The… whatever you want to call it: memorial, reception, going-away party… is scheduled for seven o’clock. I dress myself in an outfit I’d expected to wear to a funeral: black suit, white shirt, appropriately-sober tie, black wing-tips.
We all meet up down in the foyer, looking like a murder of crows in our mourning outfits.
Even Teresa’s minivan is black.
On the way out of the subdivision, I start humming the theme to “The Addams Family,” eliciting a delighted “Ha!” from Duane and a grudging smile from Teresa. Even Corbin gives me an eye-rolling grin. Poor Grace is confused, but I think she’s glad to see everyone smiling.
I have no idea about the relationship between my mother and her grandchildren; I hope she was better as a grandmother than I was as an uncle. Duane had made it clear that the kids never visited her at her house.
—
Twenty minutes later, we pull up to a seen-better-days Butler building of a church in white corrugated metal, topped by a metal steeple of sorts, the only indication that it’s a church and not, say, a county road maintenance building. Which might have proved more useful to the common good.
The parking lot is surprisingly full of cars; people walk in clumps and groups towards the door of the building. We all look at each other; Teresa is as surprised as I am, shrugs her confusion.
“I guess it must be other people from the church. They were pretty much her family and friends.”
—
Indeed, inside the church most every pew is filled with people dressed like us. They’re, of course, all strangers to me; there’s something satisfying that my mother had had a community like this to rely on even as her own children had been lacking in that respect.
All of us look vainly about for a place to sit; silently, I vote for a place in the back. But then a man walks up to us, smiling gently. He’s short and thin and somehow… underformed, if that’s a word. He has a round, childlike face and nondescript brown hair that meanders like a badly-mown lawn over his skull, a weak chin and strangely full lips of some fruitish red color. His brown eyes swim behind thick wire-framed glasses. His suit is a size or two too large for his slight frame. A sheen of sweat on his forehead catches the glare from the lights overhead.
I realize then that he is the preacher… or whatever this church calls its leader. Behind those glasses, his eyes hold a certain manic brightness to them; this is a person who—lacking in nearly every other department —has found his calling in the church.
He steps towards Teresa, extending both hands to take hers. She stiffens, glancing at Duane and me.
“You must be Teresa.” His voice is thin and reedy, high-pitched, with an Appalachian twang hidden in there somewhere. “We’re so sorry for your loss.”
“I… well, thank you,” she responds, her voice quavering more from discomfort than any form of grief. “I’m sorry… you are… ?” She trails a hand through her hair, a sign I remember from our past that means she’s nervous.
He smiles again, revealing yellowed and mismatched dentition, and he reminds me nothing more than somebody in a mugshot down at the county jail, hauled in for “indecent liberties with a child”… and, indeed, I watch Duane gather Corbin and Grace towards him.
“Dugan,” he replies. “Reverend Dugan. But everybody calls me Bobby.” He turns to Duane and the kids. “And you are… ?”
Duane smiles, but even I can see that it’s not real. “Duane Bradshaw. And this is Corbin and Grace.”
“Ah, yes, of course… Duane. I remember Nancy talking about you and the kids. One of her biggest regrets was not being able to bring you all in to our little family here.”
“Well, we have our own church… Bobby.”
“Ah, of course… good, good. Hate seeing anyone going unchurched.”
Well, there’s my cue, I tell myself, as Bobby turns to me. I watch as his glance darts over to my right ear and the diamond stud glittering there and I know that he knows. He smiles again; his teeth look like headstones in an abandoned graveyard.
“And you must be… Mark?”
I cross my arms over my chest; if he understands the import behind that gesture, then more power to him. I’m not touching this man. “Yes.”
“All the way from New York City!”
“Yes.” Jesus, Mom… how much did you tell him?
Bobby opens his mouth to say something else, but—thankfully—Duane interrupts. “Bobby… we’re looking for a place to sit?”
“I—oh… of course.” He turns and gestures at us to follow him up to the front of the church; there’s a row reserved for us. I feel dozens of eyes watching us as we make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the hard wooden benches. I notice Teresa looking discreetly around and I realize whom she’s trying to find.
“Is he here?” I whisper.
“I… don’t think so. At least, not yet.”
But Bobby’s not done with us. He looks at Teresa. “There’ll be an opportunity for you to speak if you want, at some point.”
Teresa turns to him and smiles. “Thank you, Reverend Dugan.” He hovers around a bit to see if there’s anything more, but then something else draws his attention and he moves away from us. Teresa turns to me. “Are you going to say anything?”
I shrug. “I doubt it. What could I possibly have to offer?”
—
I spent my youth being dragged to every kind of church available in Versailles, Kentucky. My mother’s restless peregrination through the Whitman’s Sampler of religions—Teresa and I dragged in her wake—exposed me to a dizzying array of faiths, most of them slight variations on each other, some of them—Judaism and Catholicism—enticingly spicy in their own right.
None of them seemed to fit her; she always started out with the highest of hopes but, at some point in the process, she derailed, finding fault with some point of their theology or with the preacher/minister/priest/rabbi himself.
Somehow, she ended up here and found a home. Perhaps she just gave up. I don’t know. Maybe she actually liked it here.
It starts simply enough. Bobby takes up his position behind the lectern, Bible splayed open on top of it, and gathers himself for a few brief seconds. Behind him is a lazy arc of makeshift easels, each of them displaying photographs of my mother at various stages in her life… presumably the pictures Teresa has exhumed from her scrapbooks.
One particular image catches my eye: the four of us—mother and father, sister and brother—in some Olan Mills kind of nightmare, each of us in our finest arrayed before a hazy background of blue. Teresa and I must have been about eight when we’d gone into Lexington to have this picture taken; I remember it dimly. It has to be the last picture of the four of us, and we look relatively happy. I realize how much I look like my father: the same long, narrow, bony face, the same eyes, the same slash of a mouth, the same brown-black hair.
Bobby starts speaking then, and I begin to understand it, him, his attraction to this crowd. Under the amplification, his voice—too weak normally to attract attention—achieves a prophet-like status, that of a man who has wandered alone into the wilderness and come back to tell the rest of us what he’s seen. He has a way of adding some kind of hook at the end of his sentences, as if he’s seen a truth too intense and too real to reveal directly, referring to it only by inference and implication.
Others in the audience echo his phrases and his effusive praise of the life of my mother, calling forth a picture of a woman I barely recognize. There is a certain informality at work in this crowd; everyone here shares the same vision of faith and truth.
The intensity increases; people begin rocking back and forth, physically transported by their emotions. Bobby responds, throwing odd bits of… Hebrew? Greek? Gibberish?… into the mix, eliciting even more of the same from the rest of the crowd.
Duane, Teresa and I look goggle-eyed at each other; even Corbin and Grace—sweet Grace—can see that something out of the ordinary is taking place here. This is a side of their grandmother they’ve never suspected.
Behind us, a woman stands up and shouts something incomprehensible, raises her hands in exultation, and the hair on my arms horripilates, itching under the sweat-soaked cloth of my shirt. My own heart is beating in some kind of response to the miasma of ecstasy around me and even as the pure expression of love and faith echoes from the plain white walls of this ersatz temple I know that I will never, ever understand it.
—
Bobby brings the crowd back down, playing them expertly, a master pianist at his ecclesiastical Steinway. He pauses and looks over at us, smiling—those teeth! those lupine teeth!—and extends a hand to us in invitation. He wants us to speak to the crowd, offer our own testimony. Teresa and I look at each other; I shake my head slightly and her eyes flare—please don’t make me do this by myself!—even as she rises.
She is, at the microphone, quiet and small and sad and overwhelmed and my heart goes out to her as she spins some bit of wordplay concocted of equal parts memory and fiction (even as they are the same thing) designed obviously to soothe the crowd, show them that we are not the reprehensible offspring of this remarkable and long-suffering woman whom they have come to know and love and cherish. She wants to show them that we, too, love her and cherish her. Even if we never quite knew her.
Teresa finishes and the crowd murmurs a quiet assent. Not moving, she turns her head to me and again there is the silent supplication and I rise and begin to mount the podium.
I turn to the crowd and look out at them, these people who have taken my mother in and loved her. I open my mouth to speak, trying to conjure up the same spun-sugar confection my sister had managed.
And I cannot. Dozens, hundreds of faces stare back at me, old and young and beautiful and ugly, all of them shining with the sweat of their metaphysical exertions, eyes glittering and mad as they look back at me, voices whispering, encouraging me to speak, to offer them back to themselves.
I open my mouth. “I… I… I… I can’t, I don’t want… I… ” flee.
I nearly trip going down the stairs; my hand rakes across the open microphone, sending a bleating crump of distortion from the hissing speakers. I run, nearly, up the aisle bisecting the space, head downcast. What will they see? A man rendered inarticulate by sadness, unable to communicate his grief and love? Or simply a coward and an infidel, an interloper, who only pretends to love?
I push through the door of the church and out into the cooling evening. I keep marching away from this unholy temple; behind me, I hear Bobby back at the microphone. His voice trails into inaudibility as I move away, out into the parking lot and into the edge of a copse of trees between the church and the road.
Now what? Keep walking? Where?
I stop. I breathe. Around me the evening talks to itself in quiet chirps and burrs of sound.
Behind me, I hear another sound, the sound I’d just made, pushing through the door; Teresa, no doubt, come to beat me—justifiably—into unconsciousness. I await the executioner, having rightly earned her judgment.
There is, then, a voice, not Teresa’s, not Duane’s, but masculine, one I’d not heard for twenty years or more and I turn and there he is.
Posted 7 December 2024