Nathan burst out laughing.
He laughed and then he laughed some more.
He kicked and stomped his foot and threw his head all around.
Ruby patted his back and said: “That’s right, Nathan—the preacher said your name on the radio. I told you he would. I told you—since you sent him that five dollars.”
Nathan sat at the table and he didn’t even moan or groan. He sat listening to the rest of the radio preacher with this mischievous look on his face. For a moment I thought to myself that I didn’t know whether he believed or not. He believed in six-packs poured into feeding tubes. I didn’t know whether he believed in heaven and faith and souls flying high into the sky and the good lord above, or if at the end of the day, all he wanted was to just hear his name on the radio.
Then I saw a look in his eyes like he was famous now.
He had a look in his eye like he was just days away from hanging out with movie stars and having sex with supermodels. He was famous now and he wouldn’t ever wear teddy bear sweatshirts anymore. He was best friends with the most famous person in the whole fucking world. He was best friends with God.
So later that night, I rolled him into the living room. He sat and watched the preacher Bennie Hinn on the television. I sat down and watched it with him too. Bennie Hinn had his comb over and he was dressed in a white suit. He brought out this little girl with leg braces on. He asked her how old she was and she told him nine years old.
She was halfway crying, and so Benny Hinn crouched down on a knee and talked to her and he told her she was a beautiful little girl and that the lord loved her and Benny Hinn loved her.
He told her that the lord would come one day and get all of us and we wouldn’t have to worry about these bodies.
So Nathan threw his hands up in the air like he always did, which meant
when I die just throw me in the backyard and let the raccoons have me
.
He laughed and watched Bennie Hinn start praying overtop of the little girl.
He threw his hands up again, saying
ahhhh
.
That’s right, when I die just throw my body in the backyard.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nathan sitting there.
His head was bowed and he was praying.
And then he was giggling.
He was still giggling later that night when Ruby put him to bed.
I thought,
My god, she treats him like a child. He’s an old man, but she’d still breast feed him if she could.
Then I went into the other room and read as Ruby tucked him in.
“Yeah that’s right, Nathan, everybody’s praying for the little girl,” she said.
Nathan held his finger up above his head and wiggled it around because the good lord was coming for us soon and would take away these piece of shit bodies.
“That’s right, Nathan,” Ruby said. “The lord’s coming soon. And he sent little Scott to look over us.”
Then she tucked him in and kissed him goodnight and turned out the light until it was only the black ass country dark surrounding us.
Then he giggled a giggle like he knew something we didn’t know.
He giggled a giggle because we were all a bunch of freaks.
He giggled a giggle because he knew we were the crippled ones.
Then he got a look on his face like he was thinking about something sad. It was like he was thinking about graveyards again.
GRAVEYARDS
I didn’t even want to go to the graveyard, but Ruby told me I had to. She was giving my Uncle Stanley hell about it for weeks until he finally said: “Oh shit, Mother. That old road up there is rough as hell. What are we going to do if I get my truck stuck up?” My Uncle Stanley just lived down the road so he always had to take us places.
But she kept going on and on about it, saying: “Oh lordie, I’d like to go to the cemetery. I don’t know when I’ll get back up there.”
She told us there was a grave up there she wanted to put flowers on.
There was a grave up there she needed to see before she died.
My Uncle Stanley finally gave in. He picked up some plastic flowers from the dollar store and drove her up to the graveyard in his truck. He drove down into Prince and we listened to the radio—99.5 The Big Dawg in country.
Lord have mercy, baby’s got her blue jeans on.
We drove through the places where Ruby had given birth to babies in shacks that no longer stood, and where my grandfather sold moonshine. We gunned it up Backus Mountain with my Uncle Nathan, sitting in the back of the truck trying to hang on with his palsy legs. Then we finally pulled up the hill and into the Goddard graveyard.
Stanley stopped the truck and on top of the cow paddy hill we got out.
He said: “Damn it’s bad enough being buried up here, let alone having to come up here when you’re still alive.”
But my grandma wouldn’t listen to him and started walking through the grass. I remembered to watch my step because my Uncle Larry stepped in cow shit one time up here when he was wearing flip flops.
I told Ruby I didn’t like graveyards. She told me it didn’t matter.
Even though I was only 14 years old there was no telling when the angel of death might come to get my ass.
I stepped over a big fossilized cow paddy and then I stepped over another as Uncle Nathan laughed at us from the truck.
Earlier that day she fed me peanut butter fudge she made and told me nothing lasts.
Now we walked past the graves of all the people she knew.
There was Grandmommy Goddard and Daddy Goddard and Great Grandmommy Goddard and Virginia Goddard.
And there was her Aunt Mag Goddard who starved herself to death. Ruby stood in front of the grave and said, “No one knows why. She just locked herself in her room and starved herself to death.”
Then there were other graves and she started walking through them.
She said: “I don’t think they’ve been mowing it very nice out here.”
Then she stopped in front of one.
I asked her if it was her mother.
And Grandma said, “Yeah that’s Mommy. The day of the funeral they tried putting her in the ground facing the west. I just hollered and carried on ’cause she was facing the wrong way for the resurrection.”
Then she was quiet and smiled a gummy grin.
Then she walked on.
“Oh look at all the little graves,” she said, walking past the grave of her uncle.
She turned to it and said, “They had to bury him on his stomach. He always said he never could sleep on his back. So he had them bury him on his stomach.”
Then she said she never could sleep on her back either.
She had me pull away some tall grass from the graves.
She said that it seemed like all there was to do anymore was die. That’s all people did in this day and age. She said she couldn’t even get the ambulance to pick her up anymore when she needed them. Of course, I knew that they stopped coming because she called everyday claiming she was dying. When they got her into the ambulance, it seemed like she was always feeling better and just needed them to take her down to Roger’s and get a gallon of milk. Finally one of the ambulance people told her: “Now Miss Ruby, you call us when you’re having an emergency, not just when Nathan runs out of 7UP. The tax payers can’t be paying for your trips to get Nathan’s 7UP.”
But I didn’t say anything about it. She walked away from the graves and I noticed all the tiny plots beside her mother’s grave. There was a grave here and then there was a grave there—the stones all broken off and covered up by the grass.
“Whose graves are these?” I asked and then I wondered. “Why all these little graves?”
I knew the answer. They were baby graves.
I walked away, looking at the end where Ruby was.
And I thought about her own mother losing baby after baby after baby after baby after baby and still going on—surrounded by the graves of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who never were. They were in this ground—all this great big lump of flesh we call earth.
I had even looked in the back of Ruby’s mother’s Bible with all of it written in the back. There was a date and then—baby died. There was a date and then—baby died. There was a date and then—girl baby died.
So I said, “You want me to put the flowers down here? Are these the graves you wanted to see?”
But Grandma just shook her head.
She pointed to a couple of graves at the edge of the mountain and said, “That’s where I want to put them.”
I thought,
THANK GOD
.
Ruby moved her walker and started moving closer to the graves, past the grave of her own little baby who died, and then past her husband, my grandfather Elgie who died of his fifth heart attack when I was three.
I heard my Uncle Stanley from far over at the edge of the field say: “Daddy would have shit himself if he knew you put him up here with all these goddamn Goddards.”
Ruby got mean and said: “Well I figured I wanted him where I wanted him. And I put him where I put him.”
She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
She said: “This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave.”
I asked: “Whose grave is it?”
I walked in front of the stone and I saw it was her grave. It was the grave of Ruby Irene McClanahan, born 1917 died…
Then there was a blank space—the space where they would put the date of her death.
She touched the shiny stone and explained how Wallace and Wallace gave her a really good deal on the tombstone. She told me I should start saving. It was a good investment.
So Grandma pointed to the grave and finally told me to put the flowers down. And that’s just what I did. I put the flowers down on my grandmother’s grave. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a camera.
She said: “Well come on now, Todd. You want to have your pictures taken by Grandma’s grave?” I told her for the thousandth time. “My name’s not Todd, Grandma. My name’s Scott.”
My Uncle Stanley shouted at her: “Ah hell, Mother. Just leave him alone. He doesn’t want to touch your grave.”
Then she started in on my Uncle Nathan who was still sitting in the back of the truck. “Hey Nathan. You want to come and sit in front of Mother’s grave? It’s a pretty thing.”
Nathan just sat in the back of the truck and shook his head like:
Fuck no
.
I finally gave in and Grandma took my picture next to her grave.
Then she waddled over to the side of the shiny marble tombstone and I took her picture.
I looked through the camera and all I could see was my Grandma Ruby standing beside her stone.
Ruby Irene McClanahan
Born 1917. And then the blank space.
Here was the date of her birth, and the date of her death, which we didn’t know yet, but which we passed each year without knowing.
So I got ready to take the picture and I saw her smile.
I saw the graves filling up all around her and I saw how Grandma would be here beneath it one day and then Nathan and then one day Stanley, and then one day… me. So I saw her whisper, “Oh lordie,” and claim she was dying like she always did.
I wished we were already back at home so I could eat some more peanut butter fudge. Nothing lasts.
I snapped the picture and it was like she was already gone.
It was like I saw that she was dying right then—real slow—and she knew the secret sound. It’s a sound that all of us hear. It’s a sound that sounds like this.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
AND NOW A MOMENT TO ONCE AGAIN
REMEMBER THE THEME OF THIS BOOK.
The theme of this book is a sound. It goes like this:
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick
. It’s the sound you’re hearing now, and it’s one of the saddest sounds in the world.
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK
That’s all I could hear from the big RC COLA clock a few weeks later.
Tick
,
tick
,
tick
,
tick
,
tick
. We sat in her kitchen and Ruby flipped to this picture of a guy who looked like he was sleeping. Then she grinned without her teeth in and showed me another picture of a guy who looked like he was sleeping too. She showed me another and then another. I thought,
Why are all these people sleeping?
She ran her fingers over the picture and I realized… That guy is not sleeping.
THAT GUY’S DEAD.
So I looked closer at the man in the picture and I saw that his face was all sunken and his hands were folded across his chest. Beneath his hands there was a little pocket Bible. He was dead all right. Dead as hell. So Ruby started telling me the story about him.
She started telling me about how he was my grandpa Elgie’s brother and how he was running around with some guy’s wife in Beckley.
Then she told me about how one day he was with the wife when the husband came home.
I guess the husband knew something was going on, but before Elgie’s brother could get his pants up—the husband picked up a block of firewood and beat Elgie’s brother to death with it. Ruby said you should never take your pants completely off if you’re engaging in infidelity just in case you need to make a quick getaway. I agreed. So Ruby took a picture of him at his funeral and then she turned to the back of the photo which had his death date on it—7/8/52.
Then she turned to another picture and it was yet another picture of a dead person. It was an old woman (her Aunt Mag) with one of those made-up funeral home faces. And what was funny about this one was that there was a man posing for the picture by the dead body. He was smiling.