He was sprawled out on the floor behind the counter. I guess I knew right away. He was on his back, his face turned from me, and I ran over and knelt beside him, pulling at his shoulders. It was a sight I would never forget: his mouth was open, blood running out of it, and his neck was practically black; his eyes were wide and glassy. One hand was gripping the pullout coupon section from the Sweetwater Gazette, and the other a pencil. Later on, when I was cleaning up, I looked at the glossy sheet and saw he’d circled the ones he wanted to save: Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh Biscuits, Minute Maid Orange Juice, Wonder Bread English Muffins. He knew I made biscuits from scratch; why did he want store-bought? That’s nagged at me ever since.
There wasn’t anything to do but call an ambulance. I sat on the floor next to him, unclenching his hands and smoothing them out, wiping the blood from his chin. I looked into his face and saw lines I hadn’t noticed. He had even less hair than I thought. I closed his eyes with two fingers of one hand, the way you see them do it in the movies. I didn’t cry. The top of his white T-shirt was damp, the color of raspberry juice and darkening. The cuckoo clock Elaine and Larry had given us struck three, and the silence of the house absorbed the sound like a sponge.
In those moments I think I felt closer to my husband than I had in twenty-four years. I think in that quiet space I almost forgave him. After the shock of seeing his face pale and distorted and helpless, I studied it with something verging on sadness, and I saw age spots and small white hairs growing out of his nose. His face in death was kind. I thought of how he had looked a few hours before, standing at the front door, wanting me to stay, and I wondered if he had somehow known and hadn’t wanted to face it by himself.
I learned a long time ago that you can’t bring back what’s gone, but the problem is that everything happens when you’re not looking, when you’re at Sears thinking of curtains and there’s no chance to say, You are not alone, and maybe I forgive you. Amory and I had moved with and against each other, mostly against, for over fifty years. We had acted roles so long they had become part of who and what we were together. In the end we had become brittle, statues, stuck in poses we’d long forgotten the meanings of.
The smiling man at the cemetery gate looked up the names and pointed me toward a ridge off to the right, section E7. “If you get lost just follow the main road,” he said, making a circular motion with his finger. “It’s a loop. Either way will bring you right back to the front.”
“Is everybody who died in the same year buried in the same section?”
“Well, that all depends.” He wiped his neck. The sun was hot, directly overhead. “We try to keep families together, but sometimes it just ain’t possible. Lot of times a husband and wife will buy a plot and ask us to save the spaces around them for the kids, but we just can’t do that without money down. What happens if a kid decides to get buried someplace else, next to his wife’s family or something? Then we’re left with one open space in G, and we got to let it go for a special price.” He shook his head. “Folks don’t understand what all goes into it. Accidents, family tragedies, you never know what’s going to happen. That’s why it pays to plan ahead.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, thanks.”
“No problem at all. Enjoy your visit with us, hear?”
Driving on the white gravel road through the grounds, I passed new graves mounded with dirt, straggling mourners in high heels carrying flowers, a man on a riding mower cutting a swath across the hillside. The place was peaceful and quiet and clean and smelled of grass. High on a slope, people were gathered for a service. I drove slowly, reading names on tombstones. Neat white rows of them, like baby teeth, stretched out in the distance as far as I could see.
Halfway up a broad, flat-topped hill I came upon a green wooden marker with a large white ? painted on it. I parked the car on the side of the road and got out. I wandered through E1, up to E3 and over to E6, and then I saw E7. For a moment I stared at the marker, unsure whether I wanted to keep going. Maybe it was enough, I thought, to know where the grave was, to know that it was there.
I had looked for my mother in a lot of places, but never in a place where she might actually be. The prospect of finding her was terrifying. The name and the dates etched in stone, the narrow plot of land with grass or gravel over it, tombstones on either side, all of them alike. Having never seen the grave, I had been free to nurture the small, secret fantasy that she might still be alive, that she might even come back one day.
“How do you know for sure she’s dead?” I’d asked my dad once, when I was ten and questioning everything. “Did you see the body? Maybe there was a cover-up. Maybe she just ran away.”
“I wish she had run away,” he said. “Then we could try to get her back.”
“Do you believe in God?” I asked suddenly.
He gazed at me for a long time with vacant eyes, as if he were looking through me. He touched my hair, my cheek. He put his hand on my shoulder until I squirmed away, uncomfortable. “Sometimes. When it helps,” he finally said.
Standing on the hillside, I saw the other tombstone first.
Bryce Lee Davies
December 18,1918-May 2, 1967
Loving Wife, Beloved Mother
I felt dizzy. This much, at least, was true. I looked over at the adjacent stone, and there she was.
Ellen Clyde Simon
March 17,1940-May 13,1967
“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
“Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows, remembers, believes,” I whispered to myself. I knew it by heart; it was one of my father’s favorite passages. He taught it to me long before I had any idea who Faulkner was or what he might have meant by it. I used to lie in bed saying the words aloud, turning the shapes of them over in my mouth like lozenges.
“Knows remembers believes.” I felt light-headed, delirious, short of breath. I looked back and forth at the tombstones. Bryce Lee Davies. Ellen Clyde Simon.
Each of them responsible for the death of a living, breathing human being.
May 2 to May 13, eleven days.
If you’d start paying attention to the people around you, maybe you’d learn something.
I stepped back, stumbling over an arrangement of plastic flowers, banging my knee on the sharp edge of a tombstone, words jumbled in my head: Believes longer than recollects. A blind person could see it. I made my way to the car and fumbled for the door handle, wrenching it open, and sat in the sweltering heat of the driver’s seat. A blind person could see it. People walking by glanced in at me, curiosity on their faces. I wrapped my arms around myself and closed my eyes. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. I sat in the car until the voices subsided. Then I turned the key in the ignition and headed for home.
At the funeral my evangelist son-in-law did the honors. Elaine and Horace sat on either side of me in the front left pew of the funeral home chapel, holding my hands. Elaine kept dabbing my face with a Kleenex whether I needed it or not. The grandchildren sat sniffling in the pews behind us. Behind them were our friends and Amory’s business colleagues, and then neighbors and employees and a few people I’d never seen before—but I expected that. Probably children he didn’t know he had.
“Amory Clyde was a good man, Lord,” said Larry, warming up. “He was a family man.”
People said “Umm-hmm” and “Yes, Lord” and “Amen,” but I wanted to hear Larry back that up before I opened my mouth.
“He was a good husband.”
I wondered what gave Larry the authority to say this. Out of the corner of my eye I could see people looking at me, nodding their heads. I think they expected me to be crying, but I couldn’t seem to get started.
“A good father.”
Horace and Elaine both squeezed my hands, tears streaming down their faces.
“A loving grandfather, and a kind and generous great-grandfather.” He looked at Alice holding Eric in her lap. “You see, Amory Cl
yde lived to a ripe old age,” he went on.
“A ripe old age,” someone echoed in the back. It sounded to me like Jeb Gregory, the handyman from the old place, who’d never had much use for Amory as far as I could tell. We hadn’t seen Jeb in years. Why had he felt compelled not only to attend Amory’s funeral but to take an active part in it? I wanted to turn around and find out if it was him, but good manners forced me to keep my eyes forward.
“And in his full and active lifetime, he touched many of us with his warmth and generosity. His gentle spirit. Yes, Amory Clyde was an industrious and upstanding pillar of our community.” Larry put the emphasis on “industrious.” I thought he was really going overboard; but then, I suppose evangelists aren’t known for their restraint. And so far nobody had stood up and screamed that it was blasphemy, though I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if someone did. Death does interesting things to people.
“How many of us have benefited from the presence in this community of the Whitfield Mill?” asked Larry in a quiet voice. There was silence in the room. Even the most vociferous were stumped by this question. “How many of us can say, ‘My life has been enriched and enlivened by the people I have met and the business the mill has brought to our little town ‘?” Some woman finally emitted a halfhearted, “Praise the Lord,” enabling him to continue.
He tried a different approach. “Amory Clyde was a good man. He gave and gave to this community, and he never gave up.” Larry smiled, evidently pleased with this neat turn of phrase, and I wondered for a moment if he expected applause. “He always strove to be fair and just in his business and personal dealings. In many ways, he was a role model for the people of this town.”
“God love him,” somebody cried.
“He experienced personal tragedy, Lord, and it made him stronger. He weathered the strike at the mill, staged by a vicious and corrupt union, and it made him stronger. He lived in this town for over fifty years, through thick and through thin, a whole lot of good times and some bad times too, and it only made him stronger!
“Yes, my friends, Amory Clyde was a good man.” Larry stopped and wiped his brow. Then he paused meaningfully, looking out over the audience as if he were about to divulge a tremendous secret.
“My friends, let’s be frank here for a moment. Amory Clyde was not known for being a man of God. He didn’t go to church a whole lot, and he did not freely discuss the role of Jesus Christ our Savior in his life.” Larry’s eyes roamed the room as if he were awaiting a sign from heaven. “But let me tell you, people, that Amory Clyde was a man of God.”
“That’s right,” “Yes, Lord,” “Umm-hmm,” came from the pews in a dislocated chorus.
“He was a man of God, my friends. Jesus said, By their fruits ye shall know them.’ He said, ‘Let my actions speak louder than my words.’ Amory Clyde was a simple man, and a good man. He lived a life of faith without even trying.”
By this time my ears were ringing. Amory had been by no means a simple man, and certainly not a good one. He had abandoned the Baptist church and started worshiping more tangible gods long before we were married. Over the course of his life the trinity of women, work, and whiskey provided him with far more inspiration than the church ever had.
Beside me, Elaine was sobbing, overcome by the power of her husband’s oratory. Horace was still holding my dry hand in his clammy one. I had had enough.
“I want to leave,” I whispered fiercely to Elaine.
She clasped my hand. “I know this is hard for you, Mama,” she soothed. “Please try to hold yourself together just a few minutes more. Larry’s got a grand finale planned.”
Dry-eyed and defeated, I sat listening to the grand finale. It was filled with clichés like “God helps those who help themselves,” which, I had to agree, described Amory to a T. By the end, more than half the congregation was audibly in tears, which must have been a satisfaction to Larry and Elaine.
When the service was over, I received people’s condolences and heartfelt embraces with the appropriate air of a bereaved widow, and allowed myself to be helped into the limousine that would lead the parade to the cemetery. As I sat there in the dim plushness, squeezed again between Horace and Elaine, I thought of Ellen, and of her funeral, which had been so different from the one today. The bright sun, the shock, the horror of it. Her death had been like the amputation of a healthy limb; Amory’s was like finally giving up a part of you that is serviceable but diseased. I was relieved that the pain was gone.
On our way to the cemetery, drivers in both directions pulled respectfully to the side of the road to let us pass. I had forgotten this custom, and it made me feel like a queen. But I would not be like Queen Victoria mourning Albert; I would not, as I read somewhere that she had, let my husband’s death consume my life. I thought it was about time, finally, to live for myself. And though I couldn’t tell anybody, I was looking forward to doing it alone.
“Yellow roses!” Elaine exclaimed… “I was hoping these would be for me. My friend Bernadette saw you walking down Main Street this morning with that old busybody May Ford—I hope she didn’t talk your ear off—and Bernadette said you were carrying yellow roses and I just started anticipating. I guess May told you these are my favorite, favorite things in the whole wide world.” Cradling the bouquet as if it were a baby, she brought it up to her face. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Ummm. Perfection.” She held the flowers out in front of her and headed down the hall, motioning for me to follow. “Everybody else is already here. They’re out on the deck.”
“I’m late,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Just a little. Don’t worry, we wouldn’t have started without you.”
In the kitchen Elaine found a vase and filled it halfway with water. She opened the little foil packet of preservative that came with the flowers and poured it in. Then she unrolled the paper wrapping, separated the roses from the greenery, and began arranging them in the vase.
“They look a little tired,” I said. “They sat in my car for a while in the sun.”
“They’ll perk right back up, you wait and see,” Elaine said, concentrating on the arrangement.
I looked around the spacious kitchen. It was as neat and folksy as Clyde’s. A collection of bright copper objects covered one wall; a pine sideboard against another wall was filled with cheery plates standing on their rims. Above the breakfast nook hung a cuckoo clock identical to the one Clyde had in her living room.
The house was a two-story gray-shingled split-level in one of Horace’s developments, Whispering Pines. It was only a few miles from Ridge View. The houses were larger and more distinctive here than in Clyde’s neighborhood; it had taken me a while to figure out, as I drove along the broad, quiet streets, that each house was a variation on three or four standard models. Some had shutters, some large oak doors, some shingles, some siding. “You won’t believe it, but every house in the neighborhood is less than five years old,” Elaine had said as she gave me directions over the phone. “Horace has quite a flair. Who knows, maybe that’s where you get it from.”
“This place is lovely,” I said.
“Why, thank you.” She set the vase of roses in the middle of the round kitchen table. “I try my best.” She wrapped the extra greenery in the paper and deposited it in the trash bag under the sink. “So,” she said casually, “what did May Ford want with you this morning?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“What’d you all talk about?”
“Nothing important. She just wanted to gossip, I think.”
“About what?” She propped her elbows on the counter between us.
“Um, not much. I don’t really remember.”
She looked at me closely. “I have a little piece of advice for you. I suggest you stay away from that old woman. She’s mean and spiteful, and she’s a liar.” She stood up straight. “People in this town gossip a lot because that’s all there is to do. Most of it’s outright lies. So you come to me if you hear something
that doesn’t sound right, okay?”
“Okay.” I fidgeted under her sharp gaze.
“Is there anything you want to ask me about?”
“I can’t think of anything.”
“Well,” she said, looking troubled. After a moment her expression changed to a tight smile. “Then let’s join the others on the deck, shall we?”
I followed her out of the kitchen into a wide, sunny room at the back of the house, with a cathedral ceiling and a slate floor covered with dhurrie rugs. A couple of overstuffed couches, a large-screen TV, and a spotlessly clean fireplace dominated the room. The entire rear wall was glass; through it I could see Alice, Kathy, and the back of Clyde’s white head. They were sitting in lawn chairs on a red-stained deck, bowls of tortilla chips and salsa on one folding table, and a blender half-full of a slushy green drink on another. Behind them stretched a well-kept yard, penned in on three sides by neighbors’ fences.
“Look who’s here!” Kathy said, jumping up as I came out on the deck. “My goodness, it must be nearly three weeks since you moved into that house, and I haven’t even had you over. I said to Horace this morning, ‘She must think we’re the snootiest people she ever met.’ I did come by once last week—did you get the pie?”
“Thank you, yes, it was beautiful. I found it on the porch railing when I got home from work. I’ve been meaning to call and thank you for it.” I glanced around at the group. “I’d like to have all of you over one of these days, as soon as I get a few more chairs.”
“We can bring chairs,” Alice said. She gave a little wave. “Hi! I’m not getting up, I’m too comfortable.”
Clyde looked at me over her shoulder. “Hello, Cassandra.”
“Hello, hello, hello,” I said.
“Over here,” said Elaine, patting the seat next to Alice. “Now, let me find one more.” She disappeared inside the house.