Homeplace (46 page)

Mike sat down at the table and fished a doughnut out of the sack. She was, she realized suddenly, ravenous. She bolted the doughnut and then began to talk. She talked for nearly an hour. When she had finished, she looked at him, waiting for some reaction: anger, pity, regret … something. Nothing crossed his face except a kind of deepening of the weariness. Her own anger began to mount again.

“Well, so you know about it,” he said. “At least you heard it straight from the horses’ mouths. Or asses, as the case may be. I can’t say I’m sorry you know. But I can say I’m glad I don’t have to tell you. I was going to, once the funeral was over. Sewell is something else, isn’t he? He would have made a great Borgia. Cat food, huh? Well. Something new in Lytton, some honest-to-God Yankee cat food. They can call it Lytton Liver and Lights, Limited. Boy’s real presidential material.”

Mike stared at him.

“Is that all you have to say about it?”

“I’d say your pretty friend Bayard Everett Sewell had said it all, for the time being,” he said.

“And you’re not going to do anything about it?”

“What do you want me to do, Mike? They haven’t broken any law.”

“They killed my father! There are laws against that!”

“No, really, they didn’t. You just can’t say they did, not publicly, anyway. You’d be in the funny farm in three weeks.”

“By God, I
will
say it,” Mike cried. The fury ran through her like heat lightning; stormed through her like a great wind. “I’ll tell everybody in this town what they did! Everybody in this state! Better than that, I’ll write it and send it to every paper in fucking Georgia. They know my by-line; they’ll take my stuff. And if you won’t help me do it, I’ll do it myself!”

She had risen from her chair and was standing, supporting herself against the edge of the kitchen table. She shook all over, profoundly. He popped the last bite of doughnut into his mouth and rose himself, and pushed her gently back into the chair.

“No,” he said. “You’re not going to do that, or anything else. You’re going to say nothing to DeeDee or Duck or Sewell, or Priss, or J.W., or anybody else. You’re going to help them give the Colonel the numero uno funeral the Lytton Methodist Church can throw,
and you’re going to go to it, and thank every little old blue-haired lady and chicken-necked geezer for coming, and smile and smile, and serve coffee and cake to ten thousand people afterward if you have to, and then you’re going to thank them all again.”

“Sam, I
can’t!
I can’t watch those three wail and carry on over his grave; I can’t watch people go up to them and
comfort
them—especially not him! Everybody thinks he loved Daddy like his own father, and they’ll be all over him, and he’ll just lap it up … they all three will. You’re telling me to just … to just … let them get away with it!”

“That’s right. I am.”

“Why?”
It was a great, despairing howl of anguish and incomprehension.

“Because there isn’t anything else you can do about it, Mike. Not now. They have not, repeat
not
, done anything illegal. DeeDee hasn’t and Duck hasn’t, and Bayard Everett Sewell hasn’t, and the Georgia Department of Transportation hasn’t.”

“Sam, there is goddamned well something on this earth that I can do about it, and I will find out what, and I will do it.”

“All right, Mike. Fine. I’m not going to tell you that the day will come when you won’t feel like this. But it will, and sooner than you think. Meanwhile, though, I want you to leave it alone. Just for now. Let’s give him a real Viking funeral. Can you do that? For him? For me?”

“Just don’t, please, give me any pious shit about time the great healer,” Mike said, her voice shaking low in her throat.

“Okay,” Sam Canaday said. “No shit. Now you’d better go up and get dressed. We need to be at the church a little early.”

“Sam,” she said, rising again. “Will you say something
at the church? For Daddy? Like a … you know, like a eulogy?”

“I can’t do that, Mike.”

“Why not? Aren’t you a good friend of what’s-his-name, that young preacher?”

“I … can’t. I don’t talk in churches anymore, Mike. I haven’t done that in … a long time. And Lytton would have a fit. You know I’m not exactly everybody’s favorite son …”

“Please, Sam. You were his. You really were like a son to him. Sam, listen.” Mike felt the hated tears start again and shook her head impatiently, but they rolled down her cheeks unchecked, warm. “I don’t have anything to … give him. To send off with him. This funeral stuff, all this to-do … this isn’t from me, it’s from DeeDee. It’s from Priss. It’s from Lytton. I want something at his funeral to be from me.”

He walked around the table and brushed the tears from her face with his thumb, gently.

“All right, Mike,” he said. “I’ll ask Tom Cawthorn if he minds. And I’ll try to come up with something.”

“Don’t try, Sam,” she said, stopping in the kitchen door. “Do it. Please. For me and Daddy.”

He put his thumb up, in the manner of fighter pilots and race car drivers.

“You got it,” he said.

T
HE
L
YTTON
U
NITED
M
ETHODIST
C
HURCH HAD STOOD ON
the corner of Trinity and Elder streets, just west of the main business district, for more than one hundred years. It had been refurbished since Mike had left, and the sanctuary was comfortable and modern now, with light, plain oak pews and deep red altar and kneeling cushions and carpet. There was a new organ with a cathedral-like tent of gleaming pipes, and a high, spacious choir loft, and a suspended pulpit that would elevate its occupant fittingly above the congregation. Not much remained of the dim, time-stained stucco sanctuary that Mike remembered, but the smell was the same: filtered sunlight and ecclesiastical dust, and somehow, minty white paste from the primary Sunday school classrooms, and the ghostly breath of the old, long-vanished coal furnace.

The light was the same, too. Mike had hated the interminable Sunday morning services; had fidgeted restlessly through the droning messages of a succession of earnest, seemingly ancient ministers, and had been badly frightened by the frequent and apocalyptic revivals. But she had always loved the light that came in through the old church’s stained-glass windows. There
were eight of them, four down each side of the sanctuary, and they depicted vignettes of Jesus with his disciples. They were as old as the church, made in Germany, and beautiful. When they were small, DeeDee had piously professed to love the window in which a Teutonic-looking Christ calmed the tossing waters of the Sea of Galilee while his faithless followers quailed in the bottom of a large flat boat. But Mike had liked the one where an abject Peter bowed bis head in shame as a cock as large as he was crowed lustily, and a betrayed Jesus looked suitably long-suffering in the background.

The light that streamed in through the windows had made of the ordinary Lytton congregation something magical to Mike, rows of enchanted, roseate people, and even on this day the lambent, deep-glowing light was the first thing she noticed when she walked into the church. The second was the enormous bronze casket standing, half-buried in flowers, at the foot of the altar. Mike’s stomach tightened. DeeDee had, she knew, gone to the funeral home and canceled the simple mahogany coffin that Priss and Sam had chosen and substituted this bronze monster, that looked for all the world like a 1956 Buick. DeeDee had ordered the casket pall, too, a great blanket of red and pink and white carnations. It looks like something they’d drape over Seattle Slew, Mike thought. Her own flowers, old-fashioned red climbing roses as near to the Paul Scarlets at the homeplace as the florist could find, spilled out of a tall white wicker basket at the casket’s head. Priss had sent massed, glowing Gerbera daisies from her own garden, and Sam had sent nothing at all. “I hate funeral flowers,” he said. “Somehow they all smell like embalming fluid. I’m not going to dump any more on the Colonel.” An urn of slender, opalescent pink spider lilies, out of season and as perfect as Chinese jade, bore a card that read, “Bayard Everett Sewell and family.”

She sat in the front row of pews where the family of
the bereaved habitually sat in this and other southern churches. DeeDee was on her left with Duck beyond her, and J.W. Cromie sat, rigid and reluctant, on her right. Mike had grabbed J.W. by his alien navy blue arm on the way into the church and marched him down the aisle to the family pew where Duck and DeeDee were already seated, and plumped him down beside her. DeeDee had glared tear-scrimmed daggers at her, but Mike had only looked straight ahead. To J.W. she whispered, “If you get up and leave I’m right behind you, and I won’t come back.” He stayed put, looking impassive and grand in the unaccustomed suit, and utterly miserable. Mike could feel the eyes of Lytton on their backs and hear the soft tide of whispers that broke against them, but she did not turn. Behind her, Priss Comfort and Sam Canaday sat in the second family pew, alone. Behind them, in the rest of the pews, the church was packed to bursting. Old Lytton, that Mike had not seen since she had been home, had come at last to send off one of their own.

The choir loft was full of men and women and teenagers in robes of a soft red that matched the seat cushions, and white surplices. Mike had never seen a full choir at a funeral before, and wondered how DeeDee … or, more likely, Priss … had managed to amass such a formidable army on such short notice, and a weekday to boot. The choir sat silent and properly solemn in the rays of colored light that slanted through the stained-glass windows … Mike had called them holy miracle rays when she was small … but they had not yet sung. Instead, the organ, manned by a small, stout, energetic woman in a robe and surplice and carved blue hair, had noodled a soft medley of solemn, old-fashioned hymns as the sanctuary filled, segueing from “Rock of Ages” into “The Old Rugged Cross” to “I Come to the Garden Alone” to “Softly and Tenderly.” As the organist reached the refrain of the
latter, the choir rose as one and sang, softly: “Come home, come ho-oo-me, Ye who are weary come home,” and DeeDee gave a great sob. Mike’s mouth twitched. She would love to have smacked DeeDee’s pale, tear-wrecked face. The choir remained standing and slid into the hymn that always brought a lump to Mike’s throat, no matter where she heard it, and she heard it often, for it seemed, of late, to have become somewhat in vogue for ecumenically elegiac purposes: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound …” Mike swallowed hard, past an aching lump. She was determined not to cry. The lump dissolved as Bayard Sewell walked past her down the aisle with Sally Sewell on his arm, and seated himself in the front pew across the aisle from the Winship family.

He did not look at Mike as he walked. But all eyes were on his tall figure, slightly bowed with this newest of the sorrows he carried, the beautiful, burdensome wife clinging hard to his arm, her face ravaged with real grief as well as alcohol. Mike heard the soft catches of breath and the murmurs of sympathy as Lytton watched this most lustrous of its native sons bear his burdens gallantly to the foot of the coffin of the only father he had ever known. Behind them, Priss Comfort snorted.

Mike looked steadily at him. She seemed to see him, suddenly, in a kind of pentimento, in some vast, paneled office with crossed flags behind his fine head. She thought, inanely, that he looked like one of those photos that you find in drugstore wallets when you first open them, and remembered with absolute and instant clarity the photographs in the terrible flamingo-pink plastic wallet she had bought when she first ran away from Lytton to Atlanta and had kept there in place of her family’s photos, and his. She looked at vulnerable, dwindling little Sally Sewell. She isn’t going to be a burden to him at all, not a bit of an obstacle, Mike thought. She can drink herself to death, and probably
will, and people are only going to say what a saint he is, and how brave and good he’s been. It’s going to help him. His poor, drunk, doomed wife is going to be a political asset. It’s amazing. Nothing can stop him. She let her mind play fully and unswervingly over all the afternoons in the urgent upstairs bed, all the things they had done and said to each other, all the heat and writhings and frog-leaping excesses of their two bodies. Nothing in her, mind or body, flinched away from the memories. That flesh had been the flesh of another woman entirely. All Mike felt, looking at the face of the man who had been her love and her lover, was a faint and clinical distaste.

The choir sat down and the organist began to play again, not a hymn this time, but the achingly sweet and delicate Largo from Dvořák’s
New World Symphony
. “Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m just goin’ home …”

Oh, Daddy, Mike said soundlessly, and turned to Priss Comfort behind her. Priss gave her a small nod and a smile. Mike knew the music, including the homely, dignified old hymns, had been her choice. “Thank you,” she mouthed. Priss nodded again and blew a brief kiss.

There was a silence, filled with rustlings and soft coughings and a few more whispers, and DeeDee made as if to rise, and Mike thought, suddenly and frantically, that her sister was going to get up and go to the foot of the altar beside the coffin and sing. She remembered the awful days of Yma Sumac. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, she thought, idiotically, and for a moment laughter so flooded her chest and throat that she was afraid it was going to burst free and spew over the congregation. But DeeDee only straightened her skirt and subsided massively onto the pew again. She looked surprisingly handsome today, in a simple dark shirtwaist that Mike had never seen before, and obviously new black patent pumps. In her little pink ears were small
pearl buttons, and her dark hair was pulled back into a French knot. Her face was scored and swollen with her grief, but DeeDee today wore a dignity that Mike had never seen, and that sat upon her well. Priss again, Mike thought. She must have taken DeeDee into Atlanta or to one of the nearby malls and bought her the dress and shoes. It must have been earlier this morning, after the terrible business at DeeDee’s house. She wondered if Priss knew, somehow. She thought not. DeeDee would wear the scars of Priss’s wrath in some visible way if the truth had come out.