In Memory of Junior (5 page)

Today, I drove over to Truck Freight to get Uncle Grove's footstone. It was addressed to me and Tate both. He called us, said it was coming. Said it was a secret, not to tell anybody. The shipping receipt said: Granite base 40 x 17, bronze nameplate, flower vase. Origin: Cutler, Arkansas, 72012. Pretty damn big piece of rock to be coming through the mail.

So I'm the one, not Tate, ended up running this little errand. Tate was flying his new airplane, new used airplane, and what the hell, this was something pretty straightforward, I figured, the kind of thing I do better than Tate anyway. Pick up the footstone, hold on to it until Uncle Grove dies and gets sent back to North Carolina or until just before he dies, and then put it in the graveyard, get somebody to dig the grave and all that. I always consider that I had to learn from having to be a man, from having to bear brunts. Not bragging or anything. Just the way it
is. I never got any fame, war medal, college degree, degrees, all that shit. But I did live with Uncle Grove for six months when I was sixteen and Tate didn't. Hell, nobody didn't stop
him
from running off and going and staying with Uncle Grove, either. He could have done it as easy as me.

Uncle Grove's thing is, he's got this thing about being buried in the church cemetery. He's called me and Tate two or three times in the last few years to talk about it. See, everybody in the family—except me and Tate—hates him because of my mother running off and all that, way back. So if he does die or something then we got to bury him under cover. Bad blood—one of those deals. He was my mama's brother. She run off when I was seven and Tate was still at her tit. Uncle Grove didn't have anything to do with it, but the family just connects them together somehow.

So I get over to Truck Freight and ask the guy can I check it out—the thing was in a cardboard box—to be sure I got the right one. He was looking a little sleepy. The footstone was resting on a forklift about four inches off my truck bed. I pulled out my razor knife and split the cardboard. And Uncle Grove's footstone was—now listen to this—
cracked in two.
Right down the middle. Little bits of granite and granite dust resting there in the fissure. That sucker was sure as hell broke in half.

“I don't think I can use it,” I said. “Not like at.” Pulled me out a fresh toothpick.

“Think you can use part of it?” the guy says.

“Part
of it?” I say. “Well, no, I don't think so. I don't see how.”

“I guess not. Well . . .”

“Think insurance'll cover it?” I ask him.

“I don't see why not. What's that sticking out there?” I pushed back the cardboard. It was the brass plate, and on it was, to the left, “L. B. Grove,” above his birth date—1901—and to the right “Tina,” just above her birth date, 1919. Along the bottom in giant letters was “M
C
C
ORD
,” and in the middle, surrounded by these carved flowers, was “Forever Together.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “There was just supposed to be one name on here, my uncle's.”

Course, he don't know nothing about that. So I figure what the hell is going on? Is Aunt Tina planning to be buried out there too? We hadn't figured out how we're going to get
him
in there, much less her too. If everybody around here dies before he does—the old ones—then no problem. There won't be nobody around to care. But if he goes early we're going to have to drop back and punt.

“Both
names?” says Tate, when I stop by his place. He's got this apartment. Marilyn got the house. “But the whole idea,” he says, “was it was just going to be him. If he dies before Aunt Bette and Aunt Ansie we're going to play hell getting him buried out there in our section—much less her. I never bargained on this.”

“Maybe they'll outlive everybody and we can just bury them wherever we want to,” I said. We've got this family section out there. “Somebody's got to start dying soon,” I said.

And I hope to hell it's Ma Laura. The thing is, if me and Tate get the homeplace, I want to sell it and use my
part to retire and start a little business at the same time. I got a idea for a business—called Removall, get rid of anything. Refrigerators. Garages. Anything. Rich people would love it.

I worked my ass off on that homeplace when I was growing up and I can't see it going to Faye just because she happens to be the daughter of my stepmother. Tate's got this thing about keeping it, or most of it, for a damn airport or something like that. Bullshit.

“You got any beer?” I say.

“I think there's some in there. Will insurance cover it—broken like that?” he wants to know.

“You think I can't handle this or something?” Tate's got this way.

“I'm just asking,” he says. “What if he comes and wants to see where we put it?”

“We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.” I was in the kitchen. I opened a can of Miller Lite. “Why don't you get some beer?” I asked him. “I figured you'd start buying real beer when Marilyn left.”

“Marilyn didn't leave. I left.”

Man, I was glad I didn't have to put up with Marilyn anymore. She was cold as a frozen gun barrel—didn't like the way I ate, dressed, picked my teeth, burped, other normal goddamn things. You figure it.

Pa Grove stands out in his garden almost every day. My father-in-law: Pa Grove. That's what he wants me to call him. Southern backwoods malarkey.

His garden's not much of a garden anymore. A few tomato plants is all he's had the last few years. He stands around out there in the middle of it and just looks, sometimes points to where the tomatoes or something used to be planted. Talks to himself. Marsville. And if you happen to be standing out there close enough to hear him, God forbid, he'll talk your head off.

Every summer until two or three years ago he'd have us take Polaroid pictures of him and his biggest tomatoes. We'd have to use that Polaroid. No other way. You try to use a Nikon and he'll start throwing things at you.

Same with big-mouth bass. You had to use the Polaroid.

He was using a boat until about three years ago when Bobbie got the Forest Service to present him with a certificate declaring him a nuisance to the Arkansas boating world—some kind of retirement-from-boating thing. She still takes him fishing though—sets him down on a lake-shore somewhere in a lawn chair for an afternoon.

He sent the pictures to his nephews, Faison and Tate. Tate is a college professor and Faison is a bum. They've been through here to see him several times. They'll sit and listen to his stories of wild people in his traveling shows—a man who ate the heads off rats. Of course he lets you know it was a “nigger.” Stories of running away from North Carolina to Arkansas, gold mining in California.

Bobbie—and I, to a lesser extent—have tried every damned way under the sun to convince him to forget about going back to North Carolina—to all that prehistory, that aboriginal, Java man, wooly mammoth prehistory, especially to be buried, for crying out loud. At least we've got a community in Arkansas—a community not all that different from Ann Arbor, for example, if you want to know
the truth. It's really a very nice little university town.

We more or less humor him about going back to North Carolina to be buried. I mean all the family that's left back there, except for the boys, hate him anyway because of his sister, Evelyn, leaving her husband and sons forty years ago, and because of whatever he later did—told them off, I guess, like he's prone to do. It just wouldn't do to
really
send him back there to be buried. Bobbie wants to have him cremated in Little Rock. And she's his daughter so I try to stay out of it. But he enjoys talking about going back to North Carolina, and this little trip we'll be making in the spring is working out conveniently because it looks like we can drop him off for a week. Faison and Tate say they can take care of him and we need a vacation. Bad. He's getting to be a serious drain on us. Ma Tina is still in pretty good shape. But we're going to have to inquire soon about a home to place him in. We've got to think of ourselves, too.

The latest thing is somebody stole his and Ma Tina's gravestone. It was unreal. I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would steal someone else's gravestone. But that's what it's come to. I shouldn't be surprised. The next thing, people are going to start stealing from vegetable gardens. You watch.

When I met Anna, sweet thing, I was sixteen and she was fourteen and she was standing beside that post in the church cabin, looking up at me, and a few
months later we told each other a lot of things. She said she'd be still loving me when she was old, no matter what, and I told her the same thing—and hell, it all turned out in the end that she was probably the best one of them all. And then something happened, we . . . what did happen? And then I got into trouble after the first one I married. I should have married Anna to start with. And at that church is where I got saved, accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, making me forever safe from the world.

We all played games in that graveyard on Sunday nights after church and sitting on the ground out there leaning up against a tombstone is where I first kissed her—our secret place. Tombstone said “Valentine” on it. The Valentine family. That fit the bill more or less.

Me and Anna had finally said years later, one day we were sitting in the Columbia Grill—she was working for the phone company—that we'd outlast everybody and get married when we were ninety and sit together in a one-room house with doors in all the walls, so we could get out quick at the same time. That's what we said, sitting right there in the Columbia Grill.

But lord, Anna died. Yep. Years and years ago. She was buried in that same church graveyard. Where she said she would be. It's a sad thing to see somebody go like that—somebody stringing along all that secret stuff in your head. Nothing left. They just take it right with them. On out of sight. Gone.

She never left Summerlin, and her ugly husband is probably still alive and kicking and he'll probably get buried right beside her. If I get buried there, I'll sneak over. You are history longer than you are fact.

I think Tina wants to be buried in Arkansas with all her folks but just won't say it.

Hell, I can't be buried beside
all
my wives.

And that church cabin had been a place where I'd never felt anything but good, and safe, and that's long gone too, but hell, right there beside the graveyard is where it
used
to be. And now I'm ready for a narrow clay bed. I can't imagine anything better. And Doc Cloverfield has give me the final word. I got it in the prostrate, and I won't allow no operating. Not down there. Not on that.

I already sent the footstone. Four-Eyes thinks somebody stole it. Tate and Faison are setting it all up for me.

I taught those boys all I could while I was there. But of course, it'll never be like it used to be, back when you got in a wagon on a Sunday afternoon, the whole family, and went to visit another family. When you, by god, had your own place to fish. People don't know the good life anymore. Fresh sausage stored in the smokehouse in soft, green corn shucks. Different families using the same smokehouse. You marked your meat and nobody bothered it. It was a different time.

Course times was tough, too. When you're on the way to my grandpa's old place, on the left side of the road around that house that was just before it, there was six rows of black-eyed peas and there was more grass in one row than there was peas in all. One Saturday, Cooper was at his ball game, see. He joined the ball team you know and played ball but I wadn't hardly living up there then as far as that goes—I was, but anyway I wadn't. Cooper, my little brother.

And I was supposed to stay there and work them peas, get the grass out of them. And Wally Womble come up
there and wanted me to go with him to the company mill, the old mill place. He was going to carry some stuff down there and get it ground. So he says to Mama, “Aunt Eula, I'll come back and help him. Let him go with me to the mill,” he says, “and we'll come back and work the peas.”

She said all right, but you know when we left the mill-pond and headed back? Right close to sundown.

And she whipped me something terrible. See, you can see it. See? Look here. See those scars? I was bullheaded enough then to stick up both hands like this, and I says, Help yourself. And she really put it on me. She took the blood out of me. Oh, boy.

Now I stand out here amongst these dried-up tomato vines. Maybe there's a little green knot-head tomato still down here somewhere that I can wrap up in newspaper and stick in the closet.

Nope. There ain't.

Now what is it, I wonder, that would set the world up like it's been set up? Would it be God that would set the world up, set me up in it, set up a mama and papa and brothers and sisters and friends and a place to live and fields and pretty spring days and good food and cold snow and a fireplace and ponds and creeks, and then jerk it all right out from under me by killing off my old man when I was a boy, for no reason in the world, except that diseases had been allowed, diseases that wiped out men and women in their strongest days, whether or not they had any children, or had just a few, or a whole lot?

Mama shouldn't never have whipped me like that, because I felt like why should I have to stay there and get the grass out of them peas when Cooper was gone to play ball.

And Evelyn, lord have mercy, was she a dandy? My
sister. She'd hook that little old crooked-legged mule up to the wagon and go down and cut a load of wood like a man. Could ride a horse, bareback, like nothing you ever seen. Shoot a gun. Had her own rabbit gums. That's right.

I've forgotten what that little old crooked-legged mule's name was.