Microscopic.”
Now the Isley Brothers were on the jukebox. There was something about those vintage, slow jams. Those old cats sang about a kind of devotion long since out of style. “I always liked this song,” I told her.
“You know why?” Celestial said. “It’s because this is the music we were conceived to. It speaks to you on a primal level.”
“I prefer not to imagine my conception.”
She was a little mopey now as she twirled the ice cube with her fingernail that was chewed down to the meat. “Dre, I’m so tired of this. Of all of this. This dirty little town. I’m tired of having in-laws. And prison. Prison isn’t supposed to be part of my life. I was married a year and half—that’s it. Roy got snatched up and my daddy was still writing checks to pay for my wedding.”
“I never got used to you as a Mrs. Hamilton.” I signaled for the check and asked for two glasses of ice water.
She rolled her eyes. “When you went to see him, did he seem mad at me? When I went last, he said he didn’t like my vibe, that I was coming out of obligation.” She set her glass down. “He wasn’t wrong, but what was I supposed to do? I work crazy hours at the shop, then I drive for hours to get to Louisiana and spend the night with his parents, who don’t really even like me. Then I go through . . .” She fluttered her fingers. “Go through everything, and he doesn’t think my smile is cheery enough? This isn’t what I signed up for.”
She was serious, but I laughed anyway. “I didn’t know there was a sign-up sheet. That’s not how it works.”
“You can laugh,” she said with angry eyes. “You know how I feel when I’m here? Black and desperate. You don’t know what it’s like to be standing in the line to get in to see him.”
“I do,” I said. “I was there yesterday.”
“It’s different for women. They treat you like you’re coming to visit your pimp. Every single one of them smiles with a little smirk like you should know better. Like you’re a delusional victim. If you try to fix yourself up and look respectable, it’s worse in way. They treat you like you’re an idiot because its clear you could do better if you weren’t such a fucking fool.” She popped her fingers to the music like she was trying to snap herself out of the spell of feelings coming over her, but she was buzzed enough that her emotions weren’t hers to control.
Had we been alone, I would have touched her, but under the eyes of the bartender and the three other men present, I didn’t lift my hands. I just said, “Let’s go.”
When we got back to the hotel, it was light out, but the casino parking lot was full. Apparently a ten-car giveaway was scheduled for this evening. When we were safe behind the doors of the elevator, I faced her. She fastened her arms around my torso, reminding me of our childhood when she used to hug the breath out of me. She smelled like vodka but also like lavender and pine trees. I held her until we reached the fifth floor, even as the doors opened revealing a family patiently waiting to get on board.
“Newlyweds,” the mother explained.
We stepped out of the elevator and stood facing the hall leading to our rooms.
“Everyone thought we would get married one day,” she said.
“You’re drunk,” I said. “Way drunk.”
“I disagree.” She made her way to her room and slid the key into the door. Tiny green lights twinkled. “I’m something, but I’m not drunk. Come in? Do you want to?”
“Celestial,” I said, though I felt myself leaning in her direction like someone tipped the world. “It’s me, Dre.” She laughed and it sounded playful like we hadn’t watched Roy’s daddy bury his wife with an old-fashioned spade. She laughed like this was a time before anything bad had ever happened.
“It’s me, too,” she said with a grin. “Celestial.”
I tried to laugh back, but no sound came. Besides, any laugh would be fake, and I never faked anything when it came to her.
It was all over when I stepped ov
er the threshold and heard the door click shut behind me. We didn’t fall into each other’s arms like in a movie, with furious deep kissing and groping. For the first slow moments, we just looked at each other, like what we had chosen was a package that we couldn’t quite figure how to open. She sat on the bed and I did, too, and it reminded me of the other time when we crossed the line, in high school. Then, like now, we were dressed up and frazzled. Back then we had been in the dark basement, yet I could make out the outlines of the ruffles of her party dress. But now we were in the full light. Her hair swelled around her head in a dark halo; both our mouths were hot with alcohol and our clothes stained with graveyard soil.
I moved closer to her and wound my fingers in her thick hair. “We’ve always been together,” she told me. “Not like this. But always.”
I nodded. “I want to be the only one you cook for.”
We laughed, a real laugh, a shared laugh. This is when our life changed. We came to each other with joy on our lips. What came next may not have been legally binding; there was no clergyman or witness. But it was ours.
Roy
In Eloe, if you want to know who you’re supposed to be, you don’t have to go further than the family Bible. Right there, on a blank page, before “In the beginning . . .” is all you need to know. There were other truths in the world, but they weren’t often written down. These unofficial records of kin were passed from lips to ear. Much was made of white relatives, whispered about sometimes in shame, sometimes in satisfaction, depending on the details. Then there was other family on the right side of the color line, but the wrong side of the property line. I was the rare soul in Eloe with no family ties outside of my parents. Olive was born in Oklahoma City and there was family there, but I never met them. Big Roy was from Howland, Texas, and wandered to Eloe on his way to Jackson. Our family Bible they received as a wedding gift from Big Roy’s landlady. When you lift the leather cover, there are only our three names spelled out in Olive’s careful cursive.