LUKE’s father, George Meaders, owned one of Cortez’s two mortuaries. It occupied a towering remodeled home on the good side of town where the streets were shaded by rheumatic aspens of precisely the same age as the houses they shielded. It was called, simply, Meaders Mortuary, that being about the only difference between it and its longer-established rival, The Andersen Funeral Home, several blocks away and over one street.
Jolly Osment felt as nearly at home in Meaders Mortuary as did Luke, who lived upstairs with his father and mother. The two boys could have been found, had anyone reason to look, lurking in some dusky corner or peeping through the drapes from the music room during any funeral or vesper rosary. Before they were sixteen the two were allowed to help only to the extent of washing the great black cars, or spiriting the flowers out the back door after a funeral while the family and friends gathered at the front to await the emergence of the casket from the building—heaving them into the old pick-up truck and racing pell-mell to the cemetery in order to decorate the grave before the cortege arrived to find it miraculously bedecked in expensive sorrow.
Mr. Meaders would watch them dust out of the back lot until they disappeared down the alley, the sprays and baskets bouncing crazily about the bed of the truck. He never failed to shudder and touch his forehead in a sort of a posteriori blessing. Whether the flowers would arrive ahead of the procession, or at all, or whether—worst of all—they might designate the wrong grave, were some of the more serious worries George Meaders encountered in his business.
Luke would rage the old truck up and around the dirt hill that supported the Catholic school, down the other side onto the highway, across the bridge, the tracks, through Shaker Village, and through the iron gates into the cemetery, delighted to be driving the protesting vehicle as fast as it would go under what could be conceivably considered legal and emergency circumstances. The flowers always arrived on time and in passable condition; however, there was one occasion when the outcome was doubtful for a time. The day was overcast and chilly, and pools of water still stood on the pavement from a morning drizzle as Luke fish-tailed onto the Shaker Village Road.
“Jeez, Luke. Won’t this thing go any slower?”
“Sit tight, Joll. I think we’re gonna do ’er in about seven minutes this trip.”
“Great. And there’ll be so many dead bodies all over the place they won’t know who to bury.”
Jolly looked through the back window as Luke vaulted the tracks just in time to see a large basket of flowers shoot perpendicularly off the truck bed. It tilted, suspended in air for a moment, then bounced onto the roadway on its one wicker foot and began spreading gladiolas in a shower of white on the pavement like some flower girl gone berserk at a wedding.
“Jesus Christ,” said Jolly, “there goes ‘Beloved Uncle.’”
Luke whirled to see what that meant, which was decidedly (as George Meaders concurred later) the wrong thing to do. When he looked over his left shoulder, Luke pulled the steering wheel in that direction. The pick-up began a slow, classical skid that transgressed a hundred and fifty feet of highway and eight feet of mud shoulder before coughing to rest against the bank, facing the direction whence it had come, leaving an elongated semi-circle of brightly-colored blooms and ribbons across the highway.
Jolly saw Luke’s face pale beneath his dark skin. He watched open-mouthed as Luke tromped on the starter. From the old pick-up there came not even a final gasp.
“I’d say we’ve done it this time,” said Jolly.
Cars began to line up along the highway in both directions. The people were reluctant to drive over the flowers that barred their way.
“Goddam.
Goddam!
Shut up!” said Luke. “We gotta
do
somegoddamthing!”
At that time a lady left her car in the line and came puffing up, wide-eyed, to the pick-up. “Anybody hurt?” she trembled.
“Not nearly as much as they’re going to be,” muttered Jolly.
“Hey, lady, is that your car?” asked Luke, pointing to her big sedan.
“Why, yes. Yes,” she said.
“Lady, we gotta use your car. Quick, open the trunk. Jolly, start gathering up these goddam—excuse me, lady—flowers.”
In a moment the other bystanders who were close enough to see were swept up in the urgency of a situation they knew nothing about, and a maniacal harvest began on the Shaker Village Road. Bouquets and sprays were flung into the trunk, onto the back seat of the car, and hooked over the front fenders. At the very last an excited man came running from down the road with the traitorous white basket, cradling an armload of bespattered gladiolas. He heaved them onto the mass in the rear seat and stood back, panting and with frenzied eyes. All the while, the woman whose car had been usurped fluttered between the trunk and the front of the car. “Oh, my,” she repeated.
“You ready, lady?” asked Luke.
“Ready? For what?”
“You ready to drive. You can drive, can’t you?”
“Drive? Oh, my, yes. I can drive. Oh my, yes. Get in.” She flung herself indelicately behind the wheel and roared the engine and began honking the horn incessantly.
“Jolly, you stay. Dad’ll crap when he drives by here in the hearse and sees this mess. You signal him it’s OK. OK?”
Jolly leaned against the pick-up and watched the crowd disperse. As they drove by slowly, they gaped at him and the truck and scratched their heads, or shook them more in disbelief of the role they had just played in some inexplicable game than at the catastrophe of the maimed truck.
Five minutes passed before the slow black cortege came into view over the railroad tracks. As the hearse drew abreast, with Luke’s father driving, Jolly managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile and formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger to show that everything was under control. Luke’s father touched his forehead in his secret sign and then faced the road ahead, ready to meet whatever further ruin the day might bring down upon his head.
Ordinarily, following a commonplace delivery, from the sanctity of the pick-up hidden in the pines, Luke and Jolly watched the dumb show enacted darkly time after time, the one nervously tapping his fingers on the wheel, anxious to be gone, the other silently intent, his eyes roving from the crowd to the grave to the barren area far beyond, to the mausoleum, and back again to the ceremony. Invariably, the shudder returned to quicken Jolly’s spine, and invariably his mind turned back.
It had been seven years since his abortive child-visit to this cemetery, the only visit he had ever made in the private sense of the word. With Luke and the girls at night or with Luke and the flowers by day, going there was what might be called purposeful, not the same as private.
His private excursion to the cemetery had taken place long before Luke was known or girls were more than a bother, good, so far as anyone could tell, for throwing watermelon rinds at. Seven years ago, give a few months, when he was only nine, Jolly had formed the simple plot in his mind—a plot that he had dogged through to its end, even after the chances for its success had waned, because one does such things for one’s father no matter how great a stranger that person is.
Jolly had wandered in from warming his plan in the morning air to ask his mother again. Maybe, he reasoned, if he asked her often enough, and directly, she would one day answer him directly before it was too late. He found her in the kitchen of the tiny house where he and she still lived, but now without Nell Ann, who that day sat cross-legged on a kitchen stool chattering and watching their mother work.
He had approached the kitchen door, silently forming the question he must have an answer to.
“Mama?” The word rose at the end like a question mark. “When’s Memor’l Day coming?”
“Jolly-Bo, I told you before, it won’t be long. Mercy, Nell Ann,” she clucked to Jolly’s sister, “I never
saw
a child so taken by Memorial Day.”
“I know, Mother. He’s more looking forward to that than his birthday. And them both not two weeks apart.”
Jolly leaned, one bare foot atop the other, against the doorway of the kitchen. His attention alternated between listening to his mother and Nell Ann visit and the purply-white, fat turnip he had been frugally chewing since breakfast. He had learned some time long ago—or had been born with the knowledge—that if you used just your front teeth and scraped on a turnip or an apple it would last pretty nearly till the next meal. Only mostly his mother made him throw it away before he had finished, because he had used it for a number of other things, like ballast for his dump truck. It was a mystery to him why Mama wouldn’t allow anybody to eat
anything
that she figured to be dirty, even if it had only just been dropped accidentally on the floor and then picked up right quick.
Nell Ann uncrossed her plump silk legs. She said, “Can’t you think of
nothing
you want for your birthday, Jolly?”
Jolly thought wildly and squinted at the turnip. He screwed up his eyes so they would know he was really trying. But he could not think of anything. “No’m,” he said.
Mama detoured enough from her path between the four-legged electric stove and the kitchen table to rough her hand over Jolly’s forehead and sweep back the sheaf of straw that hung there above his eyes. “Laws, I’ll hafta cut your hair today if I can find time. Tomorra sure,” she said and then passed on, her attention on the pot of turnips that sat among the faded yellow flowers of the oilcloth-topped table.
“You sure, Jolly?”
He watched the smoke from his sister’s cigarette coil up until it spread out flat on the yellow ceiling and writhed among the electric cords that fed from the multiple outlets in the center—from which hung a bare bulb operated by a knotted string—and then looped away in several directions like black snakes after a winter’s sleep.
The ceiling wasn’t very high in this kitchen, not like in the big house out on the ranch where they had lived until last year. Living in Cortez had been exciting at first, especially in the winter when a person could slide so much better on the frozen cement hills. But now that summer was coming, Jolly missed the country where people didn’t have to wear shoes every day if they didn’t want to, and there weren’t any sidewalks to burn your feet if you did go barefooted. There were a lot of other things he thought about some, too. He even missed the cows that chased him relentlessly. And the swamp and mulberries and Pekoe. He still didn’t have it clear in his mind what they had done with Pekoe when they moved. Jolly imagined he was probably still sitting on the front porch steps out there, thumping his shaggy tail, with that sort of grin on his face just as he always had when Jolly came from school.
“Jolly, I’m talking to you!”
“Yes’m. I mean, no’m—I can’t think of anything.” He didn’t like it when Nell Ann got up her bossy voice. He added, “I told you already.”
“Mother, he’s not even listening!”
“I am so! I want a racer bike with hand brakes and those skinny tires and a light and a horn and costs a hunnerd dollars.”
“Joll,” warned Mama, low. He knew he’d better be clearing out. As long as Mama said Jolly-Bo he had nothing to worry about. Sometimes still, in the evening when supper dishes were done and he sat by her rocker and read while she darned socks, her glasses riding low on her nose, she would call him Jolly-Bo-Bik’m-Bak’m. But the shorter the name became, the more serious. When she got all the way down to Joll then it was time to clear out before she started going the other way towards his full real name. Next it would be Jolliff or Jolliff Harrison, which was serious, but when she got to the whole thing—Jolliff Harrison Osment—it was too late.
“OK, I’m going outside.”
“Where you going?”
“Nowhere. Just out front.”
Mama’s attention was already shoved between the boiling pot on the stove and its lid held above her head like one steaming cymbal as she bent to peer at the greens.
Jolly scuffed the distance down the dirt path between the two tired pines to the sidewalk. He sat on the curb with his feet drawn up close under him and studied the turnip. He wished somebody would explain, plainly, how long away Memorial Day was. Oh, he knew it was at the end of May, and that this was May. He could read that on the calendar. But that wasn’t the same as somebody telling you,
explaining
how long.
He scraped some more on the turnip and picked up a red ant between his thumb and finger, hard, as Jamie had shown him when they were still all together in the country. He dropped the ant onto an oily spot between his feet and bent over, his straw hair hanging down like a broom. Satisfied with the extent of its mutilation, he squashed it into the oil with his bare heel. He replaced his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands with the turnip just resting against his left ear. He wondered for the thousandth time why, when you put something under your chin—like your hands or a table—your head moved up and down when you chewed.
Jolly had been pondering Memorial Day nearly ever since they had moved to town eight months before. He knew what the day was for; it was for memorying the dead. He was going to visit the graveyard this Memorial Day, alone. His mother had gone out there two or three times when she had some fitting roses or stock and someone to drive her. Jolly was waiting to make a special trip, and it had to be on Memorial Day. That was why it was so important that he know exactly the right day. If he wasn’t careful, nobody would tell him when the day came and then the whole plan would be wrecked.
He knew the road to the graveyard, although he had been there but once, nearly two years ago. He would have to walk all the way, but hadn’t he walked four miles every day since first grade? And more, if you counted playing. He pictured the graveyard in his mind and was glad he hadn’t forgotten more; but then, he didn’t remember it all either. The black cars he remembered, all the people he had never seen before, and more surprising, a lot right from the country where they had lived then. Flowers—those were what he had liked best—more flowers and bigger than Mama had ever had. Before the black cars there had been a man singing in the white dark house, a house here in Cortez somewhere, bigger than any he had ever seen before or since.