The Young family works a dairy farm, but according to a couple of reports that I heard him read up front of the classroom when Woody and I were still attending school, waking at the crack of dawn to milk crabby cows holds no interest for Bootie. He wants to attend college so he can be an archaeologist, which is a bone digger, so this cemetery job is good practice. Because he’s had to miss so much school during planting and harvest times, even though he’s in the same grade as Woody and me (going into seventh), he’s a year older at thirteen but looks even older, like all the farm boys do. I bet there’s still plenty of girls that draw his name inside hearts all over their schoolbooks or pass him mushy notes that are SWAK-Sealed With A Kiss. I don’t have time for that lovey-dovey stuff. I’m too busy worrying about Mama, taking caring of Woody, and keeping watch over Papa, so I am always courteous to Bootie when I run across him, but never overly so. Wouldn’t want to give him the wrong idea.
Coming up to the grave, I press Woody’s arms down to her sides and say, “Hey, there.”
“Mornin’, Shen,” Bootie says, thrusting his shovel into the dirt. He’s towheaded with a cleft in his chin that I’ve always wanted to stick my finger in to see how deep it’d go. First knuckle, I bet. “Haven’t seen you in forever.” Bootie looks more plumped out in the body than the last time I saw him but none of it’s chub. His bare chest is smooth, but the hair under his arms matches his brown eyes and he’s still got the most luscious smile. Like a gooey dessert. “Where ya gonna sit on parade day?”
“In the park with Beezy,” I say. “Like always.”
After Woody and I have led the Parade of Perpetual Princesses most of the way down Main, we peel off so we can join Beezy and the rest of the Negroes. The parade doesn’t go through Mudville so they got to watch it as it winds past Buffalo Park. Even though we are light-skinned, Woody and me are always nicely tanned by this time of the year. We also wear straw hats that cast shadows upon our faces so we do not stick out like two whitefish in that sea of brown bodies. (We have to be careful not to get noticed by Grampa, who does not in any way, shape, or form approve of us associating with Beezy or any of the other coloreds in a social way.)
When the parade turns the corner and heads our way, I tell Beezy every year beneath the shade of that big maple, “Here comes the high school band.”
Tittering from her folding chair, Beezy will say, “I’m blind, child, not deaf.”
“You’re blind? Really? How come nobody told me?” I’ll say in mock surprise, because she’s got one of those great booming kinds of laughs that you would never suspect could come out of somebody so small. “Next up are six baton twirlers whose sparkly uniforms are a mite skimpy on top and riding up in the back, especially Dot Halloran’s. (Never have been able to stand Dot, not sure why.) “Right behind them are Joe Morton and Cal Whitcomb dressed up like Uncle Sams and waving to everybody. After them, the float with Grampa in that Confederate uniform is coming. He’s sitting on top in that golden horseshoe throne.” I always spit into the grass once he passes by. “There’s six black horses makin’ a mess all over the street behind him.”
Beezy will sniff the air at that point and remark, “Always thought those animals were a lot smarter than folks give ’em credit for,” and that never fails to crack me up ’cause I think Grampa stinks, too.
“Whose body ya diggin’ that hole for?” I ask Bootie, narrowing it down to a Caucasian since Stonewall Jackson Cemetery doesn’t allow coloreds. They got to start their trip to the Promised Land over at Evergreen.
“This here is Mr. Minnow’s grave,” Bootie replies with a respectful bow of his head.
“Clive Minnow?” I may sound surprised, but I’m really not. I’ve been wondering why I haven’t seen our neighbor around lately. Usually when I’m doing some afternoon reading, he’ll appear in his adjoining woods with his metal-detecting device. Of course, Papa told me to stay away from him. They do not get along because you got to walk on eggshells around His Honor and Clive wasn’t light on his feet.
“Are you absolutely positive it’s Mr. Clive Minnow that you’ll be buryin’ here?” I ask, recalling how the last time I saw him, he didn’t look fatally sick. He had been complaining of stomachaches off and on, but that wasn’t unusual. A few years ago when Clive was convinced that he had gotten a brain tumor, I got worried because I’d seen a man on the Dr. Ben Casey television show get the same thing and he expired during the first fifteen minutes. But when I told Mama, she wasn’t upset one bit.
“He’s all right, Shenny. It’s not a brain tumor, just a headache,” she said, handing me a bottle of aspirins from the cupboard. “Mr. Clive is what is known as a hypochondriac.”
“A hypowhateeac?”
“A hypochondriac,” she said slowly. “That’s a person who thinks that they’re either sick or about to become sick or much sicker than they really are, but it’s only in their head.”
“But a brain tumor is all in somebody’s head!” I protested, but after I looked the word up in the dictionary that made sense. Hypochondriac means that Clive was the kind of person who had quite the imagination when it came to illness and that’s really true. Over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of times he told me that he thought he was coming down with polio or chicken pox, even leprosy and malaria. I explained to him we don’t have those last two diseases in the Commonwealth, but he hissed, “Ain’t nobody ever taught you that there’s a first time for everything, little girl?”
“How’d he die?” I ask, feeling guilty.
Bootie says, “Virgil went up to the Minnow place to deliver groceries Saturday morning like always. Nobody answered the door, so Virgil went looking. He found Clive facedown at the edge of the creek, his dog whinin’ by his side.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” I say with genuine regret. He and I had recently been bickering over a ring he’d found in the woods with his detecting device, but that’s not an excuse. I should’ve stopped by the Minnow place more often than I had been to check up on him. “Poor Clive. Poor Ivory.”
“Who?” Booty asks.
“That’s the name of Clive’s dog. Ivory Minnow.”
Bootie pulls the shovel out of the dirt, using muscles that look like they could keep you safe. “I heard drownin’s one of the worst ways to go.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too.”
My other grandparents drowned. For a while there, I think the sheriff thought that’s what happened to our mother, too. He had half the county searching the creek’s banks and bushes for her. The day Woody and I were out there watching, I pulled him aside and told him, “She’s a good swimmer. She was on the water ballet team in college.”
Sheriff Nash, who is not particularly smart, but is well-mannered, said, “Don’t think your mother drowned, Miss Shen. The rowboat is missin’.”
I told him, “But Mama would never take the boat by herself,” but would he listen?
He pulled me behind a yew bush and said in a lowered voice, “Are you aware of your mother and father havin’ any…?”
That’s when His Honor spotted us and hurried over. He said to the sheriff, “That’ll be all, Andy,” and then he dragged me farther into the bushes and reprimanded me. “Take your sister back up to the house immediately. Her crying is upsetting the hounds.”
Papa.
“Nice job on the hole, Bootie. Keep up the good work. Time to go, Woody,” I say, grabbing her by the arm and praying that this isn’t one of those times when she makes herself as stiff as her name. She can do that when she doesn’t want to leave one place and go to another. I don’t have time to look for a coaster wagon to set her in. We should’ve been back at Lilyfield by now.