Some days, sadness is all there is. In the fall of 1994 I went to New Orleans to write about the people held hostage by violence in a New Orleans housing project. I captured the stories of dead innocents and other great sadnesses in my notebook, like butterflies pressed between the pages of a science project. Then I went back to hide in the frayed opulence of the old Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles. But the sadness spilled out there, too, as if the notebook had fluttered open, letting it out. I knew a reporter once who stretched rubber bands around her notebooks, I thought, at the time, to mark her place. But maybe that wasn’t it at all.
The phone rang and it was my sister-in-law, Teresa, calling on behalf of the family. Miss Ab was dead, she told me, of the pneumonia.
I packed my bag for home, rode the jet plane to Atlanta, and told my grandmother good-bye. It would be nice to believe that she knew it was me just one more time.
I took my place among the other young men in the parking lot of K. L. Brown’s funeral home, not far from the football stadium. The older men eased on inside, their thin, bony fingers on the elbows of their wives. It is always that way: the old men and women and young women go inside, but the young men linger outside, not talking much, just smoking, standing, waiting as long as they can. We don’t do death well, us young men.
I found Sam and Mark there, just standing, quiet. Sam’s eyes were red-rimmed and bleak. It was just like him, to have done his crying in private. Most likely it was in his shop, the door closed, maybe even locked. “Hey, son,” he said, and shook my hand. “We wondered if they would find you.”
I had stopped in Atlanta to put on my one suit, a blue wool suit I wore in my interview to fool the New York Times into thinking I might be respectable. I knew, as I looked around the parking lot at the people who actually worked for a living, that I was overdressed.
Sam does not own a suit. There has seldom been any need for one. He borrowed our cousin-by-marriage Tony’s leisure suit to get married in, the same suit I borrowed to go to the homecoming dance. One suit would do us all, when we were young. At the funeral he wore a dress-up pair of blue jeans and clean work boots, like about everybody else there. Grandma wouldn’t have known us, if we had all had on ties.
Mark said, “Hey,” quietly, and just stared at the ground. When he did look up, his face was nothing short of stricken. He was stone-cold sober. I knew he would be. A bad man, a man bad clean through, doesn’t grieve, not really. Mark grieves. I reached out and squeezed his arm, hard, at the muscle.
I looked them over closely, as if, so close to death, it forces you to take careful inventory of the other lives that are close to you, important to you. Sam does everything except sleep in his hat, the one with Fruit of the Loom on it, so it always strikes me as odd when I see him with it off, and that is only at funerals. He was nearing forty, and as he had gotten older he had come to look more and more like my grandfather. He still looked solid, still seemed indestructible. His handshake was still like iron, and as I squeezed back he had looked me in the eye and smiled, briefly, to say: “Is that all you got?”
Mark was thin and pale, all long muscles and bone, and looked older than he should have. Indestructible, too, in his own way.
All my male cousins, close and distant, were there, people I had not seen in decades, but that is the way of it, with funerals. I shook hands, asked them how their mommas was, told them I was over in Atlanta now, to come and see me. They nodded politely. Atlanta is only a couple of hours away, but it is light-years from this. There is nothing in Atlanta these folks want.
The funeral director stuck his head out and said we might want to mosey inside. I said hello to the old women and shook hands with the men, and one after another they said they were proud of me.
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. You hear it all the time, how gracious and strong salt-of-the-earth people can be. I know it to be true, for dead certain.
I looked for Momma, but she wasn’t there. She couldn’t come, my aunts told me. She didn’t think she could stand it. So she did as she has always done. She hunkered down in that little house, and waited for the sadness to pass.
My uncle John told me it would be okay, if I wanted, to go and sit with her, after I saw my grandma. I noticed for the first time that his hair was completely, purely white.
The funeral chapel is built on a sloping floor, toward the casket. You hear it said, too, how natural someone looks. Well, Grandma really did look like she was just asleep, like she was just taking one of those afternoon naps that old people take. And for reasons I cannot explain, that clawed at my guts.
I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don’t need anybody.
I didn’t hear the words the preacher said over her, but I know exactly how it went. The preacher would assure those left behind that she was in a better place. There would be no doubt of that. Rejoice.
Well, she is. A woman who pretends to forget to eat so that her children will have more, like she had, like my own mother had, doesn’t have to worry about getting in.
I left before the first song was sung. I went and sat with Momma. She asked me, her eyes miserable, if people would think badly of her, not going. I told her no.
We talked about her mother for an hour, until the kinfolks started to trickle in. The next day was Thanksgiving.
I don’t think a lot about where or how I want to be buried. I think sometimes it would be nice to be laid to rest under an oak tree, but that probably won’t happen. They’ve cut all the oak trees down in the Jacksonville cemetery. And that is where I belong, I guess.
I know I do not want to be buried during football season. In Jacksonville, during football season, the marching band practices not far from the cemetery, so that the dignity of the sermon is lost sometimes, with tubas in the background.
I had to come back to the same funeral home, the same cemetery, less than a year later. One of the best, most generous men I have ever known, Tony Estes, the one who married my cousin Jackie and loaned us his suit, died in a car wreck.
It was hot, so I guess it was still summer. I remember it rained but the sun still shone on us. It happens a lot, in the late afternoon here.
A lot of people came, because Tony had a lot of friends. I guess that’s about the best thing you can say about a man.
As the minister said his words, I could hear the band tuning up, in the distance. It is almost always football season, down here.