A Gracious Plenty

  And he was most definitely not at rest.

  In the grave beside him, a baby was weeping shrill.

  The Mediator welcomed him and shook his slippery hand. “William Parker Blott,” she said. “Welcome, William Parker Blott.” The Mediator, with her periwinkle robe, the gold pipes shining in her hair, she told him the facts. “You sleep in the coffin, you work in the air. Think of it as a pantry. In life, you lived on just one shelf. Now you’re on two. The one above life, the one below, to help you see where you’ve been. To teach you how to be honest.”

  The others waited to see how he’d respond, shaking their heads, tittering.

  “You’re heavy now,” the Mediator told him. “You won’t rise up for a while. Our whole business here is to lighten, and when you’re wholly weightless, you’ll move to the next level.”

  “Ugh,” Blott said.

  “I know,” the Mediator told him. “Those morticians overdo it with the glue,” and she moistened his lips with vinegar to break the seal.

  The curious neighbors watched him recover his muscles and test his fingers and toes. The ones from plots far away tiptoed closer, peeking to see his face.

  “It works like this,” the Mediator explained. “The Dead coax the natural world along. We’re responsible for weather and tides and seasons. For rebirth and retribution. You’re going to enjoy it, I’m sure. But if you want to know real enlightenment, you’ve got to lose the weight. All of it. And we’re not just talking about blubber here, either. We’re talking about burdens and secrets, buster. This is critical information, so listen up.

  “In this place you’ve moved beyond experience. Now it’s your stories that keep you down. You can’t leave until you’ve told them.”

  William Blott, never much of a talker, moaned, and the Mediator touched his head. The way he recoiled, she might have been a serpent or an apparition, a dangerous thing indeed.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she comforted. “You won’t be lonely. You’ll learn a great deal about yourself and your kind. There are advantages.”

  “Not too many advantages,” I whispered to Lucy. “He’s got the plot next to Marcus Livingston!”

  “He’s in for a surprise,” Lucy said. “I hope he likes babies with big lungs.”

  And sure enough, it wasn’t long until Marcus began to squall full volume. William Blott collapsed into a ball and hid his ears.

  The next evening, I was trimming the grass around the edges of Papa’s stone, my hands and knees denting the earth. “He’s never gonna speak at this rate,” I told Papa.

  “You might be right,” he answered. “Then there’ll be two of ’em up on that hill sitting heavy and turning the ground to acid. I don’t know how Rulene Thornton stands it, making her home up there.”

  “I think he’ll be okay,” Ma breathed. “He’ll talk when he’s good and ready. He spent most of his life by himself. You can’t expect the man to become a talker just because he’s come to a place with so many ears.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m awfully curious.”

  Papa winked at me and laughed. “It ain’t like you don’t know nothing about him, Finch. The man was nearly ’bout a local celebrity before he died.”

  “Yeah, but he’s such a mystery.”

  “Everyone’s a mystery until they tell their own story,” Ma said.

  In those first days, when the dirt was still red and showing around William Blott’s burial space, I scattered grass seed over the ground, and Lucy called a cloud to water it for me. We were nosy, spying to find out whatever we could.

  He kept his back to us the whole time, but he was sitting up by then, inside his special tomb, slumped over, clearly depressed.

  “You know, we’re not that bad,” Lucy called. “You might like us if you gave us a chance.”

  “How long’s he been crying? That baby?” William Blott asked her, surprising us both. I ducked behind Rulene Thornton’s cross, in case he turned around, but he didn’t.

  “No one’s exactly sure,” Lucy told him. “Miss Lizzie Nobles says he was crying when she got here, and that’s been almost thirty years.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Who knows?” she answered. “He’s never said anything. I don’t know if he couldn’t ever talk or if he just forgot how. The crying gets worse every day.”

  “That’s too bad,” William Blott said.

  Day by day, he got more and more curious, peeking from his tomb when everyone had gone about their doings, calling out to Marcus and studying other nearby stones.

  He never dodged me, though. He didn’t think I could see him. He didn’t even run to hide when I was near. For all practical purposes, I was invisible to him, just a regular groundskeeper with my heart pumping fine.

  “I think he’s coming around,” I told Ma as I scrubbed dark mildew from her stone. “He’s like a scared cat hiding beneath the bathtub. He keeps sneaking out in secret.”

  “Pretty soon, when the place is familiar, he’ll come out regular,” she said. “You just wait.”

  And sure enough, William Blott began talking. But like everybody else, he crouched behind voices at first, trying to maintain his image.

  When the Mediator asked him one night how things were going, he hid behind his grouchy voice: “They’d be a hell of a lot better,” he said, “if somebody would shut that baby up!”

  But the image corroded, as images will. William wasn’t a natural grouch, so he couldn’t keep it going.

  When he tried to be a comedian, it was the intonation that failed him, his jokes about as funny as a tidal wave. When he tried to talk like a British scholar, he got dirt in his mouth and wound up coughing, done in by the accent that time.

  When he tried to pretend that he was comfortable with death, that there was nothing in his past he needed to release, he began to studder.

  I pieced together his story in bits, given in all different voices. I compared his story with what I knew of him already and added it up for myself.

  William Parker Blott lived poor and died rich. Around the neighborhood, everyone considered him a bum—we didn’t think he had a pot to piss in. We didn’t know he had family or money, either one—until he was on his deathbed. Then suddenly he was found, long-lost father, son of wealthy blue bloods. His only child, Rhett, came just once, and shamed by the destitution his father had chosen, he paid off the doctor bills and funeral home. He paid for a high-class coffin and a one-man mausoleum, with BLOTT in large letters over an arched doorway. Inside, William Blott rests in white marble, like a king, a stained-glass picture of Jesus hanging above him. His family didn’t want him buried like common country people. Even if he’d had an alcohol problem, even if he’d abandoned his young wife and son, he would not be buried like a pauper.

  Then the son offered to pay Reba Baker and the adult women’s Sunday school class who had taken on William as a Good Samaritan project. When the women told him there was no need, he made them this offer: Anything that his father owned was theirs. They could raffle it off, use it themselves, donate it to Goodwill, or have a flea market. They deserved compensation, Rhett Blott said. For he was a businessman, taking care of business. It was all just business to him.

  Didn’t he want some sort of memento? Reba asked him. Would he like for some of the deacons to accompany him to the place his father had lived?

  But Rhett said no.

  So the land that William Blott had lived on, that tangled, overgrown property where no one had ever been invited to visit, could belong to the Sunday school class, too. Rhett Blott declared that his word was gold and he left before supper on the second day after William had died. He didn’t want to spend another night in a second-rate motel with only rooms, no suites. He’d have his lawyers draw up the papers. The inheritance would be theirs in a matter of weeks.

  Reba Baker couldn’t believe it. They’d use his house for a boys’ and girls’ club. They’d sponsor vacation Bible schools or maybe even Christian camps
for children as far away as the coast. Somebody’d have to build a road in and out, but surely T & T Construction would donate a bulldozer for the church’s use.

  “What they don’t know yet,” William tells us, “is that I never built a house. There’s not even a water pump on that property.” Then he laughs, but his laugh is a sad one and goes on too long. I can feel the ground tremble just a bit, no more than the way it trembles when the teenagers play their music too loud.

  “Poor old Reba,” he says. “She’s a good old gal.”

  William has begun to catch on. The ones who’ve just died tell the stories. They do the talking, repeating the things they remember.

  The others comment sometimes. Not always. It isn’t always important.

  And the wisest voices speak least. As in life, the wise ones have usually been around the longest. They’ve had the most time to harvest insight. They speak softly as they lighten, fade away.

  The newest of the Dead have to lean into their own deaths to hear them. The wisest of the Dead are pushed away, bit by bit, by the understanding of the new.

  But there’s more to it. The stories make it bearable to be. The stories make it bearable to have lived at all.

  So William tells his story to warm them. He tells it to keep the coolness of nights out of the hollows and cracks in their bones. New voices are warmer than old ones, and stories that haven’t been told are wool compared with the cotton of things already said. Still, I have to strain to hear, as night grows deeper, and I am forced by the darkness away.

  I put my ear to the ground over Lucy’s grave and listen with her. I put my fingers in the grass and pretend it’s her hair, that I can stroke it. I lay with her there, breathing earth and listening to William.

  “I’m certainly not proud of what I did,” William says. “I shouldn’t have married or had that boy, but I was young. I didn’t know any better. I’d just returned from Korea, and I was doing what I thought I should. I couldn’t keep a job, and Daddy kept having to buy things for Rhett and Pearl—that was my wife—he bought Pearl a car. Of course, he’d already given us the house. I shouldn’t have run off and left them, but I knew they’d have a better life without me. I knew Daddy’d take care of them better than I could.”

  “Responsibility,” some old fart shouts. “Responsibility is a virtue seldom learned.” He adjusts his hearing aid and settles back down in his coffin, where he sleeps.

  Then Marcus Livingston begins to cry. William tries to talk over him at first, but voices yell, “Huh?” and “What?” The voices rake over and the baby screams and William’s voice is left behind, until he gives up.

  Then he begins humming, and the voices cease. He hums the way wind blows through wheat, and the baby falls asleep.

  “My God,” Lucy says. “Can you believe that?”

  “That fellow’s all right!” Papa cheers.

  “Bless his bones,” Ma mutters.

  “Glory hallelujah,” the Poet sings.

  All around the cemetery, the Dead sit up, cheering for William Blott, giving each other high fives and winks.

  “Would you let the man speak!” the Mediator insists, but she’s laughing, too, because nobody’s ever been able to soothe Marcus. Not even the Mediator herself.

  “For the first ten years, I lived off the land,” he continues. “Squatting in hunting cabins when I could. I slept in a warehouse for a long time. And I don’t remember where all I stayed. I camped in rest areas and airport lobbies until guards threw me out. I slept in little children’s tree houses sometimes.”

  “You’re telling us where you slept,” the Mediator states. “Tell us about yourself. Tell us the most amazing thing you ever saw.”

  “Well,” William continues. “Hmmmm.”

  Around the graveyard, we all wait to hear.

  “This doesn’t seem too important, but I guess the most amazing thing I ever saw was a cat with the head of a squirrel in its mouth. It doesn’t seem too important, though.” He looks around distrustful, like he’s expecting to be the butt of a joke.

  “Keep going,” the Mediator tells him, and everybody nods.

  “Well,” William says, “the cat was dragging that squirrel through the woods, with the whole body drooping between its two front feet. And the squirrel was still alive. I could see it kicking.”

  “That’s something,” the Mediator says. “Why do you think you remembered that particular image?”

  “I don’t know.” Blott hesitates. “I suppose the cat carried the squirrel off somewhere and killed it. But I always imagined the inside of that cat’s mouth, how the squirrel must have gnawed at his tongue. I don’t know. For all I know, the squirrel got away.”

  Then, almost like an apology, he says, “I don’t remember a lot of things. I used a lot of drugs. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “Them drugs’ll get you every time,” Ma whispers, and a former construction worker from the north side agrees.

  “Yeah,” William continues, returning quickly to the comfort of his life summary. “But finally, after a good many years—maybe fifteen years on the streets—I’m in a shelter and the person serving soup is from Richmond, from the same neighborhood where I grew up. And he contacted Daddy, and next thing I know, Daddy’s at the shelter. I don’t think anybody from around here knew my daddy. He did most of his dealings up the road a hundred miles or more. He was a tough man, and when he came to the shelter, it wasn’t a family reunion or anything of the sort. He didn’t want me to shame him, and he didn’t really want me to come back home. But he brought me a picture of my boy, and he arranged for me to go to a rehab clinic.

  “After thirty days, they let me out and handed me an envelope with a letter from Daddy. That’s when he told me about his property here. You know how he described it? He called it ‘Ten acres, uncleared, in a primitive little place where nobody knows you.’ That’s how I wound up here.”

  “Primitive little place, my ass,” Papa says.

  “I always liked it here,” Blott whimsies. “People let me be for the most part. I had a good life until the cancer eat me up.”

  “You had cancer?” a voice calls. “I had cancer, too.”

  “Did you say you’re from up near Richmond?” someone else asks. “That was my old stomping ground.”

  “I recognize you from the store,” another one tells him.

  And so it is that William Blott makes himself at home, slowly, finding himself connected to others in a thousand different ways.

  In the open air, the night is humid, though it is always cold underground. I feel my own face slick, perspiration rolling off my sides. I lay over Lucy, sweating, wondering what would sprout if I could make my body water hers enough.

  IN THE NIGHT, I dream of a cat in my mouth, its legs draping down and clawing at my face and chest. I wear the cat like a long, stubborn beard.

  In my mouth, the cat clamps its teeth around a squirrel’s neck, and the tiny paws and bushy tail of squirrel kick in my throat. I dream the squirrel gnaws the tongue of the cat, biting it off at the root.

  Then I dream I am speaking before a room of burning people, my assignment: to teach them to put out fires. But when I open my mouth, I have someone else’s tongue. It is too small and too rough, and all it will do is call me a fool for believing that flames can be extinguished with words.

  I GET TO THE store early. It’s the first Saturday in July, and the weather’s already so hot that the supper scrapings have spoiled in trash cans by breakfast. Even the dogs won’t eat leftovers when it’s this hot. And people know better than to leave that trash in the house overnight. Summers here smell like watermelon rinds gone soft, like the plastic wrapped around grocery-store chickens, like sour milk and cantaloupe, just-cut grass and salty slabs of bacon.

  I order a biscuit and sit down on a stool next to the lunch counter. Reba makes small talk with the men gathered there before work. I don’t know them, but they nod to me and try not to stare. One of them tells Reba that they’
re working a construction site, that they’re not from around here.

  She takes her time getting me my biscuit, but I’ve got all day. When I run out of coffee, I step right behind the bar and fill up my cup. She cuts her eyes, but I pay her no mind, and when the men have gone and she can’t think of anything else to do, she goes ahead and serves me.

  It’s the worst biscuit I’ve ever eaten, but I don’t mention that. I eat it like it’s candy.

  “See here,” Reba says after a time. “I’ve told you before and I mean it, Finch Nobles, I don’t want none of them vegetables coming in here. You hear me?”

  I don’t say a word. I stare her right in the eyes until she darts her eyes away and starts wiping down the counter with one of them handy dish towels that you can use all day and then throw out. One of the construction workers had spilled a little salt, and Reba treats it like a nuclear disaster, careful to get every grain.

  “I got nothing against you,” she continues. “It ain’t personal. But there ain’t no telling what happens to a body after it’s dead. No telling what sorts of gasses it gives off. And I ain’t wanting to be the cause of nobody’s sickness because they ate the prettiest tomato they ever seen, picked right out of your garden. You hear me? I’m running a Christian establishment.”

  I drain my cup and hold her gaze until she turns to the grill and begins cleaning it. She pours water on it, and white smoke poofs, then passes as she scrapes burned drippings away.

  “See here, I ain’t wanting no bad feelings with you, but you burying ’em too close to your house, Finch. That Larrimore boy that died in the car crash a few months back is just about in your yard. And poor old William Blott is at the top of the hill that runs right down to your garden. And he died of a tumor. One good rainstorm’s all it’ll take—”