Grace: Funeral

38

“Well, well, grandfather, I hear you’re a hundred years old. Tell me, how has life seemed to you these hundred years?”
 He looked up with inflamed, lashless eyes.
“It’s like a glass of cold water, my child.”
“And are you still thirsty, grandfather?”
 He raised his hand high, as though to call down a curse. “Damn whoever isn’t,” he said.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

1951

The First Baptist Church was a large, yellow-brick building not far from the center of town. It was filled with people. The men wore suits. The women were in somber dresses, dark hats, and gloves. The size of the crowd didn’t surprise me. I thought everyone knew my grandfather, and everyone did. The coffin was in front and just below the pulpit. We, the family, were slightly off to one side. Everyone in the family was there, including a lot of people I didn’t know. Aunts and an uncle, parents, brothers and first cousins I knew. However, my grandmother’s sister had six married children. The great uncle and aunt, second cousins and their spouses, and the whirlpool of their children were not even names to me, but they brought memories of a house in the country with high ceilings, a hammock on the porch, and guinea fowl running free in the yard.

I sat in the row with my brother and between my grandmother and my mother. Brother Anthony stood in the pulpit and preached salvation. He always preached salvation, at least every Sunday in the summer when I was visiting Arkansas. About the only thing Brother Anthony left out was the Invitation and that was probably only because the rededicated would have to walk around the flower-covered casket to get to the preacher. He did, at last, speak of my grandfather and I felt some of the tension, the angriness slip out of my grandmother. She never liked Brother Anthony. Still, she kept in place her purse-lipped expression I knew so well.

I passed the time looking at the flowers and watching the men in dark suits at the back who had seated all the people and handed out the printed folders that listed the hymns and the pallbearers and named the survivors. Survivors. I wondered what that meant. I was thrilled to see my name right there, in print.

The church was nice and cool. Even so all the older women in the congregation were slowly waving their funeral home fans. This was the only place in Van Buren I knew of that had air conditioning, except for the Bob Burns movie theater (for the twenty-five cents from my grandfather I could watch Lash LaRue, Superman, Zorro and Roy Rogers on Saturday afternoons from the front row of the balcony seats).

When it was over they all sang Amazing Grace without even having to open the hymnals. By this time I was looking forward to another ride in the long black Cadillac with the little seats, just my size, that folded down in back of the front seat where the man in the black suit sat and drove the car. But first we had to stand on the sidewalk and watch the men carry the coffin out to the hearse that looked just like the ambulance except that it was black and didn’t have a red light on top or sirens on the fenders.

When that was done we got into the Cadillac and rode in a great parade to the cemetery. Men walking on the street stopped and took their hats off as the parade passed. Cars coming the other way pulled off the road and waited for us to go by. My mother and grandmother sat across from me on the plush gray seats, holding each other’s gloved hands, their eyes barely visible behind the veils hanging down from their hats.

The sun was bright and hot at the cemetery and I wished I had a hat to wear. But the only hat I had was an old floppy straw cowboy hat that my mother wouldn’t let me wear with my suit, the suit that once was my brother’s and that had sleeves that were too long. All the adults sat down in folding chairs beside the coffin resting over the big, deep, dark and cool-looking hole in the ground. I read the names of Floyd and Ruth on granite stones nearby. Brother Anthony began to talk and pray again. I watched a bee hovering over the blossoms of a small crepe myrtle.

* * * * *

For days after the funeral it seemed the house was always full of people. I wasn’t really wanted in there, getting in the way of my grandmother and Juanita and the constant flow of well-dressed people carrying casseroles and sitting and talking — I’d have to be still or at least quiet. Instead, I spent my time down at the packing shed where my uncle was keeping the business going.

I didn’t mind, especially when the boxcars were being loaded and iced down. I loved all of that: the rumbling of the switch engine when it backed a car in; the metal on metal screech of the wheels braking on the rails; the slamming open of the doors; the clatter of the rollers as the boxes went down the conveyor from the shed to the car; the big men in thick leather gloves wielding ice tongs; the howling of the ice crushing machine when one of the child-sized blocks of ice was dropped in; the rushing sound at the end of the hose as the ice flew across the stacked boxes of produce. Best of all was the smell. It was strawberries or tomatoes or spinach or cantaloupes or watermelons or corn or beans and all, all smelled of green.

One time a packer caught me there, standing just inside the door of the boxcar being very still, sniffing the air like a pointer snuffling for quail. They were loading loose spinach leaves into containers in the car. The packer caught me up and carried me, laughing and shrieking, to the beginning of the packing line where the spinach from the fields was being washed and sorted. The packer tossed me into the bin with the dirty spinach and I rolled down through the chute, getting sprayed with water and tumbled about, and surrounded with the smell. The packer caught me at the end of the line.

“Can I go again?” I remember asking. “Please, please?”