“Think I’ll go in and pay my respects,” he said.
“Good to see you, Sam,” one of the men said to him, and the others mumbled agreement.
“All of us old folks ought to get together once in a while,” another said.
“We don’t ever do it,” another added, “not to somebody dies. Then we sit around out here in these rockers, waiting our turn.”
One of the men laughed suddenly, coughed, fought for his breath. “Crowd gets smaller every year,” he wheezed at last. “Some of these days, they ain’t but one of us gon’ be sitting here.”
“Yeah, and he’s gon’ be too damned old to talk,” another said. “Just gon’ be sitting here, staring off, looking at nothing, drooling down on his shirt.” He giggled and nodded his head rapidly. “Ain’t gon’ be me. I guarantee that.”
“It’ll come to all of us, sooner or later,” he said philosophically. He nodded to the men and the men nodded in reply, and then he turned on his walker and went inside the funeral home, with James following.
James signed the guest registry for both of them and asked a watching young woman which room contained the remains of Hattie Lewis. “The first room there,” she said in a funeral voice. She pointed with a gesture of her head.
The only person in the room with the body of Hattie Lewis was Neal Lewis. He was sitting near the head of the coffin in a folding chair, his body bent forward, his elbows propped on his knees. He seemed to be in prayer, but he looked up when he heard the scraping of the walker. “Sam?” he said after a moment. “Sam Peek?” He stood.
“It’s me, Neal. This is my boy, James. He drove me over.”
Neal stepped forward and took his hand and then the hand of James. “Good of you to come over, Sam,” he said. “Real good of you.”
“Sorry to hear about her passing, Neal,” he said softly. “Read about it in the paper yesterday. Heard it on the radio, too.”
“We been expecting it,” Neal said. “Ain’t easy, though.” He paused. “I guess you know how that is. I heard tell about your wife passing on. What was it? A few weeks ago? Hattie’s been sick, and I ain’t good about time these days.”
“Few weeks now,” he said.
“What I thought,” Neal said. “Come here and look at her, Sam. They got her looking real pretty. Puffed up her face some. She’d wasted away to almost nothing.”
He moved to the coffin and looked inside at the still, peaceful face of Hattie Lewis. Her face had been shaped by the mortician into a serene pose, almost a smile, as though she had simply blinked in the middle of a pleasant thought and had died and the thought had frozen on her face. He could still see the girl, taking the comb from him.
“Looks real nice, Neal,” he said. “Real nice.”
“They fixed her up real pretty,” Neal said proudly.
“She was a fine lady.”
“Best they ever was, Sam. She put up with me. God knows, that took some doing. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Guess we don’t credit them enough while they alive.”
“Don’t guess we do,” he said.
“Won’t be the same without her, I know that.”
“What time’s the funeral?” he asked.
“Tomorrow at two. Out in the Sardis cemetery. That’s where we been going to church since that falling out in town. We got us a plot out there couple of years ago, right after she took sick.”
“I’ll do my best to be there, Neal,” he said. “Sometimes there’s company on Sunday.”
“I’ll understand, you don’t make it. I’m just glad to see you here,” Neal said. He looked into the coffin. “Hattie would’ve been, too. She was always talking about what a fine family you got, having them preacher boys.” He turned to James. “This one of them preachers?”
“Not me,” James said, smiling. “That’d be my older brothers.”
“Well, son, we can’t all of us go preaching,” Neal said. “Won’t be nobody to preach to, if we did. Some of us got to give them preachers things to preach about. Guess I’ve turned up my share of sermons. Ain’t that right, Sam?” His voice was playful.
“Never saw you do nothing mean, Neal,” he said.
“Well, never tried to do nothing mean. Just couldn’t turn down a dare when it was staring me in the face,” Neal said. He moved close to James and whispered, “Truth of the matter, it was your daddy who was always coming up with them dares.”
“That right, Daddy?” James asked. “You’re responsible for getting Mr. Lewis in trouble?” He could see his father blush.
“I don’t remember making any dares,” he said.
“You remember old lady Milbury?” Neal asked.
He nodded and cleared his throat softly. He always cleared his throat when uncomfortable or when he wanted to make a point worth remembering.
“Your daddy wrote me a poem one time,” Neal said to James. “Dared me to say it in class. Old lady Milbury like to have fainted. You get him to tell you about it sometime.”
James smiled. “I will.”
“Well, we got to be going on, Neal,” he said.
“Glad you came by, Sam,” Neal said solemnly.
“You come over to see me.”
“I’ll do that, Sam. I sure will. I’d like the company.”
He talked late into the night with his son, sitting comfortably in his padded rocker, sharing his grape wine. He talked of Neal Lewis, vowing Neal had lied about him writing the poem, and he talked of the men on the porch of the funeral home and of crimson clover festivals and celebrations on the Fourth of July. James listened in amazement, realizing that his father had seldom spoken of his youth, and he urged the stories from him.
It was past midnight when he began to tire, and he drained the last of the wine from his glass. “They tell you about the dog, son?” he asked.
“Yes sir.”
“Your sisters think I’m making it all up.”
“I guess.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said wearily. “Don’t know why in the world that dog won’t show itself when somebody’s around, but she won’t.”
“Don’t worry about it, Daddy.”
“Strangest thing I ever saw,” he said. “Just shows up out of nowhere. I was down in the pasture yesterday, trying to find where Noah’s cows were getting out, and there she was, big as day. Just came trotting up. Put her paws up on the side of the truck door. I had a biscuit in my pocket and I gave it to her and she swallowed it whole.”
“That right?”
He laughed easily. “Guess I’d think the same thing if I couldn’t see her. Guess I’d think I was crazy, too.”
“Nobody thinks you’re crazy, Daddy.”
“I know, son. Just old. That’s what it is. And just being old is about the same thing as just being crazy.”
“Better get on to bed, Daddy,” James said. “It’s late.”
“I will in a minute. You go on. I’m just going to sit here a few minutes.”
“Yes sir.”
He took his journal from his desk drawer and opened it to the date and found the red-tipped pen and wrote:
Spent the day with James and we both have been up too late. James took me to get a haircut ($1.50) and a few groceries from Pennywise ($13.83) and then we went to the funeral home to pay respects to Hattie Lewis, who died two days ago of cancer. She was a special childhood friend. Talked to Neal Lewis, her husband, another childhood friend who was a cut-up in class. Saw some other old friends there, too. It seems that somebody out of the old crowd dies every few weeks now. Soon we will all be gone and everything will be left to the young people. It has been a pleasant day. Not too hot. With James here, I have not seen White Dog, but I will keep leaving food out for her in hopes that she will show herself. I’m beginning to think I’m crazy myself.
8
A hard rain began in the night, lashing in sheets from an unexpected west wind, and though he had slept pleasantly from the exhaustion of the day before and from the wine and the late hour with his son, he awoke early a
nd went into the kitchen and warmed day-old biscuits from Kate and cooked sausage and made a milk gravy and called James to breakfast.
“Bad day for Hattie’s funeral,” he said, watching the rain lap against the house. “Don’t guess I’d better try to go over.”
“Don’t think you should,” James said. “Anyway, I thought Lois and Tabor were coming down for lunch.”
“She said they might. Don’t know now. One of the kids was sick and the road’s slick now.”
In mid-morning, James left to return to his home in South Carolina, and Lois called to say she and Tabor would not visit for lunch. He did not mind. He had spent long hours with his son for two days, surprising himself with the ease of his storytelling, and he had refused his afternoon naps. It would be a good day to rest. There was nothing that lulled him to sleep as quickly, or as deeply, as the drumming of rain, not even the druggist’s medicines.
He listened to a radio sermon from a Baptist preacher who raved about foreign infidels soiling America with their oil-slick greed, and he thought about his sons who were, at that moment, standing in pulpits instructing people in the way of the Almighty. He had never been a man for churches, though he believed in keeping the Sabbath and in treating people fairly, and he believed most of all in the inexplicable power of something far grander than man or earth. He thought to himself, I ought to start going to church again. Surely my sons are ashamed that I don’t. Maybe I’ll transfer my letter from the Baptist church in Madison—if it’s still there. It had been almost sixty years since he’d joined the church to please Cora Elizabeth Wills.
The radio preacher asked for five dollars from each listener, or whatever each listener could afford. The money was needed, the preacher declared, to keep his ministry-of-the-air alive and vigorous. The preacher promised in return a brochure of special scriptures that would assuredly comfort anyone in their most desperate needs. He wrote the name of the preacher and the address of the radio station on the back of an envelope.
He took the Bible—a gift from Alma that he kept displayed to please her—and opened it at Genesis and began reading. He read two chapters, to the verse that proclaimed:
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
That’s the way it ought to be, he thought. But that was before the snake.
He turned back to Chapter One and scanned to the eleventh verse and he read it again:
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
The Bible was wrong about that. Not at all the way fruit trees behaved. You wanted to get a certain kind of fruit, you had to bud for it. You couldn’t take a Golden Delicious apple and plant the seed and have the tree bearing Golden Delicious apples like the parent tree. You had to take budwood from the parent tree and cut the bud out and slip it into the bark of the scion and then you’d get a Golden Delicious apple. But the way the Bible had it in Genesis was close enough. Certainly an apple tree would not produce pecans. It was something he would have to talk to his preacher sons about; see if there was something omitted in the translation.
And there were other things he would discuss with his preacher sons.
Adam naming all the creatures. It’d take time for that if they lined up one by one. The earth was full of creatures. It made a nice enough story, but it wasn’t practical. It was like believing that Noah put two of every creature—a male and a female—on the Ark. Who could believe that? It would have taken a boat the size of Hart County, and even then it would’ve been crowded. And what about the food to feed all those creatures? It’d have to be stored somewhere. But it was a nice story. He’d liked it when he was a boy, listening to Sunday School teachers telling about how God was in the old days.
He skipped Chapter Three. He knew about the snake and the apple and how Eve goaded Adam into taking a bite from the apple and how they became ashamed because they were naked and how God got angry and drove them from the Garden of Eden. And he knew about Cain and Abel and how Cain killed Abel in Chapter Four. He glanced at the names of the children and grandchildren of Cain—Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech. Unpronounceable names. And that was another thing: Where did Cain’s wife come from, if Adam and Eve were the first people on earth? Did God make some more people, somewhere else, and they got left out of the Bible? It was possible. One thing about them: they lived long enough. Eight hundred years. Nine hundred years. Methuselah was in there. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years.
He fanned the pages to Chapter Nineteen and saw the words:
And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground.
Sodom. Sodom and Gomorrah, he thought. He knew about that story. Good-time Sodom and Gomorrah. God got even with them, smiting everybody but Lot and his family, warning them not to look back on his terrible destruction. But Lot’s wife could not resist the temptation and looked back, and God had turned her into a pillar of salt. He had had a professor at Madison A&M who claimed Lot’s wife was the first salt-lick. He smiled at the thought and he began reading from the chapter. His eyes widened with surprise at the thirty-first and thirty-second verses:
And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth;
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
He read on, to the end of the chapter and the story of Lot’s daughters bearing his children, then he closed the Bible. He’d have to ask his sons about that, about Lot’s daughters. If a person wanted to argue the point, it could be said that the Bible contained a dirty story, he thought. And maybe that was why people were always debating it. He’d have to think about that before reading further. Even though he’d never been a churchgoer, he had always believed there was an Almighty. He had to believe that. How could he understand the growing of plants if he didn’t? He could bud the trees to grow the kind of fruit he wanted, but he could not make the leaves unfold from the tips of limbs and flutter in the wind like small green flags. That was not his doing.
The man who delivered the Sunday paper brought the paper into the house for him, and he made a mental note to write about it in his journal—The paper carrier did a neighborly deed for me, knowing I must use a walker … —and maybe he would write a letter to the newspaper to compliment the carrier. There was nothing of great interest in the paper. He did not know any of the people listed in the obituaries, though he thought he had heard of one man from Anderson, a King Welborn. Maybe King Welborn had bought trees from him in the past. He took his order pads for the last ten years and leafed through the carbon copies of sales slips, but he could not find King Welborn’s name.
He did not think about White Dog until after his lunch (soup from a can). He mixed the breakfast scraps, covering them with the congealed milk gravy, and went onto the back porch and propped open the screened door and put the bowl on the porch, out of the rain. The rain was still heavy, spilling brutally from clouds that had an underbelly coating as dark as tar. He wondered if James had made it out safely over the slick dirt roads, and he thought of the funeral for Hattie Lewis. He pulled his watch from his shirt pocket and looked at it. It was almost two o’clock, the hour of the funeral. He wondered if it had been postponed. Probably not, he reasoned. Putting off a funeral was like putting off something that was already over. Still, he thought, I’d like for it to be a nice day when I’m buried. I’d like for the sun to be shoveled in with me. He looked across the yard, puddled in water. Not much of a chance for the dog to be showing up in this kind of weather, he thought.
He was in his chair beside his desk when he heard the whimper on the porch. He got up quickly—too quickly; he could feel the pain in his hip—and went back to the porch an
d saw the dog standing beside the empty bowl. “Well, I see you made it,” he said. “Knew I was by myself, didn’t you?” The dog whimpered and stepped to him and lifted her head to his hand.
“Where you been?” he said. “You almost dry. In the wellhouse? That where you been hiding all this time?” The well-house was only a few feet from the porch. “Well, come on in. Keep me company. Won’t nobody be out here today.” He backed into the kitchen and the dog followed obediently. “Guess maybe you need some water after lapping up that feast,” he said. He poured water into a bowl and placed it before the dog and watched her drink. “Wish I had me a camera,” he said. “I’d take me a picture of you and prove you’re real.”
The dog looked up at him and then raised herself on her back legs and placed her front paws on the top brace of the walker between his hands. He laughed in surprise. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. He stepped backward cautiously with the walker and the dog stepped with him, holding her paws to the brace. He stepped to the side, and the dog followed. “I’ll be damned,” he said again. “First time I ever danced with a dog. You sure not proud how you look, are you?” The dog whined an answer.
He kept the dog in the house with him during the afternoon. The dog lay near him, head resting on her outstretched front legs. When he moved, he could sense the dog’s eyes following him. He thought: I could lock that dog up in a room and call my daughters and have them come out and prove to them I’m not crazy. But he knew he would not. The dog had the right to be seen or not seen. Besides, now it was a game with his daughters and sons. None of them believed him. They were likely talking to one another on the telephone, saying, “Maybe it’s too much for him, living alone like he is. Maybe we ought to check on a home of some kind. Maybe somebody should move in with him.”
None of them believed him. It had made him angry; now it amused him.