In Memory of Junior

by Clyde Edgerton

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In Summerlin, North Carolina, it is-quite literally-a race to the finish. Glenn and Laura Bales lie dying in the same house, and although Laura is more interested in her Whitman's Sampler chocolates, and Glenn in whatever happened to his first wife, Evelyn, their children have their eyes unswervingly fixed on the inheritance. Who will get the money, and what it will mean for this unusual little Southern community is a richly comic novel about endings.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 299

Sample

I haul things.

The footstone belonged to a Mr. Grove McCord. Old man. It was on the Cutler, Arkansas, to Summerlin, North Carolina, run. I was in on the deal from pickup to delivery because this new administration at Truck Freight Limited come in with this idea that if we don’t specialize we’ll be happier. So you pick up, you deliver, you forklift, you push paper. You do it all. Harebrained idea.

Take somebody like Yellow Freight, they specialize. In other words, if I’m working for them I either just drive, or just forklift, or just push paper. But at Limited I have to do it all, and it makes one big mess because you got all these people that won’t hold up their end of the deal. If the idea worked it would be okay. It don’t work. So I got my name in over at Yellow Freight, but don’t nobody here know it.

Anyway, it so happened that this tombstone—footstone—pickup was my pickup and then it was on the tail end of my deliveries. To start off, this old man, this Mr. Grove McCord, calls in saying to meet him out at Shady Willows—the main cemetery in Cutler. Says he’s got a footstone to be delivered, that he’ll pay cash. So me and Ed drive out there and he’s got this thing dismantled. There’s the actual footstone itself, then this brass plate with his and his wife’s names and birth dates and blanks for death dates on there, with all this fancy design work on it, and a little flower holder. He’d screwed the brass plate off the footstone, and the flower holder off the brass plate.

Me and Ed loaded it—got it up and just inside the back door of the trailer. No need to load it deeper.

He wants to ride with us to the station. No car, no nothing. So I ask him about his transportation and all, and he goes into this about by god, he’d always wanted to be buried in North Carolina anyway so he’d just got a buddy to take him on out to the graveyard and he’d dismantled the thing for shipment. He was going to take care of it all hisself, he said.

He had cash money. A roll of fifties and twenties.

We got to the station and packed the thing in a cardboard container and addressed it to a couple of his nephews in North Carolina. So. That was all that was left for him to do, he tells us, except get hisself back to the BP station over on Huddle Road. Close to his house, I guess. Ed took him on out there.

Now all this so far is not such a big deal, but listen to this: he said what he had to do next was figure out how to get hisself to North Carolina, get a grave dug, get his nephews or somebody to help him set things up, get a white pine coffin delivered, get in it, shoot hisself, and then get buried. You figure it. This is what he said, and I didn’t know whether to take him serious or not. I think he was just a old man off his rocker, see, so I didn’t do nothing. But here’s the thing.

I’d had something like six hours sleep in the last thirty-six when I started that haul. I got on the interstate and on in through Waynesville, stopping here and there, unloading stuff—rugs, collards, French doors—and headed for the final stop in Summerlin.

But see, being out of it from lack of sleep, I took a wrong turn somewhere west of Summerlin, and just as I was drifting off, the top of the damn trailer, going about, oh, forty mile an hour, hit some low-ass railroad bridge, if you can believe that. By that time, the footstone was the only thing left back there in the trailer. Way back at the back. When the top of the trailer jammed the bridge and flat stopped the truck, that footstone took off. There was this little pause and . . . a whopawham.

Miss Laura, she propped up in there in her room on the pillows, leaning to the side a little. I go in and push her back up straight every once in a while. Mr. Glenn, he flat on his back in his room. His great big head look like a yellow salt lick somebody carved his face in. They both mighty sick. Have been, some time.

And you know all these white folk worked up because of this tension: whoever die first will mean who get this whole place. His boys—or her daughter.

The hospital won’t take either one because you know how the hospitals are, and right now it look like Miss Laura she might actually be the first to pass, which would mean those boys would get the place. Cause Mr. Glenn and Miss Laura own the place joint ownership. At least that’s the way I understand it.

And this place, the land—if it gets sold—will bring more money than would fill up heaven. Something like three, four million dollars is what they say. Land going eighty thousand dollars a acre round here. You believe that? My granddaddy would die again if he knowed that. He owned two acres. Bought them for something like thirty-five dollars a acre. And that was high back then.

Mr. Glenn and Miss Laura, they feel okay about each other. They always asking how the other one doing, except Miss Laura lately, she don’t talk much no more. It’s their families with the hard feelings—her daughter, his sons, his sisters.

Old Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, who is neighbors, they visit. Wilma and Harold. Lord have mercy. But cause of hard feelings in the family they don’t visit both at the same time. They visit Mr. Glenn one day, and then Miss Laura the next.

This morning Mrs. Fuller was sitting in there at the foot of Miss Laura’s bed. Mrs. Fuller dips snuff, and in her hand she carry about a dozen Kleenex tissues she use for a cuspidor, what do you call the word—portable?

And there sit Miss Laura’s half-naked bird in his cage on a table next to the TV. Florida. What I want to know is who’s going to get him. He be one poor, sick bird. I tried to tell Faye, that’s Miss Laura’s daughter, that he sick but she don’t pay no mind. His feathers has come out all around his shoulders.

Faye is a little uppity, but okay all in all. Lawyer in Charlotte.

Miss Laura was propped up in her bed on some pillows while Mrs. Fuller was talking to her. I sit out in the hall where I can see she need anything. She sitting propped up there with her hair—a kind of dirty ocean color—piled up on her head. I don’t have to move my chair more than three or four feet to see in Mr. Glenn’s bedroom, then back to see in hers.

For Miss Laura, I think what goes on is mostly silent. When her daughter Faye put a hearing aid in her ear, she by golly pull it out, and has throwed it away twice. I found it in the trash can both times.

I had a load of wash in, so I sat there and listened to Mrs. Fuller talking. Nobody don’t pay me much mind, unless one of them need the pot or something. Registered nurse from social services come in every few days. A teenager spend the night. Course I have to bathe them, feed them, all that stuff, but I been practical nursing all my life. I got started early and so far I always found this kind of work around here. People know about me. I already got myself lined up with Miss Ivy Terrell if she happen to outlast Mr. Glenn and Miss Laura. Sometimes it’s hard work, and what I wonder about, I wonder who’ll do it for me if’n I get in such a fix. I wonder about that a lot. I hope I go fast when the Lord call me home.

See, Miss Laura won’t Mr. Glenn’s first wife.

A woman named Evelyn was. I do remember. See, Evelyn run off and left Mr. Glenn with those two boys of his. She was still nursing the youngest, Tate. It was all kind of a unusual thing. Mr. Glenn, he could tell you about the leaving better than I could. Course he don’t talk too much anymore now that he so sick.

I can remember.

I was burning up with hate, driving up that long driveway with them in the car, and looking way ahead up there at the front porch for Mama. I dreaded, really dreaded, facing her.

I was burning up with hate.

Tate was laying there beside me on the seat, smelling rich, crying. I didn’t have no idea what to do with him.

I didn’t want to face Mama.

Evelyn just walked out on us, see, and I hated her—for my sake, for Tate’s sake, and for Faison’s sake, too. They were too little to know what she had done to them. To all three of us.

I could see Faison in the rearview mirror—sitting back there in the backseat with his arms folded. Had on a T-shirt with catsup down the front.

She’d stood there in the kitchen that same morning at three o’clock, stood there and said she was leaving, said that there was no choice but to leave. That she was sorry. I moved around the kitchen table while she talked, while she stood there in the hall door and talked to me. I was walking a foot above the floor it seemed like and when my hand fell on something, like the table, the table was gone. The whole inside of the kitchen, the house, had gone away, had whited out, except for her face, her mouth moving, saying all those words. She said things about Mama and Papa that I never thought a person would even think about anybody, much less them.

Listen. Tate was at her breast. She left him while he was at her breast—a baby. A little baby boy sucking on her titty when she walked off and left him behind.

I wouldn’t tell this to anybody.

Mama was sitting there on the porch shelling peas. I could see her in her chair.

I saw Bette in the yard, beside the house, heading around back.

See, Evelyn had not been loving me when I thought she had. That was the only answer. She had been fooling me. There must have been something deep and bad wrong with her all along from the beginning. Some secret thing. She had fell in to the Devil. There’s no doubt about it.

Then, of course, along came Laura. And she’s been so good to me. So good. I don’t know what I would have done without her.

I was outside when Glenn come driving up that driveway. I knew it was a unusual time of day, late morning, for him to be driving up. Normally he’d just walk from across the back field.

I noticed he was driving a little fast. The car was swerving some. Dust was kicking up.

What I done was start for the back of the house so I could go on around and come up on the other side and look and listen through the holly bush because I figured something won’t right. I never have minded listening in when I thought something won’t right. I’ve been able to offer help because of it, too.

I got around there about time he stopped the car under the middle oak. It was a warm morning, summertime. Later that day it stormed. I remember.

Mama kept right on shelling peas. Mama would have shelled peas through a tornado. Sitting there looking down at the peas, then looking up at that car, never moving her head, then back down at the peas, through them little round wire-frame glasses. I was right up against the holly bush.

Course Mama knew who it was. She knew everybody’s car. She must have known something was wrong too—him driving up of a morning, on a weekday.

When the car stopped, dust drifted up around it and on over toward the well shed. I can see it now. Little Faison jumped out and started running. He always did like to go out down behind the house and look at the pigs.

Glenn stood there beside the car, holding Tate out and away from him—like something, you know, infected or something. Then it looked like it took him a year to come on over to the porch to talk to Mama. You could see it on his face, that the words were inside him, about to get out. They fell out about the time he got to Mama’s feet. He said, “Evelyn left, Mama.”

Mama kept shelling peas. That was Mama. She looked at him and then back down, picked out a pea—a bad one—and dropped it in with the hulls.

I thought to myself, Well, I will be damned. And I never cuss. Pretty Evelyn. What could have led her off into something she would have to answer for on Judgment Day? And I could feel Mama thinking the same thing. And poor Glenn. He looked like he was standing there lost forever, holding that baby. I felt so sorry for him.

“She what?” said Mama.

“Left.”

“I was afraid of it,” Mama says. “But I never thought it would be with a baby at her titty. I swanee.”

“Mama, she just left and I . . . I hadn’t even been to work yet.”

“Give him here.” She put her peas down. “Get to work,” she says. “We’ll figure something out. Just go ahead to work.” She took the baby. “You supposed to already be on the road, ain’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Lord, he smells,” said Mama. “Go call Bette. She’s out back, I think.” Then she said that we could use some more hands around there. That Faison was old enough to cut out them row ends that needed it. That he could get right on that.

I started back around to the back, and sure enough, Faison was out there looking at the pigs.

After that Mama acted like she’d known all along. And I’d say she had. She’d seen Evelyn’s set of playing cards, asked Glenn about them. Mama could always judge character. And she’d tell you she could. Because she could. That afternoon Mama’s exact words were, “I knew her when I met her. I knew and should have said more than I did.” She thought right off that that Grove, that Grove McCord—Evelyn’s brother—probably had something to do with her leaving. Course, when I found out why she did leave, or what I heard, I was sick to my stomach, except nobody else ever found out. As far as I know.

I married Glenn with open eyes, glazed with romance of some sort. Here was a boy who was a salesman, yet had a house on the farm. He was going nowhere but up, and after a few years on the farm, we’d move to town. That was the plan.

“Well, honey, welcome to the farm,” Glenn’s mother had said. “It’s not a easy life, but you’ll get used to it.” Why would she say that? She knew I had grown up on a farm. But if I’d said, “Mrs. Bales, you know I grew up on a farm,” she would have looked at me and said, “Why, what on earth are you talking about?” Do you see? She ran the edge of the field called irritation, dishonesty, poking fun, ran it so lightly it was invisible to the people in her camp. If you stand up to it, it’s denied. And she skirted the edge so close she could, I imagine, always hide any justified guilt from her own eyes and heart. I hate that kind of attitude. She was always behind it, peering over, and I grew to dislike her more the longer I knew her.

I knew what to do on a farm. I could churn, can vegetables, sew. I could even plow, and Bette or Ansie, Glenn’s sisters, wouldn’t have been caught dead plowing.

But before we got settled good, the baby came. Faison.

Glenn seemed always gone to Wadesboro or Salisbury, selling vacuum cleaners. And I finally came to realize that he wasn’t interested in moving to town. He wouldn’t leave home. That homeplace. And the way my sisters-in-law and mother-in-law helped me was to tell me what I was doing wrong, and how I was doing it wrong. They were always available to do that, and they were there on earth to worship and obey God and Papa Bales. And Mr. Bales—Papa Bales—and all those uncles knew in their blood that their job on earth was to order and demand service from women, land, children, and animals. And all the aunts had, as far as I know, once their baby eyes opened and focused, quickly learned to accept—even covet—being ordered, if not by men themselves directly, then by the habits and needs of men and men’s work on the land. These were just facts—like trees.

The old man was always out in the field. . .