M
y father had just pulled up to our house, the station wagon tires kicking up a spray of dirt the color of cornflakes. He hadn’t even gotten all the way out of the car before I asked him. I knew I should have waited, but I couldn’t help it. I had been thinking about it all day, working up my argument, practicing my tone, trying to sound older. Trying to sound stronger than my skinny, five-foot frame.

His voice took on a low, gravelly tone when he said his answer: “Girls can’t be pallbearers.”

I stood there looking at him through the car window, studying his face for even a hint that I might be able to change his mind. But I didn’t see a clue.
Usually when Daddy raised his right eyebrow it was a sign that there was still hope I would get the answer I wanted. But not that afternoon. Daddy had made his final decision even before he heard my full regiment of reasons—and I had plenty.

“Girls can’t be pallbearers. Especially skinny, scrawny girls with knock-knees.”

Then he climbed out of the car. Daddy towered over me like an oak over a teaberry plant, eclipsing the late afternoon sun.

I watched him grab a small rainbow trout lying on a newspaper from the back of the station wagon. He had just come from a day of fishing up at Clay Creek, and from the looks of the measly fish and his burnt face, I didn’t think he’d had a good day.

“Take this trout to your Mama and tell her I’ll eat him for supper.”

“But Daddy, I want to talk to you.”

“Not now, Luna. I’m hot, and all I want is to get out of these smelly clothes and eat.”

I hooked the trout by the gills with two fingers and carried him through the basement and upstairs to my mother. “Daddy said he wants to eat this fish for supper.” I plopped the trout on the kitchen counter.

“Just one?” my mother said.

I shrugged and she looked out the window, which had a view of our backyard and driveway. “Just one, Justus?” she called.

I leaned over the sink next to my mother and saw my father raise his index finger to the sky. “One,” he called.

Mama sighed. “I was counting on having trout for all of us tonight. Guess we’ll have leftover macaroni and cheese.” She dried her hands on her daisy-decorated apron. It was her spring apron. Mama had aprons for every season and a special one for Christmas, edged in red, with a red tieback and snow-heavy evergreen trees on the front. The rest of the months she left it laundered, ironed, and folded in a tall highboy dresser in the dining room. Every December she pulled it out like it was new, or a gift.

“It’s okay, Mama. I’m not so hungry. I don’t have to eat.” And it was true. I wasn’t hungry, not really. I thought if I had tried to eat macaroni and cheese that day it would make me upchuck. Mama’s macaroni and cheese was the last thing I ate before Mason … well, before Mason died.

Mama ignored what I said, took the trout in her left hand, and grabbed a knife from a block on the counter. She ran the knife up the fish’s belly. The sound made me wince as a trickle of blood spilled onto the counter. As often as I had watched her clean fish, I was always amazed at how easily she cut near its throat, reached in with her thumb, and then pulled like she was pulling a zipper, and out came the guts, bones and all, in one fell swoop. Then she lopped the head off with a cleaver as easily as I plucked blueberries from the bush.

“How come Daddy gets the trout?” I said.

“He caught it, Luna.”

She put the entrails in a small metal bucket near the back door. Mama liked to save the guts for the “night critters,” as she called them. Raccoons, possums, cats, or whatever else might be prowling around out there. I was never sure who ate them but the scraps were always gone the next morning.

I heard my father washing up in the basement. “Tell him, Mama. Tell him to let me be a pallbearer.”

“Hand me that cornmeal, Luna,” she said like she didn’t even hear me. “Think I’ll fry this fish.”

I grabbed the sack of cornmeal from a long, wormy shelf that at one time was the sitting part of a church pew. Daddy had nailed it to the wall so Mama had a place to keep sacks of cornmeal and flour and sugar and jars of peanut butter and a jar filled almost to the top with buttons. Seemed Mama was always replacing buttons, either on our clothes or the neighbors’.

“I’m hungry, Louise,” my father called as he climbed the cellar stairs. “Lookin’ forward to that fish.”

“Lucky you,” Mama said. “The rest of us get leftovers.”

I sucked air and let it out my nose. “Tell him, Mama.”

“Now isn’t the time, Luna. Run that bucket of guts out to the back hedge.” She pulled a half-gone macaroni and cheese casserole from the fridge. “Hot dogs. I’ll boil hot dogs too.”

I stood there a second or two, forcing the world to slow down long enough for me to see clearly, trying to understand what just happened. It was like they didn’t care, didn’t care one lick that my best friend in the whole entire world had just died and that I wanted to help carry his casket to his grave.

“Luna, the bucket,” Mama said.

I grabbed the bucket and headed out back. Mama had a special place under the privets where she left food for the critters. She also hung suet and seed bells from the trees and made peanut butter treats that she tucked into the nooks and crannies of the trunks and branches like Easter eggs for the squirrels to find.

The swingset that my father built from scrap wood was empty that afternoon. Only Polly, our dog, was outside in the heat. She was a coonhound mix and the only member of the family that understood me. I still remembered the day Mama found Polly in a cave down by Clay Creek. Polly was just a pup, a few days old at the time. It seemed the mama dog had crawled into the cave to birth nine puppies. Mama brought them all home, and for a short while our house was the happiest place on earth.

Mama gave all but one of the pups away. We kept Polly on account of Mama said she looked most like the mama. Polly grew to be a big dog, brown with flecks of black fur and large brown eyes that looked like pools of chocolate syrup. She was mostly gentle,
but she was also a good watchdog and barked loud whenever a stranger set foot on our property.

Polly rallied from her sun spot when she saw me. She always knew when I was thinking about something special, something painful or unusual, and she bounded over to me. I rubbed her neck and patted her sides.

“Good dog, Polly. You understand, don’t you, girl?”

She whimpered and nosed my thigh. “It’s okay. At least it will be, I hope.”

Polly barked once. She missed Mason too. Mason was best at playing fetch with her and best at jumping into the creek and calling her in after him. I liked to watch them doggy-paddle together all the way back to the bank.

My brother and sisters were more than likely down at the creek, jumping from the Tarzan swing into the brown, muddy water to keep cool. I took advantage and sat on one of the swings. I moved back and forth slowly with my bare feet dragging in the dirt. A hot tear rolled down my cheek. I swiped it away like it was an annoying fly.

Mason had died and no one—leastways, no human—seemed to care how it made me feel.

I swung harder and harder, faster and faster, until I got the bumps. But I kept pumping my legs and pumping my legs, and I leaned way back so that I was almost lying flat and swinging, swinging and thinking,
swinging and missing Mason. Swinging and thinking how much I wanted to help carry him, the way he carried me home one day when I slipped on a rock at the creek and turned my ankle. The way Daddy carried Grandpop. The way Mama carried the babies in the church nursery with gentle but firm hands. I wanted, no, I
needed
to carry Mason home.

I stayed outside as long as I could stand it. Polly lay back down—this time in the shade. But she kept a watchful eye on me. I went around to the front to avoid the kitchen and my mother. My father, freshly showered, was in the living room. He wore blue pants and a white T-shirt. The tattoo he got in the Navy of a Hawaiian hula dancer wiggled on his forearm when he snatched his newspaper from the coffee table. He sat with a thud in his easy chair. “Girls can’t be pallbearers.”

He didn’t even give me time to ask again, so I knew I had to pull out the big guns. I called for my mother to come out of her kitchen.

“Tell him, Mama, tell him to let me be one of Mason’s pallbearers. He was my best friend. I’m … I’m thirteen and plenty strong.”

Now the thing about my mama is that she had a voice inside, a fancy voice as she called it, that told her when and when not to argue with my father. The last time Mama went against my father’s final word was three months ago when my older brother, Justus
T. Gleason Junior, announced he wanted to join the Navy. Mama won that skirmish, and JT, as we called him, went off to sea. So when she put her hands on her hips and stood in front of my father, I knew she was preparing to change his mind for him.

“Now listen here, Justus T. Gleason. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let Luna carry her friend’s body to his grave. For heaven’s sake, there ain’t no rule.” Then she wiped her hands together like she was wiping off dirty business and strutted back to her kitchen. Enough said.

Daddy snapped his newspaper but didn’t say a word. Not a single, solitary word.

CHAPTER
2

T
hat night, the night before Mason’s funeral, I sat at the kitchen table searching every corner and every shadow of the room for words, trying to remember how Mason and I first met. I was trying to remember because his mother, Ruby Day, asked me to speak the eulogy. I thought it would be important to tell folks how we came to be such good friends. Only I couldn’t remember.

Ruby Day’s mind ran slower than a turtle through mud, and she was shyer than a groundhog in January. But it wasn’t until she started talking and moving that you could tell something wasn’t right. She had close-cropped blonde hair because it was easier to manage, an almost round face, and a tiny pug nose that tried desperately to keep her heavy glasses supported.

“I … I won’t know what to say,” she had said. “But you will, Luna. You was butter-and-eggs, remember that, butter-and-eggs?”

Butter-and-eggs. That’s how Ruby Day described us. She said we were as close as butter-and-eggs, a wildflower that grew on the roadsides. It had pretty butter-colored petals and then a darker yellow in the middle, the two colors kind of running together like soft-boiled eggs run when you crack the shells.

“Don’t you worry, Ruby Day,” I had said. “I’ll say some nice words.” Even though I really had no idea what to say—not exactly. Writing a eulogy is not like writing a theme paper for school.

I mean, it wasn’t all that easy to put a whole entire friendship on one piece of loose-leaf paper. He was always just there and was always my friend. Always there to teach me how to thread a proper night crawler onto my hook—something Daddy never bothered to teach me. “Girls don’t fish,” he said.

Mason had also been there to teach me about jazz. I remembered when he bought his first Oscar Peterson record. He looked at me with those deep brown eyes of his and a smile spread across his face wider than the record album. He said, “Jazz tells stories. Not with words, but stories just the same.”

I listened real close to the music, but I never heard any stories—just a bunch of disarranged notes dancing
around in the air. I couldn’t catch the rhythm, if there was one. But that was okay.

I wrote down two more memories, one about fishing, the other about the time Mason fixed Jasper’s bicycle. Then I erased the junk about the jazz record on account of it was just too personal to go blaring out into a crowded funeral parlor. All of a sudden, and I can’t really tell why, I crumpled the page and left it there. All my memories jumbled on the kitchen table in a wrinkled ball. Then I went to bed wondering if Mama had again tried to convince Daddy to let me be a pallbearer for Mason.

It wasn’t the first time I had to creep up the stairs and into my room in total darkness. I shared a room with my three sisters—Delores, who was fifteen and thought she was God’s gift to us all, and the twins, June and April, who just turned five. I thanked Jesus the second I got into bed that no one woke up and asked me stupid questions.

I burrowed into the covers and started to cry again on account of the sneaky side of sadness when I saw the hall light go on. My bedroom door opened a crack.

“Go on then, Luna.” It was my father. “Do man’s work, but don’t come crying to me if you drop the casket and that boy’s body spills out on the ground.”

I winced and swallowed. But I only said, “Goodnight, Daddy.”

Mama was standing over me when I woke the next morning.

“I found your crumple.” She held out her palm with the ball of loose-leaf on it. “Did you write anything?”

I pulled myself up and wiped sleep from my eyes. I figured I was really wiping dried-up tears that I had cried in my sleep. “I wrote some words, Mama. But it all sounded wrong. I can’t figure out how to say what I want to say.”

Mama sat on the bed and smiled into my eyes. “How come you loved him, honey?”

I pulled my knees up under my chin. “I don’t know. He was funny and … shy like Ruby Day, and he was fixin’ to teach me how to drive as soon as he got that old heap in his garage running. He was always teaching me things, like how to swing a baseball bat. And … and I think mostly Mason loved me back.”

“Then that’s what you say.”

Mama stood and hovered over me for a second or two. She had her glasses on that morning, and the way the sunlight glinted through the window called attention to the blonde streaks in her mostly brown hair. And when she smiled at me it was like she was smiling into my insides. Then she reached down, took my hand in hers, kissed my palm, and then folded my fist
around that kiss. “You keep that one for later. Now, I got breakfast ready. I let you sleep a little longer on account of you were up so late. Your brothers and sisters are already making quick work of the bacon, so it’s probably best to eat before you get dressed. Daddy told Ruby Day we’d pick her up at ten thirty.”

I heaved a sigh and swung my legs over the bed. “But, Mama,” I called. “What if I mess up?”

She poked her head into my room. “You can’t mess up. He was your favorite person in the whole world, and you can’t say anything wrong about your favorite person.”

I swiped at tears. “When do they stop, Mama?”

She scratched her cheek. “Hard to know about grieving tears, Luna Fish. But you don’t want them to stop completely, do you?”

I felt my brow wrinkle as Mama headed back downstairs.
Luna Fish.
It was the nickname Delores gave me after I refused to eat a tuna fish sandwich—I’d thrown it on the kitchen floor and then slid on the mess like an ice skater when I tried to leave the table. I remember Mason laughed when I told him about it, and he said he’d have to try tuna skating himself sometime.

Mason’s laugh made me think about what Mama said. I guess no tears meant no memory, and I never wanted to forget Mason—ever. So I let the tears come that morning.

By the time I got downstairs, Daddy was already in his easy chair, wearing his funeral suit—black with a white shirt and black tie. He was clean-shaven and I could smell his Aqua Velva aftershave all the way to the kitchen. Polly sat near the hearth looking all sad and concerned. I wished we could take her along and frankly didn’t understand why we couldn’t. She loved Mason too. I patted her head. “I know, girl. I know.”

Delores was sitting at the kitchen table with Jasper, my nine-year-old brother. The twins had already eaten, cleared their places, and gone outside. I could hear them out in the yard hollering at each other.

“I think it’s gonna be a hot day,” Mama said. She placed a plate of food in front of me, along with a soft-boiled egg sitting in a little porcelain cup. Mama cut soldier toast as always: three strips of buttered toast lined on my plate like troops going into battle, just the right width for dipping into the egg. “So choose a light dress—ain’t no rule that it has to be black.”

I didn’t own a black dress, and until that moment I had not given a single thought to what I was going to wear to Mason’s funeral.

“No bacon?” I asked.

“I told you to hurry up. Jasper wolfed down the last four pieces.”

“Pig,” I said to Jasper, who scrunched up his nose and stuck his tongue out. I cracked the top of the egg with my spoon and dipped one of my soldiers into the
shell, soaking up the yellow yolk, and bit into it. But the bite got stuck about halfway down. I guess I wasn’t all that hungry anyway.

“You really gonna get up in front of the whole town and talk about Mason?” Jasper asked.

“I promised Ruby Day.”

“How come Ruby Day ain’t gonna talk?” Delores asked. “Is it ‘cause she’s a retard?” She crossed her eyes and screwed up her mouth. “Duh. I’m a retard.”

“You shut up, Delores. Don’t go talking about Ruby Day like that. Go stick your head in water ‘til Mama calls you to get dressed.”

Mama, who was standing near the stove, clicked her tongue. “Don’t talk like that, Luna. And Delores, Luna is right—don’t make fun of Ruby Day. She can’t help the way she is.”

“Sorry, Mama,” we said together, but glared at each other.

Mama wet the corner of her dish towel and wiped stuck egg from Jasper’s cheek. “Go on outside and play until I call you.”

“You mean I gotta go?” Jasper dropped his fork in his plate. “I don’t want to see no dead boy.”

Mama put her hands on his shoulders. “Mason was everyone’s friend. Remember how he always tossed a football with you? And fixed your bike chain?”

Jasper looked up at her. “Yeah, but, but—”

“Dying is part of living. Nothing to be afraid of and
you can’t avoid it. Just walk up to the casket and say good-bye to Mason.”

That was when Delores started to cry, but they were fake Delores tears. She had a power to turn them on and off like hose water. “Me too? You mean I gotta look at him? I … I don’t want to see no dead boy in a box, Mama. I don’t.”

“We’re all going.” She looked at the kitchen clock. “Look at the time. Now you and Jasper go get dressed in Sunday clothes.”

“Yes, Mama,” they said, and off they went.

“What do you suppose a dead boy looks like?” I heard Delores say.

“Probably squishy,” Jasper said. “Like a fish with bulging eyes.”

BOOK: Carrying Mason

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