Getting Mother's Body (26 page)

Ma's teeth have disappeared and her skin has grown smooth. She looks young, like a child. I am a man, but an old old man, and Willa Mae, six feet underneath the top of the ground, unfolds her hands from where I laid them crosst her chest and, with a smile, takes me in her arms.

WILLA MAE BEEDE

This song's about someone who didn't have much but gived me all they did have. I call it “Promise Land” and it goes like this.

My man, he don't got nothing

So you must understand

He never takes me nowhere

Cept to the Promise Land.

When he takes me there,

We may be walking

But love ain't secondhand

When me and mines is heading

To that sweet Promise Land.

You keep your riches

You keep your castles

They'll turn to dust and sand

Me, I don't want for nothing

Cept my old Promise Land man.

I went down to Blackwell County once. I met Old Daddy Beede. He had married Willameena Drummer around 1875. They was married fifteen years before they had they first child, then they got going and had sixteen altogether. Twelve boys, four girls. They named them after presidents and philanthropists, you know, rich folks that like to give money away, and they named them after words they liked saying. Old Daddy had the name of every one of his children wrote out on the side of his house.

Beede and Willameena

Washington

Jefferson

Adams

Pierce

Quincy-Adams

Buchanna

Liberty

Freedom

Prosperity

Lincoln

Johnson

Grant

Rockefeller

Carnegie

Justice

Fortune

Don't do whatcha see me do

Don't walk nowhere I lead

My middle name is Trouble

First is Sin and last is Greed

Wise up, child, turn yrself around.

Can't tell you right from wrong

Cause wrong looks right to me.

The game yr Mamma's playing

Keeps her full of misery.

Wise up, child, turn yrself around.

Once, when me and Billy went to Galveston, we had our shoes off and was walking in the wet sand. Billy walked behind me putting her feet prints where my feets had already made a mark. Good Lord, I thought, my child's following in my footsteps. But I tried not to worry. The way I see it, you can only dig a hole so deep.

BILLY BEEDE

It's early. Not light yet. Dill's laying facedown on the grave. I was gonna run out here when Miz Candy got Dill drunk but I fell asleep and Miz Candy didn't wake me.

I stand over Dill looking her up and down. I kick her gun away. To dig I got to move her so I pull at her feet. She wakes up, wiping her face and steeling it, making her features bullet-hard, like she wants to shoot herself at me, but she don't move or reach for her gun.

Dill's got a Hole in her heart.

“When them tractors start working they're gonna dig Willa up and scatter her all which away,” I says.

“Serves her right,” Dill says.

“Her legs'll be over there, her head over there, her body someplace else.”

“She won't feel it.”

“She might.”

“So what if she do?”

“My mother don't deserve to be scattered to the winds like that,” I says.

Dill rolls over to lay on her back. She looks at the sky. In an hour or so it'll be daybreak. She gets up slow. Her body's stiff from sleeping on the ground. Her whole front's covered in dirt but she don't make no move to brush it off. She's got her hand in a fist. I close my eyes cause I know what's coming next. She will hit me.

“God damn her,” Dill says. She kicks the gravestone rocks. I hear em scrambling and scattering. I open my eyes to look. Dill's already picked up my spade and started digging.

LAZ JACKSON

I hear the sound of digging. A sound I know pretty well cause I done heard it so many times. You hear a lot of digging sounds in my line of work. I hear Dill Smiles cursing but I don't expect to see her digging, but there she is, digging, and Billy is digging too. There's barely enough light to see. I come out to help. I make sure my shirt is tucked and my pants are buttoned right and my coat's not too wrinkly. They've dug a good bit already. Long way to go still, though.

“Y'all digging?” I says. I'm just making conversation.

Neither of them look at me. Neither of them speak. Like if they broke the stride of what they was doing they might quit. It took so long to get started, if it's quit now it'll never get started again. I go to the truck and get two spades. One I stab in the dirt and hang my coat on, then I roll up my sleeves and loosen my collar and get to work.

There's a certain method to digging a grave. You don't just pop the spade to the dirt willy-nilly, there's a certain method to it. You mark your four corners, the boundary of the thing. You line out your plot. Then you dig down in layers. Keeping it smooth and even all the while, not doing like they doing, scrabbling into the dirt like a dog would. Digging's hard work. Especially out here where the dirt is hot and baked. I dig slow and steady and neat. I toss the dirt over my left shoulder. They see how I'm doing it and follow suit and soon we got a good rhythm.

I don't get much call to dig peoples up, but when you gotta do it, you dig them up the same way you would dig them down. Walter Little buried his father and his mother within the same week. The next week he come running to us in the middle of the night with a shotgun talking bout how they weren't really dead and we had buried them alive and me and my daddy was gonna have to get up out the bed and unbury them right now or he was gonna be a orphan and a murderer too. So we dug them up for him. By the time we hit the two boxes he had told us to forget it. We went and opened the boxes anyhow. And the smell was something else. We made him look. Then he went home. But that don't happen too often.

Billy rests. Dill and me dig without resting, without speaking. We get it almost all dug up by the time the others wake. Each of them, Roosevelt and Homer and Even, help a little. Candy helps too and June moves the dirt with her trowel while Roosevelt helps her stand without her crutch. When we hit the coffin they all get real quiet. They're hoping for a chest of diamonds from the looks on they faces. I'm just hoping she don't stink. It's been six years. She won't stink.

I start to pry off the coffin lid. Everybody moves back. The lid's still in good shape. It weren't expensive, but the dry heat's helped it hold up. Dill stands frozen and not looking down, but watching me. They all know I know what to do.

The lid comes off in two pieces. Willa Mae Beede's remains is laying quietly in the box, wound up in a quilt. Everybody is watching me, letting me touch the ragged quilt and move it aside, letting me get the first look at the bones, then they look too, once they see, through me, that Willa Mae's dead corpse can be looked at and stomached.

There ain't no treasure. Far as I can tell.

“Motherfucking undertaker stole the jewels,” Dill says. She kicks at the pile of dirt we dug out, speckling Willa's remains with it.

They all watch me move aside the tattered quilt, showing the bones at their full length.The skull's got some hair around it, all the flesh is rotted away, but there is a nice pillow of brown hair, good brown hair. Around the neck bones, where Dill said the pearl necklace would be, there ain't nothing. And on the fingerbones of the hands laid cross the chest, there ain't no ring of no kind. Suddenly everybody that was crowded around to see the treasure sees what's really there: just a bunch of brownish-colored bones dressed in rotten scraps of a red dress, wrapped in quilt tatters and laying in a cheap pine box.

“I buried her with her jewels. The motherfucking undertaker stole em somehow,” Dill says again. She curses and kicks more dirt. The others, except Billy, are looking at Willa Mae. Billy is looking at the tractor in the near distance.

“Motherfucking goddamn thieving undertaker,” Dill says.

“All undertakers ain't honest, I guess,” Teddy says.

“I'd appreciate getting my goddamn keys back,” Dill says and walks away towards her truck.

“Guess someone stole it all,” Teddy says. There's a strangle sound in his voice, like he will cry but not now. He will cry good and hard, but not now in front of other men and in front of his wife. He will cry later and maybe do something more than cry.

“We did our best,” June says.

“Cover it back up,” Homer says, sounding disgusted.

“We'll decide where to rebury her a lot better with some breakfast in our stomachs,” Candy says and the promise of food gets them to move inside, all at once, like a herd. They don't like looking at dead folks but dead folks don't bother me none.

Billy ain't said nothing yet and she ain't moved. She's sitting at the top of the grave, like a headstone, looking like I think an angel would look, watching the rest of them go inside then, when they've gone, looking at where they went, but not down at her mother's bones.

Even comes back outside. She's got a newish quilt which she spreads alongside the grave.

“Miz Willa Mae oughta have a new shroud,” Even says.

She helps me lift the bones up out of the coffin. The old quilt underneath Willa Mae holds together just long enough to get her up. When we clear the grave it makes a ripping sound. She makes it out in one piece though. The coffin is wedged too tight in the ground so we just leave it where it's at. The bones and their old shroud lay on the new quilt in the sun.

“I heard plenty of times when an undertaker would steal a wristwatch or a brooch,” I explain to Even and Billy, but only Even's listening. “Dill coulda been digging the grave and the undertaker coulda been stealing the jewels while Dill was digging,” I says.

Now Billy's looking at her mother's bones. Her eyes flick over them quick. Then she looks at the grave.

I wrap the remains gently up in the quilt, folding the edges carefully in, like I'm tucking in a baby.

“We got a nice cemetery down the road. Miz Willa Mae might like it,” Even says.

“I'd like to take her back to Lincoln and bury her there,” I says. “If it's all right with Billy.”

Billy don't speak.

Me and Even look at the bones wrapped in the new quilt. The quilt pattern is called wedding ring. “My mother and dad got one on they bed that looks just like it.” I'm looking at the quilt so Even notices before I do: Billy is crying. Even goes inside and leaves us alone.

I ain't never seen Billy Beede cry. And I ain't never seen no one cry like she's crying now. She may as well be fighting someone, the way her arms move around in the air and the tear-water washing her face like sweat and the stuff coming out her nose. She's saying things I don't understand. Words threaded through with a long private string of goddamn yous, the kind of curses that's said between mother and daughter, I guess. She goes on like that till she can't breathe. Then she stops and sits there, licking her lips with her tongue and running her arms across her face to dry it.

“I'm gonna take your mother back to Lincoln,” I says. “I'm gonna get her a new coffin, a nice one, and a nice angel headstone. I'll put her in the ground real good and all at my expense.”

I expect Billy to smile or say thank you or something but she is looking hard at the wrapped quilt, thinking. There's a part of the dress, just a little bit of the hem down at the bottom edge, that didn't get tucked in.

“Look where the hem of the dress is at. Sometimes she kept stuff in the hem,” Billy says.

I unpart the quilt down near the bottom. I don't want to expose the skull again. The shoes still hold the feet. The hem of the dress is a line of fabric folded over twice and still neatly stitched. I don't know what I'm looking for exactly. I am looking for a wife, I am looking for Billy Beede's hand in marriage. And there it is. In what's left of the hem of the dress I find the diamond ring.

WILLA MAE BEEDE

Don't the Great Wheel keep rolling along

Don't the Great Wheel keep rolling along

I stopped in yr town this morning,

But tonight, this gal, she's gotta be gone.

Don't the Great Wheel keep rolling right along.

BILLY BEEDE

It didn't turn out like we planned.

We got back to Lincoln all right. Uncle Teddy drove Dill's truck the whole way with Aunt June sitting beside him. I sat by the window, watching the land go by but looking at Mother's ring mostly. It was big for my finger which surprised me, but it twinkled good in the light and Laz ran it across a piece of glass showing us all how diamonds could cut.

Laz knew a man in Dallas, a jeweler friend of his daddy's. When we got back to Lincoln, Laz and his daddy took the ring and came back with sixteen hundred and twenty three dollars and fifty-nine cents. It was enough to give everybody something and Laz had a new ring for me. Not a diamond, just a plain wedding band, but it was nicer than diamonds, I thought.

When we rode back from LaJunta, Dill rode in the truck bed. She didn't want to drive and she didn't want to talk. Every once and a while she would take something out of her pocket. She reached up and ran the thing across the back of the truck cab window. It didn't cut the glass. Teddy and June didn't see but I seen. It was a diamond-looking ring Dill had. Then I knew Dill had tooked it from Mother and if Dill had tooked that ring then she had tooked the pearls too. Maybe real pearls maybe not real pearls, we never did find no kind of pearls at all, but I wasn't gonna ask Dill about them while we was riding back home. I wasn't never gonna ask her. Dill and Mother had something between them and now Dill and me got something between us. If Dill stole things I don't got a need to talk about it. The truth, whatever it is, is gonna stay secret.

Homer drove his own car back. He had a busted lip from where Dill hit him, but no broken teeth. Next time, he said, when he challenged Dill, he'd be sober and she'd better watch out. When we passed Pecos his car peeled off the road and he shouted goodbye and tooted his horn. I didn't want to send him nothing but when Laz and Mr. Jackson came back with all that money, Uncle Teddy sent him ten dollars and Aunt June wrote a thank-you note.