“Oh Lord,” thought Elner, “Here she goes again, dead twenty-two years and still putting on airs.” She had been at least seventy and died from leukemia, but Ida always had to have something one step up from everybody else. She had been that way her whole life. Their daddy had been nothing but a plain old farmer, but to hear her tell it he had been a baron with personal ties to the Hapsburgs and with ancestral lands deeded to the family. After Ida married Herbert Jenkins, she only got worse. From time to time Elner had been forced to remind her where she had come from, but Elner figured that there was no point to saying anything to her now, not at this late date. If she hadn’t changed by now, she was never going to change.
Ida rattled around in the drawer and finally found the key she was looking for.
“Here it is,” she said. She stood up and went over and began unlocking the big double doors behind her. Finally she got it unlocked, and turned to Elner. “Come on, let’s go.” Elner got up and went over, ready to follow her, but then stopped in her tracks. “Hold on a minute, this is the good place, isn’t it? I’m not headed to the bad place, am I?”
Ida said, “Of course not.”
Elner was relieved to hear it. But then on second thought, she figured if Ida had made it, then everybody must have a pretty good chance. But she still had one more question.
“What’s going to happen when I get inside?”
Ida turned and looked at her like Elner was crazy. “What do you think is going to happen, Elner? You’re going to meet your Maker. That’s where I’m taking you, silly, to meet your Maker.”
“Oh,” said Elner. “And wouldn’t you know it, here I am in this old robe with the pockets falling off and not a stitch of lipstick on.”
“Now you know how I felt,” Ida sniffed.
“Yes…I see what you mean.”
“Are you ready?”
“I guess I am, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“No, you wouldn’t, and now that you’re here, do you have many regrets?”
“Regrets?”
“Things you wished you had done, before it was too late?”
Elner thought for a second, then said, “Well, I never got to Dollywood…. I would have liked to have done that, but I did get to Disney World, so I guess I can’t complain too much. What about yourself?”
Ida sighed. “I wish I had spent some time in London, visited the palace gardens, maybe had high tea with the royals, but alas, it was not to be.”
And with that Ida threw open the doors with a flourish, stepped back, and said, “TA DA!”
Verbena Wheeler Spreads the News
11:25 AM
Down at the Blue Ribbon cleaners, after the call from her husband, Merle, Verbena was so upset that she started calling everyone she could think of to tell them Elner was dead. Her first call was to Cathy Calvert over at the newspaper office, but her line was busy. She knew that Elner’s friend Luther Griggs would want to know as soon as possible, but there was no answer. She called Cathy again but her line was still busy. Frustrated, she sat there and thought of who else she should call, and picked up the phone to call Elner’s favorite radio show. She knew they would want to know.
Over the years, Bud and Jay’s early morning farm report on WDOT radio had slowly turned into Bud and Jay’s drive time news, weather, and traffic report, geared to the early morning commuters who lived in the suburbs and drove to work in the larger cities. There were not many farms left in the fifty-mile radius, but Elner had remained a loyal listener to the show and was a regular call-in to the program. Bud and Jay always got a big kick out of her. For as long as they had been doing the Question of the Day contest, she’d always tried to come up with the answer, and sometimes her answers were the best thing on the show. When nobody got the right answer, they sent her a prize anyway. One of their sponsors was PETCO, and she got a lot of cat food for Sonny that way. Bud also did the eleven to twelve Shop and Swap show and took the call from Verbena during a commercial break.
A few minutes later he made the announcement on the air. “Well, folks, just got a mighty sad phone call from over in Elmwood Springs, and we are sorry to have to report that our good friend Elner Shimfissle has passed away this morning. She was a special lady and one of our favorite callers here at WDOT, and we will sure miss her…don’t know when the funeral will be, but as soon as we do, we’ll pass it on. OK, let’s see what we have next…. Rowena Snite over in Centralia says she has a man’s briefcase with the initials B.S. on it, she will swap for any back issues of…Crafts Made Simple, or a lady’s watch. Now here’s a word from the Valerie Girard Chiropractic Group.”
At that moment, Luther Griggs, wearing a white T-shirt and a baseball hat, was driving on Interstate 90 in his eighteen-wheeler truck, headed to Seattle on a six-day run. He was having his breakfast, a Coke and a bag of salted peanuts, and when he heard the news come over the radio he immediately pulled over to the side of the road, shut the truck down, and sat in a daze. Luther was an unlikely friend for an eightysomething-year-old woman to have, but Miss Elner was about the closest person in the world to him. They had just spoken last night about whether or not he should go back with his old girlfriend who he thought was too skinny, but Elner had advised him to go back with her anyhow.
As he sat there and the impact of the news really hit him, his throat started to hurt and he felt sick to his stomach. He did not want to go to Seattle now, he wanted to turn around and hit the nearest truck stop, get himself some pot, drink a case of beer, and knock himself out, but he had promised Miss Elner he would quit that. He also had a load of produce in the back that would spoil. Besides, Miss Elner would have wanted him to go. She had co-signed the loan to get the truck so he could have a good-paying profession, and the thought of disappointing her even now made him start up and pull on out.
As Luther drove farther out of town, and reached the Kansas City turnoff, it was all he could do not to get off. What was he going to do now? The best friend he’d ever had was gone.
The friendship between Luther Griggs, a chunky six-foot-three trucker, and Elner Shimfissle had started in a most unusual way. He had been around eight years old that day, twenty-eight years ago, when he had walked by Elner’s house and she had run out on her front porch and called to him sweetly.
“Yoo hoo…little boy…come here a minute.”
He stopped and looked at her and remembered she was the same old woman who had given him that terrible fudge a few days before.
“Come here, honey,” she said again.
“No, I ain’t coming up there,” he said. “You ain’t my mother, I don’t have to do nothing you say.”
“I know you don’t, but I want to give you something.”
“I don’t want no more of that candy, it wasn’t no good,” he said, making a face.
“It’s not candy, it’s a present, and if you don’t come over here, you’re not getting it.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not telling you, but it’s something you’ll like, and you’ll be sorry if you don’t come here and get it.”
He narrowed his eyes at her and wondered what the old lady was up to. He was highly suspicious of anybody who was nice to him. He had thrown rocks at her stupid cat, so maybe she was trying to get him to come close enough so she could hit him. But whatever it was she wanted, he was not taking any chances.
He called back, “You’re a liar, you don’t have nothing to give me.”
“I do, too.”
“What is it, then?”
“That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”
“Where’d you get it at?”
“The store.”
“What store?”
“I’m not telling, but I bought it just for you, you don’t want me to have to give it to somebody else, do you?”
“I don’t care. I don’t care what you do.”
“Well…it’s up to you, if you want your present, come over here and get it, and if you don’t, don’t,
that’s fine with me too,” and with that Elner went back into the house and shut the door.
Luther walked over and sat on the curb in front of Merle and Verbena’s house and tried to figure out what the old lady was up to. He did not go back over to her house that day, but a few days later Elner looked out the window and saw him skulking around across the street, kicking at the ground. She wondered how long it was going to take him to make up his mind. Finally about three days later, when she went out to pick up her paper, he was out in her yard there and said, “You still have that damn present you said you had?”
“I might, why?”
“I just wondered.”
“I still have it, but if you are going to talk ugly, then I don’t think I want to give it to you. Now if you ask me nicely, I’ll give it to you.”
She went back inside and waited. About ten minutes went by before she heard a little knock on the door, and it was all she could do to keep herself from laughing. She had shamelessly bribed an eight-year-old child, and she knew it, but what good is it being an adult if you can’t outsmart children. Besides, she really did have a nice gift for him. A few weeks before, the minute she had given him that Ex-Lax candy, she had been sorry, and had prayed to God every day since to forgive her.
At the time, she had been so mad at him for hitting poor old Sonny in the head with a rock, and almost killing him, that she’d wanted to get back at the boy, but now she felt so horrible about what she had done, she wanted to try and make it up to him. After that day, when she gave him the big red kite she had bought him at the hobby shop, the two of them spent hours out in the fields behind her house flying it. When Macky asked what had made her pick a kite instead of something else, she said, “Well, Macky, the boy was always looking down, and I wanted something that would make him look up for a change.” After Elner bought him the kite, Luther would come by and see her almost every afternoon. She was the first person who ever gave him a gift, the first person who treated him nice. His father was a lowlife mean drunk who could never hold down much of a job, and according to him, if he hadn’t had to marry Luther’s mother because she was pregnant with him, he might have become a famous race car driver like his idol, Junior Johnson. When Luther was seven, his mother, tired of being beaten up, had run off with some stranger she met at a bar, and had been killed in a car wreck six months later. No wonder Luther had been throwing rocks at everybody and everything.
And it did not get better. When he was thirteen, his father had gotten drunk and thrown him out into the yard in the middle of the night. Luther had gone over to Elner’s house, and later, when his father, still drunk, had come banging on her door looking for him, she had run him off with a broom. The next morning, as he sat at her table in the kitchen, he had been so despondent, he’d said, “Don’t nobody want me. I’m gonna go back over and get his gun, and shoot my brains out. The hell with it, I’m no damn good nohow. I don’t have nothing, never will have nothing.”
Elner let him talk on and on, and then said, “All right, Luther, if that’s what you want, but don’t say you don’t have anything, because you do.”
“What? I don’t have a damn thing.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, you have something nobody on this entire earth has except you.”
“What? A daddy that’s a no-good bastard from hell?”
“No, honey.”
“What, then?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. She then opened up a drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a piece of paper and an ink pad. “Give me your hand,” she said. She took his thumb and pressed it down on the pad, and then pressed his thumb on the piece of paper and held it up. “Look at that, your fingerprint is one of a kind. Never has been one like it before and there never will be another.”
He looked at the paper. “So what?”
“So what? You are a one of a kind, put here for some purpose. Now me, I couldn’t kill myself, I want to see what’s going to happen to me next. Besides,” she said, as she poured him more coffee, “you can’t kill yourself today, you have to help me pull all my Christmas things out of the attic and decorate the house before you do.” Luther stayed with her that Christmas, and on and off up until he graduated from high school.
And he might not have graduated if it had not been for her. He had been failing every subject but shop. One day she said, “I want you to bring me your grades and let me have a look at them. OK?”
Nobody had ever asked to see his grades before, and it had made him want to do better for her.
He never did make anything higher than a C minus average, but at least he went every day. He had made her a birdhouse in shop, and now that he thought back on it, it wasn’t a very good birdhouse, but she had put it right in the front yard for everyone to see, and she had bragged on him.
In high school Luther had been two years behind Elner’s great-niece Linda Warren. Besides being cute and having perfect skin and beautiful teeth, Linda was an all A student, head majorette, president of her senior class, and dated only football players. Not only was Luther a big nobody, he also had to have a tooth missing, and the worst case of acne of anybody in school, or at least it seemed so to him. On the high school pecking order scale, Linda and her crowd of clean-cut preppy-looking kids probably never would have even noticed him, but because Aunt Elner was a friend of his, whenever she passed him in the hall, she always smiled and said, “Hi, Luther,” and all the other misfits and losers he hung out with would be impressed out of their minds. Just the fact that someone from the top echelon of high school royalty like herself spoke to him in the hall made high school at least bearable. He had even gotten a few dates with a couple of the halfway decent loser girls that weren’t whacked out on dope, because they thought he was Linda’s cousin. Secretly he even began to believe it himself, and when he’d heard Dwayne Whooten Jr. make some sexual comment about Linda, he had hit him in the face and broken his nose for it.
After his senior year he had joined the army, and Elner was the first person to see him in his uniform. When he came home after serving four years in the tank division, he went straight to her house where she had fixed him a “welcome home” breakfast. Miss Elner’s house was the only real home he had ever known. He wondered what direction he might have gone had he not had her. “Don’t get on that old dope, honey,” she had said. “You don’t want to grow up and be like your daddy, you need to be real careful, will you promise me that?” All he had needed was someone to check in with, to give him a clue how to be a human being. She had even taken him down to Dr. Weiser’s and bought him a front tooth.
Across town, Mr. Barton Sperry Snow had heard the announcement over the radio at the exact time Luther Griggs did. He had been on his way to visit one of his company managers in Poplar Springs, to discuss revamping the entire district. When he heard the name Elner Shimfissle, he suddenly wondered if she was the same Elner Shimfissle he had met so many years ago. It had to be; it was the same town, Elmwood Springs, and after all, how many women in the world were named Elner Shimfissle? It was certainly not a name you would forget, and she was not someone you could easily forget.
At the time he met her, he had been working his way through business school and was doing a survey for Missouri Power and Light Company. Elner Shimfissle had been a big country type of a woman and, as he recalled, had a lot of chickens running around in her yard. She had been very friendly and had given him a piece of pound cake, and a sack of figs to take with him when he left. But the thing he remembered most about her was that she loved electricity and appreciated it more than anyone he had ever met before, or since. She told him one of the great regrets of her life was that she never got to meet Thomas Edison in person. “I just hate to think we were on the earth at the same time and I never got to shake his hand and thank him.” She even had a picture of Thomas Edison she had cut out of a magazine on the wall in her kitchen and had been very upset that there was not a national holiday for Thomas Edison. “Why, he lit the entire world!”
she said. “Just think, without old Tom Edison, we would all still be sitting in the dark, no lights, no radio, no electric garage door openers. I think, after the Lord, of course, I’d rank the Wizard of Menlo Park number two, that’s how highly I think of old Tom.” She told Mr. Snow that even though they did not have a national holiday, she personally celebrated his birthday every year by turning on all her electrical appliances at once and leaving them on all day.
What a character. He had spent only forty-five minutes with her thirty years ago, and hadn’t seen her since, but somehow he felt sad that she had died. He had just turned fifty, so she must have lived to a nice old age, because she was an old woman when he met her. Mr. Snow had just been named vice president of the Missouri Power and Light Company and now looking back and remembering her so well, he wondered if somehow her enthusiasm for all things electrical had not made him decide to go to work for the company full-time. Come to think of it, it had been his idea to put a picture of Thomas Edison in the lobby. He couldn’t say for sure, but maybe somewhere in the back of his mind she had influenced him more than he knew. All he did know was that if there was a heaven, he hoped the old lady would finally get to meet Thomas Edison in person. He knew old Tom would get a kick out of meeting her. Mr. Snow took out his BlackBerry and faxed his secretary. “Mrs. Elner Shimfissle of Elmwood Springs passed away today. Find out what funeral home. Send flowers. Sign ‘An old friend.’”
Making Arrangements with Neva
11:38 AM
When Tot Whooten got back home from Elner’s house, she picked up the phone and called the Rest Assured Funeral Home, and her friend Neva picked up.