A Long and Happy Life Read online

  Mary and Estelle stood by the truck, looking, and that boy kept his eyes and his foot flat on the box as if it was his and nobody was getting it. Then the other women came up, silent. One of them—Aunt Mannie Mayfield who had walked four miles to get there and was so old she didn’t remember a soul now she was there—hugged Mary and said what seemed to be a signal, and they climbed the steps—two girls nearly lifting Aunt Mannie who could walk any distance but up and who would be next. But the men stayed by the truck, and when the flowers had gone, that boy leaned over and shoved the box to the end, and Sammy and three others took it (to say they had, any two could have carried it alone). They stood a minute with it on their shoulders, taking their bearings. Somebody laughed high and clear. The preacher turned to the church and all the men followed.

  Rosacoke saw that and thought every minute Wesley would break loose and take his seat beside her. But he didn’t, not even when the yard was empty, and when she heard Mary and Estelle leading the others in, she had to take her eyes off him and stand and nod to the people as they passed and call them by name—the family taking the front pew and sitting as if something pressed them and the others filling in behind, leaving Rosacoke her empty pew at the back, and all standing up—except the ones with babies—till the box was laid on two sawhorses in front of the pulpit, and a boy laid flowers on the lid over what he reckoned was Mildred’s face—one design, the Bleeding Heart that Rosacoke sent at Mary’s request (white carnations with roses for blood at the center, which would take some time to pay for). When that was done five women stood in various pews and walked to the choir. The piano started and stopped and for a second there was just Bessie Williams’ voice slicing through the heat with six high words, calling the others to follow. It was “Precious Name, Show Me Your Face,” and it was Jesus they were singing to—meaning it, looking up at the roof to hornets’ nests and spiders as if it might all roll away and show them what they asked to see. But the song ended and Rev. Mingie thanked the ladies and said Mrs. Ransom had composed the obituary and would read it now. Mrs. Ransom stood where she was, smiling, and turned to face Mary and Estelle and read off the paper she held, “Miss Mildred Sutton was born in 1936 in the bed where she died. Her mother is Mary Sutton of this community, and her father was Wallace Sutton, whereabouts unknown, but who worked some years for the Highway and before that, said he fought in France and got gassed and buried alive and was never the same again. She had a brother and three sisters, and they are living in Baltimore and Philadelphia—except Estelle who is with us here—and are unable to come but have sent telegrams of their grief which will be read later. She grew up all around here and worked in cotton for Mr. Isaac Alston and went to school off and on till she started cooking for the Drakes and tending to their children that she loved like they were hers. She worked for them nearly two years, and they would surely be here today if they were not vacationing up at Willoughby Beach. Mildred aimed to go with them right to the last and then wasn’t able. She stayed here and died not far from her twenty-first birthday. Her favorite tune was ‘Annie Laurie’ which she learned from Miss Rosacoke Mustian who is with us today, representing the white friends, and I will sing it now at her mother’s request.” And standing where she was, she sang it through alone, not to any tune Rosacoke had ever heard but making it on the air as she went, knowing Mildred would never object to that.

  Then the preacher read the telegrams. They were all very much like the one from Alec her brother—“Thinking today of little sister and sorry the car is broke.” That seemed sufficient reason. Everybody nodded their heads and one or two said “Amen.”

  Rosacoke sat through that, trying to see past flapping fans to the box. Every once in awhile somebody would turn to see was she there and, seeing her, smile as though the whole afternoon would fold under if she didn’t watch it with her familiar face (the way a boy three rows ahead watched her, holding her in his gaze like some new thing, untried, that might go up in smoke any minute). It was that hot inside and her mind worked slowly back through spring water and shade till she was almost in the night with Wesley, but the voice came at her faintly where she was—“Miss Rosacoke, will you kindly view the body?” It was the preacher standing by her, and she turned from the window—“Now?”

  “Yes’m, she is ready.” They had uncovered Mildred and they wanted Rosacoke to see her first. Mama had warned her this would happen, but there didn’t seem to be a way out. She stood up, hoping the preacher would walk with her (and he did, a few feet behind), and went to the box, setting her eyes on the pulpit behind it so she wouldn’t see Mildred the whole way.

  They had laid Mildred in a pink nightgown that tied at the throat and had belonged to the lady she cooked for, but she had shrunk to nothing this last week as if her life was so much weight, and the gown was half empty. She never had much bosom—Estelle got most of that and when they were twelve, Rosacoke told her, “Mildred, why don’t you buy some stuffing? Your bosoms look like fried eggs”—and the ones she had, swollen uselessly now, were settled on her arms that lay straight down her sides and left her hands out of sight that were her good feature. Sometime during the ride her body had twisted to the left, and her profile crushed bitterly into the pillow. Whoever took off the lid had left her alone. Rosacoke wondered if she should move her back for all to see. She looked at the preacher and nearly asked if that was what he meant her to do. But she thought and turned and walked to her seat down the middle aisle with her eyes to the ground, passing through everybody waiting to look, feeling stronger with her part done and Mildred turned to the wall where nobody would see.

  And so was Wesley turned away. He was squatting on the ground, and his shoes were sunk in the dust, but he was polishing every spoke in the wheels of that machine as if he never again intended driving it over anything but velvet rugs. The congregation lined up to view Mildred, and Rosacoke had time to think, “Tomorrow he will ride it to Norfolk and take his new job and sell motorcycles for maybe the rest of his life, but he can’t leave it alone for one hour and sit by me through this service.”

  And he polished on with his arms moving slow as if they moved through clear thick oil. At times he would rock back on his heels to study what he had done, and his sides would move above his belt to show he was breathing deep—the only way he gave in to the heat. When he was satisfied he stood and cleaned his hands on a rag and his arms to where his sleeves were rolled. But it was grease he was wiping, not sweat. He was somebody who could shine a whole motorcycle in the month of July and not sweat, and his dark hair (still cut for the Navy, stopping high on his neck) was dry. It didn’t seem natural and when he leaned against his tree and stared at the ground, he looked to Rosacoke as cool as one November day six years ago, and she thought about that day, so clear and cool—the first she saw of Wesley. He lived three miles from her, and all her life she heard about the Beavers but never saw one till that day—a Saturday—when she went out in Mr. Isaac’s woods to pick up pecans off the ground. It was too early for that though—the leaves were gone but the nuts hung on, waiting for a wind, and there was no wind this day—so she was heading home with mighty little in her bucket, going slow, just calling it a walk now, when she looked ahead, and in one tall tree that the path bent round was a boy, spreading his arms between the branches and bracing his feet like he was the eagle on money. It was a pecan tree and she walked straight up under it and said, “Boy, shake me down some nuts.” Not saying a word he gripped the branches tighter and rocked the fork he stood in, and nuts fell on her like hail by the hundred till she yelled out to stop or else her skull would crack. He stopped and she picked up all the pecans she could carry, thinking the whole time he would climb down and help her, but he stayed up there and when she looked at him once or twice, he wasn’t even watching her—just braced on his long legs that rose in blue overalls to his low waist and his narrow chest and bare white neck and his hair that was brown and still cut for the summer, high above his ears by somebody at home, and his eyes that stare
d straight out at sights nobody else in Warren County was seeing unless they were up a pecan tree.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked him.

  “Smoke.”

  She looked but the sky looked clear to her. “Don’t you want to share out these pecans?”—as if bushels of them weren’t lying all around her.

  “I don’t much like them.”

  “Well, what are you doing up that tree then?”

  “Waiting, I guess.”

  “Who for?”

  “Just waiting.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Wesley”—as if he was the only Wesley ever made.

  “Don’t you want to know who I am?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Rosacoke Mustian—how old are you?”

  “Going on sixteen.”

  “That’s old enough to get your driving license. My brother Milo and me slept in the same bed till he got his driving license, and then Mama said he would have to move.”

  He smiled at that and she saw the smile was as close to victory as she was coming that day so she said, “Thank you for shaking the tree” and went on home and didn’t see him again for nearly a year, but she thought of him in the evenings long as those nuts lasted—him caring for nothing but the smoke she couldn’t see, wondering if there was fire somewhere, waiting.

  Through that the line went on past Mildred. Some of them—the young ones mostly—skipped by her fast as they could and took a little look and jerked away, and Jimmy Jenkins fell out in the aisle on his way to sit down because he held his eyes shut till he was past Mildred (to keep from having her to remember). A good many took their time though and were sorry her head had turned, but nobody reached in to set her straight, and when Minnie Foot held her baby up to see and he dropped his pacifier in the box, they considered that pacifier gone for good—except the baby who commenced to moan and would have cried if Minnie hadn’t sat down in time and unbuttoned and nursed him off to sleep so deep he didn’t hear Sarah Fitts when she saw Mildred and wailed “Sweet Jesus” at the sight, but the name went out to Wesley wherever he was (out the window and facing the church but not seeing it, not studying the funeral), and he looked up quick and smiled—maybe at Rosacoke, maybe at the whole hot church—and still smiling, straddled his cycle in a long high leap like a deer and plunged downward on the starter like that same deer striking the earth and turned loose a roar that tore through the grove and the whole afternoon like dry cloth ripped without warning and Wesley was gone.

  Rosacoke saw it that way, that slowly. After her remembering she had turned from the window to watch the last ones pass Mildred and to get ready for the testimonials that would be next, but when Sarah released her “Jesus,” Rosacoke looked out to Wesley again to see what he would do about that, saying to herself, “That is one something he has got to notice.” So she saw it from the beginning—his leap—seeing the deer in him as he started and with him still smiling, something even stronger when he reared on his black boots with the calf of his leg thrusting backwards through his trousers to turn loose the noise. She could see that and not think once what he had done or wonder would he come back. She could even turn and watch Mary and Estelle being led to take their last look and breaking down and taking everybody in the church with them into tears except Rosacoke who had as much right as anybody, knowing Mildred so long. But she didn’t cry because suddenly the sound of Wesley’s cycle stopped—he had taken it up the road a quarter of a mile beyond the church and now surely he would be circling round and coming back to wait. And sure enough he began again and bore down on the church like an arrow for their hearts till every face turned to Rosacoke, wondering couldn’t she stop his fuss, but she looked straight ahead, not seeing him when the noise got louder and loudest of all and fell away quick as it had come. That little staring boy three rows ahead slapped his leg and said out loud “Mama, he gone.” Wesley had passed her by. He was headed for the concrete road, she guessed, and the twenty miles to Mason’s Lake and the picnic and everybody there.

  “Supposing he is gone for good,” she said to herself. “Supposing I never lay eyes on him again,” and that made her wonder what she would have left, what there would be that she could take out and hold or pass around and say, “This is what I got from knowing somebody named Wesley Beavers.”

  There were these many things—a handful of paper in a drawer at home that was the letters and postal cards he had sent her. (He didn’t write much and when he did, it was like getting a court order, so distant and confusing that you wondered for days what he meant by some sentence he meant nothing by and wound up wishing he hadn’t written at all or wanting to call him up, long distance, wherever he was and say, “Wesley, I would like to read you this one sentence you wrote” and then read him his own words, “We went to Ocean View last Saturday and met some folks at a eating stand, and they asked us why we didn’t come on and go skinny-dipping by moonlight so we did and had a pretty good time and stayed there till Monday morning early,” and afterwards ask him, “Wesley, will you tell me what sort of folks you would meet at a hotdog stand, and what is skinny-dipping please?” But how could you just pick up the phone and pay good money to say that when all he would answer was, “What are you worried about?”) Besides the letters there was one picture of him—a grinning one in uniform—and a poem she wrote for a What I Am Seeking in an Ideal Mate Contest (but never sent in as it got out of hand) and a sailor cap he gave her at her request. (She could have bought it for a dollar at any Army-Navy store. She wore it once when he came home, hoping he would take a few photos of her but of course he didn’t, and finally she gave him the only likeness he had of her, all but forced it on him as a birthday present—Rosacoke Mustian from the neck up, tinted, and looking less like herself than anybody you could imagine.)

  That much, then, but wasn’t that much left of everybody she ever knew who was gone for good?—the rusty snuff cans that kept turning up around the yard as signs of her Papa, and even the collars of every dog she ever had, and a 1937 New Jersey license plate that hung on the back porch to this day—the one thing she knew that was left of her own blood father who found it the evening she was born, lost on the highway, and brought it home drunk as a monkey and nailed it up over the waterbucket and said, “Will everybody please recall this is the year my daughter was born”—that one thing and nothing else, not a picture, not a thread, no more than if he had been swept away by the Holy Ghost, bag and baggage, in a pillar of fire instead of drunk and taken at dusk by a pickup truck he never saw but walked straight into as if it was a place to rest.

  So would there be more than that of Wesley?—anything besides that first November day and a lot of Saturday nights and this last afternoon with him vanishing in a roar and dust? It came to her—what he had said the night before when he was quiet and she asked him if, when he was in the Navy, he looked much at her picture. “Sometimes,” he said. “Why?” she said and he said, “Because I would forget what you looked like” and then laughed. Thinking about it though, she reckoned he meant it, laugh and all. He had known her seven years nearly, and when he went that far from home, sometimes he forgot her face. But what was so bad about that? Rosacoke herself when she went to 4-H camp in the summers (and that was for only eight days) would lie on her cot at night, thinking, and suddenly one of them—Mama or Rato or Milo or Papa—would be walking around in her thoughts with no more face than a cheese has got. She would strain to recollect the features and even try to draw out a face in the air with her finger, but sometimes it wouldn’t come till she got back home and looked. Funny how when you could remember every mole on President Roosevelt’s face and see Andy Gump clear as if he had ever breathed, still you couldn’t call up a face you had spent your whole life with. But it never was Wesley she forgot even when he was no more to her than the farthest Arab on burning sands.

  There would be the way he looked. And wouldn’t that be with her always?—whoever she would meet, wherever she would go even in her sleep—th
e sight of his face up a tree amongst pecans or down from the tree six years and turned to what he was this afternoon but holding in him all the time that younger Wesley, unchanged and hard at the core, untouched and maybe untouchable but enough like an unlabeled seed, dry and rattling in her hand, to keep her wondering from now on if he might not have gone on growing—that first Wesley—and learned a way to look at people that didn’t make them feel ten thousand miles away and to think about something but the U.S. Navy and motorcycles and to talk to people when they talked to him and say whatever he meant and stand still—supposing he had learned all that before it was too late, wouldn’t he have made a lovely sight, and then if someday he had ever had to go, couldn’t he have left something suitable behind him such as a child that would bear his funny name but have his face and be half hers and answer when she called?