Thirteen
T
HE BUICK WAS SUNK to the bumpers in black mud. A D-9 Caterpillar couldn't have pulled it out of that muck, von Guericke's vacuum principle being what it is, implacable, and in another day or so the car would be swallowed whole by the earth. Leet's scouts had not yet found it and the windshield was clear of leaflets. I could see inside that a disgusting mound of living mud had forced its way up through the floor hole.
We walked on to the Mayan ruin, our trouser legs wet with dew and picking up grass seeds along the way. We were sore from sleeping on the ground and our faces and hands were blotchy with mosquito bites. I led the way. We kept our earlymorning thoughts to ourselves. Victor carried a rock that was coated with dark green moss on one side. He wouldn't answer any questions about it, wouldn't say what his plans were for the rock. He just kept shifting it from hand to hand as his clenching fingers grew tired.
Our approach to the ruin was in no way noisy or alarming but neither was it stealthy enough to permit us a glimpse of the third brother. He had already flown to his hiding place. The other two were as merry as ever at the prospect of another full day in the brush. They greeted us with shouts of laughter and they gave us some coffee and tortillas and canned white lard from their meager stores. We spread the lard on the tortillas.
After breakfast we toured the ruin. They pulled a stone from the pyramid and showed me their hidden cache of figurines and other artifacts, but they wouldn't let me handle the objects. Then they pointed to the tire ruts in the soft earth and they acted out a car blasting through the clearing, each in his own way, in a kind of motor dance. A drunken Popo, I suggested, but they indicated that Popo's rig was much smaller and slower than the phantom machine. They asked me for cigarettes again and I gave them some of the money I had taken from Ruth's shoe box. They got out their E bonds and I thought at first they were trying to give them back to me. They went to the cache and brought back an incised monkey skull to add to the bonds. Finally I got the drift. They wanted to exchange these things for a little nine-volt radio battery. Of course I had no battery and I gave them the rest of my money and accepted the skull. We shook hands all around.
Victor and Webster were dozing in the grass. I got them on their feet and we walked another two miles or so before we caught a ride in a pickup truck. The driver was an American, a hippie-looking fellow but rugged too at the same time, a pioneer. We rode in the back with the milk cans, our rigid limbs splayed out in all directions to provide support.
We got out at the market in Belize. The air was moist and very still. Webster treated us to some Pepsi-Colas at the Chinaman's store and I was a little surprised at this because most children are close with their money. Mr. Wu himself was indisposed, or maybe around the corner making a deposit at Barclays Bank, under that heraldic black eagle sign, or maybe he was just sleeping in. His mother or wife or sister was running the store. The firemen were at their table and I said to myself, Things are happening all over and they go on drinking their coffee. As long as it isn't a fire, they don't care.
Webster left for his hotel duties. Victor and I walked on to the tabernacle. Christine's van was parked in front of the place and so was Father Jackie's jeep. I knew Christine would have some sharp words for me when she saw her son's swollen face.
The door was open but no one seemed to be about. The chapel was in disarray. Some of the borrowed chairs were overturned and the floor was littered with flat scraps of paper that would be hard to sweep up. The movie projector was still on the table uncased, the lenses unprotected from drifting bits of lint that would take on a hairy, jerky life when magnified and illuminated.
We went upstairs. Christine had moved her bags in and there by the door to the doctor's room was his pebbly grip, all packed. More suitcase facts. The breakfast or supper dishes were still on the table. I couldn't understand the sudden housekeeping decline. I stood there and thoughtfully ate some cold black beans from a bowl. I was eating at every opportunity. Victor curled up in Melba's chair. His chin glistened with lard. Christine probably wasn't much of a cook. The lard tortillas had been perfectly acceptable to him.
I roused him and we went back downstairs and then we heard voices from behind the movie screen. There was a door in the rear wall that opened into a yard and it was there we found themâDr. Symes and Melba and Christine and Father Jackie. But where was Mrs. Symes?
This backyard was a nook I had not known about, a small fenced area with crushed white shells on the ground. Roses grew along the board fence and there were chairs made from rough sticks and leather straps, although there was none for me. Under the roof drain there was a rain barrel, to catch soft water for hair-washing. The place was no doubt intended as a meditation spot, a private retreat, but on this occasion everyone was eating watermelon. Dr. Symes used salt. He couldn't see the fine white grains as they dribbled from the shaker and he bounced them off the back of his hand so as to gain some idea of the rate of flow. The flesh of the watermelon was orange instead of red.
Victor went at once to Christine's lap. The rock was a gift for her. She said, “Hey, a super mossy!” and she looked it over and then put it aside and began to pick bits of dirt and gravel from Victor's hair. She had no words at all for me and no one was curious about our adventures because of a grave development that overshadowed such things. Far from being a luau, this was a wake!
Mrs. Symes had suffered a stroke and, I gathered, had died during the night. Dr. Symes and Christine had taken her to the hospital in the van, and had stayed there with her until they were told there was no hope. I couldn't believe it. A person I knew. Here one day and gone the next. An old enough story but it never fails to knock me for a loop. Then I get over it about as fast as anyone else and very soon I am able to carry on again. Melba cut me a section of watermelon and I sat on the rough shells and ate it with my fingers.
Father Jackie, who had a strong nasal voice, was doing most of the talking. He said, “She drank far too much ice water but you couldn't tell her anything.”
Dr. Symes shifted his weight about on the sagging leather straps. He was fully dressed, even to the hat and bow tie and flashlight. On the ground beside his chair there was an old-fashioned steel lockbox, of a dark green color. He wiped his sticky hands on his white trousers. I could see he was impatient with Father Jackie's lay opinion, with the notion that cold water could cause death or even serious illness. He had been holding his mother's aluminum cane between his knees and now he began to rotate it rapidly back and forth between his open hands, like a scout trying to make fire. All this in preparation for an important statement.
Before he could get it out, Father Jackie said, “I know one thing. There was nothing on this earth that Meemaw was afraid of.”
“She was afraid of hurricanes,” said Melba. “Waterspouts. Any strong wind or black rain from the south. That little cloud right up there would make her uneasy. She was afraid that bits of flying glass would cut her neck.”
Father Jackie told a story about a trip he had taken with Mrs. Symes to a place called Orange Walk. They had gone in his jeep to attend a sale or an auction of some kind at a bankrupt ranch. Throughout that day he had played various good-natured tricks on her, some of which she turned back on him to good effect. It was an interesting story, if a little long, full of lively incident illustrating different aspects of the old lady's character.
What part of the U.S.A. did Father Jackie hail from? I wrestled with this problem and couldn't work it out. He talked on and on. A theory formed in my head on the origin of his nasal tones. It was this. When he was a small child, his prankster fatherâa bitter man, jealous of the boy's promiseâhad taught him to speak in this fashion, taught him to honk, to recite, “The three lintle kintons they lost their mintons and they began to cry,” thus fixing the habit early and assuring his failure in the world, the boot from every job, even street attacks. But was that really probable? Wasn't it more likely that this was just a kind of pulpit whine that was taught in his particular seminary?
The Orange Walk story was a pretty good one, as I say, and when it was over, Christine laughed and squeezed his knee in an intimate way and said, “You stinker you!” One of his knees showed through the parting of the brown robe. He reached over and plucked a shiny coin from Victor's ear and said, “My goonness, what's this?” But the boy was in a stupor again, his mouth ajar, and the illusion did not delight him.
Dr. Symes saw his chance and got his statement out. He said, “I don't know what the poets of Belize are doing this morning but I can tell you what they should be doing. They should all be in their little rooms composing memorials to that grand lady.”
A large speckled insect flew slowly about before our faces, going in turn from one speaker to the next as though listening. Melba slapped at it ineffectually. She asked me if I had a camera. I said no and then she asked Dr. Symes. “I sure don't,” he said. “Marvel used to have a little box camera but I myself have never owned one. I have never personally photographed anything in my life. Why do you ask such a question?”
“I thought it would be nice to have our picture taken out here with the roses and then later we could look at it and say, Yes, I remember that day.”
Dr. Symes said the last time he had his picture made was in California. It was for his driver's license and they wouldn't let him wear his hat. “Don't ask me why. It's just some rule they have. No hats and no caps. They've got a million rules in California and that just happens to be one of them.” He shook his head and laughed at the memory of the bizarre place.
Melba said, “If it's your own hat, I don't see why you couldn't wear it if you wanted to.”
“I don't either, Melba, but you can't. I've seen plenty of good pictures of people wearing hats. Some of the finest pictures I've ever seen have been of people with their hats on. All I'm saying is that it's forbidden in California.”
Father Jackie said he had a 35-millimeter camera at his cottage. But this was just by way of information and he made no move to go and get it. Christine said that her former husband, Dean, had a number of expensive cameras and that his favorite subject was his watch-repair tools. He would arrange the tiny instruments on a green cloth and photograph them from atop a stepladder, the challenge being to capture all the tools with a minimum of distortion. She was not allowed in the room while he was doing this but afterward he would show her the finished prints and ask her which one she liked best. After she had left Dean and moved to Mesa, she said, he annoyed her by prowling outside her apartment at night and shining different kinds of lights through her windows. I don't know whether she meant lights of different intensities or lights of different colors because all she said was “different kinds of lights.”
Father Jackie asked Melba if she wanted him to arrange for death notices in the local papers and the New Orleans papers.
“Let's hold up on that,” said the doctor. “We don't want to rush into this thing.”
“I'll be glad to type up a full obituary if you'll give me the information. I'll tell you right now, these newspapers will just throw your stuff in the wastebasket if it's not wrinten up on a typewriner. I found that out from wrining lenners to the ennitor.”
The doctor said, “Just hold up on that, if you will, my friend. You can do what you please at this end, but I have already told Melba that I will handle the Louisiana end. I will make all the notifications that need to be made. Do you understand what I'm telling you?”
“It's no trouble, I assure you.”
“I appreciate that and I appreciate your concern but I want you to leave that part of it alone.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Fine, fine. That's what I say.”
Dr. Symes then told Melba that he didn't like the idea of his mother being buried here in this Honduras mud, so far from her real home in Louisiana where Otho lay. Melba said it was a question of a person's wishes. Mrs. Symes had insisted on burial in the Belize cemetery with the pirates and drowned children and nameless wanderers, and a person's last wishes, when reasonable, had to be respected. She had not insisted on one of those simple funerals that cause everybody so much trouble, but there were one or two special requests. Her age, for instance. She was sensitive about her age and didn't want a date of birth inscribed on her tombstone. So be it. Melba intended to see that all of Nell's reasonable wishes were carried out.
The doctor made no strong protest. “Very well,” he said. “I leave it in your hands, Melba. I know you'll do the right thing. Whatever you decide to do will just tickle me to death.”
“I don't see why you can't stay for the funeral.”
“You know I would if I could. We can't always do what we'd like to do, Melba. I'm needed in Ferriday now and it's a trip I can't put off. It's imperative that I be on the ground there personally. I won't be missed here anyway. There'll be so many mourners at the service that you'll have to put up loudspeakers outside the chapel. And all around the altar, just beaucooz of beautiful flowers. I'd give anything if I could see that lovely floral display, or just one glistening tear in the eye of some small child whose heart Mama had touched.”
They had already been over this ground, I could tell. Melba sent me to the market for a second watermelon and when I came back they were discussing very frankly the disposal of Mrs. Symes's property. Melba had been a witness to the will and she knew the terms. It was clear that she and the doctor had already chewed over this matter too, and were returning to it now for mere secondary comment. Even so, I was able to get the picture and it was a bleak one for Dr. Symes. His mother had left him nothing. Nothing, that is, except for the green lockbox, which contained a poem she had written about a hurricane, of some three hundred-odd verses. The tabernacle went to Melba, and certain sums of money to the girl Elizabeth and to a cabdriver and handyman named Rex. The rest of the estate went to Mrs. Symes's great-granddaughter, Rae Lynn Symes, who was Ivo's daughter. It was a handsome settlement and was to be used to further the girl's music education.