They were a little late to Ernest’s church, although the service hadn’t started and the musical warm-up was going on. Teever’s giant old Bruzzi Boots made a lot of noise as he clumped along, so they slipped quickly into the very back pew, which is where they wanted to be anyway: easy in, easy out. They were both a little uncomfortable being in church, but the simple space, just a cube of whitewashed beaded board ceiling and walls and a rough plank floor, was so plain and informal that they relaxed a little. A young girl dressed in a long granny gown stepped up with her little violin to play an almost-perfect “Ashokan Farewell”—an off-key note and her wide blue eyes enhancing the sweet PBS poignancy of the tune. Then an old man played a buzzy keyboard and a big lady in a bluebird-colored robe rose from the side of the altar, swaying and singing in a strong, even jazzy, voice about mercy, salvation, God’s love, and life everlasting. It was rousing and lovely, even if the lady looked more like Mary Byrd’s old Carolina-blue VW Beetle than an angel, and even if the message was the spiritual version of Corelle.
Mary Byrd was surprised to hear Teever’s gravelly voice join in softly when the whole congregation began to sing. He leaned over to say proudly, “I remember some o’ them old songs, Mudbird.” She realized that at some point long ago, Teever must have had something that resembled a normal family and home life—church, regular meals and baths, and work, and maybe even school—although he never talked about it. Not to her anyway. She wondered at what point things had gone off-road for him. He hadn’t just stepped out of a cotton field. Vietnam? Or maybe before that—the Meredith crisis? Either one was enough to make a kid go wrong. Maybe she’d ask him some stuff on the way back.
It was amazing how little the country church resembled the cold and scary Catholic church of her childhood—about as much as a square dance resembled a ballet. It wasn’t even like the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches Charles’s family attended, either. There wasn’t a lot of mumbo-jumbo, or bowing and scraping, or fancy trappings and incense. Presbyterians were pretty plain. But they were still pretty stiff. And when did they start doing communion, for god’s sake? Here—did this little church even have a name?—the otherness felt similar to Mary Byrd; the feeling of them and me. They knew the drills and she didn’t, not unlike the Latin masses of her childhood. But in this old rickety place, where they seemed to value light and air, and even on this dreary wintry day, it wasn’t forbidding and gloomy inside. It reminded her of Evagreen’s church. She supposed that not having a lot of dark wood beams and chiseled stone and drapey crap made the difference. The stained-glass windows weren’t advertisements for wealthy church families, but each pane was simply glazed in rectangles of blue, red, or yellow. Did people need all the trappings to feel more serious about their religion? The opposite ought to be true. No distractions. She didn’t care about any of it, but the plainness of this space seemed so much more—something. Holier, or homier. A holy kind of home, maybe.
The only decoration in the place, other than winter greenery—magnolia leaves and cherry laurel—was some kind of icon on the wall above the altar. She could barely make it out from so far back. The flat, expressionless face, its features crudely painted on, looked just like the Jesus face she’d seen in the spectacular cathedral at Kizhi, built all of wood without a single nail. This Jesus looked like a big rag doll that had been loin-clothed and arranged in the crucified position, although the arms of the thing were a little too straight-up—more Superman than Jesus. Or maybe the arms were supposed to be raised up to the dingy cotton-ball clouds across the top. What looked like actual bird wings stuck out from behind each shoulder, and a broken piece of chain, ends dangling, hung around its middle. Plastic greenery arched around the sides of it, and in the two bottom corners, printed large, were the Greek letters A and O. The background was either old sprigged blue fabric or patterned wallpaper bordered with large, faded gold something—rickrack?—the whole thing framed in pine with stars, or darker wooden crosses at the corners. Block-lettered on the wall beneath it were the words and god so loved the world. Really? Mary Byrd thought. What father would ever have sacrificed his child? But it was a very amazing piece, and it was sort of more amazing that some folk art picker asshole hadn’t come around and bought it or stolen it and sold it in Atlanta or New York for a zillion dollars. She pictured it in her living room or kitchen, looking wrong but very cool.
It dawned on Mary Byrd that even though the ankles of the icon were crossed, and it looked like there were spots where the stigmata ought to have been, it was not a crucifixion, but an ascension. She thought of the famous ones she’d seen at the Uffizi; one by Mantegna, maybe? It was a triptych, and one of the panels showed Jesus standing on a solid cloud as if he were on a cherry picker, his robes perfectly shaped and intact. He was holding a flag and surrounded by putti, and with his right hand he made the gesture he always made, a sort of gentle, instructional, palm-out-and-up gesture: “Hark, listen up, everybody.” In those old paintings, Jesus was natural and life-like and the scenes often so graphic that you totally got it about Jesus’s humanity and suffering. In the odd little puppety thing here, Mary Byrd was struck by how the figure sort of clobbered you in the same way, somehow transcending its toyness and commanding attention to the earthly lessons of Jesus’s life, and to the mystical and supernatural properties of Christianity itself, blah blah. Well, she thought, it was just a rag doll, scraps, and a Walmart glue gun, and she was just flashing on her William and Mary Renaissance Art lectures. Sometimes a weird rag-doll Jesus was just a weird rag-doll Jesus. But it did have a kind of sacred, mummy-in-the-mvsevm thing about it, some powerful voodoo appeal. Some redneck Giotto knew what he—or she—was doing.
Mary Byrd noticed that Teever was staring at it, too. She wondered if he could read the sign. Curious, she whispered to him, “Wonder what that’s about, up there.”
Without looking away from the thing he said, too loudly, “Easter.” A couple of church members turned to look back at them.
After a moment, Teever whispered more. “Mean, Jesus dead, going to heaven to be with his daddy, where people like Ernest and you an’ me not goin’.” Surprisingly, his voice was a tinge rueful. He cut his eyes over at her and gave her a meaningful look. Mary Byrd still couldn’t tell if he could read the message on the wall or not, but she guessed he didn’t need to. She wondered what Teever’s idea of hell might be. Parchman? She’d always joked that hell for her would be having to spend eternity tailgating in the Grove on a game day. Ha. There was probably way worse waiting for her.
She wasn’t sure why she’d decided to come to Ernest’s funeral; it wasn’t a great idea, since she’d already been gone from home for days. And then, it felt disloyal, of course. Even though it would just be an afternoon, getting away again had been a pain in the ass: arranging for picking up the children, having Charles on alert while they were home alone, feeding and walking the dogs, food, homework, same old. But partly, she truly felt the need to mourn. She was curious about Wallett, Ernest’s little town, and his family. And Teever had wanted badly to go, and there was no one else to take him. But she hated funerals and she hated church and there had just been so much death and awfulness going on. Had Evagreen and L. Q. gone to Roderick’s funeral? she wondered. Could Christians be true Christians and forgive a child’s murderer? Jeez. Teever hadn’t gone to Rod’s funeral; he’d been dealing with his hurt foot or something, and he wouldn’t have been welcome, probably. She hadn’t even seen Charles since she’d gotten back from Richmond; she’d come in the previous night, and he had let her sleep in and had gotten the children off and gone to work. So she’d just gone ahead and come to Wallett.
Mary Byrd and Teever had ridden down the interstate toward Wallett mostly in silence. It was alarming to see all the damage the ice storm had done to the landscape close to town. Trees down on houses and cars, more cars abandoned on the road, hedges and decorative shrubs broken up, people out with chain saws trying to push all the dead trees into bonfires. Coming back from the airport the night before, Mary Byrd hadn’t been able to see the craziness of the damage in the dark. She’d commented to Teever that it looked like a war zone, and he’d snapped, “Un-uh, no way. How you know what a war zone look like? Those people look dead to you? War zone, ain’t nuthin’ alive. This here just a bad storm, just branches be piled up, not people. It ain’t nuthin’ like a war zone.”
But fifteen, thirty minutes away everything had looked pretty normal. It was so odd to Mary Byrd that she’d missed the apocalyptic storm that people would be talking about for years. Lots of people, she’d heard, still didn’t have electricity. The damage seemed so weirdly biblical, as if some vengeance were being wreaked in a narrow swath west to the river. On whom and for what? Or maybe it was just a reminder that there was always a monkey wrench that could be thrown into the existence that everyone pathetically believed they had some control over. A cosmic smack-down, known to many as an act of God.
When they’d gotten close to Wallett, they’d seen that a roadside memorial had already been put up at the exit where Ernest had died. A white cross, a plastic wreath, some antlers. A little cedar had been planted where the storm debris had been cleared. Mary Byrd had glanced over at Teever, wondering what he was thinking. It was tempting to think that he wasn’t thinking at all, which was what most people who knew Teever probably thought, but she knew better. The inside of that head was wired and streamlined for sizing things up quickly, manipulating, and surviving. He didn’t waste a lot of time or brain cells worrying about things he couldn’t do much about, or cluttering his thoughts with nonessentials like art, love, responsibility, or hog futures—crap that caused people misery, ulcers, and heart attacks. But what did she know? There was a little flotsam in Teever’s hair, Mary Byrd had seen; god knows where he’d spent the night. Or any night. Otherwise, he looked presentable. She was surprised to notice how gray he was getting; he was too old to be doing yard work. Mary Byrd had tried to avoid breathing in the air close around Teever in the warm car, but she was pleasantly surprised that he smelled of wood smoke and, faintly, gasoline. Maybe a little beer. He had on some wrinkly but fairly clean khakis, a wrinkly but fairly clean blue button-down shirt, an expensive-looking tweed jacket that he said he’d “traded-up” for with a dude who’d gotten it off Ernest, which he wanted to wear for the sentiment of it, and a nice tie of Charles’s. He’d asked to borrow one that she’d gotten for Charles at Barneys years before; it was deep blue, with tiny, barely discernible black skulls all over it. Mary Byrd had suggested that it might not be great for a funeral, but Teever had said he thought it was just right.
Breaking the silence in the car, Mary Byrd had said, “Okay, so tell me again exactly how you hurt your foot the other night?” She expected a variation on what he’d already told her.
“I tole you: tryin’ to help Mr. Johnny break up some ground for a lady’s garden,” he’d lied. “Stepped on a tool blade.”
“And it cut you that badly?” she had asked suspiciously. “Through your shoe?”
“You seen them shoes, Mudbird,” he’d said. “They was rotten.” Teever had groaned and shifted on the seat. “Man, this thing still hurtin’, too.”
“God, I’m sure it does,” Mary Byrd had said almost sympathetically, knowing what was coming.
“Don’t you have somethin’?” he’d asked. “Anything?”
“Damn it, Teever,” she’d protested. “I think I have a Xanax. A Xanax. With her right hand she’d rummaged in her bag for a Tylenol tube. She didn’t want him handling all her pills but she couldn’t drive and open the tube. “Here,” she’d said grudgingly, handing it to him.
Teever had shaken out the assortment into his palm and had flipped through them with his index finger: Tylenols, a pink Benadryl, two Ritalins, a green capsule, a blue Xanax, and some white and yellow pieces.
“Take one,” she’d said.
He’d put all the pieces quickly in his mouth, letting the Xanax drop to his lap. “Okay, but I see all these halfs in here,” he’d said, chewing. “You ain’t foolin’ nobody.” He’d shuddered. “Oowee. Bitter.”
“Well, thank god they’re bitter, and expensive, or we’d all be dead,” Mary Byrd said. A huge truck had passed them on the right, doing about ninety, just inches from Teever.
“Shit!” she’d shouted. “Did that seem really, really close?”
“Um-hmm,” he’d answered, unconcerned. He’d been fiddling with the pills, pretending to be trying to get them back in the tube and stashing the Xanax. “Seem a shame. Ernest still around, we’d have plenty. No tellin’ what he leff behine.”
Mary Byrd had been occupied with trying to drop back behind another insane truck. “What is the matter with truck drivers?” she’d said, thinking of Foote, hauling major ass around the country, never hitting anything, stately in his expert careenage.
Teever had replaced the tube in her bag and settled back. “They jus’ like everybody else. Trying to get where they goin’ fast as they can.” He sighed. “Man, I feel better already.”
Teever’s foot had been scary when she saw it this morning. It didn’t look infected and he felt fine, but he needed stitches and antibiotics. Mary Byrd decided she would make him see a doctor the next day. He’d said it had been much worse but he’d gone to the Mexicans and one of them had doctored on it and it was going to be fine. That could be the truth, or not. They’d been in such a rush to get off to Wallett, and she hadn’t wanted to get too close a look, but she’d made him come in the kitchen and take off the nasty bandage and poured peroxide over it, even though Big William had scorned peroxide (“It’s just water with bubbles,” he’d said).Then she’d made him squeeze in half a tube of Neosporin and she’d given him a fresh Light Days maxi pad and adhesive tape and made him tape it on whether he liked it or not. She’d retrieved Charles’s old pair of Bruzzi Boots; Mary Byrd’s father sent everyone a new pair every few years. The size twelves could accommodate Teever’s short, flat feet even with the bandage. It would be fine for the funeral; in messy winter weather country guys always wore boots, even with tuxes. Teever had been happy about the boots and looked the part of the Delta planter. Meanwhile the Quarter Pounder had stolen the disgusting alleged Mexican bandage and had been gnawing on it in the dining room. What was the matter with dogs, she’d thought, changing lanes again to avoid a large, blackened roadkill loaf.
A few people, even later than Teever and Mary Byrd, had continued to file into the church. The choir lady had stopped singing, but the keyboardist played on. Let’s get this show on the road, Mary Byrd said to herself with a sigh. She was exhausted from the Richmond trip and knew she had no business coming to Wallett. But she also felt strangely energized and buoyant in a way that was so unfamiliar. To have gone to Richmond, done what she’d done, and heard what she’d heard was such a relief. She felt a mix of feelings: liberated, but a tiny part of her was sad to have to let go of the comfortable guilt that was so much a part of her and such a convenient excuse for so many things. And in a lesser way, the news of Ernest’s sad death was the reverse: her heart had broken a little and she knew she’d miss him, and maybe awfully. Their silly, unsettling attraction for each other was erased. There had been no crimes, not really, and now no footprints remained on the slippery slope she’d walked. Mary Byrd realized that into the ground with Ernest she could dump a whole lot of the shit that had been weighing her down. She knew Ernest would be happy to take it all with him, even the stuff that had nothing to do with him, like her guilt about Stevie. She could hear Ernest saying, “Baby, just put it all on me. I can handle it. Where I’m going, I can just chunk it all on the bonfire.”
There would be more Richmond crap to deal with; Mary Byrd knew that. Linda Fyce had her beady eyes on the prize. She’d put something out there. More people might bother them or want to talk to them. But they didn’t have to talk to anybody anymore. Zepf, the murdering, child-molesting asshole, was safely behind bars, and it was clear that Stith was going to try to keep him there. Ned Tuttle wasn’t guilty after all, and he wasn’t coming after anybody. How different would life be if the murder had been solved in 1966? Maybe Pop wouldn’t have frozen her out. Maybe he wouldn’t have had a heart attack and James and Pete would have had a father. Maybe she wouldn’t have had nightmares all these years. She wouldn’t have felt like a complicitous, white-trash slut. She imagined Eliza in her place; she’d sheltered Eliza and Will in ridiculous ways. Their lives were so stable and innocent. There was still what had happened and her heart hurt so much for Stevie, and for all the other boys and their families. And for Tuttle—pitiful, dorky thing—and his family. Mary Byrd understood how even Zepf himself was a victim; no doubt some sort of unlucky and terrible circumstances had occurred in his life to cause him to become a victim of his own monstrous and uncontrollable urges. She felt her eyes sting with stupid tears and she had to cough back what she thought might be some gross noise rising in her throat. Teever looked over at her and awkwardly pawed her shoulder. He would be thinking she was choking up over Ernest, which was fine; but there was really no point in crying over Ernest, who’d courted disaster as if it were one of his women, and had clowned around with death every day of his crazy life.
Teever tried some Richard Pryor—“Eulogy”—to comfort her, leaning over and whispering, “And it seems that death was quite a surprise to his ass,” but she didn’t get it. One thing Mary Byrd was grateful for: she’d learned early that this is the way the world works, randomly and chaotically, with billions and trillions of stories overlapping and colliding and entangling so that one could never feel that one’s own story was one’s own. Everything that happened was like a stone thrown in a pond, rippling out, or an earthquake causing distant tsunamis. There was no black and white, yours and mine, almost no good or bad. But who threw the stones and heaved up the earth? Pssh, she’d exhaled, dismissing the lame, Zennish drift of her thoughts. Was she having an acid flashback or something? If there was a god, he was a player and a cruel asshole. A real trickster dickhead. Someone who, if he’d been in your fraternity, you’d have hated. God may work in mysterious ways, she reflected, but a lot of those ways suck.
As if in punishment for this thought, there was a loud, feedback buzz from the keyboard at the front of the church. Mary Byrd jumped, and Teever looked at her and laughed silently, his tweedy shoulders heaving. The service got under way at last, although the little church was only about a third full. There were lots of empty rows between the congregation and the back-row rat pack who were Ernest’s buddies. That included Teever and Mary Byrd, she supposed, although they sat on the other side of the aisle from the posse. As the keyboard guy played a hymn (Mary Byrd knew she wouldn’t know most of the Protestant songs), Ernest’s family straggled in to take their seats in the front pews. There were Ernest’s two aunts, or grandmothers or whoever they were. A tall, skinny one who looked nervous, and like she might be smelling something bad, and a short, plump one who looked placid and composed, but sad. Uncle Pothus came last, an old colonely-looking guy in a suit with a bow tie, a neat white beard, and longish white hair. He looked somewhat out of place in this crowd, like Ernest would have. Or did: Mary Byrd could see that in the coffin he was similarly decked out. The uncle limped a little—she remembered that Ernest said he had the jake leg—and was visibly, but not, thank you Jesus, audibly, weeping.
Mary Byrd knew Ernest didn’t have a mother and did have a father, but who knew where he was. Ernest had never met him but knew his face from pictures. He’d seen him at the casinos a couple of times over the years. His father didn’t know him, but Ernest told Mary Byrd he didn’t care. Could any man not care about having a father? That was it for family, except for the aunts and uncle. How weird it must have been to have grown up around nobody but adults. No wonder Ernest did whatever he pleased and expected to get what he wanted. Spoiled, orphaned only child. That’s probably where he’d gotten spending money, too, from the relatives. He always had plenty, but to Mary Byrd’s knowledge he’d never worked. He’d always said he had “oil rights” from some family property in south Mississippi, Lux or Sumrall or somewhere.
The funeral proceeded slowly. There was more hymn-singing and scratchy tapes of certain of Ernest’s favorite songs—“To Live Is to Fly,” “No Expectations,” “Tom Ames’ Prayer,” the Neckbones’ “Cardiac Suture,” “Free Again,” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money”—which caused Mary Byrd and Teever to nudge each other, amazed that the old ladies had been okay with having that stuff played. Surely they wouldn’t play “Jack on Fire,” Ernest’s anthem, which had some really bad lines.Then, a raw, lovely song by somebody, or some group—she couldn’t remember the name but it had “nails” in it—a song that Mary Byrd recognized because she’d heard it coming from Eliza’s room, and it had been so haunting—my empire of dirt—that she’d stopped in her tracks outside Eliza’s door to listen to it. She’d had to take the tape away from Eliza because the next song had been about somebody’s big gun or big dick rubbing on someone’s face. Then the jam box played Jim Mize’s crusty love song “Drunk Moon Falling” and “Simple Man,” which Mary Byrd was surprised about because Ernest had thought Skynyrd was déclassé, and Green Day’s “When I Come Around,” which probably meant he’d recently been messing with some coed, but she didn’t see any likely suspects in the small crowd. An annoyed, weary-looking preacher had given a sermon, claiming that they’d all come to “celebrate the life of John Pothus Ernest,” but his message had been a sad spiel of resignation about the fact that even if you’d started life as a good boy, a great baseball player and turkey hunter, and a good student, as Jacky-boy Ernest had once been, if you strayed from the flock, you were bound to come to an end like his, because of God’s plan. Hardly a celebration. Ernest’s life was the celebration! And as if they all weren’t ending up in a box or an urn no matter how much drinking they did or didn’t do, how many other people’s spouses they fucked, or Sundays they didn’t show up in church. It seemed . . . un-Christian to Mary Byrd, and unfair because Ernest wasn’t there to defend himself, and if she’d been Ernest’s kin, she would have prayed for a bloody flux to be visited upon the preacher. No one in the church seemed to mind, though, so maybe they all agreed.
She glanced across at the rat pack pew but none of them seemed perturbed, either. They were either dozing, drunk, or daydreaming about their next drink. She recognized some of these guys from around town. They’d told Teever and Mary Byrd they were having a huge wake for Ernest that night back in town, where “a virgin will be sacrificed, except that we can’t find one.”
The jam box played Handel’s “Sarabande,” which Mary Byrd knew Ernest had thought to be the most beautiful song in the whole world ever since he’d heard the Chieftains’ version in one of his top five movies, Barry Lyndon. Who’d put together this mix tape? she wondered. Probably Ernest himself, before he’d gone off to Bosnia, half-hoping to be blown to smithereens and martyrized forever. She’d started on her own funeral playlist on the plane, with her will. We’re all so stuck on ourselves.
The flight back from Richmond, once she’d made up her mind to do it, had gone well. True, she’d had a Bloody Mary and a yellow crumb of Valium, but still. Waiting to board the plane, she saw something you often saw on flights to or from Memphis; a little kid, one with a bald blue head sitting on his or her mother’s sweat-suited lap. A soccer-mom pietà, no doubt on their way to one of the children’s hospitals. What right did Mary Byrd have to be fearful about her own selfish self taking a simple plane ride? She resolved to get a grip. Mann had called her at her mother’s with the bad news about Ernest, so death was even more on her mind, if that was possible. As the plane had climbed on takeoff over the city, she thought she could make out Monument Row—Jeb, Jeff, Stonewall, Bobby Lee—and the construction site where the new Arthur Ashe statue would soon stand facing his stadium. Look away, poor Arthur: you showed us, didn’t you? And somewhere below—they passed over Appomattox, the last dead boys, and the justly inevitable surrender, where, she recalled, Grant had sadly regretted his grungy uniform facing the impeccable and impassive Lee. It wouldn’t have surprised Mary Byrd if the plane had crashed, but at least she hadn’t felt absolutely positive that it would. Instead of putting herself in a coma as she usually would have, she’d stayed awake and used her captivity in the hurtling Delta tin can constructively. On her barf bag she’d jotted down a short will, which gave her a sense of control although of course if she went down, the will would go with her. But if she had to be thinking so much about death, she might as well put the preoccupation to work.
FINAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR ME
1. Bury or cremate—whatever’s cheapest. Make absolutely sure I’m really dead before you do anything. If you bury me (don’t send me to Richmond) pls get Don D to build me a plain pine box, or bury me in the trunk Liddie gave us that we use for the coffee table, unless someone wants it. (Coffintable! Hahaha.) If no room in your family plot, put me in the black section on the hill where the old cedars are. If that’s OK with them. If cremated, throw ashes into my zinnia bed or get one of my bros to dump some in the Ches. Bay where we used to go, or Mann could scatter a pinch in the KGB Bar in NY. Pablo could make a ceramic headstone. A little music would be good—maybe Lucy would play a little. If you or the children want a poem or something, fine. No speakers!
2. No visitation, church, or preacher. Graveside only. Must have a bouncer with a list—no assholes dancing on my grave. You and Mann and Lucy know who I mean.
3. Wish people wouldn’t send flowers unless from their yards, better to donate to Humane Soc, St. Jude or Cntr for Missing & Exploited Children. If winter some cedar with blue berries and magnolia leaves is fine. Pls plant me a little cedar or a dogwood—the old ones in cem. probably clobbered in storm.
4. Give something from my jewelry to cousins Kathy and Susan, Lucy, and Mann and whatever my bros want—I don’t know what. Eliza can help.
5. If there’s a wake at the Bear, play all my favorites! (As much Everly and Neville Bros. as you can stand.)
6. Don’t dance on my grave, either, Chaz! If I die doing something stupid or bad, try to forgive me, and don’t let E &W hate me. Luvyabye! Mary Byrd D’Abruzzi Thornton, from somewhere in the sky with barf bags.
Mary Byrd slipped a hand in her purse to feel the folded bag still tucked there as Ernest’s sad little family trio and cousins trudged up to the coffin to touch him a last time. Pothus worked something into Ernest’s jacket pocket, and spoke out in a quavery voice, “We had us some fine times, didn’t we Jacky-boy? I’m going to be missing you like front teeth, yes sir, I will.” He cried softly and the aunt ladies tended him. Others began filing by the coffin. He was loved. It was nice to know that.
Mary Byrd whispered to Teever, “What do you think his uncle gave him?”
Teever whispered back, rubbing his thumb and fingertips together, “Foldin’ money. Wish I had somethin’ to put in there, too. Crown, Marlboro, somethin’.”
Mary Byrd kept quiet but thought to herself that what she’d have put in, knowing the one thing that Ernest would want from her, would be her underwear. Preferably worn.
Teever rose suddenly from the pew and limped up the aisle to the casket. He brought something out of his pocket and put it in the coffin. When he returned, Mary Byrd cocked her head and widened her eyes.
“You don’t got to know everything, Mudbird,” he said. “He was some dude, whatever he was. I’m not gone see nobody like that again.”
She would miss Ernest. The world wasn’t a better place because of him, but it sure had been more interesting. I should have slept with him, she thought. Who would have been hurt? Where did scruples get you? He was the fuck not taken.
Mary Byrd and Teever sat a little longer, listening to Al Green sing “Amazing Grace” and watching people cluster up around Ernest’s kin. That would be the right thing to do, to go up there and speak to the family, but she wasn’t going to. She wasn’t going to get that close to the body, and she just wasn’t going to anyway, for a million reasons.
There was no point in trying not to think of Stevie’s funeral—his tragic little self was so much on her mind—so Mary Byrd let herself go there. She didn’t think she’d ever, over all these years, tried to remember it, and she didn’t remember much.
It had been a lovely May day. The sun had been shining warmly but she had shivered, and had drawn a deep breath to will her teeth to stop chattering. She had been sick with the fear that it would be raining and they’d have to bury Stevie in the mud and that would make everyone even madder with grief. How did they get to the funeral home? What did she wear? She had no idea, although she thought it would have been important to her at the time. Or maybe not. The babies hadn’t gone, but she wished they had because they’d have given her something real to focus on.
Across the parking lot of the funeral home they’d seen the trucks from the local TV stations. The cameramen had kept a respectful distance but Pop hadn’t cared anyway; he had looked as if he’d never care about anything again. He was taking tons of sedatives and Angelo and her mother had walked with him. Of the service, all she could remember was that the sight of the small white coffin had made her want to cry, but she wouldn’t. She’d shrunk away from her family on the pew. Her mother had cleaved to her stepfather, and Nick had sat fidgeting and craning his neck around, trying to make eye contact with their cousins. At the grave, Mary Byrd had taken off her glasses so that, sitting behind her parents, she wouldn’t see the hopeless, gaping finality of the half-size hole so clearly, or Pop’s face, or the faces of her friends and teachers, and Stevie’s classmates and teachers from Longwood Elementary and so many others spread way up behind them on the hill. Was the boyfriend there? She hadn’t cared.
The boy cousins had been horsing around inappropriately, so they’d been dismissed by the adults. They all had walked to Doc’s for cherry Cokes and candy bars. Neither children nor boys, Mary Byrd and her cousin Kathy had drifted along with the rest of the pack, Kath holding her hand and watching her anxiously. She wasn’t going to cry and she didn’t want to talk, she just wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else. At Doc’s, the boys had broken down in a hysterical, choking giggle fit over nothing, or the usual joking about the Kotex and douche bags in the “ladies’ products” aisle, drawing shocked stares from adults in the store who all knew who they were. Mary Byrd had frozen at one point, thinking she saw Tuttle watching them, peering through the soaps and shampoos in another aisle, but the round moon face had instantly disappeared. How could he be walking around freely, she’d wondered, eating Mars Bars and reading comic books and hanging around as if nothing had happened? Was it even him? Nothing was real anymore. She’d been scared and had hurried back home.
After Stevie’s funeral, their house had been horridly empty, and she and her mother had watched the evening news. There they were on TV. She had been shocked, she recalled, at how unrecognizable and diminished her family had looked without the three littlest boys. Small, hunched, and only the four of them. Her overweight stepfather had seemed to have lost a hundred pounds in the few days since Stevie had died. The notion that she was never really going to have a warm and safe place in the family, or even in the world, had come over Mary Byrd like ice settling into her stomach and chest and bones.
The jam box stopped and Ernest’s family and the church people began moving out to the cold hole where he’d be buried in the deep, red clay. In her head Mary Byrd took the memory of Stevie’s funeral as if it were a bad page of writing off a yellow legal pad, wadded it up, and lobbed it at Ernest’s coffin. The throw was high, but Ernest reached up from the casket and snagged it with one hand, the hand with the diamond signet ring he was so proud of. He winked at her with his right eye, and she blew him a very small kiss with her middle finger. Pallbearers rose, closing and then lifting Ernest’s coffin, and shambled slowly out the door.
The fat lady began singing,
What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near
Leaning on the everlasting arms
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms
Mary Byrd’s heart began thudding and her breathing quickened and she turned to Teever, clutching his arm. “Teever! I’m so, so sad!” she said desperately.
Startled, Teever looked hard into her distraught face for a moment before saying, “It gone be okay, Mudbird. He in a better place now. Like that lady jus’ sung: he got blessed peace and he safe and secure. Don’t somebody in the Bible say, ‘Weep not?’” Teever stood. “I’m gone get a smoke off them guys. It gone be okay, you hear? This life ain’t nothin’ but a bale of tears.” He lurched across the aisle to the posse. “Wassup, spleen? Got a smoke?” she heard him rasp to one of the guys as they slouched out.
One of the goofballs sighed, “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”
Still breathing hard, Mary Byrd watched the men troop outside. The church was empty. She felt powerless to move. She was overcome by a frightful, suffocating urge like a ferocious sneeze or a terrible cough that could not be suppressed and she began weeping big heaving sobs and gushing tears. Head in her lap, she wept and wept, a bale of tears, full-on blubbering like there was no tomorrow. Or like there was.
The drive back from Wallett on I-55 was way too long and more boring than the ride down, when for the first half hour or so they had had all the storm damage to see.
Going back, the day had cleared, the clouds opening up to reveal one of those glorious Mississippi winter sunsets, which seemed an appropriate ending to the day and to Jack Ernest’s time on the planet. It would be hard, Mary Byrd and Teever both knew, to not be expecting to see Ernest up at the Bear, or at the late-nights, or skulking around on the periphery of some literary event. Even if you didn’t see Ernest that often, it was comforting, somehow, to know he was out there, the antidote to too much wholesomeness and small-town charm and polite society. Their dark sides were important and Ernest had nourished that.
Mary Byrd found herself in a strange place. Now the world seemed lighter—still fragile and land-mined with the unexpected, but there seemed now to be more space, more navigable paths to choose, and more fortitude for any obstacles or skirmishes or forays ahead. But she newly grieved, or re-grieved, for her lost stepbrother—her brother—and for what he’d endured, small and alone, terrified, in pain and drowning in his own blood. That would always be with her, with all of them, and she knew it would continue in their lives in ways they couldn’t yet imagine. It was like the jagged little bit of grit that got into an oyster and no matter how much the nacre of time smoothed it over, it was still going to be there—a pearl of pain. Now what had happened at last had a definite face and name, and it had nothing to do with her.
It dawned on her that if her mother had ever known about the nonsense about her leading poor Tuttle on, she would certainly have said so, her mom being her mom. Why hadn’t this ever occurred to her before? Why had she clung to that guilt?
If Stith was to be believed, her family was going to have a chance to strike back. But Mary Byrd found it hard to accept that she also grieved for Zepf, another ruined life, and for everybody, for the whole world, which was a place where people did unspeakable things to each other, for reasons that must be a part of whatever it is that makes humans human, but not necessarily humane. Was the real difference between humans and other animals that humans gassed each other and butchered each other or forced sex on each other for reasons other than survival? What a world, what a world.
“Wooo,” she twitched her shoulders. Basta. Time to lighten up. She exhaled loudly. “I’m glad that’s . . . behind us.”
“Me too,” Teever said. “What we gone do now, Mudbird?” She knew he meant without Ernest.
“Man, I don’t know,” she said. “But I can tell you a lot of things we’re not going to be doing now,” she said wryly. “Did you score any smokes from those guys?”
“Jus’ that one. Sorry,” Teever shook his head. “I had a carton last night,” he lied. “Mexicans cleaned me out. Need to quit, anyway. Clean up my act.”
“Are you serious, Teever?” She thought he wasn’t, but he did have that cough, and maybe even he was worried about it. She hoped it wasn’t contagious. TB cooties would be pinballing around in the car right now. “You’re going to quit smoking and drinking and stuff? ”
“Aw, hell no, Mudbird. Jus’ kiddin’. I’m gone always be a kind of a wretch,” he said. He should have kept his mouth shut. If he said he wasn’t going to straighten up, they’d all be amazed when he did. No point in jumping the gun. He wanted to feel the rush of resolve he’d had that night around the bonfire, but daylight always had a way of sapping things, stealing your nature, like you were a vampire. “I might never get found,” he said to Mary Byrd, wondering if he could get the good feeling back.
The light was nearly gone. Teever squinted, focusing his eyes on the horizon beyond a vast soybean field.
“Hola!” he suddenly yelled, thinking he saw that unearthly green flash as the fiery disk of sun disappeared. “Thought I saw somethin’. N’mind.” But the flash, or flashback, gave him a surge of confidence and well-being. “I do got options.”
Ignoring what seemed just another Teever non sequitur, Mary Byrd asked him, “Where do you think Ernest is?”
“He somewhere,” Teever said.
“Yeah, but like where?”
“Don’t know.” He thought a second. “But I do know that there’s things folks aren’t spozed to know ’til they need to know ’em.”
“You think?”
“I know. We all knew how things gone turn out, where we gone end up, wouldn’t be nothin’ to keep people from acting the fool twenty-four twenty-four.”
Mary Byrd laughed. “Isn’t that what we do anyway?”
“It would be way, way more worser,” he said. “Trust me.”
“For some stupid reason,” she said. “I pretty much do.”
They drove on in the interstate gloam, not talking, finally exiting onto the last annoying stretch of two-lane between Batesville and their town, where new faux chateaux vied for highway frontage with double-wides, Tool Central, Toyota, the Eureka True Vine Church, and 1950s pretend Taras that made the 1980s pretend Taras almost look good in comparison. Once this had all been the beautiful old Riverdale Cattle Ranch, where velvety Limousin cows had stood posing in the emerald fields as if it were Barbizon and they were waiting for Millet to paint them.
Mary Byrd wanted to take advantage of Teever’s thoughtful, sober mood. It almost never happened. She wanted him to talk seriously about himself, but something told her that his private life was maybe one of those things that he thought “folks aren’t spozed to know.”
Instead she asked, “Well, what about Rod’s funeral? Did his family have trouble getting down here because of the storm?”
“What you think, Mudbird?” Teever said. “You dumber’n a box a mud. Course they had trouble—folks got to drive from way up north. You think everybody got the money to fly around like you and Charles? ”
“Take it easy,” said Mary Byrd. “I didn’t mean it like that.” She felt dumb and white. “But what about Angie? What’s going to happen with her, do you think?”
“Hard to say. Hard to say. She do not need to be in no jail in Memphis, I know that.”
“Yeah, I know. I hope Evagreen and L. Q. are okay. And Rod’s parents. Jesus.”
“Not ever gone be okay for them,” Teever said. “No way.” He coughed wetly into his tweed sleeve. “But I got a feeling something gone happen with Angie.”
“What do you mean by something? Something good or bad?”
“Don’t know, Mudbird. Something. Like I say, there’s shit we ain’t spozed to know. Sometimes, hard to tell when a thing be good and when it be bad.” He shrugged.
“Ha,” she said sarcastically. “Where’s all this coming from? You channeling the Dalai Lama or something?”
“Who she? I’ll channel her anytime,” Teever said, allowing Mary Byrd a second to look over at him to see if he was serious. She couldn’t tell. “No way—I’m channeling the Tolliver Lama, Mudbird.”
“Sounds to me like you’re channeling Amos, or Andy.” So much for serious.
He shrugged again. “Shit happens. Maybe up to us to make it turn out one way or the other.”
“I don’t see how any of Angie’s mess could turn out good for anybody. It’s so awful. Think about Desia, her little girl.”
“Maybe so,” he said, heaving a sigh that rattled his throat but didn’t catch. “Why you asking all these questions, anyhow? Can’t we just drive in peace?”
“Okay then,” she mocked him. It made no sense at all, she thought. Someone like Zepf, who’d killed and molested at least one innocent child, might be released from prison, and somebody like Angie, who’d been pushed over some dreadful edge and killed her husband in self-defense, would remain in prison for who knew how long. Was it possible that Angie could get the death sentence? Mary Byrd’s shoulders hunched in disgust. She reached for the radio buttons. “It’s time for NPR. Let’s just listen to that.”
“Not them people with them crazy names—Carl Kasell, Korva Coleman, Calvin Cockamamie.”
“I love NPR.”
“Zo listen to that stuff all day down to the Iko Theater. Them two dudes talk about cars—white folks’ nice cars, like yours. Puh. Don’t know shit. Need to put some black guys, some Mexicans, on that show, talk about some real cars and car problems.”
“Well, I’m sure as hell not having that kind of conversation now. Why are you being so cranky?” Mary Byrd poked the buttons until she found WEVL out of Memphis, which they could just barely tune in. This was as crazy as driving with Foote.
The deejay’s voice shouted from the dashboard, “Okay, people, some funky stuff comin’ at you, take us back to nineteen fifty-seven. Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, but if you don’t like the racy stuff, now is the time to spin your dial. Here’s Andre Williams doin’ his signature song, ‘Jail Bait.’”
“Okay, here’s my attempt at racial reconciliation,” Mary Byrd laughed.
Teever perked up. “Oowee, I have not heard this song in too long. And this not his best song. There’s one that’s too nasty; everbody knows it. Cain’t even say it front of a lady. You a lady, Mudbird?” He laughed.
“Shut up, Teever,” she said. “Okay, we’ll listen to this so we can have racial harmony in this car. Where’s your attempt to reconcile?”
“Mudbird, I would only be too happy to let you get to know the pleasure of a black man’s company, you know, personally,” he said, grinning. “Too happy. There my attempt to reconciliate.”
Mary Byrd laughed. “That’s another conversation we’re not having. You never give up, do you?”
“No ma’am, I never do,” he said. “Not Teever. No way.”
At least he never played the race card like some of those guys did out at Junior’s juke joint—trying to guilt-trip the little white coeds, who were so pleased with themselves for being adventurous enough to be in a black club, into dancing with them: “Oh, you jus’ don’t wanna dance with a black man.”
“I don’t give up on nuthin’,” he said, “no way, no way, no way.”