Yellow Mesquite (19 page)

The picture of Jesus at
The Last Supper
still dominated the living room, still shimmied and turned into Jesus in
The
Garden of Gethsemane
as you moved past.

His mother made a light supper and afterward his dad took him out and showed him the new calves. If the price didn’t hold on beef through fall, he was thinking about going into the sheep business.

“How’s your own job going?” he asked.

“With Whitehead? That’s good. Keeps me hopping.”

His dad looked toward the Mercedes. “Looks like you got a good future with that old man there. Them Whitehead’s sure been good to you.”

 
Harley gave him a quick look. “I earn my keep. Besides, I’m going to New York soon as I save up the money.”

Harley followed his dad’s somber gaze to the cemetery a couple of miles in the distance where the sun was sinking behind a row of pointed evergreens that reminded him of Vincent van Gogh’s
Cypress Trees.
The toolshed where the shovels and rakes were kept was visible at the back of the cemetery. The county truck and the backhoe were parked nearby. A canvas awning had already been erected over the hole.

“It’s a long way up there to New York, and you with a family and all.”

Harley forced a smile. “Well, we’re not gone yet.”

They went back inside where his mother was touching up her hair with a curling iron. She combed it out, then went into the bedroom and put on a new dress. The twins were already dressed in their Sunday best, and hovered close on either side of Sherylynne, quizzing her on everything from the use of makeup to what it was like to be pregnant, adding their own opinions regarding the knotheads at the local AM radio station who refused to play Elvis or Little Richard, choosing instead to fill the airwaves with Lawrence Welk and gospel music. Finally his mother told them to leave Sherylynne alone, and they went out and sat impatiently on the sofa.
 

Harley went in and sat with them. “Looks like you girls are going to be aunts here before long. Auntie Mae and Auntie Leigh.”

Anna Mae laughed and rolled her eyes. “Just as long as we aren’t old-maid aunts.”

He grinned. “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

Annie Leigh gave him a sly look. “After you left, our girlfriends stopped coming around as much.”

“But the boys, they made up for it,” said Anna Mae.

“I bet they did. I may have to come back here and hang out on the front porch with a big stick, keep those old boys in line.”

Anna Mae laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You probably would!”

“No boys for us. We’re going to college,” said Annie Leigh.

“I’m really proud of you two,” he said with a sudden rush of emotion.
 

His dad shaved and put on his old dark suit with the shiny seat. He bought one suit and wore it to church every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, to Wednesday-night prayer meetings and all weddings and funerals, and when that suit wore out, he went back to Sears Roebuck and bought another one.

Sherylynne wore one of the new smocks the Whiteheads had bought her. Harley put on clean Levi’s and a white shirt that his mother insisted on touching up with the steam iron. They all rode into Hardwater in the Mercedes to Tritt Funeral Home for the traditional viewing where Uncle Jay was laid out.

The entire Buchanan family and half the community of Separation was there, or had been, signed the guestbook and left. They stood in little groups, talking in hushed tones, lights dimmed, music soft, unobtrusive.
 

EARLY THE NEXT
morning, Sherylynne was up and about. She said she felt
wonderful
. She helped his mother arrange the card tables they had borrowed, and set the non-perishable food out with the paper plates. Friends and neighbors had been dropping by since the day before, leaving off covered dishes. The Buchanan clan and friends would be over to eat after the funeral.

Harley’s dad brought out Uncle Jay’s old double-barreled shotgun. It was an ancient 12-gauge with worn scrollwork on the breech. Twin hammers stood straight up on either side. Harley and Uncle Jay had spent a lot of time quail hunting with that gun.

“Aunt Julie asked me to give it to you,” his dad said. “He would want you to have it.”

Harley took the gun, too choked up to say anything.

At ten they dressed, Sherylynne in a plain black smock and Harley in a dark suit he had bought for the occasion.
 

The church was a narrow one-and-a-half-story building with Sunday-school rooms in the basement, small windows at ground level, built years before from native rock. The patches of variegated ocher stone reminded him of reptile skin, and brought to mind the horned lizard Darlene had cut open when they were kids.

The church seemed to crouch back from the highway, its second-floor double doors thrown open like waiting jaws. Wide stone steps reached down, broad concrete banisters like forearms—like the Great Sphinx of Giza. Harley thought he might paint it like that: a crouching reptilian avenger that would eventually receive them all.

Cars crowded the church, parked all the way back to Raymond Dunn’s pasture fence. Harley was just as happy to let his family out near the entrance and park the Mercedes some distance back.

Groups of men stood talking in the graveled churchyard. Most of the women were already inside. Harley followed his dad across the yard to a group of Mexicans standing off to themselves, the men holding their hats in work-weathered hands. Harley and his dad shook hands with each of the men, nodded respectfully to the women and thanked them individually for coming. The women bowed their heads and crossed themselves. The men nodded in turn.
Lo siento
, they murmured, looking at their feet.
 

Harley and Sherylynne followed his mom and dad inside and were ushered to the front where four pews were roped off for family. His grandmother, granddad, aunts, uncles and cousins were present, as was Aunt Julie’s sister from Williamson County. The open casket sat before the pulpit on a bier of flowers. Harley studied Uncle Jay’s waxy nose and his dead slit eyes against the satin lining. Harley felt a little flush of guilt, wishing he could draw him.

The minister sat behind the pulpit, solemn. The six pallbearers sat opposite the choir, two of them Uncle Jay’s longtime friends, old one-eyed Enoch Engleson and Dent McCaulley, both looking uncomfortable in new suits. He saw that Engleson had gone all out with a new black patch for his broken-egg-yolk eye.

The pianist dinged a note on the piano. The choir rose and began to sing: “Rock of ages, cleft for me / Let me hide myself in thee…”

Aunt Julie wept in her handkerchief. Other aunts, uncles and cousins sniffed and cleared their throats.

The choir sat down and the preacher came forward. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the joyful knowledge that God has called one of His own home to eternal life in Heaven with Jesus Christ our Lord.” He went on to tell how Uncle Jay’s parents had walked from Pine Ridge, Tennessee to Burnet County, Texas in 1875, how their firstborn had died on the way, then how Grady Jay Buchanan was born in 1887 and in the tradition of his pioneering ancestors, rode horseback from Burnet County, Texas, west to Hardwater, when he was eighteen.

The preacher continued: “When he was twenty-nine years of age, he married Julie Denison from Williamson County and they lived together in the union of holy matrimony these forty-eight years…”

Harley looked at Uncle Jay. What he saw, this waxy imitation, had very little to do with the Uncle Jay he knew. What the preacher was saying had very little, either. A preacher could come in and give facts, but he couldn’t tell how it was. He could give the dates and name the names, but he couldn’t say what Uncle Jay really wanted out of his life, or if he ever got it. And the preacher
wouldn’t
tell about Uncle Jay’s wildness, not at his funeral anyway, or ponder out loud why Aunt Julie stayed with him all those years, or guess at how much money he’d spent gambling and drinking. Harley wondered what Uncle Jay’s last thoughts had been, dying the way he had, or how Aunt Julie felt about that?

The preacher did mention Uncle Jay’s generosity, how at one time or another he had done something for just about every man, woman and child in the community, and Harley knew it wasn’t always a big thing, like his habit of slipping nickels to the little Mexican kids. The story had gotten around how he once threatened to wreck the business office at the hospital in Hardwater because they wouldn’t admit a Mexican woman in labor. Uncle Jay signed her in and paid the bill himself. There were very few funerals at the Baptist Church in Separation, Texas, with Mexicans mourning on the front steps. Catholics, no doubt.

It wasn’t a long service. There was a prayer and the choir stood again: “What a friend we have in Jesus / All our troubles he will bear…”

The pastor nodded to the pallbearers. Enoch Engleson rose, ill-fitted and gangly as Ichabod Crane in his new suit, his one good eye red as a stoplight. Engleson stepped down in front of the casket and stood stiffly at attention; then he turned and saluted Uncle Jay sharply, boot heels clapping together so hard he almost knocked his feet from under himself. The choir played on: “Do thy friends oft forsake thee / Is there trouble everywhere…” Harley realized Engleson was drunk as a coot.

Engleson wobbled over and unhooked the little black ropes on the mourner’s pews. The Buchanan family filed out and passed before Uncle Jay’s casket with hushed throat-clearing and sniffing. When the last family member sat down, the congregation began to file by. The piano and the choir went on and on—“is there trouble everywhere…”—as friends and neighbors passed by in single file for a last look.
 

Then he saw Darlene Delaney. Darlene
Hinchley.
 

She stood in line, moving along the wall, eyes downcast. She looked tragically grieved, big almond eyes heavy lidded and glistening wet, mouth drawn down at the corners. She turned and came toward the bier, cutting her eyes toward Uncle Jay as she passed, lifting one hand alongside her thigh to brush her fingertips against his casket.

Harley watched in his peripheral vision until she passed from sight around the pews on the far right. He was flooded with guilt—Uncle Jay’s funeral, Sherylynne ready to give birth any moment, and here he was, obsessing over Darlene, another man’s wife.

 
Then it was over.
 

The pallbearers picked up the casket and walked it down the aisle with the piano playing and the choir singing and Aunt Julie sniffing. Enoch Engleson’s knees buckled, but Uncle George Thompson grabbed the casket and between them all they got Uncle Jay out the door and down the steps.

 
Harley and Sherylynne were washed out with the crowd down
 
into the churchyard. People milled about, talking in hushed tones. His mom and dad went over to help with Aunt Julie. People Harley had known all his life came up to him and Sherylynne, shaking hands—Travis and Bernadine, Frog and Bender, on and on—offering sympathies and congratulations on the pregnancy. The twins were surrounded by their girlfriends, the whole bunch boohooing.

An old man limped up to Harley—stooped, mouth twisted, one eyelid drawn down toward the bony knob of his cheekbone. He respectfully removed his hat. A few strands of gray hair lay flat over a speckled skull.
 

“Hidee, young feller,” he said from the side of his mouth. “You don’t know me, do ye?” He glared at Harley through little bright eyes, a twist of a smile pulling at the good side of his face. “Well, sir, I’m J. T. Blanket, a friend a yer kinfolk there in the box.”

Harley nodded and shook the old man’s hand, brittle as a stick.

“Hee-heee,” the old man wheezed. “Me and yer kinfolk there, we had us some times in our day. You bet’che we did. Now, I remember once in Hardwater, let’s see, must’a been back about nineteen-ten, we got after old Sheriff Biggerton in Jay’s Model T, chased him down the street, run one wheel plumb up on the boardwalk. Heeee, them sure was some good times, them days was.”

“Yessir. I’ve heard him mention your name.”

The old man bent toward Harley. “He tell you he stole that Julie Denison from me? Slick as a whistle. Heeee. By god, I got my shotgun down to go calling on ’im. Yeah, I did. Went calling on ’im.”

“I don’t think he mentioned that,” Harley said. In his peripheral vision he saw Darlene and Billy Wayne talking with his mom and dad and Aunt Julie.

“Well, sir, I never made it. I run inta old Enoch Engleson there, and he had a jug of whiskey, offered me a drank and, shoot, first thang y’know, I can’t find my ass with both hands… Ah, ’scuse me, young lady. Ordinarily, I don’t take kindly to rough talk in front of wimmen, but I ain’t as swift of mind as I use’ter be. Uh, now where was I? Uh, yeah, well, sir, me’n old Engleson, we got to dranking this licker like damn fools’ll do, and when he found out what I was up to—gonna pay a call on your kinfolk there with my shotgun and all, well sir, he got all uppity and we had us a big knock-down-drag-out. I busted that eye of his out with a stove poker.” Darlene and Billy Wayne stopped to talk with Mr. and Mrs. Delaney. “Hee-heeee. Well, that part was a accident, sorta. By god, you know what that son of a bitch Engleson done? Ah, ’scuse me, young lady—shot a hole clean through my dinner bucket. Heeee. You wanna see something? Here, lookit this here.” The old man put his hat on and pulled his shirttail out from where it was wadded up under his suspenders. His body was pale and hairless, his flesh a translucent yellow. A thick twist of a scar curled around one side of his navel like melted candle wax. “Right through the dinner bucket with a forty-five. Hee-heee.”

Sherylynne looked away.

“Mr. Blanket, Sherylynne’s not feeling too well.”
 

“I tell you, that took the starch right outta me, that forty-five did.” Mr. J. T. Blanket stuffed his shirttail in and glanced around. “Where is that damn Engleson, anyway? I need a good drank’a whiskey, one fer yer kinfolk there in the box.”