This Rock (25 page)

Now I'm just a dog. I admit I'm just a dog. Ain't never done nothing but get in trouble and get looked down on. I've been a shame to you ever since I was a youngun. I don't give a damn
.

After Daddy died it was like I never done nothing rite again. That's a fact. Daddy would sometimes take up for me, but after he was gone nobody else did
.

I don't want you to try to get me out of heer. And don't get U. G. to try. The judge said it would be thirty days, and by God it will be. Don't spend none of Daddy's money on me. I have got free room and board from the people of Greenville County and I will take them up on it. Don't spend none of Daddy's molasses money on me. No sir
.

If somebody here gives the guard any sass they get rapped with a billy club drove into their gut. You don't answer a bull he'll ram you with a club in the belly. If they want to they can wait a day to
bring you any water. In this heat you sweat out every drop in a few hours, and then you are so weak you just lay still and feel the air has teeth
.

I was laying heer righting this and somebody grabbed my pensil and broke it in two. I had to pay a guard four cents for that pensil, and now I have to right with the stub. Since they took my knife I can only sharp the led by rubbing it on the floor. I naw away the wood and rub the led on the seement to give it a point. Never thought a little peece of pensil would be so dear. When I get out of heer I'm going to buy a box of yallow pensils
.

The big feller that broke the pensil has it in for me. He has a grudge cause I'm from North Carolina. He says people from North Carolina ain't Tarheels they're shit heels. He's a big feller named Warren that will blow snot on his hand and wipe it across your mouth. He was caught peeping into people's windows is why he is heer
.

“I will teach you a lesson before I'm done,” he will say. I would fite him except they took my knife when they put me in heer
.

A drink of licker would sooth me. A drink of licker would be like a frend to comfort me. But I don't want to get any more licker till I get out of heer. The other day Wheeler and Drayton come to see me. Now I knowed Wheeler had something in his shirt cause of the way the shirt pooched out at his side. I kept looking at his shirt and when he leaned up close to the bars he reached into his shirt and brought out a half pint bottle
.

I stuck that bottle in my own shirt fast as I could, but another prisoner had seen it. Soon as Wheeler and Drayton was gone, and soon as it got dark, Warren started in on me. “Ain't you going to be sociable?” Warren whispered in my ear
.

I pulled away from him and pushed myself up against the wall. His breath stunk like the floor of a chicken house
.

“Powell don't want to share with his buddies,” Warren said to the others. He muttered something to the other prisoners and they grabbed hold of me. Sixteen hands held me to the bunk while Warren twisted the bottle out of my shirt
.

In the dark he drunk most of the licker hisself, and then he give
the others a little sip. And when the bottle was empty they held me against the bunk and crammed the neck of the bottle in my mouth
.

“Now you have something to piss in,” Warren said. “Save your piss and drink it.” In a fair fite he knows I could beat him easy. And when I get out of heer I will
.

I will see you uns in a month, after my vacashun, your son, Moody

After I got the letter me and U. G. drove down to Greenville and paid Moody's fine. We got him out of jail and brought him back. I never showed nobody the letter. When I mentioned the letter to Moody he said he had never wrote a letter. He said he wouldn't know how to write a letter while he was in jail, even if he had wanted to. But I had seen the letter, and I remembered every word of it. It was the year Jewel died of the flu. I remember it well.

Muir

“Y
OUR FRIEND
H
ICKS
died last night,” Mama said.

“Hicks?” I said.

“He died when he was milking. They found him in the stall with the cow standing over him.”

“I don't believe it,” I said.

I had seen Hicks the day before at the store. He had been playing checkers with U. G. as usual. He was a good friend and was somebody you could always depend on to say something funny and friendly. He liked to play checkers, and he was always ready to take a drink, and he was always ready for a laugh. But he wasn't a mean drinker. Far as I knowed he'd never hurt nobody. He loved a good story as much as anybody you ever seen, and he never teased me about trying to preach. People said he stayed at U. G.'s store so much because him and his wife, Jevvie, quarreled. Every time he took a drink she run him out of the house. But I never seen him quarrel with nobody else. I remembered how tall and stooped Hicks was, and how he made a little extra money sharpening saws for people. He could sharpen a saw until it melted the wood it touched. And he took pride in his checkers playing.

Mama said Hicks's funeral was tomorrow evening.

Hicks lived up on Mount Olivet, and though I hardly knowed the rest of his family I seen I had to go to his funeral. I'd spent too many hours with Hicks at the store to stay away from his burial service. I would go and wear the old suit I had bought to preach in.

“I'm going to need the car tomorrow,” I said to Moody at supper.

“You may need the car, but I need it worser,” Moody said.

“I have to get to Hicks's funeral,” I said.

Of course Moody got up before daylight and drove away in the Model T, and I ended up walking to Mount Olivet on that November afternoon. The church was right on top of the mountain, and it was about five miles from the house. I knowed it would take about an hour and a half, and I give myself plenty of time, since the funeral was to begin at three. I started out right after dinner.

The walk up to Mount Olivet was easy. It was a calm and mild afternoon with gathering clouds. The haze on the far mountain hinted there might be rain. People setting on their porches after eating Sunday dinner spoke to me as I walked past. Everybody knowed it was the day of Hicks's funeral. But most wasn't going to the service, maybe because Hicks was a drinker and wasn't a regular churchman.

I liked the way the suit fit over my shoulders and hips as I walked. I hadn't wore if for a long time, but it still fit. The sun gleamed on the delicate herringbone pattern. I turned up the dirt road that run along Freeman Creek and started climbing.

“Hey, Muir, going to your wedding?” somebody hollered. I looked back and seen Blaine walking behind me. I stopped to let him catch up.

“That's a humdinger of a suit,” Blaine said. “You going to preach the funeral?”

“Only if they ask me,” I said. “A man needs one good suit in his life.”

“So they'll have something to bury him in,” Blaine said.

“Hope to wear it a few times before that,” I said.

“Better hope it don't rain,” Blaine said.

“It rains, I'll just stand under a tree till it stops,” I said.

I expected to see more people on the road going to Hicks's funeral. But we didn't run into anybody else till we come around the bend a
few hundred yards below the church. There was a cluster of men and boys gathered by the road. One was pulling the wire of a kind of trolley that carried buckets of water from the spring far down in the holler. “Howdy,” I said.

“What say, 'fessor?” one of the men said.

“You boys getting any?” Blaine said.

“Getting any what?” one said. And everybody laughed.

“Getting a drink of water,” one of the Jenkins boys said.

“That's what I meant,” Blaine said.

I watched one of the MacDowell boys pull on the trolley contraption. It was strung on pulleys attached to trees right down the steep mountainside. The buckets was wired to hooks and they filled their-selves in a reservoir of rocks down at the spring. It was a fancy device. The bucket in the reservoir filled, and then it took the MacDowell boy several minutes to reel it up the mountainside to the road as the other bucket was lowered to be filled.

“I never seen one of them before,” Blaine said.

“Old Hicks invented it,” the MacDowell boy said. “Thunk it up and built it.”

“Then we should have a little ole drink in his honor,” the Jenkins boy said.

“Not of springwater,” Blaine said.

“Branch water and bourbon,” somebody said.

“What if we ain't got no bourbon?” Blaine said.

“Then just plain liquor will have to do,” the MacDowell boy said. He reached into the water bucket and pulled out a dripping jar.

“Why, you sneaky son of a bitch,” the Jenkins boy said.

“I wouldn't want ole Hicks to be funeraled without a toast,” the MacDowell boy said. He passed around the bottle and everybody had a sip. I pretended to have a taste, just enough to wet my tongue, because I didn't want to show no disrespect by refusing a drink in Hicks's honor. And I didn't want to show no disrespect to the family or the church by coming to the funeral smelling like corn liquor neither. I dampened the tip of my tongue and passed the bottle on to Blaine.

“Here's to Hicks, wherever in hell you are,” Blaine said and raised the jar in the air.

“I hope they have good drinking liquor in hell,” the MacDowell boy said.

“If they have good liquor, then it ain't hell,” I said, and everybody laughed.

“Wherever Hicks is there'll be a drink of liquor,” the MacDowell boy said.

I took a dipper of water from the bucket and drunk it. “We better get to the church before we miss his funeral,” I said.

“Don't reckon Hicks would grudge us a little sip,” Blaine said.

S
EVERAL MEN IN
suits stood outside the door of the little church. One that I recognized as the pastor at Mount Olivet stepped forward to meet me. I was surprised he knowed who I was.

“Hey buddy,” the preacher said, “could you help us out?”

“If I can,” I said.

“We seem to be short a pallbearer,” the preacher said. “Could you fill in? After all, you was a friend of Hicks.”

The pastor showed me where to stand, and I found myself opposite to U. G. I nodded to U. G. and he nodded back. I nodded to the other pallbearers too. There was the MacDowell boy, a Willard, a Freeman, and somebody I thought was a Griffith.

The pastor told us what we was supposed to do. When they brought the casket in the wagon we would slide it out and carry it to the table in front of the church. Then we would set on the left front bench while the family set on the right. After the service was over we would tote the casket out and the family would follow.

I stood in line and nodded to the people as they walked into the church. I tried to look dignified and clasped my hands in front of my waist. I had been to a lot of funerals but never served as a pallbearer before. I stood up straight as I could.

A wagon with the coffin in it come creaking up the road. When it reached the churchyard the driver turned the wagon and backed it almost to the church steps.

“Here goes, boys,” the pastor said. I took hold of the cold brass handle on the right side of the coffin and pulled. The box slid out over the rough boards and I passed the handle on to the Freeman boy
and grabbed the second handle and pulled again. When I took hold of the third and last handle it felt like the whole weight of the casket fell on my fingers. But when I lifted up I found the box was already moving in the grip of the other pallbearers. I had to skip to catch up and take the extra weight as the casket tilted up the steps.

Rain started to fall just as we went into the church. A drop hit the arm of my suit and made a dark spot.

Mount Olivet Church was the smallest sanctuary I'd ever seen. It was really just a little clapboard chapel with a steeple no bigger than an outhouse. Inside was maybe ten benches on either side of the aisle. The preacher had cleared off the communion table in front of the pulpit where the offering baskets and the communion platter usually set. We rested the casket on the table and turned it around lengthwise to the congregation. I was sweating with the effort in the muggy air. I was going to set down with the other pallbearers on the left, but the preacher tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a screwdriver on the floor beside the pulpit.

After thinking for a second I seen what he wanted me to do. Without looking back at the congregation, I picked up the tool and started loosening the screws on the lid of the coffin. There was four on either side and one at each end. The screws come out of the pine easy, but I was careful not to loosen them too much. The screws must not fall out of the lid when it was took off, or they'd be hard to find in the dark church. Me and the preacher lifted off the cover and carried it to the corner, but the screwdriver slipped out of my grasp and went clattering to the floor. I scooped it up and laid it by the pulpit again.

As I straightened up beside the coffin, I seen Hicks's face for the first time. He laid with his eyes closed and his skin looked dark as a bruise. And there was a smell coming from the box. Somebody had put cologne on the body, and talcum powder. And there was the scent of camphor from the cloth that had laid all night on his face. And there was a faint smell of whiskey, and another smell too, like Hicks had already started to rot, as any animal on a trail might smell after being dead two days.

After I set down, the family on the right come forward to view the corpse. Hicks's widow, Jevvie, had to be helped by her son Lamar.
Jevvie limped to the front of the church and stood with her hands on the side of the box. She looked inside and sobbed loud and deep. The sob filled the church like a gong had been hit. It felt like the whole church had been struck dumb. Everybody froze because Jevvie's sob sounded so complete and final, like that was all there was to say about Hicks, about his life and his death. Everybody knowed that Jevvie and Hicks had quarreled about things all their married lives. Jevvie looked down at him in the coffin and shook her head. It was as if all the sadness of her life was summed up in that sob. Finally Lamar led her back to the front bench on the right, and the rest of the family filed forward, other sons and daughters, the grandsons with their hair combed for the first time in their lives and their shirts buttoned tight around their necks.