The Past Is Never Page 15

  “But our father wasn’t homeless,” I said. “He had a home. Our home.” None of it made a lick of sense.

  The fat policeman pulled a box of tissues from a drawer and slid them across the desk, but I didn’t cry. I remembered the photo of the little girl they’d found underneath the sweet gum tree in Arkansas and how they’d been sure it was Pansy. They were wrong then. They could be wrong now.

  “I hate to push you,” the detective continued, “but we need to know if you want the body. If you don’t claim it, he’ll get a pauper’s burial in the local cemetery here. If you want the body, we’ll have to arrange for transport. Or you could talk with one of the funeral homes down here about cremating the remains and having those sent. Honestly, you’re probably gonna want to do that. The body’s in bad shape. It’s not like you’re gonna want a viewing.”

  Willet said we wanted the body. I was surprised. It would cost a couple thousand dollars to have our father embalmed in Florida and shipped across state lines. On top of that, we’d have to pay for a funeral. Willet had zero respect for our father when he was alive. I couldn’t see why he’d go to any trouble to show respect for him in death, but Willet was adamant about burying the body in White Forest. “It’s what Mama will want,” he said.

  “Can we afford it?”

  “I’ve got some money. And Granny Clem can pitch in. It’s her son, after all.”

  Willet leaned back in the hard wooden office chair and stared at the officer. “Do you ever look for her anymore? Or did you give up?”

  “I think about your sister every day,” he said. “I wonder what we missed at the time. Did we overlook something? But I tell you, I don’t have any more answers now than I did then. It keeps me awake.”

  Willet stood and looked down on the fat policeman. “It goddamned well ought to,” he said.

  We left the sheriff’s office and drove to the field where the quarry used to stand. It was one of those late summer nights when the stars seemed especially thick and close. If you let your gaze go soft, you felt like you could reach up and grab a handful of light. We sat in the bed of Willet’s truck and passed a flask of whiskey between us. We cursed Daddy while toasting him.

  “I guess he didn’t have Pansy after all,” I said.

  “Sorry sonofabitch,” Willet said. “I sure thought he did.”

  “We’ve got to tell Granny Clem. And Chester, I guess.” I didn’t look forward to breaking the news.

  “Tomorrow,” Willet said.

  “I don’t understand what he was doing in Florida. And if things were so bad he was living on the street, how could pay for a whole month in a motel?” I took a sip from the flask. The whiskey burned my throat. “Why wouldn’t he come home to us? We could have helped him.”

  “Don’t it seem like our lives are just a bunch of questions with no answers, Bert?” Willet took a long pull on the flask. “I’m goddamned tired of being all question and no answer.”

  In the distance, something howled. It might have been an old hound dog or a banshee witch. The nearly full moon hung behind a fuzzy wisp of clouds. I took another swig of whiskey. My thoughts went soft and my body felt warm. The whiskey helped drown the heebie-jeebies I felt whenever I was near the quarry. I drank some more. “I saw something in the woods the day Pansy disappeared.”

  Willet looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “When you left me alone and the storm came, I saw some sort of creature in the woods. A monster. It was carrying something. I think it might have been carrying Pansy.”

  “What the hell, Bert?”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me. I was ashamed to be seeing monsters at my age. It seemed stupid.”

  “Goddammit, Bert, why didn’t you say something back then?”

  Clouds moved over the moon and a star shot across the sky. I made a wish, but nothing happened. The old quarry was nothing more than a pile of dirt even after all those years. It ought to have been overgrown with weeds and vines. Daddy was right about the quarry. If even the kudzu wouldn’t crawl over it, it must be poisoned land. I asked Willet why nothing grew there.

  “I mean, I can understand why there are no trees,” I said. “But no wild grass? No pokeweed? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Willet grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “What did you see that day? Because I heard something. I heard someone in the woods.”

  “Maybe you heard Bubba.” He shook me again. My head felt heavy as it wobbled on my neck.

  “I don’t believe it was Bubba. It sounded bigger than Bubba and it was crashing through the trees.”

  “Why didn’t I hear that?” My voice sounded funny, like it was traveling through a tunnel. Willet’s face kept floating in and out of focus.

  “I went looking. I thought it might be some of the boys from school. We used to hang out in those woods, you know? Stupid kid shit, drinking and smoking and pretending to be big men.”

  I took Willet’s face between my hands to steady my focus. “The monster was big.” I was drunk.

  “Thing is, I can’t figure why Bubba was there at all.”

  I drank some more whiskey and laughed out loud. Willet thought he knew everything about me, but he didn’t know about my trip to see Bubba and I wasn’t about to tell him.

  Willet lit a cigarette. “Go easy on that whiskey, Bert.” His advice came too late. I held onto the lip of the truck bed to keep from sliding to the ground. My body felt good and warm and limp as stewed collard greens. We stared at the pile of dirt marking the spot where we’d last seen Pansy. A pair of purple cotton panties was crumpled atop a mound of beer cans. Liquor bottles littered the area. Spent shotgun shells scattered across the ground among the colorful burnt leftovers from someone’s fireworks. A mosquito landed on my arm and sucked my whiskey-soaked blood. Another shooting star sped across the sky. I didn’t bother to wish for anything.

  Granny Clem seemed mostly befuddled when we told her about Daddy’s death. Willet told her about the motel and the things the detective said about how he’d been living.

  We sat at her kitchen table, clutching cups of coffee. It was early, not even eight o’clock and my head ached from the previous night’s whiskey. Granny Clem was dressed for the day in one of her long floral dresses. Her gray hair was knotted into a tight bun at the base of her neck. She was expecting a morning patient.

  “He’s gone,” Willet said.

  Granny Clem turned the coffee mug in her hands and pursed her lips. “You say he was in Florida?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She had the same look she got when she was trying to place an unwanted baby, like she was sorting through an enormous file cabinet of possibilities in her mind. She leaned toward us, her elbows on the table, and let out a soft grunt. She gulped her coffee.

  Willet told her about the cost of transporting the body. “I have some money, but I don’t reckon it’ll be quite enough to cover it. And there’s the funeral. Nothing fancy, of course. A little something for Mama.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I hate to ask.”

  “Oh, I’ll take care of it,” she said.

  “You don’t have to carry all of it.”

  She reached out and took Willet’s jittery hand. “I’ll take care of it. You save your money.”

  “Why Florida?” Willet set his coffee mug down too hard and it splashed on the table. I reached for a paper towel to mop it up, but Granny Clem waved me off. She swiped at the spill with her bare hand and stared at her coffee-stained palm.

  “A man has a right to his own life,” she said. “Even a man with a family.”

  It was a strange thing to say, but I was used to Granny Clem’s odd ways. Willet was not.

  “What the hell does that even mean?” he asked as he drove us away from Granny Clem’s house that morning. “I tell you what we ought to do. We ought to go to Florida and find somebody who knew the sonofabitch. We ought to get some answers.”

  “We can’t just go to Florida,” I said.

 
“Why the hell not?”

  “We can’t leave Mama alone.”

  “What if he did take Pansy? Maybe he had another family. Maybe he took Pansy to live with them.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. The detective said he was homeless.”

  Willet drove too fast along a dirt road and a rock flew up and cracked his windshield. He slapped the steering wheel with his palm. “Goddammit!” He stopped the truck in the middle of the road. Gray dust billowed and settled around the vehicle. I rolled up my window in spite of the heat.

  “It ain’t right,” Willet said.

  I was frustrated, too. It was terrible to know so little about our own father. It wasn’t fair, but I didn’t see how chasing his ghost to Florida would bring us any answers.

  We held Daddy’s funeral on Tuesday. It was a quiet service, just me and Mama and Willet and Granny Clem and Chester. Chester cleaned up real good. He wore a baggy gray suit. He’d slicked his hair back with some sort of oil and shined his shoes. He looked and smelled like he’d showered.

  Mama wore her best dress to the funeral. She hadn’t bought new clothes since Pansy disappeared. Her best was a faded navy sack dress dotted with pink flowers. She looked like a little girl or a very old woman. She coughed so hard we could barely hear the preacher. Not that it mattered. He was a generic funeral home preacher and he didn’t know our father. Of course, at that point, we’d realized we didn’t know our father either. The preacher read some verses and talked about the value of a life spent serving the Lord. He said our father was in a better place now. It was a load of horseshit, and Daddy would have hated it. The only thing that stunk worse than the preacher’s sermon was Daddy’s body. The plain pine casket rested on a table in front of the pastor’s pulpit. It was closed, of course, as the body was found in such an advanced state of decay. The funeral director tried to talk Mama into cremation. “In cases like this,” he told her, “it’s a kinder option.”

  Mama refused. “We are not cremation people,” she told him. I was always learning something new about my family.

  It was soon clear why burning Daddy’s body might have been a “kinder option.” After so many weeks spent decaying in the damp Florida heat, the fluids they used to preserve him barely slowed the process. The soft rotting stench filled the room. The pastor held a white handkerchief over his nose as he delivered the eulogy. Willet and I cupped our hands across our faces and traded horrified glances. I tried breathing through my mouth, but the taste of death was worse than the smell. Granny Clem pretended to have a cold and repeatedly pressed a tissue to her nostrils. Chester pinched his nose with his thumb and forefinger and avoided eye contact with any of us. Only Mama kept her hands folded in her lap. Only Mama couldn’t smell how rotten things were.

  At the cemetery, rain began to fall. It was a relief, as the day was hot and sticky. Men from the funeral home unpacked two large black umbrellas and held them over us for a brief graveside service. Granny Clem spoke.

  “It’s a mighty awful thing to bury a son. And it’s no easy thing to bury a brother or a husband or a father. But this grave is just a place for a body. It doesn’t hold Earl. It never could. We should remember that. Bert and Willet, your father is not buried here. Loretta, your husband won’t be resting here. Chester, you know your brother could never be held in a box. And when I think of Earl, I’ll think of him as the man with big ideas and big plans, who charmed everyone he met. He could be difficult, but the best people are. He was never simple. Thank God for that. He won’t be here.”

  On the drive home from the funeral, Willet brought up his idea of a trip to Florida. “It would be good for us,” he said. “To get away.” He didn’t talk about finding anyone who knew Daddy or hunting for clues about where our father had been living, but Mama wasn’t stupid. She knew he wasn’t proposing a vacation. She knew what he was after.

  “I just buried my husband,” she said. “Show some respect.”

  “Aren’t you a little curious about where he was living all these years?” Willet said. “About why he didn’t come home?”

  “Willet!” I slapped his shoulder and glared. “It’s not the time.”

  Willet clenched his jaw so tight I worried he’d chip a tooth. He drove for a mile without speaking, but just before we turned onto our street he said, “We don’t have to decide right now.”

  “I’ve already decided,” Mama said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Back home, I fixed Mama a plate of food she wouldn’t touch and I passed out dead asleep in my clothes. The creature from the woods came to me, but this time he didn’t haul anything through the rain. He chased me through heavy fog. I tried to run, but my legs barely worked. I tried to hide, but the trees kept vanishing. I tried to scream, but could only whisper. The creature moved closer. He enjoyed my panic. He toyed with me. There was no escape. He was stronger and faster and he knew the woods better than I did. I found myself on the edge of a cliff. A tangle of menacing vines seemed to beckon me over the side. I peered into miles of jutting gray rocks and trees growing sideways, roots grabbing the earth. It was the old quarry. The creature faded. This was the real danger, this hole where people drowned their shame. All the secrets of the Devil were here. I knew if I tossed myself over the edge, I would discover the truth. I would understand my father’s life and I would know, finally, what happened to Pansy. All I had to do was jump. Bile rose in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. If I jumped I would die, but I would know the truth. Which was more important? Life or truth? I needed to know, even if knowing sent me straight to hell. Behind me, something moved. I turned to face the creature and there, on the edge of the quarry, I looked at the beast’s face for the first time. Its eyes were as familiar to me as my own.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said, as I tumbled into the quarry.

  After we buried Daddy, Mama gave up on living. She was constantly coughing and hacking and struggling to get a breath but she refused to see a doctor. “I don’t need a doctor to tell me I’m sick,” she said.

  Granny Clem sent me home with all sorts of teas and rubs meant to loosen Mama’s congestion or quiet her cough. The remedies worked for a time, but the horrible wheezing cough always returned. I tried to convince her to stop smoking, but she said smoking was her only vice and her only pleasure and she didn’t intend to give it up. There was no point in nagging her. I rubbed her back when she coughed. I ran hot showers and sat with her in the steamy bathroom, both of us sucking in warm moist air. Mama wasn’t but fifty years old. A hard life will chip away at youth, and Mama’s life was harder than most. A bad cough was the least of it.

  Willet came and went, sometimes spending months on a job in Louisiana or Georgia. He sent money home to us and I kept it safe in an account Mama couldn’t access. She sent less money to the preachers in those days, but you could never tell when she might decide to make a donation. I worried about Willet. In Jackson, an ironworker fell ten stories onto a piece of hard asphalt. He should have died, but instead he broke his neck and spent the next two years undergoing surgeries he couldn’t afford.

  “I don’t want to end up like that,” Willet said. “There’s got to be a better way to make a living.”

  I told him to take some time off and try to find something less dangerous. He promised he would, but then someone would offer him a spot on a crew and he’d be gone again. Most of the jobs made him miserable, but when he got a spot on a crew in Tampa, he was thrilled. “I’m going to ask around about the sonofabitch,” he said. “See if I can get some answers.” But when he called home from Tampa after the first week, he sounded discouraged.

  “Might as well be in another state,” he said. “It would take me a half a day to get anywhere near where his body turned up.” He said he’d try to make the trip on an off day, but he didn’t get many of those and never two back-to-back. He wanted to stay in Florida an extra week after that job ended, but I begged him to come home. Mama was getting worse.

  “She needs a doctor,” I said. “But she w
on’t go.”

  Willet came home. He made a doctor’s appointment and threatened to carry Mama from the house by force. She complained about the waste of time and money, but she relented. At the appointment, the doctor showed us X-rays of our mother’s lungs. It looked like a pen had burst and leaked black ink over the image. Her chest was filled with fluid. She was drowning.

  “If you’d brought her in sooner …” the doctor said. He wanted to drain the fluid, but Mama refused.

  “I’m going home.”

  “You need to be in a hospital,” the doctor told her.

  “Why?”

  “You’re dying.”

  “I can die at home.”

  “It will be painful,” he said.

  “It ought to be,” she said.

  We did our best to make her comfortable. We propped her up with a dozen pillows. We brought her cup after cup of tea with honey and lemon. Willet coated her feet with mentholatum and made sure she always had clean cotton socks. He stopped talking about Florida. Granny Clem came by most days with fragrant herbs and incense to burn. She cooked for us, though no one had much appetite. She made chicken and dumplings, sausage gumbo, and pots of vegetable soup. She made yeast bread and cornbread. We always had one of her pound cakes on the table. I picked at those cakes, pulling off a bite here and there. The pretty yellow bundt cakes soon looked like they’d been gnawed on by rats.

  It was two weeks before Christmas and the early morning air was damp and cold. I pulled a blanket from the hall closet before going in to check on Mama. I hoped she hadn’t gotten chilled during the night. I’d slept better than I had in months and thought I’d make a big breakfast. Mama’s appetite was gone, but I was hungry and Willet would appreciate the effort. The grocery store would open soon and I could pick up fresh eggs and bacon and grits. I could practically taste the butter on my tongue. I looked forward to pulling out the skillet. I wanted to fill our home with the smell of frying pork. I remember this so clearly—my appetite and the cold snap and the peaceful calm of our home.