Heading Out to Wonderful (30 page)

Sam snatches up the envelope and runs, the truck still idling in the road, useless because he doesn’t know how to drive, his feet don’t even touch the pedals, and so he runs along the road, a mile from town, a long way for a boy, followed by the dog whose nose is dipped in the blood of his master, “Go down go down you Knoxville girl,” and Sam knows a shortcut, and so he takes it, the envelope clutched to his heart sticky with Charlie’s blood, his present, Charlie had said, but he doesn’t know what it is, just that he is not to lose it and he is to remember, not even to tell maybe but to remember, and what is he to do with one more secret?, knowing that he will tell because he has to, because he doesn’t understand and somebody is going to have to explain it to him.

Sam is running now off the road and into the woods, which are filled with autumn’s thicket, and he loses a shoe in the brambles, but he runs on anyway, scratched by blackberry and raspberry and scrub pine. He is crying, truly scared, but racing toward the only place he knows and the only people who will take him in, Jackie at his heels.

The bells aren’t ringing any more when they reach the town and Sam races home and sits on his own porch. He is howling hysterically and his legs are covered with cuts and scratches and his face, too, and there is blood in his hair, and when his mother sees him, hears him and then sees him, she thinks that an accident has happened, that the truck lies mangled somewhere in a ditch with Charlie and beef strewn over the road and Sam can’t speak, can’t tell where it hurts or what happened, can only howl, the dog howling, now, too, and the neighbors gathering at the end of the walk, their own prayers put away for the night, and where is his baseball mitt that Charlie gave him for his birthday and his mother is asking where it hurts, feeling his thin arms and legs to see if anything is broken, asking if there was an accident, and Sam shaking his head no, no, no again, no nothing had happened but Charlie is hurt, he is hurt real bad, and they wouldn’t have believed him except that there is no Charlie and there is blood everywhere on the boy, and something, something must have happened, and so they get in the car, and Sam, howling, points the way, the headlights on now, until they come to Charlie’s truck in front of her house, the radio still playing in the idling truck, and they see it for themselves, the young girl, the handsome man, face down and dead, and then it is official, the only crime that ever happened in Brownsburg, Virginia is over, is done, the ballad ended, the string broken, the last note played. Yes, yes, yes, Jackie’s real gone. Jackie is a real gone guy.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I
T TOOK FOUR
hours to bury him. In the end, there was only the brother to do it. The preachers had railed about sin and hellfire, and said that anybody who touched or went near Charlie Beale’s body would go to hell as surely as he was bound there. Will would have helped, he offered, but, at the last, the brother knew that it was something he had to do alone, was something that he had, without knowing it, come all this way to get done.

Sylvan had been swept up at once, headlights ringing her dead body with men in uniform circling in the dark, while Boaty Glass sat on his porch, mute and unmoving, watching as the dead body of his wife was first examined by the coroner and then carted off to Kenneth Harrison’s to be made ready for the funeral. When the coroner told him that Sylvan was pregnant when she died, not a muscle in his face twitched. He figured he knew whose child it was, figured everybody knew as well, but he just didn’t care any more.

He was going to bury her in some old housecoat he found in the closet, but then that nigger woman showed up with some getup she’d made for her, never worn. It was ludicrous, but it might as well be that as anything else. But no shoes. She might as well go out of this world like the barefooted hillbilly she was, he figured.

Boaty wanted her buried the next day, no viewing of her body, mangled anyway, her face bruised from the fall on the stairs, and he wanted her shut in the ground and out of his life by nightfall the next day. He wanted her put down in the town cemetery, but nowhere near his family, and since her own people were not buried there—god, where were they buried?, some field out in Arnold’s Valley somewhere—she was to be put off to the side, alone, to spend eternity apart, away from her betters. He didn’t go down there in the dark to pick a spot. He just didn’t care.

He didn’t intend to hang around her grave anyway, ever, so it didn’t matter to him. Any free spot would do.

Charlie’s body, they left out all night. First frost. Not even anybody to watch over him, who was there? Alma, in bed, grieving; Will, sitting by his boy Sam, who was mad with night terrors, Will saying what he could, doing what he could think of, but nothing worked, the terrors wouldn’t be ameliorated by touch or word or prayer; Jackie, jumping at every sound, the scent of blood still in his nostrils; the whole town, worked up, sad but somehow thrilled, touched with the enormity of the tragedy that had happened right there in their own backyard; Ned, drunk and weeping as he would weep for pretty much the rest of his life. Even the coroner wouldn’t touch him. Defiled, the ministers said. Damned.

The preachers reminded their flocks in hastily called prayer meetings that Sylvan was murdered and, in the eyes of God, an innocent victim, and so she could be buried in sacred ground. Charlie was both a murderer and a suicide, two things that made him both damned to hell and inadmissible in the town cemetery. No, he wouldn’t be buried with the holy and the heaven-bound, and no faithful person would touch him without risking following him to the fire. The women believed, and the men at least listened, and did as they were told.

So there was only Ned, and nobody was sure except him that he could do it by himself. Some things you just know how to do, even if you don’t know you know it. How to bury your own flesh and blood is one of those things. And Ned was a carpenter, so he knew it not just in his heart but to the board foot and the last nail.

He went down to the lumberyard and ordered what he was going to need. Charlie Austin got it all together and just gave it to him, free, no charge, at least he could do that, no threat of hellfire in giving away some of his stock to this helpless boy whose grief was like an anvil dragging him down. The boy drove back to the house and got the only suit Charlie owned, the one he’d worn in court. He got it out of the armoire Alma had picked out at a country estate sale the year before, when everything was just starting, before anything really had begun, when everything was empty rooms and full hearts and bright hopes and a limitless future, and he pulled out the black tie, the only one, and he wrapped these things in a clean quilt from the bed and got back into the truck and didn’t remember until halfway out there that there were some good shoes, too, and there should have been socks, and maybe even some underwear, this was what his own brother was going to wear until time ran out, but he wasn’t going to go back, not now, not until it was done. He drove up to the house and got out to unlatch the gate and bounced the truck over the cowcatcher, then got out to latch the gate again, carefully—even though Boaty hadn’t kept cattle for years, there was nothing to get out, get away—and that done, he was alone with it, ready and not ready for the task and the grief that confronted him now, naked in the face in the cold late morning.

And it staggered him, buckled his knees to the ground, wracked him with the sobs of a child. Things you cannot bear are borne; the breath comes into your body on its own. Things don’t stop. They just don’t.

First he built some sawhorses, then he started to measure and cut the boards. He warmed up in the sawing, and he took off his jacket and worked in his shirtsleeves. Last night’s liquor began to run from his skin, mixed with the tears that wouldn’t stop coming. He built a plain pine box, bigger than his brother’s body, because in his mind his brother was bigger than he was in life, and he stopped when he heard the bells start to ring, signaling the start of that other funeral, and he could picture it, just for a minute, the dutiful town dutifully lining up to pay their respects, not even so much to her as to Boaty, to Harrison Boatwright Glass, the preacher saying what Boaty told him to say and nobody believed, the men imagining the coupling of the two of them even in death, the women trying to picture, inside the box, the dress they’d heard about; the men had told them, when they came back in the dark to supper, about the dress that Claudie had held in her hands, the dress that Sylvan Glass would wear, barefoot, when she got to the gates of Heaven.

As the boards came together, the beat of hammer on nail, the procession moved from the church to the cemetery, Boaty walking alone, behind the hearse, and in the graveyard, the words were said, and Sylvan Glass, aged twenty-one, went into the ground forever.

When the box was built, Ned stripped his brother naked and tried to wash him as best he could with water drawn from the spring in an old bucket he found there, with bits of an old blanket he found in the back of the truck. Even he could see the beauty of that body, the grace, the correctness of the way everything met everything else. He washed the body, and there was nothing gentle about it, not even the sounds of the brother weeping, not even the silence of death in the body of Charlie Beale, not even that—even in that there was a roughness and rage at the doing of things that were not wished but had to be done anyway—and the brother then dried him off with the blanket, and dressed him awkwardly in the shirt and suit, and tried to tie the tie around his neck, but the tears would not stop, they would not stop, and so he gave up, and wrapped the black wool tie around the slash of his brother’s throat, hoping it would be all right. His body was wracked with sobs for the man he barely knew except in his blood, but loved because of that. He cried for what they might have been to one another, for things that were not able to be saved, not any more, for crimes of his own that his brother didn’t even know about, for the crimes of his brother that were already famous and would not die with him.

He hoisted his brother by the shoulders, the heavy suit, the light but still body of the man, the bare feet, and he tried to get him in the box straight, and then he realized that his brother’s eyes were still open and he tried, but they would not close, and he had no pennies, and so, as he nailed the boards above him one by one, Charlie Beale would stare into the approaching darkness with the same look of startled fear, the fear of the animal before the trigger is pulled, forever and ever amen.

The sun was getting long over the mountains to the west, and he dragged the box to the truck and he somehow got it into the flatbed, and he drove to town, and as he drove through it, the people of the town, home from the funeral of a woman they had not loved, shut their curtains and their blinds and their shutters on the body of a man they had loved, lest the spirit come into their house and dwell among them, still living, still asking in its gentle way for their forgiveness, which they could give, but not now, not tonight, could not under orders from the men in the pulpits.

Ned drove to the cemetery, not fast, not slow, just drove, and he parked in front of the gate, locked for the night, and looked into the cemetery to see if he could spot the place where they had buried Sylvan Glass, and he found it, marked by a single spray of roses from the Kiwanis Club, “With Deepest Sympathy, Our Sister in Heaven,” and he banged his fists against the gates until his hands bled, rattled the rusted steel but they did not open and no one came, no one listened, although everyone heard. He pulled the box from the flatbed, dropping it on the ground, mad now, crazy mad and struck dumb with his grief and his solitude in all this, alone, a boy, a carpenter boy who had not even done his best work in burying his brother, but done what he could.

He dragged the box around the high wall of the cemetery, until he came to a narrow open place on the side of the road that was nearest to the place where Sylvan lay, and then he said “fuck” out loud and went back to the truck and got a shovel and started digging close to the wall that separated Charlie Beale from Sylvan Glass, and it took a long time. He stopped, thinking it was enough, but he saw as the light began to fade that it wasn’t enough, and so he jumped back down into the hole and dug until it was dark and that would have to do, feeling the chill of the cold walls of his brother’s grave, and he slid the box in, and started shoveling the dirt, jumping at the thudding sound of every shovelful as though he were being smacked repeatedly in the face.

When the dirt was up to his waist over the body of his brother, he threw the shovel in the road, and began to climb the mound, tamping down the dirt with his feet, like he had just planted a row of potatoes, and kept thumping with his feet until there was only a gentle mound, no higher than his shin, and he paused, and tried to think of some words to say, some words that would be different and more true than the words that had been said over the body of Sylvan. He spoke of blood, the bond of blood, and he spoke of the dirt and the animals, and the beating heart, the beating heart, the beating heart of brothers.

And then he was done, and it was over, and Charlie was laid to as much rest as he was going to get, and Ned picked the shovel up out of the road, careful even now, of his tools, and he drove home, back to the only house Charlie still owned, and he sat on the porch, the porch light on, tilted back in an old cane chair, and he drank whiskey until he was unconscious, with everybody watching, waking from sleep and watching, and when he woke up and it was still dark and he was still drunk but not drunk enough, he went in the house and got more whiskey and he drank that until he passed out again, and this was to be how he spent his days, in public agony, a cacophony of grief and inebriation. Day after day and night after night, he sat there drunk and drinking and nothing would stop him, and they all knew it, and the women began to bring him food, and the men liquor, and sometimes the twins came and sat with him, just sat, knowing there was no comfort to be given, so profound was this grief, so reckless was this sweet youth with the sympathies of his heart, and there was no diverting what was happening, and so they abetted, believing they shouldn’t but knowing there was nothing else that they, as Christians, could do, and within seven weeks the boy had drunk himself to death on an open porch in the middle of town while everybody watched, and, by that time, Harrison Boatwright Glass had gone out into the country and bought himself a new bride, a true redhead, who walked into a situation she knew nothing of, inherited a place she tried to make the best of, the second wife, the redneck beauty who couldn’t do the simplest figures in her head, and she was the new wife and the brother Ned was dead and it was winter and the snow fell on the graves of Sylvan Glass and Charlie Beale, the places where nobody would go and stand witness, not ever again and that was the end of the story. That was almost the end of the story.