A Grave Error

By Elizabeth Jones

11: 46 a.m. We jar down I- 20 under a heavy sky. Our car elicits the leers of empty, rotting buildings—the abandoned efforts of a once thriving city, the shell of entrepreneurship. We’re off to West Haven Funeral Home, into a pocket of central Mississippi scarred by statistics and sad history, to the funeral of our housekeeper’s faceless husband.

My dad and uncle laugh still remembering their childhood under tender Pearl, who has been with our family for three generations. I’ve heard all about how she’d let them drive their childhood car, a blue ‘64 Chevy Impala, around town. As it barreled through the streets, she would grip the dashboard so tightly her knuckles would suffuse, becoming as white as theirs.

She would have spent her last troubled breath to coo and fuss over us, and we all relished our roles as her little urchins. For all of our affectionate terrorizations, her word was gospel.

Pearl possesses an unconditional love that at times has blinded her. She’s invested it in lost causes and people. Uncle Johnny tells me that story and others to remind me of how selfless she’s always been; “that was Pearl.” As for Willie—we didn’t really know him.

The car complains with every bump and my mother fumbles in frustration with the directions. Miles and curses later, our car creeps apologetically into an empty lot, where we circle awkwardly, park, straighten up; still askew, one more time.

Again behind steadfast Momma, we trudge into the brick building, clean but musty and too quiet.. A slide-letter bulletin board with plastic white characters offers:

WIL LIE MIG GINS: 11.00.

My mother turns to a room vacant but for a coffin with Willie inside and inside Willie, a decomposed liver. He’s situated expectantly: arms folded, smirking in satisfaction. “It’s about time those damn doctors let me be.”

My youngest brother is watchful for movement; confused but subdued at the sight of work-worn black man lying cold, creased with wrinkles and topped with thinning, wiry hair. We bid Willie forever farewell.

Again surveying the deserted lot, my mother explains, “The family doesn’t always stay the whole time, so we must have missed Pearl and everyone….” She insists we then visit the home of Willie’s bereaved wife, and so we meander through streets weed-choked and symptomatic of welfare living.

Everyone seems to be outside. Either reclining motionless on porches or buzzing on congested street corners.

The locals don’t really notice us. Only in the flocks of dancing children do we see a fleeting interest in our shiny, quiet car, but as quickly as they are distracted, they return to hopscotch on annotated cement, colloquial and lewd.

We find our destination at a dead end and stalk up cracked steps to a stained porch. My mother calls through a screened door opaque with dirt, softly and sweetly stretching Pearl’s name. We’re beckoned by a tired “come in, dahlins.” The softness of Pearl’s return makes me feel colossal and out of place.

We see her gaze affixed straight ahead, as if she’s watching the TV. It’s beside her, collecting dust in desuetude now that Willie’s gone. Pearl is five feet from the door, giving herself to a sinking dune of a recliner. I perch uncomfortably in another exhausted chair. I need to sneeze, maybe sigh, but I don’t dare move a muscle.

This woman changed my diapers, suffered through The Little Mermaid six times a day, read my mind and read me the Bible, slipped me candy then warded off the cavities. Held my mother when I didn’t want to be held anymore. She kissed me goodnight and doubtless prayed for me each night before her well-deserved rest. Here I sit, catatonic and paralyzed and self-loathing.

My mother weaves idle conversation with that famous sympathy, that kind of palaver that says “nothing amiss” when everything is and is considered a duty and rite of Southern womanhood.

Meanwhile, I sink into the surroundings. The walls are a mural of black and brown, white and red. Pictures of all Pearl’s cherished children; my father and uncle with funny crew cuts and comic books, my brothers in Storm Trooper garb, little me with a spatula and a wild grin.

Pearl’s arthritic fingers seize a tissue. It joins others in the mass of white cotton, sodden with hot tears. Her angst perplexes me. Long has it been whispered in my house that for the leaking ceilings and creaking joints in Pearl’s life, Willie was no kind of remedy.

Never mind that we thought we were.

To us, Willie was apocryphal. He thrived on excesses. He was a domestic nightmare, a philanderer and liar, and willing spender of Pearl’s wages.

And Pearl was the boy on the burning deck. Even as she weeps, she insists how rare and unlike most men he was. For all of her trying, for all of that pacifying magic and unrelenting sweetness, he never changed. Maybe that’s why she cries.

Then it occurs to me that perhaps Pearl and Willie had a love that was troubled but deep; that maybe we were the whispered secret in a house ready to join the ruins, and that maybe they had life patched together better than we.

As I offer my goodbye I try to look her in the eye, and Pearl winds me into a firm and forgiving embrace. One foot out the door, I hear Pearl ask my mom if we’re returning for the visitation, tomorrow, at 11. They’re picking out Willie’s coffin this afternoon, and she’s glad he has only one suit because that sure made the decision easier!

I hear my mother’s jaw drop, I feel the shuffling of my brother’s feet cease, and even the little one halts in perceiving that our smooth exit has encountered a snag.

Quickly, Mom recovers. “Of course.”

Back in the car, en route to the blossoming and well-kempt heart of Jackson, smooth concrete and clipped hedges, to a reel of images with captions less somber and desperate—a final thought forms as I peg my sights on home. That same uncle once told me Willie had six fingers on one hand, a deformity that belonged in this, our caricature; a deformity that both haunted and fascinated him. I was never close enough to look.