In Memory of Junior (15 page)

“Bring the boy, too,” he says.

Right here is where Dud starts in with this low moan. I say, “Let's go, Dud, I don't think we have no choice,” and he goes, “Ahhhhh ahhhhh.”

We get inside and sit down in a booth. Dud's shaking like something's got a hold of him. Louise, the waitress—I knew her—drops a wet rag in front of him and says, “Push that around a minute, honey. I'll be right back.”

He puts his hand on the rag, looks up at her walking away, and he's as white as a sheet, and his head falls right over onto that wet rag. Out. Then in a few seconds his head comes back up. He looks at the man in the overcoat. His head goes over again.

“What the
hell
is wrong with him?” the man asks me. He's across the table from us.

“I don't know,” I say. “I guess he fainted.”

A couple of people have noticed.

Dud's head comes back up. He looks at me, desperate-like. See, when your head falls over, the blood to your brain brings you back around. If your head's propped up, you stay out.

“Hold on a minute, Dud,” I said. But he's gone again. If that rag hadn't been there he'd a hurt hisself, sure.

A
lot
of people have noticed by now.

Dud is up again.

“Next time,” says the man, “prop his head up so he'll stay out, goddammit. This is ridiculous.” Something like that.

Dud straightens up. Starts back down. I catch him and sort of prop his head back in the corner of the booth and finish wiping off the table.

Louise comes with her order pad out, looks at Dud, leaning back, out, and she says, “What'll it be?”

“Steaks,” says the man.

“Is he okay?” she says to me.

“Yeah. He's napping.”

“What kind of steaks?”

“T-bone.”

“How you want them done?”

“Rare for me,” says the man.

“Medium,” I say. “And he likes his well-done.”

When Louise left the man whispers to me pretty direct and sincere, you know what I mean, he whispers, “This is making a goddamn scene. We don't need a goddamn scene, Grove. Wake the boy up, get him outside and around back. My boys will watch him.”

I didn't think that was a very good idea. This man hadn't even told me his name yet. “Let's get him some horseradish to nibble on,” I said. “That'll keep him awake and, you know, looking normal. I think that'll cause less trouble than taking him around back. This is his first run.” Hell, I didn't know if horseradish would work. But I just walked back in the kitchen and got some.

It worked. Brought him out of the fainting, but not the shaking. The steaks came and we ate them—except Dud didn't eat much—and by that time the truck was back, loaded, with what turned out to be pure alcohol, not whiskey. These boys had stole it from the U.S. government and if I'd got caught, I'd still be in jail.

We brought it all the way back down to Darien, Georgia. Dud stopped shaking somewhere in Tennessee.

It all worked out fine. Yeah, it worked out fine. We unloaded and me and Dud washed her down. And in the end, as per normal, I got two dollars a mile for the whole trip. And this was in 1936.

Uncle Faison left after this long story Uncle Grove told. Man he's been through a lot. He's a good storyteller. He makes these really old stories seem like they just happened—right outside somewhere. But he's a little crazy, too. I can see why Uncle Faison ran away to go live with him.

Dad was talking on the phone to the funeral home, and then somebody else, then to this lawyer. Uncle Grove was watching “60 Minutes.” This grave-digging stuff had to be some kind of joke or something. But I figured he could do whatever he wanted to. The footstone had his name on it. He said he mailed it to Dad and Uncle Faison. I don't know what he's going to do, but I hadn't told because I promised him I wouldn't. We like shook on it.

I cleaned up the dishes and stuff in the kitchen. I didn't know what to put the cabbage in. I put it in this bowl and put a little plate on top for a cover. I loaded the dishwasher, put in the detergent, and when I came back in Dad was off the phone and Uncle Grove was talking about bird hunting—all this stuff about watching a dog work and all. Then he said he wanted to tell me about this gun I was going to get. Then he went into this stuff about somebody named Ross shooting a hole in the wall with it one time. Then he said, “We let that nigger have it to—”

I flashed. He said it before and I hadn't said anything about it. “They are not ‘niggers.' They are people,” I said. “They are African-Americans.”

“I call them niggers,” he said. And he goes right ahead. He wouldn't pay any attention if he didn't want to. Sometimes
he would look right at me and call me by name and all this, and then next time around if I like said something he didn't want to hear, he'd ignore me.

He was telling about somebody tearing up a liquor still close to their house when he was a little boy. He explained where it was. He explains by pointing to where this place was, then runs his finger along an imaginary road and points, like there's a little map right there in front of you. He'll say, Our house set back here, and here's the old road coming, turned down here, and went around here, come right back in down here by the old barn. Right across old man Fernigan's place and right over there is the still. He calls this man a “nigger” but Dad doesn't say a thing. His name was Shaw and Uncle Grove said he could “call out weights. Ten eggs is a pound; pound of wheat flour is a quart.” Such as that. He said he used to take a fertilizer sack and wash it, clean it good, cut holes in it, and like that's what his children used for clothes.

And we give that nigger that gun. I think he had six shells. And he didn't go down the barn path. He walked right straight across the field. And he wadn't gone ten minutes when we heard that shooting over there. If he'd had that rifle or buckshot, he'd killed every one of them.

And he come back in the night, with the shotgun, right when we were eating supper. You always worked till dark. Then you eat after dark. He put the gun back up over the
door and sat down right there at the door, kind of listening out the door and he told us the whole story about how he got in there close and shot one in the chest with bird shot and then backed out of there, a tree at a time, shooting.

And he had two trickles of dried blood down the side of his head.

When we finished eating, Papa got up, walked over and more or less inspected his head, then had him sit down at the table, put his hands down by his side, and rest his head on a rolled-up coat.

Papa made us all sit along by the wall. Oh, I can see it now. That light from the oil lamps on the wall and the one Papa had Mama to hold right up over Shaw's head.

And Papa pared that skin with his pocket knife and picked out two buckshot, one just above his ear and one right back here. Picked them out. Yeah, it wadn't completely gone, you know what I mean. Just under the skin, see. They were shot from too far off to go on through that skull of his, and the rest of the shot hit that gun stock. There was just two shots hit him, and I believe there was one in his hand. Three hit him altogether. The one in his hand went in too deep to mess with. And I can see him at that table right now as clear as if it was yesterday.

So, I said to Junior—to Morgan, I mean—that's the gun you're gone get because these boys will get it when I go my way and you're the next one in line. It's a good old gun—a lot of history around it.

The boy was all agitated about what people called each other back then. That's what they get in the public schools. I told him about after I got grown coming across this same Shaw when he was a old man, just as white-headed
as a ball of cotton, and I was with Clarence Turner and Clarence said, “Mr. Shaw, you know who this is?” and he looked at me, and Clarence said, “It's Grove McCord, Uncle Tad's boy,” and I want you to know that old nigger hugged me, and cried like I was one of his own. He sure did. Aw, we were good to each other back in those days. Nothing but good to each other. Now, back when they had the slaves, I can't say nothing about that. But I don't care what they say, you got your niggers, and you got your poor white trash, and then too, you got people with good hearts, all colors, and people like me, who try anyway. And you know, whatever you leave behind is your history, and it better be good, because you're history longer than you're fact.

I drove up to the funeral home to see what the hell was going on about the autopsies. If they didn't have them right away then it wouldn't do no good.

It all fell apart.

I know Mr. Simmons, the main man up at the funeral home, so I figured he'd let me know about any investigation, if one had been started. Drew had laid the groundwork on the thing and I didn't want to bug him anymore. For all I knew, they had already done the autopsies, and knew which one died first, which I had to find out so as to, you know, get the lay of the land—as you might say.

When I got up there, Mr. Simmons said a couple of men were in with the bodies. I waited. When they come out I introduced myself and all that and told them I was
concerned, what could they tell me. They said they were looking for some kind of probable cause of foul play, or something like that.

We're standing in the hall outside the door to the room where the bodies are, and all of a sudden with her coattails all flying out behind her, who comes sashaying up but—yeah, right—Faye.

“What's going on, Faison?” she says to me, like these guys weren't even standing there. And she had fire in her eyes like . . . like a mad dog.

“I don't know,” I said, telling the honest truth.

These two men start to walk off.

“Just a minute,” she says, and they stop.

She introduces herself to these guys, sticks out her hand, and her voice is shaking. “Please don't go anywhere,” she says to them, then she turns on me. “I know what you're doing, Faison Bales, and you can call the whole thing off. There will be no autopsy—over my dead body there will be an autopsy of my mother. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

So I say as calm as I can, “There may have been some foul play involved.” I mean, I figure I got to hold the line now.

“No there wasn't,” she spits out. “I checked that girl out thoroughly before I hired her. I did all that and I've talked to her since last night. Have you?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I didn't want to interrupt no investigation.”

And then, boy, did she do one on me. She was literally shaking all over and she told those guys—I don't know, I guess it was the coroner and an investigator or
somebody—that if there was an autopsy on her mama she would sue the city of Summerlin into the next century and back, and then she hopped on me about being a land-grabbing no good son of a bitch, low-country worm something.

WHOA, I said, you goddamned spruced-up, slick, goddamned I don't know what-all and I told her she wasn't going to get any of my family's land because it won't right for her to come in out of nowhere—especially
Charlotte—
and get it all.

And she said that I didn't have no choice and if I had known the first thing about the law, or if I'd had the decency to come to her, then I wouldn't be
sneaking around
in the funeral home trying to find out who died first.

Now that did kind of run all over me. I felt like choking her. And here is where she laid some very bad or very good news on me. I haven't taken it in, yet. I'll have to talk to our lawyer who ought to have known about this if it's true, but he didn't. This is it: in North Carolina, she said, if two people, like a husband and wife, die within twenty-four hours of each other, then by
law,
get this now, by
law,
they died at the
same time.
Some kind of simultaneous something something. She was spitting that stuff out right and left.

I kept my hands in my pockets. If she had been a man, I'd had him in every corner of that place at one time.

So, anyway, what it all comes down to is that me and Tate don't get the whole place, but it means by god we don't end up empty-handed either.

You would not believe the way that woman looked at me. But I know good and well she would have done the same thing in my shoes. Anybody would.

I mean, look. Now, listen. When I grew up on that place, I was fresh out of a mama, and I worked hard in them fields. My old man was gone all week, every week, and in the late summertimes when Aunt Bette and Aunt Ansie were babying around with Tate on the front porch or some such, I was cropping sand lugs—tobacco. You ever cropped any tobacco? Try it. One day. See how it is. There's not any work that I know about that will touch it as far as worseness is concerned. Multiply that by all the days I did it all day long.

See,
I'm
the one got the shit jobs. Tate was a precious little thing. They protected him. I got the shit jobs. The whole time I was growing up, from the time I was seven on, while my mama was gone and my daddy was away working, and then from twelve to sixteen, while Ma Laura was there giving me a hard time, that farm, friend, that farm got to be my mama and daddy, my brother and sister, and my boss, and I knew every damned inch of it like the back of my hand, and there won't no job on that farm, hard job, that I didn't do, because you see, my granddaddy was getting too old, and my daddy was gone, so I was what you call the man of the place. All the while, my buddies played on baseball teams in the summer and went to Boy Scout camp and all this while I'm doing grub work on that farm, and after I left it all started going downhill. And I by god deserve a piece of it now that it's been more or less freed up. The truth is I deserve it all. That's the truth of the matter. But now who do I share it with? A female Charlotte lawyer and my baby brother.