From his father’s gropes Kennesaw had run his shame to True as refuge, and later, with Hunko too bright an ember in his furnace and him dousing the flames in an education that ceased to distract him, True had been the keeper of Kennesaw’s secrets, not that his secrets, she told him time and again, were anything to fault. In the years to come it was loneliness forged of shared grief and longing that drew Kennesaw to her; and finally, what kept him coming to her house for his birthday tea year after year was friendship based on age and familiarity, and the habits we can’t shake and the hurts we can’t outrun, and the senility that in its arbitrary mercy blocks our memories of it all.
As the wind picks up and the sky grays over, Kennesaw trudges the remaining miles into town, catching his breath by the hole in the stone wall at Nedewen Field where dust returns to dust. He passes the broken stone markers that show their old age like chipped teeth in a mouth full of mourning, and lays to rest the memories of those who have gone before him. He continues on down the gravel road and crosses the tangled patch that had once been the village green, and past the strip of acre beside the barn behind True’s house where the prized row of Granny-Macs once stood.
It’s taken him all of the morning and most of the afternoon and much of the last ninety-nine years to reach here. The weather is due to turn calamitous. Kennesaw runs a moist hand across his moist scalp as he continues on his way to True’s. He approaches her plain front gate where he rests a moment before starting up again and making his way up her walkway and onto her front stone slab, which is only a pebble more settled than his.
One arm pumping and then the other. One leg shuffling and then the other. One ache and then another and then another and then another. And this is how the aged walk into heaven.
He’s ninety-nine. It’s been a long journey. Tea sounds good to him.
Nothing in life ever really goes into a hole in the ground as long as there’s a body that remembers, and as long as that body has breath in it, those rememberings join hands with time as it trudges to its indeterminable end, just as dirt caked and dried on an uncleaned spade joins with new dirt dug from a new hole, ground by a heel that tracks dirt of its own. And not until that heel has stepped its last, and the spade is dropped by the last hand to hold it in place and left to idle and rust in the dust with no one to make use of it ever again, does a remembering get forgotten for good.
A man can go crazy with thoughts of this ilk scurrying around his head like squirrels in an attic. Yet heady thoughts like these are typical for Kennesaw. Just before he stamped the mud off his boot heels on True’s front porch, which was just before he felt the crack of his pants for any telltale wet spot of sting turned itch turned sticky, which was just before he rap-rappety-rap-rapped on the etched glass of her vestibule door, which was just before the door creaked open on its own as if on haunted hinges, he reminded himself that True with her senses gone to applesauce was lucky to no longer remember anything more puzzling of her own life than a few random pennies and pins in a drawer full of nonsense. Ninety-nine years were behind Kennesaw just as surely as the afternoon sun was well over his left shoulder and had burned a red ring round his nape. And just as sure as he’d track into True’s house warm, dense crescents of clay, he’d muddy up her parlor with all his ninety-nine years full of living past, all his family shame and all his Hunko regret, and they’d push aside True’s living past that she keeps in a mound of musty intimates, piled on the tattered davenport where she once sat waiting for Mawz Engersol to take her to a dance, and all of them can reminisce about the lives they didn’t live at their annual how-do-and-happy-birthday. To have memories that make no sense, or ones that allow no peace, is bedevilment either way, and some merciful heel or hand might earn its entry into heaven by cleaving both their skulls with a spade.
It’s so like Kennesaw to think this way that it’s not surprising that as soon as he blinked his way into True’s dark vestibule and juddered past a stack of wood crates over to her tattered parlor davenport and moved her musty intimates off the davenport and down onto a splotch of what smelled like fresh pee on the clay-hued hooked parlor rug, and finally sat his stinging, itching, clogged-up ass down on the tatters and felt a buckled spring where you don’t readily invite a buckled spring, that the squirrels in Kennesaw’s attic went frantically in search of nuts, and his bluer-than-blues lollopped, and his wits blew south, and in no time at all, face first into the musty mound of intimates atop the splotch of fresh pee on the clay-hued rug, Kennesaw and the clarity of his memories, in a fit of the vapors, landed.