But I didn’t say anything about it. She walked away from the graves and I noticed all the tiny plots beside her mother’s grave. There was a grave here and then there was a grave there — the stones all broken off and covered up by the grass.
“Whose graves are these?” I asked and then I wondered. “Why all these little graves?”
I knew the answer. They were baby graves.
I walked away, looking at the end where Ruby was.
And I thought about her own mother losing baby after baby after baby after baby after baby and still going on — surrounded by the graves of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who never were. They were in this ground — all this great big lump of flesh we call earth.
I had even looked in the back of Ruby’s mother’s Bible with all of it written in the back. There was a date and then — baby died. There was a date and then — baby died. There was a date and then — girl baby died.
So I said, “You want me to put the flowers down here? Are these the graves you wanted to see?”
But Grandma just shook her head.
She pointed to a couple of graves at the edge of the mountain and said, “That’s where I want to put them.”
I thought, THANK GOD.
Ruby moved her walker and started moving closer to the graves, past the grave of her own little baby who died, and then past her husband, my grandfather Elgie who died of his fifth heart attack when I was three.
I heard my Uncle Stanley from far over at the edge of the field say: “Daddy would have shit himself if he knew you put him up here with all these goddamn Goddards.”
Ruby got mean and said: “Well I figured I wanted him where I wanted him. And I put him where I put him.”
She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
She said: “This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave.”
I asked: “Whose grave is it?”
I walked in front of the stone and I saw it was her grave. It was the grave of Ruby Irene McClanahan, born 1917 died…
Then there was a blank space — the space where they would put the date of her death.
She touched the shiny stone and explained how Wallace and Wallace gave her a really good deal on the tombstone. She told me I should start saving. It was a good investment.
So Grandma pointed to the grave and finally told me to put the flowers down. And that’s just what I did. I put the flowers down on my grandmother’s grave. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a camera.
She said: “Well come on now, Todd. You want to have your pictures taken by Grandma’s grave?” I told her for the thousandth time. “My name’s not Todd, Grandma. My name’s Scott.”
My Uncle Stanley shouted at her: “Ah hell, Mother. Just leave him alone. He doesn’t want to touch your grave.”
Then she started in on my Uncle Nathan who was still sitting in the back of the truck. “Hey Nathan. You want to come and sit in front of Mother’s grave? It’s a pretty thing.”
Nathan just sat in the back of the truck and shook his head like: Fuck no.
I finally gave in and Grandma took my picture next to her grave.
Then she waddled over to the side of the shiny marble tombstone and I took her picture.
I looked through the camera and all I could see was my Grandma Ruby standing beside her stone.
Ruby Irene McClanahan
Born 1917. And then the blank space.
Here was the date of her birth, and the date of her death, which we didn’t know yet, but which we passed each year without knowing.
So I got ready to take the picture and I saw her smile.
I saw the graves filling up all around her and I saw how Grandma would be here beneath it one day and then Nathan and then one day Stanley, and then one day… me. So I saw her whisper, “Oh lordie,” and claim she was dying like she always did.
I wished we were already back at home so I could eat some more peanut butter fudge. Nothing lasts.
I snapped the picture and it was like she was already gone.
It was like I saw that she was dying right then — real slow — and she knew the secret sound. It’s a sound that all of us hear. It’s a sound that sounds like this. Tick. Tick. Tick.
AND NOW A MOMENT TO ONCE AGAIN
REMEMBER THE THEME OF THIS BOOK.
The theme of this book is a sound. It goes like this: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It’s the sound you’re hearing now, and it’s one of the saddest sounds in the world.
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK
That’s all I could hear from the big RC COLA clock a few weeks later. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. We sat in her kitchen and Ruby flipped to this picture of a guy who looked like he was sleeping. Then she grinned without her teeth in and showed me another picture of a guy who looked like he was sleeping too. She showed me another and then another. I thought, Why are all these people sleeping?
She ran her fingers over the picture and I realized… That guy is not sleeping.
THAT GUY’S DEAD.
So I looked closer at the man in the picture and I saw that his face was all sunken and his hands were folded across his chest. Beneath his hands there was a little pocket Bible. He was dead all right. Dead as hell. So Ruby started telling me the story about him.
She started telling me about how he was my grandpa Elgie’s brother and how he was running around with some guy’s wife in Beckley.
Then she told me about how one day he was with the wife when the husband came home.
I guess the husband knew something was going on, but before Elgie’s brother could get his pants up — the husband picked up a block of firewood and beat Elgie’s brother to death with it. Ruby said you should never take your pants completely off if you’re engaging in infidelity just in case you need to make a quick getaway. I agreed. So Ruby took a picture of him at his funeral and then she turned to the back of the photo which had his death date on it—7/8/52.
Then she turned to another picture and it was yet another picture of a dead person. It was an old woman (her Aunt Mag) with one of those made-up funeral home faces. And what was funny about this one was that there was a man posing for the picture by the dead body. He was smiling.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Oh I don’t know,” she said. “Just some guy I asked to pose by the pretty flowers.”
So I sat in the kitchen not really knowing what to think.
Grandma looked through all of her pictures of the dead and then she said: “Of course some people don’t think it’s right. They don’t think it’s right taking pictures of the dead.”
Then she flipped back through all of the other pictures and looked at the one of Elgie’s dead brother.
She closed her picture book and smiled her smile.
That evening we went to the Wallace and Wallace funeral home to pay our respects for a woman she knew. It was another woman who was coming home one day and the mountain collapsed on her. I especially didn’t want to be at the funeral when Ruby took out her camera later. I’d been going to wakes with her for years now, and I’d even been to wakes at people’s houses, something called sitting up with the dead. I thought about how I watched people picking the body up and holding it and petting the dead hair and crying. I thought about how they carried it around and cried. I knew something was up that night, sitting around in front of the casket, and I knew what it was when my grandma leaned over and said: “Why don’t you take a picture for Grandma?”