“I hope so," I said.
Nettie whisked the eggs, turned the bacon over in the pan, and took a transparent bag filled with okra from the refrigerator. Soon, about a third of the okra was simmering in another skillet. When the bacon turned brown and crisp, she arrayed the strips on a thick length of paper toweling. She poured the eggs into the skillet and gave them another whisk. The toast had been slathered with butter, sliced diagonally in half, and set at the edges of the plates. She sprinkled pepper and dried parsley into the skillet, gave the eggs another stir, and divided the okra between the plates.
"Do you eat this kind of breakfast every day?"
"Sometimes we add home-fried potatoes, and sometimes we have chicken livers, but today I don't want to take the time. Is the coffee still hot?"
“I'll warm it up," I said, and turned on the flame under the percolator.
The doorbell chimed. "There's May," Nettie said. "Would you let her in, son?"
A UPS driver in a summer uniform stood on the porch, holding a box wrapped in butcher paper. "Delivery for . . ." He looked at the name above the address. "Ms. Star Dunstan?"
I saw anEast Cicero return address in the top left-hand corner of the box. After I signed the pad, I carried the package into the kitchen. "UPS," I said. "Star must have sent some of her things before she came here."
Nettie flapped her hand at the package. "Put that on the floor." I placed it against the wainscoting. Nettie divided the scrambled eggs with a spatula and slid them out onto the plates. The doorbell rang again.
I went back through the living room and opened the door. Resplendent in a flowered hat, Aunt May extended a gnarled paw. "Help me over the doorstep, Neddie. I'm on the late side, but I thought I'd say good morning to Joy. Any chicken livers today?"
"Aunt Nettie thought they would take too much time."
"Chicken livers take only a little bitty time."
May clung to me on the way to the kitchen. I held her arm as she lowered herself into her chair. She made a show of admiring the overflowing plate before her. "Truthfully, chicken livers would have been too much for me today." She handed me her cane.
I sat down between May and Nettie underClark's ripe gaze. The sisters pitched into their breakfasts. The telephone rang. May dabbed her mouth with a napkin and said, "Perhaps Joy has had another vision."
Shaking her head, Nettie got up from the table and lifted the receiver. "All right," she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It's that doctor with the big head and the little red mouth."
Within my skull I felt a lightness like a reduction of gravity. I leaned against the counter and said, "Dr. Barnhill? This is Ned Dunstan."
Dr. Barnhill informed me that my mother had experienced another stroke thirty minutes earlier and that the efforts to revive her had been unsuccessful. He also said a lot of other things. It sounded as though he were reading them off a sheet of paper.
I hung up and saw their faces staring at me, suspended between hope and what they already knew to be the truth.
3
HOW I NEARLY WAS KILLED
• 30
• Neither Nettie nor Clark had seemed heartbroken when I told them not to expect me for dinner.Clarkhad spent the afternoon sulking over having been kept from checking his traps, and Nettie had not forgiven me for the crime of squandering far too much money on a coffin. After the sales pitch in the display room of Mr. Spaulding's Heavenly Rest Funeral Home, she drew me into a corner for a lecture on the subject of sensible behavior. Still under the illusion that my decision had to be sensible because it was mine, I reminded Nettie that I was spending my own money on my mother's burial. She couldn't argue with that, could she? I should have known better.
Mr. Spaulding's ambassadorial presence filtered in and out of view, andClark shifted his shoulders in his conga-player's shirt and sneered at the velvety carpet. When I took the leather chair before Mr. Spaulding's desk and made out the check, Nettie muttered in complaint. It occurred to me that my selection of the third-least expensive coffin over the bottom of the line had violated the principle that there was no sense spending money on the dead when you could give it to the living. Any illusions that Nettie did not have designs on my checkbook died when Clark nudged the Buick through the brick pillars at the end of Mr. Spaulding's drive, turned toward the Commercial Street office of Little Ridge Cemetery, and said, "Sometimes, boy, you have to think of other people, not just yourself."
My hour and a half with Aunt Joy and Uncle Clarence had been even worse. I went over with the idea that I was performing an act of charity for two old people. I hoped for some information about the interesting figure of Howard Dunstan, and I wanted to see what would happen when I brought up Edward Rinehart. Clarence, remembered as a chipper old party, might still be lively enough to brighten my visit, I thought.
Mindless as an infant, and like an infant oblivious to the stench of his own excrement, Clarence slumped over the leather strap pinning him to his wheelchair. Splotches of dried and drying baby food adorned his shirt. Joy told me that every night at7:00 she pushed him down the hall to the tub and cleaned him off, although she didn't know where she found the strength. Clarence was getting along just fine. Joy wished that she could say the same for herself.
We sat in the two chairs that were their living room furniture. As Joy escorted me into her maze and my pity yielded to empty-headed horror, the older, drier fetor I had noticed the previous night gradually overwhelmed Clarence's atmosphere. Established, ingrained, it seemed as much an aspect of the house as the floorboards and beams. Everything absorbed it, including Joy, who virtually swam in its sea.
The youngest and most diminished of Howard Dunstan's daughters perched on the edge of her chair and spoke as if she had been saving up the words for decades. There was no point in trying to interrupt her: Joy's bitterness claimed all the conversational space. Her transparent voice grabbed the oars and rowed straight toward the horizon of the known world. When she had reached it, she kept on rowing. Joy was talking about herself, our family, and Howard Dunstan. She plied her oars, and the dry, inhuman stink of her father's house carried her forward.Clark's river-bottom had poured into Joy's house and coated everything with what he called "the ugly part of nature." If that was nature, I wanted no part of it.
A flashing crimson hand halted me at an intersection. When my feet stopped moving, my mind filled with the image of Joy perched on a filthy cushion with one bony arm extended toward her husband. I saw what happened next. Blindly, I turned to the left and kept walking. Two blocks down onPine Street, the next traffic light burned green, enabling me to cross what I half-registered was Cordwainer Avenue.
I barreled along onPine Street, seeing nothing until a gray-haired giant with the face of a warrior and wearing a red and green dashiki slowed down and stared at me as the distance between us decreased. His expression combined anger and sorrow. I waited for him to speak. At the moment we drew abreast, the giant turned his head but said nothing. The current of tension passing between us snapped almost audibly when we drew apart.
I moved on for another two or three paces, then stopped walking and looked over my shoulder. The man in the dashiki immediately wheeled around.
"Son, you look like shit and sound like a steam engine. Please tell me you're not about to have a coronary."
"My mother died this morning."