EPILOGUE
-1-
Monday, May 17, 2004
In Trish Sullivan’s living room, in the presence of immediate family both in corpus and in spiritus, Trish, acting under the authority of a one-day license issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, officiated at the marriage of Maddie Devlin and Michelle Furey. After Trish pronounced them married, she asked what surname they wished to adopt. Maddie said Furey-Devlin and Michelle said Devlin-Furey so they flipped a coin which, miraculously, landed on its edge. When everyone stopped laughing, they kissed with the love only newlyweds share as their families, both in corpus and in spiritus, cheered.
“Who carries who over the threshold?” Charlie Sullivan asked.
“Neither,” Maddie said.
“We’re too old for that,” Michelle added.
Boston’s newspapers refused to publish their wedding announcement.
-2-
Thursday, October 9, 2008
The image of the two tombstones lingered in the mind of Leroy Wallaca, Jr. as he, his wife Miranda, his mother Silvy Thomas, his grandparents Cealy Thomas and Hannah and Gideon Wallaca, and his Uncle Badger Thomas walked toward the gates of Nigger Heaven. It was a warm, sunny October afternoon and Nigger Heaven was as overgrown with weeds as ever. Miranda pushed a stroller carrying Leroy Wallaca, III. It was Yom Kippur, after the Sabbath the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Hannah insisted they visit Leroy’s and Jim Ed’s graves that day. The leaves on the maple trees bordering the footpath were tinged with hints of yellow and scarlet. Birds darted from branch to branch, chirping in the autumnal air. Squirrels scampered from tree to tree, playing rather than gathering food for the winter.
“I don’t remember Indian summer lasting so long,” Silvy said.
Age had rounded Silvy’s cheeks and swollen her feet so she could only wear oversized slippers. On her good days, she used a cane; on this day, a walker. Her stomach bulged under her loose-fitting dress. Her eyes were puffy.
“As God’s in His heaven,” Cealy said, “first frost will come soon enough.”
As they approached Nigger Heaven, the dates on the tombstones receded deeper into the past, headstones of people who never saw the twentieth century, the nineteenth, some the eighteenth, headstones carved with images of cherubic angels or laughing death heads, headstones where the ‘s’ looked like an ‘f’, headstones from the time when more people died before the age of ten than after the age of fifty.
At Jim Ed’s and Leroy’s graves, Silvy asked Hannah to say some words, and Hannah did, the same words she said every visit, the same words she had said years earlier when the Trojans flanked Jim Ed’s grave and an empty coffin was lowered into the earth. When Hannah finished, Silvy said, as she always did, how nice a prayer it was, and they bowed their heads in silence.
Now, as they passed through Nigger Heaven and approached the rusted iron fence that separated the dead from the living, Silvy asked her mother, “How can you be thinking of frost on a day like this?” As she spoke, a gust of wind blew some trash against her legs.
“It’s in the air,” Cealy said. “Always is.”
Silvy kicked at the trash and Barack Obama and Joe Biden Palin smiled at her from a campaign poster. Someone had blackened their front teeth and crayoned Hitler-style mustaches under their noses. A spider crawled across Obama’s cheek, stopped for a second on Biden’s right eye, then scurried into the grass at the edge of the cemetery. Silvy folded the poster, her hands shaking too much to square the corners of the creases, and placed it in the basket hanging from the railing of her walker. As the four of them continued past the headstones, past the hedges, past the shrubs and birds and squirrels, out of Nigger Heaven into Nigger Hell, the spider, hungry to snare its dinner, weaved its web in the tall grass beside an ancient and anonymous grave while, in his stroller, Leroy III shook his baby rattle and scared the songbirds from the trees.