Grounded (7 page)

The annual Fourth of July parade was always a big deal in Digginsville. Kids decorated their bikes with crepe paper and rode down Main Street and around the little cluster of side streets we called the neighborhood. Members of troops, clubs, and associations carried banners made from bedsheets and marched behind the bike riders. Anyone with a fancy car drove it behind the marchers.

When I came downstairs for breakfast that Fourth of July, I found Mamaw in our kitchen. She had filled Lilac Rose’s old baby carriage with my dolls and was feeding them breakfast.

“The babies are going to be in the parade,” she announced.

I stared at my grandmother. She was still in her nightgown. Her hair looked like a gray tumble-weed.

“Have you told Mother you’re doing this?” I asked a little meanly.

“
I’m
the mama,” Mamaw said sulkily, stroking a life-size baby doll and pressing a Cheerio to its red plastic lips.

This was a disaster! How had she even reached the dolls off the high shelves in the basement where I’d hidden them the night before?

“I’d sure hate to see those pretty babies get run over by a fire truck,” I said. “You remember how the fire truck always drives by at the very end of the parade, don’t you?”

Mamaw bit her bottom lip. “I don’t like when my babies get hurt,” she said sadly.

Mother came into the kitchen. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress with a belt that made her look thin as a broom handle. She’d gotten even skinnier since the crash.

“Park the carriage in the breezeway,” she ordered. “Babies aren’t allowed at the parade. Too dangerous for them. Now go get dressed.”

Mamaw did as she was told. Her brain was
turning to mush, but even she recognized the futility of disobeying Mother.

Shortly before ten o’clock, we went outside. Uncle Waldo was standing in front of his house with a coffee cup in one hand and a small American flag in the other.

“Happy Fourth, neighbors,” he said, raising a friendly toast to us with his cup.

“Same to you,” Mother replied, turning to look in the opposite direction, toward the bike riders two blocks away. “Daralynn, bring a chair down off the porch for Mamaw.”

“Let me do that,” Uncle Waldo offered, starting toward our porch.

“Daralynn’s perfectly capable,” Mother said.

I retrieved the chair, planting it in the grass for Mamaw. She always loved a parade.

“Here come the baby bicycle riders!” Mamaw cheered.

A ragtag brigade of fifteen or twenty kids—mostly younger than me—rode their Schwinns in a procession past our house. I sat on the curb and waved mechanically, remembering how much it’d meant to me to see Wayne Junior and his friends waving when I rode in the parade.

After the bicyclists came the local Girl Scout troop, led by Miss Jackie Harris. They were followed by the Boy Scouts (
BE PREPARED, DIGGINSVILLE,
their banner ominously commanded), the Future Farmers of America, the 4-H’ers, the American Legion, and The Summer Sunset Retirement Home for Distinguished Gentlemen. These were Aunt Josie’s five housemates, shuffling along at a glacial pace with their banner held in front of them. Every few steps, one of the men mustered the energy to wave. I waved back, wondering why Aunt Josie wasn’t marching with her gentlemen like she usually did.

The antique cars and trucks were next. All the usual suspects were in attendance: Norm Olsen, the mechanic, in the souped-up Mustang he drove once a year. Marvin Kinser from the hardware store in his pickup truck with the chicken-wire Liberty Bell in the bed along with a tape recorder playing a warbled rendition of “It’s a Grand Old Flag.” And as always, Avis Brown in her shiny white Oldsmobile, throwing tiny packages of red and black licorice with the words
WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND READ ALL OVER? THE DIGGINSVILLE DAILY QUILL!
printed on the front.

I was surprised to see Clem’s yellow convertible behind Avis. He was wearing a jaunty plaid cap and
throwing great gobs of saltwater taffy. Aunt Josie pranced alongside the car, passing out leaflets.

I didn’t dare try to catch any of Clem’s taffy—not with Mother standing twelve inches away. But I couldn’t resist seeing what Aunt Josie was up to. When she got close, I stood up and held out my hand.

“Clem says
you’re
the one who gave him the idea for this,” Aunt Josie said to me in a stage whisper. She was crackling with energy as she handed me a leaflet. I read the words in one nervous gulp.

As soon as Aunt Josie had passed, Mother grabbed the paper from my hands and read it.

“A parade of
fools
is what this is,” Mother said, crumpling the leaflet and stuffing it back in my hand. She turned her back on the parade. “Come on, Mamaw. We’re going.”

“Can I get an ice-cream cone?” I asked cautiously. The tradition in Digginsville was that after the parade, everyone gathered at the Dig In Diner for free ice cream. Mother was mad, but she’d let me go fishing by myself. I was hoping maybe she was letting up a bit on my leash.

“Get one and come right home,” Mother commanded.

“Thanks!”

I took the alley and ran down to the Dig In Diner, beating most of the parade by several blocks. But news of the horse and carriage had already reached the diner.

“Best idea I’ve heard in years,” Mrs. Eliza Ravinwoods was saying when I walked in the door. “With a horse and carriage, we’ll be the envy of the Ozarks. I’m in for fifty dollars.”

Mr. Forest Swisher agreed. “Just think how nice a carriage would be for our senior citizens,” he said. “They’ll be able to do their own grocery shopping.
And I won’t have to hire high school boys to deliver groceries. This carriage could save me a bundle. I’m gonna give that Clem fella a hundred dollars.”

I thought of Wayne Junior, and how he was planning to buy a car with the money he’d saved from delivering groceries for Mr. Swisher. Then I remembered how Lilac Rose and her best friend, Natalie Jean, were scheming to ask Mr. Swisher if they could be the first delivery girls when they got old enough to work. I wondered how they’d feel about all this.

I stood in line for my ice-cream cone and watched the Summer Sunset men hobble in the door with Aunt Josie behind them.

“Daralynn, honey!” she called with a big wave when she saw me. “You haven’t forgotten about Mr. Aubrey Bryant’s living funeral, have you? It starts in an hour, but come on over to the crematorium right after you finish your cone. It’s going to be packed tighter’n a can of sardines.”

“Mother needs me at home this afternoon,” I fudged.

“But you’ll miss all the fun,” Aunt Josie said, clearly disappointed. “It’s going to be a terrific party.” She turned to address her housemates. “Aren’t we all going to have a
good
time this afternoon?”

The old men mumbled weakly in the affirmative.

“Let’s get each of you an ice-cream cone, shall we?” she said in her silky voice. “Then we’ll have Mr. Clem drive us over to Mr. Bryant’s party. Won’t that be fun? Did you see Mr. Clem’s yellow Cadillac? It’s fancy dancy. I just
know
you’re going to love riding in it. It’s not quite big enough to hold us all so we’ll have to go in two shifts. But first, let’s get us some ice cream. Mr. Bryant, you go first because it’s your big day. What kind would you like? Let’s see. They’ve got chocolate ripple, butter pecan, peach…”

When I left the Dig In Diner with my cone, I could hear Aunt Josie herding her gentlemen to the first living funeral at Clem’s Crematorium.

“Won’t it be handy when we have a horse and carriage and can travel together?” Aunt Josie was saying. “Mr. Clem says a deluxe carriage can seat six adults comfortably. Won’t that be
something
?”

That night as I watched the fireworks over Doc Lake, I thought about Mr. Clem and his horse and carriage. It would be the biggest thing ever to happen in Digginsville. Parades were all well and good, but every town had a Fourth of July parade. Fireworks, too. What other small town had a horse and carriage you could ride in to go fishing?

This would be as big as the Traveling Reptile Museum that rolled into town once a year. The TRM, as it was called, was a ghastly snake show that traveled the country in an air-conditioned trailer, pausing for a few hours on town squares. Folks paid fifty cents for the pleasure of climbing inside the trailer and eyeballing the giant snakes that slithered around on sticks stuck in dusty aquariums.

But we couldn’t claim the TRM as our own. It just passed through Digginsville every summer. A horse and carriage would be one hundred times better. It would change the way people lived and went about their business. And I’d get credit (and maybe even a trophy!) for inspiring Mr. Clem with the idea. Of course, he’d be Uncle Clem by then. And who knows? Maybe he’d teach me how to drive the horses—as long as Mother didn’t find out. She still thought Clem was the devil incarnate for opening his crematorium.

I decided that night to spend the next afternoon at the public library, researching cremation. I made a list of questions, including:
Why do some people bury dead bodies and others burn them? How did cremation get started? Is it illegal? Is it immoral? What happens to people when they die?

Before I went to bed, I glued the Giddyup and Give a Buck leaflet in my book of
Pertinent Facts & Important
Information
. Then I wrote another letter to Daddy, Wayne Junior, and Lilac Rose. I ended the letter this way:

That night I had a dream about getting a postcard from Daddy. It was addressed just to me, which never happened in real life. Daddy always addressed his postcards to The Oakland Family. In my dream I was so happy to get that postcard, I was flying!

The only bad part was that the postcard was written in a language I didn’t understand. And I couldn’t find anyone to read it to me.

Weirdly enough, Mr. Aubrey Bryant died three days later.

“I can scarcely believe it,” Aunt Josie whispered. She’d called me at the beauty parlor. It was obvious she’d been crying.

“He hadn’t even gone to his ball game yet this summer, had he?” I asked quietly into the phone.

Mr. Bryant’s claim to fame was that every year he took the Greyhound bus by himself up to St. Louis for a Cardinals’ baseball game. He was one of Aunt Josie’s more energetic gentlemen.

“No,” Aunt Josie said, sniffling. “Didn’t even get to go to his ball game.”

“How’d he die?” I asked. But before I could hear the answer, Mother grabbed the phone from me.

“
Who
died?” she barked into the phone.

I couldn’t hear Aunt Josie, but I could guess from Mother where the conversation was going.

“And you’re going to let him be
cremated
, are you?” Mother said. “All right then. Do as you will.” She hung up the phone without saying good-bye.

“Mother,” I leaped in recklessly, “
lots
of folks are cremated these days. Maybe not in Digginsville, but in big cities where there’s not enough room to bury everyone.”

(The
Encyclopedia Britannica
had been very informative.)

“It’s not a crime,” I added.

“Well, it
should
be,” Mother stated. Her face was red and squished with anger. “Jesus told us to care for the dead, not to
burn
them. Cremation is pagan. It’s an insult to God. A body can’t be resurrected if it’s not buried in God’s holy earth.”

“Not everybody feels that way,” I reported. “In some religions, they believe embalming, like they do over at the funeral home, is an abuse of the corpse.”

“
Who
believes that?” Mother demanded.

“Uh, I can’t remember,” I said, backing down. I
was pretty sure it was Jewish people and Muslims, but that wasn’t going to help this argument any.

“Christian people burn trash, not bodies,” Mother said in her best lecturing voice.

I knew what she was thinking. This was the second cremation in Digginsville, but the first of anyone we’d known. Maybe cremation really was the way of the future.

“At least Mr. Bryant had a nice life over at Aunt Josie’s,” I said.

No response from Mother.

“I bet he left Aunt Josie a little pocket change,” I said in a singsongy voice, knowing this would elicit a response.

“
That
you can be sure of,” Mother snorted. The discussion ended when her next customer arrived for a tint and perm.

Everyone knew the tradition at The Summer Sunset Retirement Home for Distinguished Gentlemen. Residents paid whatever they felt appropriate for lodging and meals at Aunt Josie’s. And when they died, they were expected to leave a “legacy,” otherwise known as a generous donation.

That’s why when you visited Aunt Josie’s house, you’d see little brass rectangles with words like:
WE
ARE INDEBTED TO MR. JAMES ELLSWORTH FOR THIS COMFORTABLE READING CHAIR.
Or,
THIS BOOKCASE WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF MR. ROBERT FAYEHART AND MR. ARTHUR JOE RAY.
Or,
BATHROOM RENOVATION FUNDED BY A HANDSOME DONATION BY MR. BRUCE LYNN PRATER.

Not every legacy donation resulted in a brass plaque. Some were spent on general repairs for the house. Others went toward upkeep of Aunt Josie herself in the form of clothes, shoes, hats, and makeup.

Sure enough, the Friday after Mr. Aubrey Bryant’s death, I saw Aunt Josie on my way to Swisher’s Grocery. She was wearing a tight-fitting lime green pant-suit with matching shoes.

“Looks like you got yourself a new outfit, Aunt Josie,” I said, putting my box of empty soda bottles down on the sidewalk.

“This ensemble,” she said in a serious voice, “was brought to you by an untimely contribution from Mr. Aubrey Bryant.”

I couldn’t help noticing that despite the new clothes, Aunt Josie looked frazzled and exhausted.

“Here,” she said, sticking two packs of Black Jack gum in the pocket of my shorts. “I’m feeling generous. Can you visit a minute?”

We sat down on a bench outside the grocery store. I tore into my gum and was admiring the deep licorice flavor before I realized Aunt Josie was crying.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, slumping over with her head in her hands. “Do you think the excitement was too much for him?”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Mr. Aubrey Bryant,” Aunt Josie said. “If that living funeral drove him to an early death, I will never forgive myself.”

I told her I couldn’t imagine how a party could kill somebody. “Besides, he was awful old,” I added. “What’d the doctor say?”

“The cause of death was listed as heart failure,” Aunt Josie said, blotting her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “Dr. Colyer said poor Aubrey’s heart just pooped out. But I wonder if that living funeral did him in.”

“Maybe he just needed to say his good-byes,” I said. “Once he did, he was free to pass over to the next world.” I silently wished I’d had the idea for living funerals a year earlier. That way I could’ve exchanged a few good-byes of my own.

Aunt Josie blew her nose noisily. “Aubrey Bryant was one of the nicest men I have ever had the pleasure
of knowing,” she said, mopping her nose with the handkerchief. “And I’m not just saying that because he was one of mine. He was a first-class gentleman. Never took his teeth out at the table, like some of them do. Never left whiskers in the sink when he shaved. Never called me Buttercup or Sweet Dreams or anything disrespectful. I was always Miss Josie to him. And I appreciated that.”

“He sure seemed to like living at your house,” I contributed.

“Fourteen years he was with me,” she said, nodding through her tears.

“That’s a long time,” I said, trying to be helpful.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“He had a vain streak,” she said, now hiccuping in addition to crying. “Did you know he wore a toupee?”

“Mr. Bryant did?”

“Uh-huh,” Aunt Josie confirmed. Then she giggled weakly. “He didn’t tell me about it for the longest time. When it comes to hair, men can be prouder than women.”

“How’d you find out about it?” I asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, brightening at the memory of a good story. “His hair started looking real snarly. I told him I needed to give him a shampoo
and condition before his hair turned into a rat’s nest. That’s when he took the toupee off his head and handed it to me, like he was handing me his hat.” She laughed and then sighed heavily. “I’m sprinkling his ashes in the garden tomorrow. You want to help?”

“I can’t,” I said without elaborating. I knew Mother wouldn’t let me, even if I wanted to. But I couldn’t help asking what I’d been wondering for weeks. “What do they look like?”

“What?” asked Aunt Josie. “The ashes?”

I nodded.

“Just regular old ashes, I imagine,” Aunt Josie said. “Like if you burned leaves or something.”

“Did they smell like…burnt skin?” I asked.

“No, child,” she said. Then she stopped. “Truth is, I’ve never actually seen anyone’s ashes up close. You sure you don’t want to come to the crematorium and pick ’em up with me? You can peek at the ashes as I walk Mr. Bryant home.”

The whole conversation was making my mind spin like a pinwheel. “You’re going to turn your backyard into a cemetery!” I blurted.

“What are you talking about, Daralynn?”

“If you sprinkle Mr. Bryant behind your house, it’ll be like having a dead
body
back there.”

Aunt Josie unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it in her mouth. “Bodies underground. Ashes on the ground. What’s it matter, really? It’s not them. It’s not where they are.”

“It’s not?” I asked.

“’Course not,” she said, smacking her gum.

“Then where are—” I started to ask. But Aunt Josie was standing up and adjusting her bosom.

“I knew I should’ve ordered this jacket in a size fourteen,” she said. Then, turning to me, she added in an almost shy voice: “Meet me at the crematorium tomorrow morning at ten?”

How could I say no?