Tina Mcelroy Ansa (32 page)

“That’s the kinda man Jonah McPherson was!”

Satisfied that he had had his say and delivered his eulogy, the man walked back to his pew and sat down. But the negative testament didn’t even begin to break the stride of the funeral. As soon as the disgruntled mourner had sat down, another, more generous griever stood to tell about the time Nellie made it possible for her daughter to stay on in high school without having to clean houses on Saturday.

The service, with its impromptu songs and testimonials, seemed to go on even past Lena’s endurance of deathly rituals. And she was so tired from the wake the night before, when it seemed that every man, woman and child in Georgia came through the doors of her parents’ house on Forest Avenue to eat, drink, laugh, remember, lie, cry and joke, that she could hardly hold her head up.

“Look at her, poor thing, another Little Lost World,” Mrs. Hartwick, St. Martin’s former first-grade teacher, said from the door of the basement church as she wiped flour and egg batter off her hands onto her white and pink eyelet-trimmed apron and watched Lena and the other mourners trail downstairs out of church for the meal she and other church women had prepared. “She ain’t got no mama or no daddy. Ain’t got no sisters or no brothers. Poor Little Lost World.”

The women in town took her in totally after that, calling on the phone for nice long talks every week, making sure she was up on Sunday morning in time for Mass, inviting her to every little social occasion in town. Of course, after a while, Lena was listening more to their stories of mourning and grief and need. But she didn’t mind. That was the way it usually went.

Before she was seven, she knew that Peanut had contracted TB, lost all his heft and had to go away to the TB home. That was back when he was fat and healthy and women called him “pig meat,” one older female customer had told Lena, “ ’cause he was young and tender.”

Now, he was an old man—skinny as a rail and only as tall as a prepubescent boy—who still came to The Place every single day it was open and who gave Lena a stick of Doublemint gum he purchased
there each time he saw her. At age seventy-seven, he lived with the last woman who took him in before he became old and decrepit.

“A mere ghost of a man.” Lena had heard that expression all her life. Peanut, so she had overheard over and over at The Place, was a mere ghost of a man after his bout with TB.

He was one of the honorary pallbearers at the funeral. Lena couldn’t help herself. Even in the depths of her grief, she thought, I guess an honorary casket is about all little Peanut could help carry anyway.

Lena didn’t think it was planned that way, even though Sister swore she could produce research to prove the historical significance of such a ritual, but all of Jonah’s former women showed up dressed to kill in various ensembles of widow’s weeds. Black lace and black veils and black silk and black voile and lightweight black wool. Their perfume gave the church full of wreaths and wheels and sprays and Bibles some competition.

One hefty woman squeezed in a tight taffeta black sheath broke loose at the door of the church, screaming and yelling and thrashing around.

“I knew you didn’t have the strength, Lena, so I did it for you,” Sister told her later. “I looked around at that loud-ass screaming woman and the man she came in there with and I gave her a look that said, ’Who the hell are
you??’”

Then, Sister leaned over and patted Lena’s hand as if she had accomplished a great deed of sisterhood for her.

“At least the other ladies had the decency to grieve and weep quietly. Hell, you let ’em sit right up near the front like family.” Sister sucked her teeth. “God, the people in this town take you so much for granted.”

At the foot of the cement steps out in front of the church, Lena, dressed in one of her mother’s black wool suits, had to be reminded by the elegant thin old man from Parkinson’s Funeral Home that there would be no ride to the cemetery. No caskets to follow. No dirt to see
dug. No hole to look down. No lone rose to be cast on each descending casket. No bodies to bury.

The dead had indeed buried the dead.

Mr. Parkinson would have been the one to take Lena’s hand at the funeral and say, “Your mama looks good. Nellie held her color.” But he couldn’t.

Mr. Parkinson, the elder, had played poker many a night and morning with Jonah and his cronies. Won a pile of money. Lost a pile of money. He felt it was his professional duty to try to console and comfort Lena. He had built a business, a good reputable business, on his professionalism.

Years later, it was the memory of his professionalism at Jonah and Nellie McPherson’s funeral service that allowed him to keep his head held high. There was an incident at his establishment. If he had been there, he assured himself, it never would have happened.

A casket was overturned. A body left in the care and security of Parkinson’s Funeral Home was desecrated. Customers were upset. Other services were disrupted.

And the gossip. The gossip!!

Mulberry talked about it for months.

A fight! they told one another in coarse places like bars and street corners and over bridge and whist tables. A family argument come to a head! they informed one another as they got their hair washed and clipped and curled. Flipped the woman right out her coffin right down there at Parkinson’s Funeral Home! they screamed to each other in Laundromats.

Mr. Parkinson hated that part worse than anything, but it was the part of the story that townspeople loved repeating.

“Woman popped right out of that casket, while the family, the woman’s three daughters, rolled around on the floor with the corpse, fighting each other!”

Then, the funeral the next day. All those people, showing up just to look.

Lena leaned toward the natty little funeral director and said, “Mama always used to tell me, ’You can’t go to the cemetery with ’em
every time.’”

Mr. Parkinson, the elder, murmured, “Umm,” and nodded appreciatively as he handed Lena back to Sister and the circle of old men and women, her godchildren and the women from Candace that immediately surrounded her and nearly lifted her downstairs to the waiting fried chicken, grits, scrambled eggs, biscuits, juice and coffee Mrs. Hartwick and the other church women had prepared for the mourners.

For months afterward, the entire town mourned with Lena, feeling every one of her grieving pains. They were all prepared to catch her when she finally fell apart. They were fully prepared to do it. They just didn’t know how they were going to stand seeing Lena in mourning.

The first day after the funeral that she walked in The Place, Peanut had exclaimed, “Lena, you po’ as a snake.”

So, she had to buck up right quick, go back to eating regularly and do her mourning where people in town could not see how bad she looked, how bad it did her.

She would have given anything to have a few ashes from her parents’ bodies to put in matching elegant urns over the hearth in the Great Jonah Room. She still had the brass urn that had held her Granddaddy Walter’s ashes on the mantelpiece in the dining room on Forest Avenue. But after she came back from her first semester of college, she had strewn the ashes herself on the train tracks on Montpelier Avenue right before the seven-ten southbound Silver Crescent headed for New Orleans came through, according to the dead man’s last request. Then, she returned the urn to the dining room mantelpiece. And no one at the house on Forest Avenue ever knew.

But by the time she had arrived at her parents’ crash site, a heavy rain had rushed through the Florida community and washed away everything but the heaviest pieces of plastic debris. The gray ashes, the bits of charred bone, the scrap of hair still attached to the skin, were all washed away.

No one had the heart to disturb her as she stood in the rain looking like a kindergartner in a yellow mackintosh and tall yellow rubber boots surveying the scene. When Frank Petersen arrived from Mulberry to get her, she looked at him and said, “Frank Petersen, I won’t even be able to lay my hand on a tombstone and say, This my mama right here.’” And for the first time since she had gotten the news, she fell on the old man weeping.

The only evidence left from the plane crash in which Nellie and Jonah had died was his voice on the air controller’s tape informing the small Florida tower that he was having some engine trouble and, not knowing the area well, was looking for assistance in finding a place to make an emergency landing. He didn’t even sound nervous to Lena. It was the last communication from the twin-engine plane the couple named Miss Lizzie in honor of Lena’s grandmama. There was not even a data flight recorder or black box to give some details of the couple’s last moments.

Lena usually could feel when death was near. But earlier in the day when she had seen her parents off at the airport, Lena had watched Jonah and Nellie jump into their cute, luxurious Beechcraft at the Mulberry Airport like Sky King and his niece Penny and fly south toward a sunny day in Florida without the least trepidation about her folks’ safety on that trip. The mist of death she had felt hovering, she felt, was meant for somebody in another plane, someone outside her blood family. But she was wrong.

“See, Sister, you talk all that caul stuff about seeing the future and powers and everything. But that damn veil ain’t never done nothing good for me,” Lena cried, weeping on her friend’s shoulder the night of the funeral like a disillusioned child.

“Give me my roses while I’m still alive,” her mother had said all the time. “I don’t need anybody screaming and crying at a funeral when they didn’t show me no love in life.” And though Lena had pleaded that in lieu of flowers, mourners send contributions to Nellie’s and Jonah’s favorite charities, the church was flooded with blossoms.

“Give me my roses while I’m still ’live to enjoy them.”

It was one of the three phrases that played themselves repeatedly in Lena’s mind during the long funeral service and Mass.

Her mother saying, “Give me my roses while I’m still ’live to enjoy them.”

Her father saying, “Lena, don’t let nobody make a fool out of you in business.”

And all of Mulberry saying, “Lena, you know you a lucky little baby girl.”

W
ith Herman around and in love with her, Lena felt for the first time in her adult life that she was truly lucky.

And if Herman’s presence on her property was a haunting, then it was the sweetest and gentlest one she had ever experienced.

Most of the ghosts from her past had appeared in terrifying forms: wolves, cats and wild dogs; headless, footless bodies; decaying bodies with heads facing one way, torsos the other; babies who turned into ghouls. They controlled her in her sleep and drew her into dark and dangerous situations to frighten her. They spoke through her mouth, scaring her and getting her into trouble with her friends and teachers. They tried to pull her into their world.

The worst that Herman did was he wouldn’t hardly let Lena conduct any business. All through May and past June, after the wisteria had disappeared and the small white flowers on the jasmine vines had taken over, Herman really got in the way of her duties.

It was not that he forbade her to conduct her regular voluminous business dealings. It was just that his “being” got in the way. His
laughter got in the way. His invitations to explore her land got in the way. His way of life, so to speak, got in the way. Herman’s yearning for Lena got in the way. And Lena’s love for Herman got in the way.

The first few days after he appeared, all Lena had to do was think of Herman with his cheekbones like chiseled Georgia granite for him to appear to her.

She would feel the breeze on her neck and then look over to see Herman sitting on the sofa across the room from her. Or she would feel a tickle on the bottom of her bare feet, and he would be lying in bed next to her. Or she’d see a wisp of smoke escape from a late-night fire he had laid and lit for her, and he would be standing there by the fireplace in her bedroom carving the box for a kalemba.

But after a while, Herman did not wait for Lena to evoke him. He’d come sauntering into her bedroom first thing in the morning or be lying next to her when she awoke, watching her, waiting.

Adjusted to living alone, unaccustomed to another body—even a ghostly one—in bed with her, Lena would jump, startled at his presence. But she got used to it.

He didn’t seem to need any sleep.

“I don’t need no sleep, baby. Other than to run through yo’ dreams every now and then so you won’t forget ’bout me while you restin’.”

“How am I ever gonna forget about you, Herman?” Lena asked sincerely. He was making her so bold.

“I just wanted to hear you say it, Lena, baby.”

It still surprised her when she and Herman went out walking on the property and came up on Mr. Renfroe or a stable hand who would look up and wave at her and speak as if she were there all alone.

Herman was so real, so solid, Lena had a hard time believing that other folks could not see him. Could not hear him. Could not feel him.

Those first days, they just walked and talked and explored her property a great deal when she was at home. Right from the beginning, it seemed to Lena that they spent
all
their time together. But
they didn’t. Lena had too much else to do. She just thought about him all the time. She got up early to spend sunrise and first light with him before going into town and came home as early as she possibly could to end her day with him out on the deck looking at the stars through the telescope she had bought him.

It was amazing to Lena, but things worked out without her hand in it. For the most part, Lena’s time with Herman was undisturbed. Her cleaning, stable and yard crews did their jobs while she was at work and only one or two people ever saw her talking to an empty space or riding Baby next to a riderless Goldie.

With James Petersen safely settled down the lane in his own home and the gardening and stable crew finished for the day, Lena and Herman would lie together in the two-person hammock he had found in the barn and strung between two tall pine trees overlooking the river and watch the sun go down. Sometimes, they would lie in perfect silence. Other times, they tripped over each other’s words talking so much.