The Ice at the Bottom of the World (14 page)

The other side of the family arrives in unfamiliar out-of-town cars, shiny. Dark windshields. Music in the last of the caravan that scatters gravel past the paupers’
square up the cart path past where the Beales and the Chessons and the Lamberts and the Warrens are all laid out, and then, instantly, alarmingly, the newcomers park alongside the brass-railinged coffin of our most newly deceased.

Spiked heels and hand-stitched leather feel for footing, and there are belly thrustings from the long ride, starch crackling. Chatter from the last caravaned car in the back. Singsong handbag indecision. Is it the addiction of tobacco or the obligation of tissue? To hell with it, leave it in the car, it will all be over with shortly.

The son of the deceased adjusts his entourage into seats adjoining what he calls, over cocktails, his previous administration. There are some missed looks, some coat and shawl tucks, spit whispers and lip-read warnings, but hands manage to cross divides from both sides and there is a quiet conference with the man in black with the book, the noddings to begin it, let’s begin, okay, Father?

Would that it were so simple in our town. Would that it were so simple to lay in this one old dead lady, to dismiss this bird-calling biddy who lived at the end of the road to Cemetery Ridge. The bird-calling biddy, flinging sometimes to her nearest neighbor, the cave-dwelling Mr. Leon, a nickel or a piece of pie wrapped in newspaper. The bird-calling biddy, night after night, year after year, that phonograph record on her hi-fi turned so far up, her late husband’s world-famous Summerset
Birdcalls of Enchantment. Night after night, year after year, the whole neighborhood, the warbling, the trilling, the long deep swooning and the high-pitched chirping. Night after night, louder with her age and the wear on the phonograph record, and her not turning it all the way up to better hear her husband’s calls but to hear him draw his breath before them, like if you lived in our town before he died you could hear him do at every outdoor party with summer and gin, you could hear him draw his breath across the backyard barbecue over the sizzle of grease in the grill, over the rattle of ice in your glass, her husband drawing his breath before setting off over the Eastern Seaboard in search of mates, wooing them through the trees, purging the nests, warning the young. Would that it were so simple in our town to dismiss this old lady, the bird-calling biddy, quickly, the one who played that phonograph record over and over so loud that it was something that you ceased to hear until it stopped and we knew that she was dead, the needles so grooved into the worn-out vinyl you heard just a long raw rumble punctuated by squeaks, birds drowning in the surf of an ocean, the nighttime soundtrack for our landlocked streets.

Our quiet streets, her vacant house, this new funeral for our dead—and, of course, Mr. Leon.

Just as we waited for the late arrivals from out of town we wait for Mr. Leon, because this evening the
questions from the absent bedridden and from the indisposed will not be about you and how you dressed and how you fared. The whispers will be Did Mr. Leon show up?

He did?

Did he … do anything?

Did he … 
eat
anything?

   A straggler appears on the opposing hill, canebrake stick raised in our direction not so much in greeting as in some self-directed indication of further forward progress. This is a setback for the out-of-towners, those with the two-hour drive and the afternoon appointments. They settle back in impatient folding-chair slumps. A southeast breeze is all that is commencing. It brings up pine scent from the sand-floored forest. The soil spaded at our feet smells sweet, its sugar attracting dime-sized shadows of woods spiders working their ways to the edge of the chiseled clay.

Mr. Leon spits a large wad of something among the paupers’ places and sets off toward us, leaning heavily in a sideboard motion on his stick. He poles himself downstream the cart path afloat atop his shoes. From the folding chairs, those who know know that Mr. Leon is wearing his finest—the homemade vest of domestic cat, tails adrip down the front, the head of a tom on each shoulder as the top-off to the horror-show epaulettes.
Beard, bald head, bib overalls the dull, slathered gray, the milky lusts of some mineral deficiency, Doc says; no doubt a freshly sliced chunk or two from Mr. Leon’s alluvial walls in Mr. Leon’s pocket for a sitdown, sidewalk snack somewhere, maybe even in front of your house if you are a schoolboy and live in our town. Your father might look through the front blinds and then look at you and say, Why is Mr. Leon in front of our house tonight, and you will say, I don’t know, even though you are one of the schoolboys who pelts Mr. Leon with anything you might want to see him stop and bend over to pick up and lick. Rotten produce will do, from behind the Belo Market, where you and your friends can sometimes find Mr. Leon in summer, perched on the broken crates and boxes of spoilage, Mr. Leon eating stick after stick of butter that has soured while you and your schoolboy friends scuff your bicycles closer and closer, taunting him for a curse, maybe even working up a spit to blow into whatever it is he is eating carefully cradled in his clay-caked fingers. But Mr. Leon even does better than curse you. He tells you something, something like Pussy crackles when it’s hot, you little bastards. And then he leaps down with his canebrake stick so that you pedal off.

Flee, you little shits.

If you are a schoolboy, you go home and work out in your mind for days what he said. Crackling. And you, you little schoolboy, cannot hear the bacon cooking in
your mother’s skillet the same way ever again without suffering a secret thrill.

Mr. Leon poles himself along the cart path towards us, his backwards-facing yellow tie swinging out from under one side of his domestic catskin vest to slip beneath the other, a pendulum marking time according to Mr. Leon’s own personal schedule of intent, until he sits, winded, on the tombstone of Mrs. Cannady. The police had come to the caves looking for her the day she disappeared. Mr. Leon! they hollered up from the search party along the tracks. Mr. Leon! Have you seen Mrs. Cannady? And if you had been a schoolboy with them, then you would have heard nothing until someone decided to start the climb up the cliff to the caves, and then you would have heard from deep in one of the gray, hollowed throats, sounding out, Drag the lake, you bastards! and you would have seen the men from the fire department fetch the rigging and the police would have shooed you home to supper so you would have cut through the woods around back and climbed the hunting stands high in the trees over the mill pond where from up there, even in the deepening evening green of the pine forest and the algae dark around the water, you would have been the first to see the cold and green lovely glow of the alabaster body come rising to the surface on its hook, shoes and a note on the shore.

The out-of-town party is showing its restive eagerness now. Hems are kneecapped, furs reshouldered, fingers tap silk shirtsleeves that are timepieced beneath. Mr. Leon pries himself off Mrs. Cannady with his stick and tick-tocks towards us. He proceeds with his stick out-struck now and it wands back and forth like a water rod. Mr. Leon’s shadow seeps upon us until he is so close that the air is cool with the smell of wet clay. He stands before us, an eruption from the ground nearby, snot bulbs mud on the tip of his nose and his eyelids are so heavily crusted with clay that it is difficult to see where Mr. Leon’s eyes are resting until you are sure they are resting on the mound of fresh fill from the grave. Mud forms in the corners of his mouth. The sharp teeth in the cat heads on his shoulders have been bleached somewhat since his last appearance and the flesh has drawn drier back to lend the animals a fierceness in death they did not possess in life. A woman in the front row from out-of-town fans herself with one hand and has the other buried in the jacket pocket of the man beside her. There are many mansions in the house of the Lord, says the man in black with the book. Mr. Leon raises his canebrake stick for silence and climbs atop the mound of fresh grave fill.

He settles into a crouch upon the mound, shrouded with his catskin vest, his anointing fist in the air. Several people stand and step back. Air begins to blow through Mr. Leon’s narrowing lips, and he blows a fine
mist of clayed spittle across the casket’s pall. Mr. Leon draws another breath, and at once we hear the cooing of the mourning dove, a gentle fluttering touch of tongue that tapers into the chip of the lark cheated by spring. There is the whistling search for the sparrow’s mate, the swallow in its field of straw, and the unanswered call of the bobwhite, unanswered, and unanswered again, then the spiraling screech of the seagull and the mimic of the mockingbird taunting us, a screen-door squeak, the cry of a cat—and then the caw of the crow, admonition, the call to fresh carrion, the feathering squawk of flight.

Mr. Leon flaps his arms, throwing mud and dust, still blowing the spittle from his foaming mouth, the worn vinyl sound of surf. Then he settles quietly into himself, hunkered on the mound of fill, a little last cooing, his eyes that are blind to us looking out at us all.

Thank you, you bastards, Mr. Leon says as he reaches down and eats from the lip of the grave.

Of Cajun-Creole-French descent, M
ARK
R
ICHARD
grew up in Texas and Virginia. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest radio announcer in the United States at WYSR-AM in Franklin, Virginia. His stories have appeared in
Esquire
,
Harper’s
,
Grand Street
,
Antaeus
, and
Shenandoah
, and he has been the recipient of several prizes for his fiction, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1990).
The Ice at the Bottom of the World
won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for a first-published book of fiction.