The Long Journey Home (39 page)

Mercer turned the car into Laurel Hill Cemetery and drove down to the sexton’s station. He parked the car, lit a cigarette, and settled down to wait for me. The sexton saw us and came out of his office. He was a kind-looking man with thick white hair.

“I’m looking for the graves of Gem Vaughn Forbes and Grace Downs Clemons,” I explained. “The man at the funeral home said you would know exactly where they are buried.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” he replied, and went in to look up the location of their graves in his record book.

Around me in every direction spread acres of tombstones: stone crosses, obelisks, angels with their great stone wings and somber faces, cherubs, columns, urns, and in the far distance what looked like a statue of a Confederate soldier high on a pedestal. I looked down at the red clay. I remembered how, when I was a child, I always hurt, physically hurt, when we’d ride by a place where the road had been cut out of higher ground, leaving banks of clay exposed. It felt like not only the earth’s skin but my own had been ripped away, leaving me with raw flesh and exposed nerves. But the clay under my feet was hard-packed earth, tough and enduring.

The voice of the sexton startled me out of my absorption. “Your
friends would be buried in section six. That’s a far piece from here,” he explained. “I’ll just walk with you and show you the way.” His eyes were lively, his voice warm. I was grateful for his company.

As we started on our walk, he paused and pointed to a stone on our right, saying, “That was Mrs. So-and-So.” I’ve forgotten the names of these strangers now. “She baked the best peach cobbler in the county. I remember it to this day. Yes, I do. And her apple fritters, too.” Gesturing to another stone he commented, “Old Mr. So-and-So was mean as a mule but honest as the day is long.” Passing it, he gave the man’s stone the kind of pat he might have given an acquaintance’s shoulder. He chuckled. “Not one of us boys would dare to swipe a watermelon from his melon patch. He’d just as soon shoot us with his shotgun as shoo us off with a shout.”

I walked beside him, feeling as if I had stumbled into a Southern version of Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
. I longed for a tape recorder. The sexton stopped and pointed at a thick, rough stone. “That was the stone old Dr. So-and-So climbed up on to get in his horse-drawn buggy. When he died they just put his name on it and set it at his head. I guess they thought he’d need it to climb up to the first step to heaven.”

His voice softened. “There’s the grave of little Miss So-and-So. Lord, she loved dancing more than anything. People said she was going to be a famous ballerina someday. Died young though, bless her heart. They buried her with her ballet slippers right beside her.”

We walked a bit farther. Then he stopped. “Here’s the plot of your friends,” he said quietly, almost reverently. Without another word, he turned and walked away, leaving me alone at the bordered plot, pea gravel thick on the ground around the marble slabs covering the graves.
GRACE DOWNS CLEMONS
, I read.
GEM VAUGHN FORBES
. I felt relieved to find Grace Clemons beside Mrs. Forbes and not off someplace by herself. They had been a family, not by blood or law, certainly, but by caring and endurance.

I looked at the simple, severe plot. Stones and marble. Had I expected grass and flowers, shrubs, perhaps a tree? But who was left to
care for the living things? Theirs was as maintenance-free as a plot could be. There was nothing at all to remind me of Merrie Gardens or Paradise Park.

Grace Clemons’s words came back to me then. “If you aren’t with me when I die,” she’d said to me when I was a child, “go to my grave. The soul has to have a place to come home to.” But I don’t believe that the soul of the Grace Clemons I had known and loved would ever have recognized such a colorless, lifeless place as home.

I stood a long time looking at the polished slabs of marble. Did I want the sky to open to a chorus of angels? Did I want to hear Grace Clemons’s low, husky voice whisper in the warm air that held all the stories of the dead that the sexton had told me?

“If there is a way to communicate after I’m dead,” Grace Clemons had said to me when I was a child, “if there is a way to cross over that threshold, I will come back to you.”

In the still, humid air of that afternoon, looking down at the plot, I felt the fact of Grace Clemons’s and Gem Vaughn Forbes’s deaths far more acutely than I felt any evidence of their lives.

Tears spilled down my face. I’d come to Grace Clemons’s grave just as she’d asked me to. I’d come out of gratitude, and to fulfill a promise, knowing that whatever life is—imagination, memory, and a great universal force beyond all human comprehension—I’d come knowing that during one of the most painful and humiliating times in my life, when an insensitive nurse in a psychiatric hospital had threatened to break what pride and sense of self I had left, Grace Clemons had indeed kept her word. Grace Clemons had come back to me, and with her came guidance and strength that continue to this day.

I bent down and picked up a few of the small stones and put them in my pocket. I looked a last time at the granite slabs, then turned away and began to walk back to the car.

“Is there no voice, no language of death?” The old familiar words of the poem Grace Clemons had recited to me so many times repeated themselves in my mind as I moved among the monuments
marking other lives, other times forever gone, forever living in hearts that remember.

An early-evening walk to town and back with Mother was the loveliest time of my stay in Cairo. In the three blocks to town, we walked past the Wight house, where Mother had spent many childhood hours happily pushing the Wights’ latest baby in its carriage. We walked past the King house, where I’d played cowboys and Indians with Johnny King.

We walked past the Butt house, where old Mr. and Mrs. Butt played Chinese checkers on the screened-in front porch on summer evenings until Mrs. Butt was taken away forever to the state insane asylum. We walked past the house that had been Grandmother’s until she’d grown old and moved up the street into Aunt Sarah and Uncle Leonard’s house. We walked to where The Old Home Place once stood. It had been replaced by a rose garden, and my fig tree was long since gone, its fruit a sweet memory on my tongue.

Side by side Mother and I walked, a comfortable and deep silence between us. Only in looking back can I see that evening walk as one of those experiences when I’ve felt connected with eternity. Eternity in the distant bark of a dog, in the call of a mockingbird, in Mother beside me. Eternity in each slow step we took, the last pale pink of the sunset dissolving.

Mother, Mercer, and I sat side by side in a glass-bottomed boat. We looked down through the glass into what the tourist brochure called the deepest and largest spring in the world. As we left the dock, thick grasses beneath us swayed in the cold water’s currents. The boatman
began his own music, and the haunting sound of his chant seemed to have changed no more since my childhood than the call of the mockingbird or the cry of the loon. He called out the names of Wakulla’s underwater wonders—aquatic life, schools of fish, and fantastic limestone formations.

It had been nearly half a century since the trips to Wakulla Springs when Mercer and I were children, and many years since I’d seen my mother and brother. Now I was sitting between them and we were all looking down—sometimes as far as 185 feet—through the clear water, too deep for grass, to limestone and sand. There, at the spring’s depths, lay a few remaining fossilized mastodon bones. School after school of fish swam over them, flashing silver in the light-filled water. The three of us looked far below a thirty-foot ledge of limestone to the gaping mouth of a cavern. Only there the water was not clear. There, at the spring’s source, water bubbled up a milky blue from the underground river that fed it.

Mercer’s body tensed. “It feels like my face is a mask,” he said. “It feels like my face is just a mask being pulled from the bone.”

I thought of how far he’d come and how difficult his struggle had been since he had been flown home from Vietnam to pace circles around me in the psychiatric ward in Bethesda Naval Hospital, barefooted, talking about Daddy and the American flag, then home to Mother and a lifetime on Thorazine, Stelazine, and whatever other drugs the medical world had offered as an answer.

The boat had passed the spring’s bubbling source now and was heading back toward the dock, but I was still remembering the way Mercer dragged his feet that day in Bethesda.

Bubba’s second baby died that same week. After seeing Mercer, my family and I had driven down to the baby’s funeral. Bubba’s baby boy was beautiful. So small and perfect, and so like my own son Chris. Both of them looked like Mercer. But Bubba’s little boy had been born with the umbilical cord twisted around his neck. Bubba’s first little girl is dead too, and our sister, Harriet. And after years of poverty that followed the early years of plenty, our father died and
has been dead for so long now that Bubba’s daughters and my sons are grown. And still the boatman’s chant continued.

I wondered what Mother was feeling, sitting so close beside me after the sad years of distance, anger, and hurt between us. I knew that she would never tell me her deep feelings any more than she would ask about my confinements in mental hospitals. This was the way she had learned to live in order to survive, to turn away in silence from what she could not bear.

The boat nudged itself against the dock, and the boatman looped the rope secure. We climbed out onto the dock and walked toward the Lodge.

I thought of how often Mother had said, “I did the best I could,” referring to being our mother. And this was true. I was glad I’d come home that one last time, that last year of her life.

I was glad we’d come to Wakulla once again.

“You couldn’t pay me to drive anybody else to this place, Sister,” Mercer said, stopping to light a cigarette. “I only brought you here because I knew you really wanted to come and I love you so much. Wakulla has always scared me to death.”

“Even when you were a little boy?”

“Yeah, especially then.”

“I didn’t know that,” I replied, realizing that I’d always believed he loved Wakulla the way I did. The ground under my sandals felt like home.

Mother was walking a little ahead of us, stooped and gray, shrunken and tired. Across the front of the Lodge before her—just as they did when I was a child—calla lilies repeated themselves like flames against the wall.

M
OTHER DIED ON
A
UGUST 26, 1986, AFTER WEEKS OF SUFFERING IN THE
hospital. I had wanted to be with her, but Mercer said my being there would evoke too much emotion in him and he already had all he could cope with. He also told me that Bubba didn’t want me to come down either. Of the two of them Bubba seemed to be the one taking the most responsibility for Mother.

Perhaps Mother wouldn’t have wanted me there with her. She’d refused my help when she was recovering from that fall down the back steps many years earlier, injuring her sciatic nerve; then there was the time she was badly hurt in a car wreck and I’d wanted to fly down to be with her, but again she’d refused my help. Maybe she felt more comfortable with my sister-in-law, Anne, sitting beside her bed, feeding her ice chips.

But I longed to be with her.

In fact, I might not have been able to fly to Georgia. As soon as I heard Mother was dying, my entire body grew weak. As the days and weeks passed, I became progressively weaker. There were days when I could do nothing except stay in bed. Then Bubba called and told me that Mother, who was kept alive through the aid of a breathing tube,
had scribbled a note saying she wanted to die. In response, they reduced her oxygen. I felt frantic to be with her. After a long evening of suffering, I got into bed and reached for my pen and journal. I wrote Mother a letter she would never receive in the mail but perhaps could receive in her heart that night. I wrote:

After I finished writing I finally fell asleep.

When I woke the next morning I couldn’t bear being alone in the
apartment, waiting. I took a shower, dressed, and went out and ran errands. I returned home to find that Bubba had left a message on my answering machine telling me that Mother had died.

I missed Suzanne terribly.

Half kidding, I asked my friend Sheryl Stoodley, a graduate student in the theater department at Smith College, with whom I taught a women’s theater/writing workshop in a prison in Lancaster, Massachusetts, to find me a new lover. Almost as soon as the new semester started, she told me she thought I might be interested in one of her professors, a new faculty member from the South. She suggested the three of us have lunch together. We agreed to meet at Paul & Elizabeth’s, my favorite Northampton restaurant.