His wife sat next to him on the porch. Out of the corner of her sight she watched him breathe like a man in the middle of a heavy labour. She’d see him stand up and look down the road and say ‘Alright boys, time to go.’ every time he heard an engine, or what might have been an engine, gearing in the distance. She’d sit silent when he realised no one was coming and shook his head in frustration. She’d have time to think ‘What can I do?’ just before she fell back into the muddled fadedness that was taking up more and more of her days.

She’d start remembering her mother and her mother’s children - eleven in all, and she the oldest - and how her mother would fry up big chunks of pork fat to pour over greens and onto bread. Then she’d be there, in the kitchen, fourteen years old and holding a cast iron skillet, tilting and turning it, with the heat from the stove so real and hot she could feel the burn on her face. She’d turn around to talk to her mother who was saying something about the baby in the other room, and she’d think, just for a second, ‘How good momma looks for a dead woman.’ And as soon as she thought it, ‘dead’, she’d think ‘That’s right. Twenty five years now’ and that was always enough to bring her back. To the sun on the porch and to her to husband. His white hair and impatient stance. Looking, watching, waiting…

“You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a Piggly Wiggly. And that’s all I have to say about that!”

——-

On the night Cosby Puckett was murdered most of the town – and all of the Bean Boarding House - were bunched up in a brush arbor down by the river waiting for Brother Ernst Muncey to preach from the book of Isaiah. Like the prophet, Brother Muncey had seen Christ’s glory and had come to tell about it. As the miners and their families listened to the missionary from Mercer beat on about Kingdom Come and Glory, the only daughter of Octavia nee Bean and John Paul Puckett was on her way to discover the hereafter for her very self.

His eyes, grey and wet like the belly of a fish, rolled back and forth in their place with every other breath he took. Once in a while he’d shake his head and let out a ‘wheeeeww’. A long kind of exhausted sigh that seemed to say this is the awfullest sort of work I’ve ever had to do in my life.

Ezra believed in God. He just didn’t believe in Brother Eugene Ledbedder. And it was Preacher Ledbedder who showed up every single Sunday morning to stomp and sweat around an old wood pulpit. Who threw open-palmed hands up into the air and pointed fingers at his congregation whenever he said words like eternal and damnation and adultery.

Cousin Bedford tried to kill himself today.

My grandfather says it best. “That Bedford is the most bone idle person alive”.

My grandmother clucks and shakes her head real pitiful like and says she reckons it’s brain damage caused by a shovel and he can’t help it. “You know what the Bible says. The Bible says we take care of those who can’t take care of themselves.”

A few years ago someone told Bedford the government would do just that. Take care of him. “They’ll give you stamps to eat on and a check to buy weed with.”

That came nearer to moving him than anything ever did. So near, in fact, he actually went and bathed and thought about signing up. Then he thought about it some more, and about how it would probably involve sitting in an office somewhere and not being stoned. And maybe even writing and talking with his eyes open. That’s when he decided the whole thing was too much work. That’s when he went out and found a woman who’d do it for him.

Her name was Suri and someone had told her “The more babies you have, the more money they’ll give you.” So she was out looking for a man to have them with when she ran into Cousin Bedford sitting on a park bench, holding a joint, and thinking about looking for someone like her.

Of course if Bedford had known then, what he knew now, he may not have ended up in front of that train this morning.

Then again, knowing Bedford, it probably wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Eunice and Aubrey had been sisters all their lives. That they felt the need to mention this as often as they did - or at all - was a matter of some curiosity for most of the people who knew them. Neither had ever married, though there was a time back in ‘72 when Aubrey thought she might like to. But her thinking stopped before she managed to meet a man and Eunice made sure it never started again.

Joseph had a way of knowing and speaking that set him apart from most people. The old lady in the photo saw it and felt it and said as much to his mother on the same day Joseph was born - before he had a chance to really know or say anything. Then both women died and nobody else much mentioned it. Until Joseph turned 30. Then everybody started to talk, because the town was small and Joseph was not and what else was a small town to do?

Some people said he was special and not quite right in the head and maybe that was where all his goodness came from - he didn’t know any better.

Others said he was marked by a higher power that tended toward Jehovah but from time to time became an eastern deity or a weird kind of mystic energy.

Everyone agreed he was different. What they couldn’t agree on - what no one really wanted to agree on - was why.

“Because that’s what death is. Where the sun don’t shine. An un-illuminated image that creeps up and cuts the ties that bind us in one cold, sharp swing…”

–Buffy Holt

———

I’m not a morbid person. It’s mortality that fascinates me. Life is what it is because it’s fleeting. Temporary. Transient. It wouldn’t be half as poignant if we were stuck with it for eternity.

My grandmother once told me she didn’t understand how people could write about death all the time and not be consumed by its ugliness. But the truth is, death isn’t ugly. It just IS. And it’s the only real thing humanity has in common. The being-born bit doesn’t matter so much because it’s not part of our consciousness. It gave us what we got. That’s all.

It’s not how we started but where we’re going that’s important. And the story is in the getting there.

So that’s the thing. No one told me I was dead. Just like no one told Red and no one told Sarah and no one told the Man from Manchester who died beneath a baler. I just knew. Worse still, I knew what we were and how we came to be that way before most of the people around me knew and that, oh that, is the most annoying thing in the world. In this life or any of the ones that come before. Having people around you galloping about in circles thinking the things they do matter when, really, it’s all just a way to pass the time.