A Gracious Plenty (10 page)

“I’m hoping they don’t notice,” William tells us. “Maybe they’ll think I had a wife. I kept those clothes separate from the ones they saw me wear. I had a bunch of campers,” he explains. “I had a job at a junkyard years back, and one of the fellows there helped me drag old camper skeletons to the woods. I used each camper like a room. And the women’s clothes and makeup and things are in a camper by themselves—with a little vanity and mirror. I just dressed up in that one place. I didn’t go out in public.… Not too much, anyway,” and he sounds guilty, like he might cry.

“Now, son,” Ma croaks out lightly, “you don’t need to be ashamed here.”

“Why didn’t you tell your friends?” the Mediator asks him.

“I just didn’t. They were all so nice.…”

“I don’t blame you for not telling,” the Larrimore boy says. He was the newest one before William arrived. “If I’d done the things you been doing, I wouldn’t admit it, either. It’s sick and disgusting.”

But the Mediator interrupts him. “You’ve got your own confessions to make,” she says sharply. “And you’re next.”

Yeah, I think. Let’s hear your secrets, Larrimore boy.

“As for you, William,” the Mediator begins. “William?”

And he looks at her.

“Your sin was not dressing in women’s clothes. Do you know that?”

He shrugs.

“Assuming that cross-dressing is not a sin, I want you to ponder what the true sin may be. That’s for next time,” the Mediator tells him. “Now let’s hear from Mr. Larrimore.”

T
HIS TIME, IT’S
a group of girls defiling the graveyard, except they’re not playing ball amid stones or racing around. They’re strolling through in short skirts and heels, smoking cigarettes, their faces made up, though their bodies are still childlike. They’re alternating cigarettes and lollipops, sucking on one, then the other. I turn off my lawn mower and watch them.

They stop at an old grave where the stone is flat against land and meant to mimic the lid of a coffin. We’ve got lots of those in the cemetery. But on this particular one, the center has been hollowed out so that the body can rise without barriers on Judgment Day. For years, I’ve planted daisies in the ground there, where there is no stone. The smallest girl plops down in it, like it’s a bathtub, flattening the flowers.

“I’m laying right on top of Maizie Fogg,” she hollers, and laughs. Then the little smart-ass turns to me, giggling. She calls, “Hey, Granny,” waving.

Another one, laughing along, she waves, too. “Hey, Granny.”

A bigger one tries to stare me down. She might be thirty feet away. She looks at me hard and says, “Uhg—leee,” and they all snicker and whisper. The little one jumps up and they begin to walk off. The big one outs her cigarette on the stone of Melvin Hinson, the funeral home man who brought me the swing when I was newly burned. She twists it on the marble and leaves it crumpled in its bed of ash.

I abandon the lawn mower. I try to keep my cool. I tell myself that Mr. Melvin has lightened already and won’t even know. I tell myself that he wouldn’t care if he did. He’d laugh at the meanness of living children. He wouldn’t care, and I shouldn’t, either.

I tell myself that one of them could be Lucy, that all of them are probably her cousins or nieces.

The smallest one looks back. She sees me cutting across the grass and jerks her head around, leaving her yellow ponytail swinging.

Then the bigger one turns around, her thick legs spread. She puts her hands on her hips and stares at me from behind large round glasses and orange makeup that only accentuates her pimples. Already she stands too tall. I look at her and know she wishes she looked more like her friends, who will soon have waists and boyfriends, whose eyes aren’t lost in the fatness of their cheeks.

“You got something to say to me?” she says hard, almost in a holler, her fists clenched.

“Yeah,” I reply. “What are you doing in here?”

I think, She might hit me. I think, Remember Lucy. Remember being a teenager. Remember how lonely.

“I’ve come to pay my respects to the dead,” she mocks, and she whispers something else under her breath. The other girls, still playing tough, laugh too high. But their laughs cut off to silence and betray them.

“Looks to me like you trying to whore for the dead, prancing around here with your ass hanging out like that,” I tell her. “Is this how you pay your respects?” I hold up her cigarette butt.

She doesn’t say a word

“Let me tell you about this man,” I say. “You see this stone? This one here with the black spot of your
respect
on top? This man right here, he’s the father of Ms. Bertie Waldrop, the principal at the junior high. What school did you say you go to?”

The big girl gets round in the eyes, the other two giggling without sound. The big one turns and heads down a path of bricks I layed myself. The hill is steep, and after rains, the mud’s slick. But the bricks help you keep your balance. The girls still stumble, slowed down by the incline. The little ones keep peeking back to see where I am.

But they’re too cool to run, which is what I do. I skip ahead of them and cut them off at the bottom of the hill, at a gravestone topped by an angel. The angel stands eight feet high, I reckon, and she’s dark from weather, and she’s half-concealed by the branches of a crepe myrtle tree I planted myself, years and years back. I was probably still in my twenties.

I cut them off, and I point to the angel, sepia-dusty and shrouded in pink flowers from the tree, and I say, “See here? This angel watches over the place. This angel’s the one who told me you were misbehaving and where to find you.”

The girls look up and then down and then at each other, rolling their eyes.

“You crazy,” the chunky one says. “We see you talking to these dead people like they can hear you.”

“Oh, they can,” I say. And I’m not mad anymore. In fact, I’m enjoying myself. I lead them down the road a bit, toward my house, then toward the gate.

“They ought to put you in the crazy house,” one child tells me. “I’m gonna call the crazy house when I get home and tell ’em to come pick you up.”

And the others laugh like it’s funny.

“You see this grave here?” I say. “This one belongs to Jed Larrimore. Now, he wasn’t much older than you when he crashed his car over on Bottle Branch Road. Did you know Jed? He never got to play in a single football game. Did you know he would’ve been on the team when school starts this year? Did you say you knew Jed?”

No answer.

“His friends bring him these little flags and stick ’em on his grave,” and I pull them up and show them. “This flag’s the U.S. flag, of course. And this one’s for the U.S. Navy, because Jed had dreams of commanding a whole fleet. Course, he never made it to the navy. It’s nice of his friends to bring him the flags, don’t you think?”

They’ve increased their walk to a trot, but I’m quicker. I stay ahead of them and point out things all the way to the exit.

“You taken history classes yet? Here’s a history lesson for you. Engraving methods have changed in lots of ways throughout the years. But if you’ll look right there, you can see that on a real old stone, the engraver left the letters and chipped the stone away, so that the words poke out. But on newer stones, the words are actually engraved
into
the marker.

“When you get buried, you’ll probably have your names carved into the stone. You ever thought about what you want on your stone?”

They keep moving, expressionless.

“Well, have you? ’cause if you’ve got a favorite Bible verse, you can get that put on it.”

“We ain’t religious,” a child declares.

“That’s all right. There’s plenty of nonreligious folks out here. In fact, there are some grave markers in the shapes of trees and scrolls and even obelisks. Now this one here—this is Miss Sadie Witherspoon. She
was
religious. She spent twenty years as a missionary to Kenya, doing her best to help others. I wish you could’ve met her. I heard her tell one time about seeing a wild elephant pick up a man in his trunk and bash him into a tree. She always regretted that she couldn’t help him.” My voice has lifted to almost a song, loud and clear and proud to know these people. I could tell these girls stories all day long.

The children have quit trying to run off and now keep their pace with mine.

“And this one belongs to a baby who died at birth. Isabel Jenkins would’ve been her name. Don’t you just love the little ones? I love the stones with little lambs or angels. Here’s another one,” and I point. “Roland Ashworthe Jenkins. Two dead babies in one family. I can’t imagine naming a baby Roland, can you?”

They don’t answer me.

“See here,” I say, “if you could be buried anywhere on these premises, where would you want your stone to be?”

Then I just stop and stare at them. And when the silence goes on too long, I leave it.

“Why are you
doing
this?” one of the girls asks, and her voice is way too loud, and she begins to cry, ducking behind a tree to hide her face.

“Look,” the big one says, now tough again. “You made her upset.”

“I just thought if you wanted to pay your respects, you ought to understand why these people deserve it. They deserve respect, you know? And one day when you’re buried here, you’re gonna hope some little tramp don’t come along and put out her cigarette on your tombstone.”

“We can walk in here if we want to,” the middle-sized one shouts, and she’s just a brat, a regular brat, not impenetrable as she was pretending to be.

“You’re
welcome
in here,” I tell them. “It’s a
good
place to come to quiet your mind. But I expect you to behave yourselves. Okay?”

They just stand there.

“Okay?”

And they nod.

“Next time you come, you find me. I’ll show you some things you ain’t seen before.”

I usher them out, laughing to myself. Behind me, I hear one of them holler, “Uhg-leeee,” fierce again, now that she’s got her distance. It doesn’t bother me. I know that their mouths say things their hearts don’t mean.

The Mediator is practicing ballet on the lawn mower as she waits for me, the grass heavy all around.

“You did that very well,” she says, stretching her leg on the crossbar of the handle.

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t realize you were so good with children.”

“I’m not.”

“Sure you are,” and she twirls on her toes on the red metal edge, takes a bow, and hops down.

I clap for her, and she turns and begins clapping for me. All around, I hear clapping, from the Dead, and in the distance, Lucy’s piercing whistle.

“Bravo,” the Mediator says. “You’re coming right along.”

I’m not sure what she means by that, and I’m a little embarrassed to have been watched. Sadie Witherspoon comes up and congratulates me, too, but she’s very light and can’t make herself apparent for long. Which is a good thing. I hurriedly pull at the cord to crank the machine back up.

I mow the back side of the hill, up to the top. William Blott sits beneath a tree and points out things in the ground to Marcus Livingston. I’m glad he’s lightened enough to move around the area. It’s a good sign for him. Soon he’ll be going everywhere.

William waves to me awkwardly, like he’s not sure I can see him on a regular afternoon, but he smiles when I wave back. Then Marcus waves, his hand turned out this time, instead of in.

Later, while they’re napping, I take a lily and plant it at William’s tomb. A peace offering, though he doesn’t know there was ever anything wrong.

P
ERPETUAL CARE ISN’T
cheap. There’s money needed for gas and upkeep of the mowers. It costs to keep the roads safe, and every spring I have to fill in potholes where water froze in cracks and exploded the pavement. There’s the cost of maintaining a secure fence, and the price of proper drainage. And though I make my money from the funeral home, which pays to bury the bodies on this land, each year I send out collection envelopes to the families of the people residing here.

I type up a letter and copy it at the post office, inviting living family members to come and enjoy the tranquillity. I mention that there are four benches positioned beneath shade trees, that there’s a view of the river and a view of the church and of the whole neighborhood from the top of the hill. I remind them that the hours are from eight to six, and I ask them for twenty dollars to pay for the upkeep of their relative—more if they have it, less if they don’t.

I get pretty good results. There’s a lot of people who appreciate knowing that their loved ones are being watched over. You won’t find year-old plastic flowers faded by the sun. You won’t find old poinsettias left to brown and wilt. You won’t find footstones hidden beneath weeds or whole plots gone to ruin. Not here. Not while I’m in charge.

For a nominal fee, the families can request special services. For twenty dollars, wildflowers planted over their loved ones’ plots. For fifty, a fruit tree. For two hundred, a whole backdrop of shrubs. But most of the families don’t go this far. They know if they wait long enough, there’s a good chance I’ll plant a seed for their relative for free.