Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (25 page)

39
Fools

The Moulavis left on a Greyhound just after Bo’s funeral, bound for Washington, D.C.

Maybe, I recall thinking, Sanna’s father hadn’t quite given up his dream of America, and would go searching for it at its diseased but still-pumping heart.

We cried, the new girl and I, and even Emerson and L. J. We’d smelled too many lilies in hospital cells, too many fumes, seen too much skin in black flakes and arms bloody as raw beef beneath and hair turned to brittle black threads. We’d been burned on the insides, by the smoke and the fumes and the cross-frenzied red. And we cried because we’d been welded together somewhere in the flames, somehow part of each other, and yet we never wanted to see each other again. So we circled our arms across shoulders and cried because there was so much and there was nothing to say.

Em made one final map with his hands; Farsanna put her hand over his and squeezed it.

_________

It had been Emerson’s idea that Jimbo’s ashes—that was nearly all that was left even before the morticians got hold of him—should be laid to rest at the Blue Hole. I’ve always loved my brother for that. Bo’s funeral was packed, the Baptist church-belly swollen and heaving and sick, this time with grief. For the burial, the whole part of the town that could walk, teenagers and children and grown people, they all kicked off their shoes and made the climb down to the Hole.

Welp wasn’t there. Not that I saw. And neither was a single one of the Beckwiths. But Mollybird was. And Mr. Steinberger, and both of his daughters. And a whole town of mourners who slid their way down to where we laid Jimbo’s ashes to rest, by the side of still water that wasn’t in any way blue.

It was my idea to transplant the pink rosebush that in some cruel kind of trick survived the explosion, singed but alive at the roots. Having come from Mollybird Pittman to Emerson and Jimbo’s landscaping business, and from Jimbo to Farsanna, and somehow living through the blast, it struck me as fitting, somehow.

It was L. J.’s idea to take two seared rafters from the Moulavis’ kitchen and make a cross out of them for the grave—not a white one, but scorched and half-eaten by flame. And it was the idea of the good Reverend Riggs to take another two charred, broken beams from the site and replace the hanging white cross in the Baptist church sanctuary. They tell me it’s still hanging there, the cross so falling apart that when the organ moans out of too many pipes, the cross sheds charcoal and bits of wood onto the choir.

_________

I’ve never seen it myself, though. At seventeen, I went north to Wellesley, where once they’d got an earful of my accent, they were thunderstruck I could read and write my whole name. I went back south, back home, only twice during college, and then only to bury my parents, their dying of natural causes within a year of each other. And I’ve never yet been back inside the place where Jimbo’s daddy made his son so ashamed, and helped send us all down the road that dead-ended with me standing there, watching it all, doing nothing, and Bo’s body caught fire like a torch, lit by the good of his heart.

My father did live long enough to see Emerson go to Dartmouth, but not long enough to see him become a professor of seventeenth-century English literature and live in Seattle—his specialty being John Donne. That much I might’ve predicted. But I’m still walking around shocked about this: The very month after our father died, Em joined a church—though at least only an Episcopal church, so it could’ve been worse. He tries to explain it to me: It’s some kind of breath to him, some kind of pulse to his life that—I’ll be straight up—I just don’t understand. And some days—only off days, mind you, or down days—days like today maybe, I’d like to. At least understand. But I will say this: Every time I hear Emerson talk, hush-breathed, using words like
mercy
and
holy
, I picture what Jimbo would do. I see him throwing back his head in a hearty laugh at our Emerson kneeling so earnestly on a prayer bench. And I imagine Jimbo would squeeze right in beside him.

To no one’s surprise but his daddy’s, L. J. never took over Waymon’s Feed and Seed. When Uncle Waymon suffered a stroke, his second son, Matt made a real enterprise of the old place, even took Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers as a sideline. Bought Emerson’s old truck, too, with the company name Bo painted there on the door. I have to give Matt credit for keeping the name.

The Big Dog herself, overindulged to the end, breathed her last from the shade of an old dogwood tree while she was supervising our spreading cedar mulch just a week before Emerson left for Dartmouth. She was buried, by request of Mollybird Pittman, beneath a particularly large, particularly red hybrid tea rose. Em never even tried to argue that Big Dog needed to be in our yard—maybe he knew, even then, we wouldn’t be back, him and me. Not anytime soon anyhow. And in the hole with Emerson’s best friend—outside of Bo—we placed an unopened box of barbecue scraps and a full can of Dr Pepper, memorial gifts from Hyme Steinberger and daughters.

L. J. went with the Peace Corps to Togo—or was it Tonga? He eventually became a lawyer in Birmingham and busies himself with pro bono civil rights cases. Pro bono to the extent, he admitted to me when I asked, that he does very little for pay. And his wardrobe looks like it, I assured him last time business brought him to Boston. So he calls when he’s in town, and he pounds out the occasional terse, meant-to-be-friendly e-mail. My aunt’s Christmas letters hint that she still grieves her son’s lack of graciousness and tact, his never, she implies, having made too much of himself.

Me, I moved down the Mass Pike from Wellesley to Boston. And after years of playacting big-city sophistication, I still prefer Emerson’s old pickup to my Saab, and Steinberger’s barbecue to Legal Seafood’s lobster. I still prefer male friends to female—though who has time really for either?

I couldn’t say why I chose Boston for a place to prop up my feet—not that there’s time for that either—and the weather here makes me wear shoes. Don’t hear me wrong: I love this city—as cities go. I love its quirky little streets: Water and Milk. And cobblestone-pocked Beacon Hill—where I live. I love Mike’s Pastry’s cannoli in the North End and the bookstores, quirky and musty and marvelous, sprinkled through the whole town.

But some nights just before I drift off to sleep, listening to the rumble of car wheels on my cobblestone street, I hear Emerson’s voice and his bluegrass guitar, or see Jimbo dangling from the rope swing, one hand on the rope, the other melodramatically over his heart, and singing to Sanna, and also to me,

When the night has come
And the land is dark …

And I enter my dreams on those nights hearing banjos and dulcimers and mandolins, all mixed up with Motown, and watching a sea of blue mountains roll out before me, smelling the sun on the hemlocks and damp, fern-carpeted forests, feeling my bare toes sink into warm, wet red clay.

No, I won’t be afraid,
Just as long as you stand,
Stand by me …

And I am trying, I think, to stay there, to not have to leave ever again.

But even then, sometimes my dreams take a nasty turn, the clay turning to embers beneath me. And I cannot move. Or maybe just don’t.

_________

On the way to our first trip back to the Blue Hole, to visit where we’d just buried Bo’s ashes, Em drove and L. J. and I shared the cab seat with him and Big Dog, who sat at our feet, her head still and sad in my lap. Not one of us talked as we drove down the Pike. We passed by Steinberger’s, then looped left by the Overlook.

There was an old Pinto parked there off the side of the road that clung to the edge of our Ridge. We all knew whose it was—whose drunk of a momma’s it was.

L. J. motioned for Em to slow down.

Emerson tapped on the brakes, but didn’t slow down too awfully much. “Nope,” Em said.

L. J. motioned again.

Em’s head popped around. “NO ... WAY.”

“Don’t you think,” L. J. asked pointedly, “Jimbo would’ve wanted us to find Welp? And not give up on him yet?”

That was the problem with our having hung out with Jimbo for so long, his always digging out room for a chance that somebody could change.

There was Welp, sitting with his tires just where our Ridge gives out of strength and lets the earth fall away into cliff, and down three thousand feet into valley. The Pinto was idling loud and irregular, metal pings and heavy, hard thunks that shifted the loose soil beneath it.

Em slammed the truck into park. “You screwed up, Welp,” he called out, his hands clenched on the wheel. He took a deep breath and met L. J.’s eye, and I could see my brother was groping for something like mercy. But shaking his head, his hands turning white at the knuckles, he came up only with this, strangled there in his throat: “You screwed up big time.”

Welp sat there in his car. He nodded.

L. J. inched his way out of the cab and approached Welp slowly, like the car might just be driven right off the side of that ridge. “Perhaps Welp,” L. J. said over his shoulder, “is cognizant of having screwed up.” He stood a couple of arms’ length from the Pinto.

Welp looked out his driver’s-side window, his shoulders starting to heave. “I tried to stop it, right there at the end. I don’t know what happened. Me and Mort was supposed to be just having some fun. And then the old guys come along and things got out of control and … You got to believe me: I tried to stop it, right there at the end—”

L. J. nodded—real slow, and held out a hand. “You got to put that car in reverse and come on out of there, Welp. Come on out of there now.”

“I even wrote a letter. To them. Said I was sorry. So sorry.” His whole body convulsed as he cried. “I gave it to a nurse down to the hospital, before they left town. Did you know that? I gave it to a nurse. And I wrote one to Bo, and snuck in one night and read it to him and his daddy.”

L. J. moved one step closer. “You did some good, then, Welp. You did some good. You throw that car in reverse now, and you tell us more.”

My heart beat loud and heavy and irregular along with the car’s engine, the violence of the Pinto’s motor shifting the gravel beneath its tires.

Welp sat there, just sobbing behind the wheel and he reached up a hand to L. J., just fingers to fingers, and touched.

“
So
sorry
,” Welp said one more time.

Then his foot pressed the gas of his momma’s old Pinto to drive off the edge of the world.

“Bobby!” I screamed.

For an instant, Bobby’s foot mashed the brake, the car’s front tires slipping forward and down.

“Bobby!” I called from the truck bed, and scrambled out as I yelled, “Bobby, Jimbo was talking about you at the last.” When the words formed in my mouth, they were a lie, something I spit out to keep a car from plunging over a cliff—a selfish act, really, words to keep us from living through any more death than we already had. But shouted out like they were, echoing there at the edge of our mountain, Bobby’s miserable face turning to listen, it suddenly hit me that my lie was also the truth.

The Pinto’s front wheels shifted on the loose shale and dead leaves at the rim of the Look. The car’s front end sank as the tires lost their grip on firm soil.

“
Bobby
!” Em yelled, as the Pinto nose-dived into thin air.

_________

When the flashing lights had come and gone, and the tow truck had observed the pile of scrap metal it needed to fetch three thousand feet down, and after the police had finished shaking their heads that Bobby Welpler had managed to throw himself out the driver’s-side door before the car had plummeted down, or that he’d managed to cling onto a rock until we could pull him to safety, after all this, we piled in Em’s truck. Bobby huddled with us in the bed of the pickup, all of us shaken and numb, and went to the Hole. We sat there by the grave in a huddle, and looked at the water and wept. Even the boys. Even me. Nobody was there swimming, so the stirred-up brown had gone a dark almost-blue.

Bobby lay facedown alone on the granite palm, and whatever he said, to Jimbo or Jesus or whoever it was he imagined could hear—we let him say it in peace. We let him alone until he was done being alone, and then we hung onto each other, what was left of us, on into the dark.

_________

They tell me folks back home still talk about Jimbo and us and that summer, and argue on about just who was to blame, or where the trouble back then really began:

“Jimbo Riggs, if you’re asking me.”

“You lay off on that boy, bless his sweet heart. He was as good a thing as this town ever growed.”

“Sweet on that colored girl was what he was, I tell you what.”

“You ask me, it was the fault of them newspaper editor’s kids. You just look where both of them ended up if that don’t tell you how—”

“I heard Bobby Welpler got hisself mixed up in the thing. Heard that was why he left town and why he come back, and why he built his momma that house.”