II

The River Jordan

The Reverend Mr. Whitehead read his funeral passage verbatim and with dispatch from the page marked Funeral Reading in a leather-bound, gilt-rimmed, flawlessly maintained edition of the King James, extemporizing only at the end to tell us the judge was a loving father. I saw Walter Snole nod behind the crowd where he rested both hands on top of his spade handle and his chin on top of that, pumping his head as if his itch was scratched, and now he could shovel the dirt. The Reverend Mr. Whitehead paused like a preacher at a wedding, waiting for anyone to speak now or forever hold his peace. Then he was finished, so he stooped for a few clods and tossed them on the casket, and it was over.

Except that the Reverend Mr. Washington, the colored preacher, stepped up to announce that Jedus be telling him to preach some too, to which the vast majority of attendees agreed as one,

Yeah!

Pray, Jedus!

He’p me now!

Riding the crest of affirmation and allowing no time for dissent, Reverend Washington then imprinted the book of history indelibly, his falsetto preaching voice rising over the thousands upon thousands of white graves having yet in their hundreds of years of repose to hear a black man preaching Magnolia, and for all we knew still waiting to hear. Never mind, on that day the shrill voice assured all those living and dead in hearing range that we are on our way to Jordan on the same path trodden ever since when. Reverend Washington exhorted that the souls know where they want to go, and there come a time when the going is suddenly free of earthly burden for heavenly taking, and this be such a time for our dearly departed judge.

He’p me Jedus!

His dog-eared paperback Bible looked soaked down and dried out, and in a minute he shook it in the air, picking up the pace and finding his stride. The man had heart, ranting down the road to Jordan, surmounting obstacles on the way with further pleas. He’p me, Jedus! Or Walk! wid me, the other blacks and one or two of the whites repeating those lines and otherwise affirming, Yeah!

A light rain started not halfway to Jordan, but most of the blacks didn’t open their eyes. When the drizzle picked up, the Reverend Mr. Whitehead touched the Reverend Mr. Washington on the arm and looked up, to God and the dirty rain. Reverend Washington grinned and fast-forwarded his exhortation directly to the riverbank just across from Jordan.

He’p me, Jedus!

He prepared to cross quickly and actually began the crossing when the torrent gushed from the sky. Reverend Washington was already knee deep in the river and deigned to turn back but had to wade on alone since everybody else took to their cars, until finally he did too. It poured ten minutes or so, and when it stopped no clods remained for Reverend Washington to toss on the box. Just mud.

I waited through the rain and came out again into the mud since I wanted to hear firsthand and not the second- or third- or fourth-hand accounts, soon to circulate in town, of the judge’s wife’s eulogy. I knew she’d start up sooner or later; the New York Times called her a lively, talkative woman, but we didn’t see that as emulation of our euphemistic custom, because we knew her to be loud and hateful and mad as a hatter. I wanted a moment with Anne too, the judge’s daughter. I reasoned my motivation here clearly; we literally shared childhood, spending every day together for years, but hadn’t seen each other since she moved north to live with her father and his new wife. It seemed an odd move and an odd arrangement and most odd that she left her mother alone here, especially since that was just before her mother died, but then the whole topsy-turvy world around here was past reckoning and just wanted to get back to its old self, and maybe she did too. I can only speculate. With the principals removed from the arena, the tension died down directly and the cruel memories faded, till they were disinterred for the old man’s funeral. I thought we’d go for coffee or something.

She saw me when she arrived but didn’t acknowledge. It’d been fifteen years, so maybe she didn’t recognize me, though I doubted that. She looked good, plain but healthy, like her mother had looked. Her short dark hair and black tweed suit and plain white blouse highlighted her cheeks, rosy with life, not rouge, or maybe she’d only chilled on a permanent basis up there in New York. She looked fit and strong and kept a proud posture, and I concede a flicker of hope rose in me. My moorings had loosened long ago, so maybe a coffee date seemed easy, one more step on an old, familiar path.

She hovered protectively over her stepmother, who didn’t utter a sound that day and hardly looked like the femme fatale who stood this town on its ear. I remembered the mongered accounts swirling around town like dust devils then. You had one story of the bed sheets found at the beach on Sullivan’s Island not too far from Henry and Heloise Middleton’s beach house. Whether imagined or real didn’t matter since those bloodstained sheets spawned the most recorded history of any single skirmish since The War. One Mrs. Gervais Grimble (née Pringle {née Grumble}) said a spot of blood was found near the end of one sheet. She was certain it was the bottom sheet, which sleuthing was deemed significant then, in those historic times prior to fitted bottom sheets. She was certain too that the stain was at the foot of the bed. Pressed on her certainty, she said, “I swear it was!” She knew because Mary Green told her so. Mary Green was the Warings’ housemaid then and heard about the sheets from Flo Manigo, the Middletons’ housemaid, whose beach house was a trysting place for the judge and the Yankee spitfire. Mrs. Gervais Grimble had that disarming ability to raise one eyebrow. It implied something devious, like sodomy or pedophilia or worse, the devil’s curse. Devious potential lurked everywhere, counterbalancing what she strove so diligently to make nice, like tea and cookies and a little visit. She was remembered for her debutante years, when she once asserted with characteristic vigor that she did so know about the fallopian tubes; they were a small island chain off the coast of Maine, and indeed they could get cold, which anybody could plainly know without having to visit Maine, because all you had to do was look at those pictures in those books, and you could practically feel the cold. “I don’t know why anybody would want to live there!”

Some years later, at the crux of the scandal, she asked, “Don’t you see? At the foot of the bed!” She’d pieced it together, and though nobody needed to get ugly about it, and this was obviously not in need of further analysis, it most certainly did not appear to be nice. So whoever tolerated that rant was left to picture the blood, the bottom sheet, the foot of the bed and the obvious scene transpiring. Trouble was, the scene wasn’t obvious but obscure, leaving nothing to be seen or conjured or by any sane or stable means fantasized.

I gave it my best nonetheless, venturing that the blood could have been from a razor cut; the judge was such a stickler for personal appearance, and it reopened under duress as he knelt at the foot of the bed in passionate abandon to suck the Yankee spitfire’s toes, which is just the sort of thing that kind of woman wants, and if that bottom sheet with the blood at the foot wasn’t proof, then what?

The theory was laughable, but nobody laughed, nor was humor intended. Oh, yes, I was dead serious in my effort to sleuth any component of this scandalous crime against morality; I made myself blush. Mrs. Grimble raised the other eyebrow on the case made by the prosecution, also more amazed, frankly, than she cared to be. Toe sucking was simply not discussed, though astonishment was general and pervasive in town those days, all sourcing back to this new wife, this font of sadism and perversion, this Svengali, this siren, this Eve come to spoil our garden with easy pussy, which, if you think about it at all, would be the logical next stop after the feet.

Hunched, short-winded, sexless and old beyond her years, the new wife only mourned in silence.

I approached Anne and her stepmother as the crowd dispersed. Half the cars started and rolled out while the other half tried to start and failed, the drivers finally raising their hoods and asking each other who had a decent set of cables.

“Anne.”

“Hello, Arthur. How’ve you been?” She responded well enough but wouldn’t look at me, rendering the air between us colder than the fallopian tubes.

“Good.” I touched her arm, warming things up, I thought. She looked up, so I smiled and opened our new discourse warmly, “I’ve been good. Very busy …”

“Like a set of jumper cables at a nigger funeral?”

What? What cause did she have to talk to me like that or to use that language here? “Anne. I want you to know how … good it is to see you. I’m sorry about your father. I want you to know that too. You know I …”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I do. You know I visited him last year. I was sorry I missed you. Your … stepmother can tell you. We had quite a chat. He …”

“Arthur.”

“Yes.”

“I know.” She turned away from me and guided her stepmother slowly toward the parking area. I walked along, thinking her bitterness nurtured and aggressive, but I hardly suspected the arrow waiting in her quiver.

“In town long?” I asked.

“Too long, I’m afraid. We arrived last night, and we’re not leaving till this afternoon.”

“I see.”

Finally she stopped to look at me directly in the eyes. “I do too,” she said.

“Anne …”

“Arthur.” She parked her stepmother on a sound footing, then turned to me. “Arthur. I know what you did. I saw you. I’ll never forgive you. I can’t. If my father chose to, that’s his business. He was always fond of you. He … loved you. Thank God he was crazy by the time you started throwing brickbats through the window. We’re leaving now. Goodbye, Arthur.”

She knew. But how could she? Never mind. I’d have time to sort that out. In the meantime, she was getting away, leaving me nothing for it but to tighten my drag. What was I thinking, as I lashed back? That she would commiserate at last and come for coffee? “Do you think he ever got as crazy as your mother?” They both turned back to face me. The old lady’s eyes opened wide. Anne said, “Leave my mother out of this, Arthur. She’s no more of your business than any of this ever was.”

“She was everybody’s business, as I recall.”

As startled as her stepmother and as hateful as I’d seen her stepmother in the past, as though the hatred was learned, Anne nearly snarled. “Goodbye, Arthur. You take my mother and make her your business and keep her your business. Just don’t bother me with it. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

“She’s right over there.” She pointed. “This cemetery has a special deal on three-grave odd lots, you see. When my mother died they had to put her over there, because she wasn’t a Waring anymore. That’s how much business she was for everybody. They buried her with the transients. Right over there, in case you brought flowers.”

“I’m sorry, Anne.”

“You certainly are. Goodbye, Arthur.” Abruptly departing, they left me standing alone to find a vacant hole of my own I might slip into. I would replay that scene many times in the days ahead, determining my best retort, which would have been to ask how a mother could be buried with transients, if a daughter gave a good goddamn. Of course perfect retorts composed in hindsight are better left unsaid. Why pour gasoline on the fire? No reason at all, except to fan the flames, and frankly, we were all a bit parched from the heat of the thing, though the coffee idea suddenly felt like cold coffee, and the loosened moorings felt as suddenly rusted and rotted through, leaving me to drift alone on the deep blue sea, speechless, with mixed and convoluted imagery competing to illustrate the forlorn solitude and regret I’d come to. Beyond that, my most heartfelt retort would have challenged her to love me still.

Anne walked away, resolute and erect as a few minutes prior but wholly changed, her demeanor still precise but now smooth and sparse as granite. I pondered a coffee date with myself, in which I would pour the cold stuff over my head, so I could douse the fire and drift on out to sea.

Yet the prevailing image was the one most physically apparent, of myself as another statue, one with slumped shoulders and a head hung low and covered in bird shit. So I stood, frozen, as it were, marking another milestone in history, in which the Covingdales were denuded of their sanctity and social grace in a fell swoop. How could she have known? How could she have seen? But then what could she be doing, bluffing? Among that crowd of statues guarding the graves and paying tribute to monumental greatness, I looked up to ponder life and wonder what might come next.

I couldn’t return to the office. Nor could I imagine where to bear the afternoon. I considered the yacht club, but it was two already, so the first wave would be there, cheering each other on, any port in a storm, hoo yeah! We’d survived the downpour, requiring the dredge of the great hurricane parties of the past, which any thunderstorm warranted, sloshing up to a beachhead, so we could get this thing established for once and for all.

I watched Anne and the old lady walk toward the parking area past the raised hoods of the several stalled cars with passengers inside, waiting their turn for the jumper cables.

“Anne,” I called.

She turned meanly and strained her voice to cover the distance. “A man who hurts his own …” She glared at me, then slipped into her car and left.

I pursued her to the point of reaching my car, where Jim Cohen stood by, brushing away the ding in the door with one hand, holding a set of jumper cables in the other. “Op’mup dem hood, Mist Aht,” he said, oblivious to the tragedy playing out around him. I watched Anne as I mustered a call, a plea, a shout, then swallowed it back down and stooped to pull the hood latch under the dash as instructed. Jim Cohen worked the first release under the hood and struggled against the second as I watched the ruins of a happy childhood shrink down the flooded, rutted and pot-holed cemetery drive. Doubt and trepidation compounded on hearing the second latch give way with shrill complaint and feeling no strength left for a response other than to start my engine as instructed and wait.

Surely a waterman like Jim Cohen knew the consequence of wrong terminals. He must have graduated from a bateau with oars to one with an outboard and a battery. He waddled around to the side of my car, scraping himself along the paint and doggedly testing cables to terminals in a shower of sparks and a disconcerting buzz, then scratching his head and changing them. I yelled out that red is negative. He mumbled something to the effect that dem red be’s de one wid de yidda … ’n d’other he’s … yeah. Aw right … He waddled to his own car, got in and wound his starter, but got only smoke with sparks and a small fire on the plastic sleeves of his charred cables. So he got out with greater speed if not alacrity and yanked them off, threw them on the ground, shook his head and grumbled more vehemently at the sorry state of affairs over at the Cadillac Motor Company and more or less said, “You be’s gwine on a Wadmalaw?”

“Come on,” I said. “Why not?” I spoke evenly and dispassionately, amazed that nature’s power could enable my voice to sound as if one moment led to the next with no repercussion, as if a terrible loss had not just occurred.

It was 1968, and we were keeping up with the times. Forty-three dead in the Watts riots, thirty-eight in Detroit, Martin Luther King, Jr. gunned down in Memphis. In Charleston the brick thrower was consenting to give the black pallbearer a ride home, so perhaps a continuing buffer assuaged the terrible loss. Yet we served as whipping boy to the world on the issue called racism, which was more specifically the so-called cause of my terrible loss. I’d suspected a nigger in the woodpile all along and lived to prove it. But that insight too would remain unshared.

Except of course by brethren of differing hues. Each of us knew that a black man asking for something and a white man giving something often as not are two different things. This difference is not a disjunction in communication; oh, we understood each other. No, it was more a practicality of commerce between the two. Jim Cohen wanted the ride and more; he wanted a tow, not so much for the car, which he admitted might be ready for a graveyard, and here we were, so why bother? Except of course you can’t leave a Cadillac in a graveyard but have to tow it home to your own yard where you can jack it up onto cinderblocks where the wheels used to be, again in tribute to former greatness. Then again, we do be’s ratchere, right now. Then again, he needed a tow on account of the produce in back, “Datuh be’s de grocery load fum dem Promise Land,” meaning his usual roadside spot out on Savannah Highway, Promise Land Produce & Root Relish. He also meant that he was bound for the Promise Land and not from the Promise Land as he’d said. Why would he haul produce away from the stand? He wouldn’t. This load was his best of the year to date and would bring in some good money fuh true and looked to him like I be’s de bestess man fuh hauling him fuh true. I didn’t feel qualified to correct his modifiers and wasn’t in the mood anyway.

I could have done without the glib rhetoric threatening allegory with profound meaning, and didn’t mind letting him know that I was not a renewable resource, nor did a favor requested and then granted lead to carte blanche on his personal list of errands for the day, meaning no, he could not give me an itinerary of stops. More to the point, I wasn’t about to tow Jim Cohen’s produce Cadillac, vintage mid-50’s and looking round the bend of Pork Chop Hill and bottomed out on a fresh load from the gleaning fields, with my Mercedes Benz of a very recent year. He pointed out the tow ball behind my back bumper in case I forgot it was there, so I reminded him it was for my boat, so he reminded me that many people refer to Cadillacs as boats, so I reminded him there wasn’t no way in hell I was about to tow that boat down to Wadmalaw on a rope, because the power brakes on that battleship won’t work without the engine be running, which it wan’t, and for that matter, neither do the power steering. “So if you want a ride home, Mister Jim, get in the car. Otherwise, I’ll be wishing you all the best.” I did not say These niggers but I’ll admit to thinking it—but only thinking it with an open mind, open and glib, don’t you know. That is, we are a nation whose strength derives from self-effacement, I thought, including ethnic humor based on pratfall as pungent as a good point or punch line might warrant. If you care to snidely remark or tell a joke about Tories or snooty snoots or bluebloods, I’d laugh loudest, especially if a vital nerve were touched, I thought. This latter contention was also theory, formulated with data as yet lacking in firsthand experience. Oh yes, I had not felt the vitality or voltage of certain nerves, even at my age, which was only fifty-eight at that time. Who’d a thunk you could live that long and still have so much to learn? Not me, not with my evident success in life.

Jim Cohen ignored my logical position on power brakes, power steering and the general idiocy of towing a junker with a Mercedes by means of a rope. Did I need to explain this? As his kind were wont to do, he waddled on back to the produce load where he rummaged under the corn till he found about a twelve-foot steel pole with tow cups welded at either end. One end went obviously enough on my tow ball and the other fit over the tow ball welded to his front bumper. I didn’t bother telling him we’d pull the damn bumper off, because he was so obstinate you couldn’t tell him a thing. Besides that, the tow ball on his front bumper looked well-worn, so he must’ve welded it through the grill to the chassis with steel bars or something, which might take care of having no brakes, but not no steering. He grinned as if reading my thoughts and pulled out an old frayed rope maybe a foot and a half long and looped at both ends. One loop went around a hook on his transmission behind the engine, accessible through a hole in the floor, and the other slipped easily over the niggerknocker on his steering wheel. I know you’re not supposed to call them that, and I don’t anymore, except here, because I don’t believe they have any other name. This one showed a woman in a bathing suit, and the bathing suit went down on hard right or hard left turns to reveal her breasts and vaginal triangle. She was a white woman with a black triangle and red nipples, but I expect Jim would have got one with an all black woman if anybody bothered to make one, but nobody did. Besides, it was a cartoon woman, and nobody ever cared a snitch around here about things like that, though the fantasized jungle lust for white women was so fervently portrayed in the northern media, as if a black man might actually fulfill his sexual need over the cartoon white woman on his niggerknocker going naked every time he made a turn. Hell, he’d have to run into the ditch to get a good look at her anyway.

Well, I can tell you it was a day of reckoning and reflection, not to mention gumption and conviction on my part, even attending the judge’s funeral. It went from bad to worse with Anne’s display of unbridled contempt. I won’t say I didn’t deserve it, but that didn’t make it hurt less. And in fact I’d spent so much of myself regretting my behavior since that ill-advised night, I fairly felt rehabilitated and repaid in my debt to society. I could have made a case, in fact, for those bricks flying through my own window of opportunity; they so forcefully made me look at the moment between past and future and see how futile my ambition had been. We worked every day, nine to five, or put in those hours at any rate, jockeying for position, making our moves, hail fellows getting along by going along, ever mindful of opportunity’s ephemeral nature. We live and die in the blissful delusion that gainful endeavor will deliver us from tedium, some of us, unless we are blessedly transposed, unless catharsis of our own making turns the window into a mirror. Just so, only by looking inward can we see what is what, perhaps not instantly; in my case it took years until I realized who I was and what would come of it, which was this: I was a lawyer in Charleston. The end.

That I had loved Anne Waring in many ways for many years felt as natural as loving a parent or a sibling or, as I can only imagine it might have been, a loving wife. I won’t say that I lost sight of her in those years since she’d grasped my fervent boyhood under the covers, perhaps thinking she merely grasped a forearm of equal muscularity, but she hadn’t grasped anything of mine since, not that she should have; she’d been a tomboy of sorts, which is far different than a male boy at the age of hormonal challenge. It was a phase for her, leading late to the femininity still evident years later.

It was a phase for me too. They say the male of our species has a penile instinct with a mind of its own. Meanwhile, in those tender, desperate years, the ineffable Eudora did latch on, not her idea, mind, but in utter, disgusted acquiescence after so much pleading, dry humping and urgency. We lie in queasy resignation to the awful demands of romance, her flogging the bologna with pneumatic insistence, me chafing worse than a baby’s butt. I nearly reminded her to breathe, till she squealed in horror as I soiled my pants and, alas, got some on her hand. Such was the nature of radical perversion where I came of age. We were engaged directly and then married. In only a decade I loathed her. That Anne Waring seemed so much more worthwhile only compounded my discomfort. Then I stayed married another two decades, beginning with a cross burning and brick throwing at the house of my supposed true love. That my life was sacrificed for a hand job is simplistic and inaccurate, except in those times that it all felt worthless as those few minutes of a debutante jacking me off on her parents’ Queen Anne sofa, no pun intended, and please, no spunk on the Jacquard.

That Anne and I reunited on a cold, wet and stillborn day felt tragically similar, though this small death was awash in her certain hatred for me that burned no less than acid on flesh. I went to the judge’s funeral as an act of humility. I went as a humble man, a man humbled by knowledge and contrition. I wanted to see if the love between us had been the real thing, or illusory as all else.

And like an old fool, not one looking in all the wrong places but one who looked in the worst possible place, I got stuck in the mud, as it were, on humiliation. From there things went from worse to worse yet on mortification, pulling out of the judge’s funeral with Jim Cohen riding shotgun and the produce Cadillac in tow. Who looks for love at a funeral? Who tows a jalopy out to the boonies with his Mercedes? These and other rhetorical questions are the stuff jokes are made of, jokes that make people laugh and keep on laughing on account of the imagery so freely conjured; can you picture it? And the laughter sticks, displacing humor with ridicule and undermining everything you ever worked for until you’re no longer a landed, bred and born gentry of original stock who’s moved up in society according to its unwritten laws and the dictates of history and the generations begetting the generations that paved the way no less than the cobblestones offloaded from the original ships where they served as ballast, albeit in the bilges, which is where you now reside, figuratively speaking of course, but thrust back and just as far below the waterline, for all the respect you can muster.

We eased over the potholes near the grave as Jim Cohen said goodbye to his friend, the judge, with assurance that Mr. Art be doing fine, that a Mercedes might be small but that don’t mean nothing because it really just a different kind of Cadillac is all it is. “Mist Aht, e awright. Mist Aht awright.”

On the other side of the grave Walter Snole straddled the siphon as he hand-over-handed it back into the grave, then took two giant steps back in the mud, losing a boot and not going forward for it but proceeding to tease death on the pump pull-rope, pulling and gasping till he and the pump looked and sounded ready to bust a gasket or two. The pump started just shy of beet red and coronary thrombosis, and he stood there living and breathing and hardly seeming to mind the mud splatter flecking him head to toe. He took note of us, looking up forlornly to confide his assessment of his lot in life: “I’ll tell you the truth now, a cemetarian’s work is never done.”