A Gracious Plenty Read online

  “Can you believe that?” she asked me when we’d known each other for a few weeks. “I don’t even get a stone. My parents have no shame.”

  “They got no money,” I told her.

  “They find money for things that are important,” she replied. “Do you remember when I won the state baton-twirling championship?”

  I shook my head no.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  And she laughed. “Well, anyway, Mama found money to send me to baton classes every day for the month beforehand. Because she wanted me to win. And you’ve seen all the pictures of me in all my dance costumes, haven’t you?”

  “No,” I told her.

  “Oh really? They’re up in the auditorium. I guess they’re still up. Well, anyway, she found money for the pictures because she thought she was going to get a modeling agency to take me on.”

  “I guess they just can’t find money for a tombstone,” I told her. “They’re awful expensive.”

  But I didn’t give a rip about her baton twirling or her tap dancing or her pictures either one. I liked the part of her that left all that. The part of her that changed her name and sliced her beautiful body so it would be more than just beautiful.

  What binds us is the scars. Mine from burns, hers from a knife, and both of us numbed by it.

  The day after her burial, I was picking the dead flowers out of her funeral spray while the Mediator was welcoming Lucille Armour. I wanted to get a peek at the beauty queen anyway, the girl who everybody loved.

  So I worked right above them, plucking through greenery while the Mediator and Lucy sat Indian-style, facing each other on the silky cushions of her coffin.

  “She’s not dead, is she?” Lucy asked the Mediator, and pointed right at me. “That’s why she looks so thick?”

  “Yes,” the Mediator told her, and she was about to explain the way I move in and out of their world when Lucy announced, “She looks like she was skinned alive. What happened to her face?”

  “Burned,” I answered, and smiled at her and went back to my work, cleaning out the carnations.

  Lucy slumped back for a second, cowering in her bed. She looked to the Mediator, who was cutting her eyes up at me.

  “Finch,” the Mediator scolded. “I’ve told you over and over not to speak until I’ve explained the exceptions to the new folks.”

  “Sorry,” I replied.

  Then Lucy said, “Whew. Impressive scarring. Stop by later and I’ll show you mine.”

  “Okay,” I said, wondering what kind of scars beauty queens get. Little blisters from high heels on the backs of ankles?

  And I moved on to trim a boxwood, since I had my clippers out.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the new girl. She didn’t look much like a beauty queen, and I couldn’t figure out why. Usually the Mediator coaxes the body back to its predeath state when she first arrives at the coffin, before she opens it or wakes the person up. It scares a body to wake with holes in the head, with Y incisions stitched haphazardly along the torso after an autopsy. And while the hole in Lucille Armour’s head had been filled in, her hair looked like a rat’s nest. I wondered if there was a problem.

  Later that day, I returned to Lucy’s grave, and I’ve visited her every day since. She’s my first real friend. She doesn’t have a beautiful spot, but I’ve planted a weeping willow. It’s skinny and slumps, but it’s finally growing. I think that in time it may thrive. I sit beneath the new tree and tell her how it will shade her in summer, blanket her in winter, how the leaves will be a canopy for her one day soon.

  “But yesterday, some boys climbed under the fence and broke off the tree I planted behind Hallie McBride. That tree cost me thirty dollars. I ought to find the little fools who broke it and beat ’em with it till the leaves fall off.”

  “Remember your blood pressure,” Lucy jokes, then adds more seriously, “You shouldn’t hate these children.”

  “They hate me. They try to tear up everything I got.”

  “You’ll be sorry,” she says. “When you see the bigger picture, you’ll feel bad.”

  “You hated me, too,” I say, defending myself. “Don’t get self-righteous on me.”

  “Sorry,” she mutters.

  And I get a little sad, and I tell her a thing I don’t much say aloud. “These children—they’re so afraid.”

  Then she tells me a memory: seven years old, in her bathing suit and tap shoes, curly-headed and lean. She had a cardboard box, and inside it, a kitten she couldn’t keep. “Done got two dogs,” her daddy had said. “Find it another home.”

  So Lucy was carrying it down the street, asking everybody she saw if they wanted a kitten.

  When it grew late and nobody had taken the kitten home, she began calling like a circus vendor, “Free kitten, free kitten.”

  And apparently I heard her, though I don’t remember. Lucy says we met near the firehouse, but I have no recollection. She tells me that I asked to see the free kitten, and that I asked her questions about where it came from (the woodpile) and why she couldn’t keep it (her daddy said so). She tells me I asked her name and she told me, and that all the time I was asking questions, she was staring at my shoes.

  That’s what she remembers. My shoes! Red canvas sneakers fading to pink and folded-over blue kneesocks, she says.

  “You remember my feet more than my face?” I ask her.

  “No,” she admits, sheepish. “But, Finch, you can’t blame a child for that. You gotta remember—you look different. Naturally, a child will react. But when you yell, you show them that they’re right to fear you, so they go on fearing and hating people different from them. Now is that what you want?”

  That Lucy. Those words. She’s not always the voice of wisdom, but sometimes she says things just right. And I wish I’d known her sooner, when I could have kissed her face and she could have wiped mine dry.

  I don’t recall the shoes or socks, the cat I took home, or the child Lucille. I’ve worn so many pairs of shoes and fed a thousand strays. But I wish I’d remembered Lucy. Lucy, who dreamed for nights after of my melted face, of kittens that scratched and clawed. Lucy, who hitchhiked to Richmond on graduation night and took a bus to D.C.; who ran from the pageant life and her mama’s instructions, “Just smile!”; who ran from her daddy to men so much worse; who came home in a zippered bag. I wish I’d remembered her.

  Technically, I could be her mother—my body could have done it as surely as Lois Armour’s did. But I’m not her mother, and Lucy was already old when she died. Old like me. Marked like me. Skin raised keloid, the slight purple of slugs. We have so much in common that sharing my voice with her is a natural instinct. I have taken her in.

  And I don’t torment her mother. I whisper one word. Suicide. I whisper it on the street, in the grocery line, at the polls on voting days. Whenever I see her, I say it beneath my breath. Suicide. I say it for Lucy.

  Something is driving Lois Armour crazy, all right. But that something isn’t me.

  I KNOW THE WAY mothers go crazy. I lost Ma that way, my sweet ma, who let herself die over sins she didn’t commit. In the days before my burning, while Papa was tending graves, Ma played with me all the time. We played library, and I got to be the librarian, and Ma was the little girl. We played Singing Sisters, and Ma cut cattails from the ditch, and we put on concerts for the squirrels. She let me help her in the garden. She let me play in the rain. She let me toss my dolls into mud holes, stir them around, and make doll soup.

  She showed me trees to climb and taught me how to climb them. She knew the places to pick grapes and helped me fill my bucket. She took me to the circus and bought me candy cotton. And then one day when she wasn’t looking, she let me burn off my face.

  Ma never recovered from that.

  She kept herself alive for ten years after, but every day was a task. And she cried. My happy ma cried. She touched my cheek and wept like widows and orphans. Even years later, when I was healed, she cried
that way.

  Ma got skinny and distant. She didn’t sit on the porch with me and Papa, and she didn’t talk. She did the laundry and made the beds, kept the garden and cooked the meals, and she never complained. She never left the house anymore, and when Papa would send me on errands, she’d say, “Sam, you can’t send her.” She told me once that I didn’t have to go to school if the children made fun of me. She told me she’d teach me herself.

  And once when I came home hurt by words, insisting that I’d never show my face in public again, Ma pulled out her wedding dress, the dress she’d been saving for me, and she ripped the yellowed tulle and satin, pulling the skirt from the bodice to stitch me veils.

  I swore I’d never wear them.

  In the nights, she’d come to my bed and touch my scars, stroking my skin and crying sometimes. In the end, she couldn’t even cry anymore, and her own fingers were nothing but dust on my cheeks. She died slow, eaten away by her own insides.

  Ma loved me, but she didn’t burn me. And the burns were hard to live with, but not as hard as being left stranded. Sometimes I get so mad, I kick her stone.

  THERE IS WORK required of all who pass away. The Dead control the seasons. Everything depends on them. In June, the Dead tunnel earthworms, crack the shells of bird eggs, poke the croaks from frogs. The ones who died children make play of their work, blowing bugs from weed to weed, aerating fields with their cartwheels. They thump the bees and send them out to pollinate gardenias.

  The ones who died old cue the roosters to crow and dismiss the dawn each morning. They time the tides, give directions to wind. They serve as midwives at animal births and reach out to stroke the dying sun’s head until the rays spread pink and orange across the sky.

  The ones who died strong push the rivers downstream, pull at clouds and keep the sky in motion. They green the grass and tug it taller, grab tree trunks and stretch them upward in tiny bits.

  The ones who died passionate kiss each bud and pinch its base until it pops open, surprised. The ones who died shy string spiderwebs, almost invisible. There’s a job for everybody, on any given day. The Dead are generous with their gifts to the living.

  Unless, of course, they are angry, and then they call the bees away so that nothing will bloom. When they are angry, the Dead catch the rain in their hands, bury it in their pockets, and laugh when the hard ground cracks.

  But for now, it is June. The season is easy. The season is new. The Dead are content today.

  The Dead always have their bodies to fall back on, but if they want to move through walls, they can take the shapes of termites. They can ride a breeze the way a song does. And, contrary to myth, they do not wear their burial garments for all eternity. Who would want to spend eternity in a musty Sunday suit? The Dead, they have some choices. They can wear whatever they like.

  Lucy Armageddon wears tight patched jeans, a suede vest. Her hair stays knotted in light brown dreads—the way she grew it when she rejected pageantry and hot rollers—her face and arms still sunburnt. I watch her summoning clouds from her tombstone. She pauses to wave, and I’m glad her arms are strong. I’m needing a storm.

  I work my way through the cemetery with my weed-eater, speaking to everyone I know. I meet Papa near the riverbank, Papa, who has only been dead for a couple of years. He still carries his smell, sweet and musky, like the deodorant he always wore. The traces of aftershave are fading, but Papa is still distinct to me. If he didn’t turn to air when we hugged, I’d believe he was full-bodied.

  “Where you off to?” I ask him.

  “Gotta peel the skins from snakes today,” he says. “Dangerous work, but somebody’s gotta do it.” And we laugh because the snakes won’t see him at all. They won’t even know he’s been around.

  “Where’s Ma?” I ask. I haven’t seen her much lately.

  “Doing light duty,” he says with a smile. “She’s off to pinken tomatoes in all the gardens. She’s getting so light that nobody much notices her anymore.”

  Ma has been buried almost thirty years. She’s come a long way in that time. We will all be proud for her when she fades.

  Papa asks if I need anything.

  A mess of butter beans for supper, I tell him, if he sees somebody with nothing to do. I try to kiss him good-bye, but as usual, it’s just a gesture, and he is gone.

  When I go to be with the Dead, I feel it like a hazing, like the air before a summer storm, almost like a fog. The world around me opens, loosely woven, spaced for wind to sift through and blow my meanness out. But I never get there completely. I never get there in body. It’s a partial reunion, with no way to really touch them except in my mind.

  THE VEGETABLE MAN is still alive but smokes so hard and coughs so dark that he may not be for long. He comes each week, his rusty truck rattling predictably into the parking lot of the church just two blocks from the gate. Then he blows his horn three times long, two times short, and I can hear it all the way over here, even if I’m at the back of the cemetery, clipping the vines that grow along the fence. When the horn blows, I know that within the hour, the Vegetable Man will be stopping by.

  He visits regularly in summer and fall, though I don’t see him as much come winter. He has a cousin buried here, but most of his people are up in Petersburg.

  I don’t buy from him. He buys from me, at a discount. Sometimes I trade him squash for peas, potatoes for rutabagas or other things I don’t grow.

  “Damn, almighty,” the Vegetable Man says. “Not an ounce of fertilizer, you say?”

  “Not an ounce.”

  My squash plants grow eight feet tall, sometimes ten. The potatoes come thirty to a hill some years. Though the Vegetable Man has seen my garden before, he shakes his head and laughs as he loads up his truck. He is old, with white stubble that never grows to a beard. He’s worn the same boil on the side of his nose for as long as I’ve known him.

  “God have mercy,” he says. “My wife could make drawers out of them squash leaves, and she’s got an ass on her, too.” He laughs and coughs, and bits of the raw turnip he’s been chewing spray into the basket of onions.

  The back of his truck is full of rust and dirt. He’s built a wooden awning over the truck bed, but now the wood is dark and softened, shadowing the vegetables but not offering much protection from rain. The brown paper sacks are held down by a bushel of string beans, a half-bushel of okra. Today he pays me in quarters and crumpled bills, pulling money from every pocket and a greasy five from beneath his hat. He throws in a couple of pears, “to have with your supper,” he says.

  At the store, they’ve stopped selling my vegetables—since Reba Baker took over and made the place a “Christian establishment.” They say it’s unnatural for cucumbers to grow so fast, so long. I ask them what they think fertilizer is. And ain’t nothing never died in their yard? A possum or coon? I’ve been eating my vegetables all my life and couldn’t die if I tried. I tell them that, but the only time they sell what I’ve grown is when the Vegetable Man does it for me, without their knowing.

  “You going to the store?” I ask him.

  “Done been,” he says. “Reba made me swear I hadn’t been up here ’fore she bought anything. Sniffed everything I sold her to see if it stunk of death.”

  “She thinks death stinks, she ought to get a whiff of her breath,” I retort.

  Then the Vegetable Man cackles and shakes his head. “You being nasty, Finch. Reba ain’t that bad.”

  “Maybe what’s bad to you’s different from what’s bad to me,” I say. “But I got no use for Reba Baker. She claims to be Christian, claims to do good and love everybody. But don’t matter how many raffle tickets she sells to help crippled children. Don’t matter. She’s full of hate and venom.”

  “You women fight ugly,” he says as he climbs into the cab of his truck. “I ain’t getting involved. No siree, I’m just gone take these pickins I got from you and sell ’em over at Foxbridge. You ain’t gotta worry. I can sell your vegetables.” He cranks up, and his engi
ne rattles like loose dentures. “See you directly.”

  When he’s gone, I wash off the pears at the outside spigot for fear he’s spit turnips on them, too. I put one in my pocket and bite into the second. It’s sweet, but not as sweet as the ones on the tree next to Ma’s grave.

  A cat I don’t recognize rubs between my ankles, and I pick it up and scratch its ears. It purrs and tries to climb into my mouth, smelling the pear that somebody else grew. Sweet cat. I drop it on the ground and jingle the change in my pocket. Two dollars in silver, three dollars in ones, and an oily five. Money I don’t particularly need. It’s not about money, selling the vegetables. I’d give them away for free. It’s not about money at all.

  I try to imagine the hands that picked these pears. I try to imagine the hands that planted the pear tree that grew the pear I’m eating. I try to imagine the yard that tree is in. Or is it a grove? A graveyard? I try to imagine the Dead who called down the storm that watered that tree that grew the pear that I eat.

  I decide that tomorrow I’ll see Reba myself. I’ll pay her in change and wait while she counts it. If she won’t eat my vegetables, I’ll make her take my money. In one way or another, she’ll handle what I’ve touched.

  THE NEWEST GRAVE here belongs to William Parker Blott. Unlike most people who are buried first and later crowned with a headstone, Blott and his monument arrived together, a week after he died. His family paid the engravers so much money that they stopped what they were doing to design Blott’s new home. And what a home it is! It took two ton trucks and a crane just to place it. We’d never seen anything like it before.

  William Blott woke to death disillusioned. Like everyone else, he was disappointed to find that death wasn’t what he’d thought. There were no lounge singers singing his name, no chorus lines kicking to welcome him here. There were no photographers snapping pictures, no symphonies, no hullabaloo. There weren’t even the predictable things—the saints waiting by walls of jasper, the harp music. There was no deep-flowing river with a raft waiting to carry him across. He was not reborn into a different body. Not a child, a tree, or a common bug. He was not unconscious, as he’d hoped.