Baby brother wanted anything but a church funeral so they’re gathered in Knipe Cemetery, less than a half mile from Cecil’s place, in Perkins, to send him off. Folding chairs and picnic tables arranged in the caliche lane between graves. It’s an overcast Tuesday in April and when the breeze chills through him Cecil is glad he only partly feels it. Only partly feels anything.
Wheel up to that casket gripping his little book and look to that mob of vacant faces. Everyone alone in the crowd, all the blissfully ignorant grandkids and family and those others Cecil doesn’t know and doesn’t care to, Ben’s high society set. Hell everyone in America has got that same look blanking his face of late. Even the party-crashers, those who hardly knew Ben. Hardly knew him but were there in those last minutes, when things really mattered. Aura and her preacherman beau, that Nate Franklin. That big Indian fellow Dean and his woman, the lovely girl with her ugly man’s name. Sam.
Becca’s still too stunned for living, as are her kids, peripatetic Sarah and the sleep-deprived Reese. So it’s down to Cecil to try and talk Ben up into Heaven.
“I guess this is the only way anybody ever gets the last word over Ben,” Cecil starts.
But when the distant backfire of a car punctuates his opening shtick Cecil flinches.
“Little runt probably arranged for that ahead of time.”
Sheepish titters from several of the assembled mourners.
Cecil points his book at a granite headstone catty-corner to Ben’s plot.
“That there is Pistol Pete’s grave. For those of you who don’t know, Pete was a minor celebrity round these parts. Lived just south of town. He was a little sawed-off runt of a lawman but Pete could cow any man who stepped to him. Ben and me got to meet Pete a couple-few times. Came and talked at our grade school, even. Recited some yarns from this book about his life I’m holding here in my hand. It got so scatological our teacher had to ask Pete if he’d leave early. We saw him address the crowd at an Aggies game, too, in nineteen forty-eight. It was some kind of fun. Anyway I remember Pete said something that night and it stuck with me. He said the hardest part of being a lawman was figuring how to talk with the aggrieved. I never quite grasped what he meant. But if any of you are hurting like me, then we’re all in a pretty sorry way right about now. So I’m starting to understand it.”
Swallow that lump and keep on jawing.
“After that basketball game, when we saw Pete, well on that car ride home my back was broken in a wreck. The doctors said I’d live six months, maybe a year at the outside. That’s been almost fifty years ago now. Shows you all that schooling don’t make a person much smarter than the rest of us. But the truth is I always expected Ben would be the one talking at my funeral. No doubt about it, that would have been a better speech. Ben had more hot air in him than a sauna after a chili cook-off. But I can’t say I’m overly sorry it’s gone the other way.”
Now everyone is laughing.
“I was headed places before I got broken. I was going to be a bigtime basketball star. Make a trailerful of money, marry the prettiest girl, drive the fastest car. But the car crash changed all that. For both of us. Ben went from looking up to me—hell, everybody did, there’s a lot about me to admire—to caring for me. And the change never sat well. I was hard on little Benjamin. Angry at him for getting out of here. I never left Perkins, though for a long while I wanted to. But baby brother went on to do some great things in the city. He was an important man. A good one. He might have had a few more notches in his belt than anyone I see standing here, but Ben’s heart was even bigger than his waistband.
“None of you probably knows this, but the night I was hurt it was Ben that was driving our truck. He was twelve, which was plenty old for plowing back then. But not for highway driving. I was just a smidge older. If our dad had found out, well, Ben’s funeral would have happened a long time ago. So when the sheriff came asking, we lied. Said I’d been at the wheel. And until just a few weeks back we never spoke about it. Not ever. It got so I’d remember the accident and it would be me behind the wheel, not Ben. That little fib we told, it turned into a kind of truth between us. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about that, last couple days. About the past. About memory. How Ben wound up sharing my fate once I was paralyzed. It was a heavy weight to carry, all that success he had. And that secret responsibility for . . .” and here Cecil looks down at his useless limbs, “. . . all this. For me. Even though it wasn’t his fault. Not a bit of it. Sometimes I’ll imagine going back to that night, after the game. I’ll wonder what it would have been like if we’d switched our lives. How would things have worked out, if it was Ben’s back that was broken, and not mine?”
Cecil takes a moment to fix the flutter in his chin.
“I don’t like what I see, imagining it. I don’t expect I’d have handled success as gracefully as Ben did. Not that he couldn’t have done better. But I don’t expect I would have come back to Perkins, practically every Sunday, to check up on a quick-tempered invalid. And I don’t expect I’d have come to love Ben with as much conviction as I do today. With as much certainty. And I did love my little brother. For that. For everything.”
From the front row Becca begins to glow. She’s muttering something too, unintelligible, lost under the whispering weather.
“God rest his great big jelly-belly soul.”