The Good Morrow Read online

The Good Morrow

  Richard G. Patterson

  Copyright 2007 Richard G. Patterson

  Chapter 1

  April 1978

  It was a beautiful day for a funeral. The puffy white clouds on the horizon only served to intensify the blue of the sky above, and a gentle breeze filled the air with smell of honeysuckle. The earth from the grave seemed moist and rich as though it was yearning to have something planted in it. The plastic grass had been rolled up and put away to one side.

  If it had been legal, Bubba would have had them bury The Old Man without a coffin. He knew The Old Man would have liked that. At least he was able to get rid of the plastic grass. One of the benefits of being bereaved is that people don’t hassle you too much. They might try to sell you a bill of goods going in, but if you have specific instructions they’re not about to create a stink.

  The sun was raising beads of sweat on the gleaming forehead of The Reverend Mr. Wilcox, and he saw no reason to mince words.

  “In the sure and certain hope if resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Winston; and we commit his body to the ground…”

  Bubba had to smile. If there was any sure and certain hope shared by this gathering, it was probably the contrary. The image of Old Man Abernathy rising from his grave to resume his place among them was more than anyone would care to contemplate. Even he himself had to acknowledge that every shovelful of dirt was going to lighten the burden he had carried for some sixty-odd years.

  “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him, the Lord lift up his countenance upon him and give him peace. Amen.”

  Amen. The Old Man had probably never felt an ounce of peace or contentment during the whole 103 years he had walked the earth. Bubba was sure he had come out kicking and screaming; and judging from the look on his face when Bubba had pulled the sheet up over him, it was clear that he never intended to let go. He had a strangle hold on whatever demon he had been wrestling all his life, and he was taking him down with him.

  Bubba felt it surging up inside him again like it had that night. Maybe if he knew how to cry, he could flush a lot of garbage out of his soul; but he knew it would subside. Even that night he hadn’t actually shed tears. He had been overwhelmed, and his insides had dissolved; but none of it had leaked out. You don’t cry real tears in a dream – even at your father’s deathbed.

  Sister Sarah had been sitting on the other side of the bed reading aloud from the Bible as though the cryptic hallucinations of St. John would somehow ease the pain with which The Old Man passed from senility to oblivion. Bubba got up to see what the racket was in the hall and almost lost his temper when he discovered it was Lydia with her kerosene lamp.

  “For Godssake, Lydia, put that thing away. It’s bad enough without your trying to burn the place down.”

  Bubba turned on the hall lights and went back into the bedroom leaving Lydia frozen by the glare of modern civilization. She maintained her regal bearing and held her lamp aloft while her mind did battle with Chaos. Gradually her eyes adjusted well enough to block out all the irrelevant details, and she was able to recall who she was and to resume her vigil.

  Under any other circumstances Bubba would never have turned on the light. He would have just let her be or perhaps even guided her down the stairs to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. But the prospect of his father’s death had gotten the best of him.

  ‘’And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters. With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.”

  The preposterousness of this litany was more than he could bear, and Bubba would have said something rude to Sister Sarah had not he noticed the look on The Old Man’s face. He was dead. He had been dying for twenty years, but now he was dead. Between the time when he had gotten up to go out into the hall and now The Old Man had changed from a person to a corpse without altering his appearance in the least. Bubba couldn’t even have said how he knew, but he knew.

  Sister Sarah kept right on reading as Bubba pulled the sheet over The Old Man’s face. There was no indication that she had received any data whatsoever from the external world, but Bubba knew that somewhere in her heart she had once again assimilated the most unacceptable fact of life.

  II

  Ruthie arrived at Bellevue Plantation just in time for the funeral. The place was even more of a mess that she had remembered it. The grounds were totally overgrown. What had once been a formal garden now looked like a jungle, and the vines pawing at all sides of the house made it seem as though the swamp would swallow the whole place in another couple of years. How anyone could live in a place like this was beyond her.

  She tripped on a loose step as Bubba came out onto the porch to greet her, and she was glad she didn’t have time before the funeral to sit around with all her crazy relatives pretending she was sorry The Old Man had died. It had been a long drive, and she hated funerals; so it was going to be a real test of her endurance to see just how much she could take of these lunatics today. They all seemed to have crawled out of the woodwork for the occasion. Lydia was there with that look in her eyes. At least someone had put a relatively clean dress on her today. And Sister Sarah with that creepy smile that comes from being too intimate with Jesus, fanning herself and looking as though she couldn’t wait for Sunday school to start. And Hiram, or The Colonel as he preferred, who’d never seen a sober day since he washed out of boot camp in 1925, reeking as usual of corn whisky and unearned perspiration. And Jack, whose sole contribution to Western civilization was the refurbishing of the still which the servants used to keep The Colonel and themselves well oiled. Even Little Lee had shown up with that thing from Brooklyn with the hairy armpits who was supposed to be his girlfriend. And of course there was the ringmaster, Bubba, who at least gave the appearance of being capable of rational thought; although even the most casual perusal of his behavior since he retired from the bench would easily serve to dispel any such illusions.

  It didn’t help matters that her husband, William, professed to find all her relatives such entertaining company. She knew for a fact that he could spend hours talking to the gorillas when he took the children to the zoo – which was probably why he was good at selling insurance, but it didn’t help in dealing with her family.

  III

  At lunch after the funeral Ruthie found herself sandwiched in between Jack and Sister Sarah while William continued his “conversation” with Lee and Kathleen across the table. She decided the only thing to do was to eat up – Jesse did know how to fry chicken – and jabber away just like everybody else.

  “I really can’t tell y’all how relieved I am to know that our Graham will be going to Castle Heights next year. Pass the butter, will you, Lee. I just couldn’t bear the thought of his being subjected to public school.”

  “Hogwash.”

  She chose to ignore the Colonel’s comment on the assumption that it was addressed more to the world in general than to her in particular. Lee laughed and choked on his biscuit while Bubba started the rice around again.

  Ruthie realized that she was immune to her relatives now that The Old Man was buried. The whole charade of being an Abernathy could cease. No more hideous Thanksgiving dinners, no more impossible Christmas shopping, no more forcing her children to play up
to grotesque old women, no more summer vacations wasted in this sweltering compost heap. Her plans no longer hinged on the whimsy of a capricious and senile old patriarch. All she would have to do from now on was deal with Bubba. While he might be out to lunch in a lot of ways, at least he was not willful and autocratic the way The Old Man was. If anything Bubba’s biggest problem was his lack of determination and his amenability – traits which Ruthie could easily steer in her direction. All she had to do was to take things gradually one step at a time, and she was sure she would be able to persuade Bubba that the land ought to be put to some good use. He would never bother to do it on his own, so she knew she would be instrumental in it; and everyone would benefit. The figures that she came up with after her talks with the people at Syncom or C.D.C. staggered her imagination. Her children would have the best of everything; and, if she handled the whole thing properly, she would become a major player in the South, someone to be reckoned with rather than just the wife of another member of the Beneficial Mutual Million Dollar Club.

  IV

  After lunch everyone adjourned to the living room for the reading of the will. Bubba took his place behind the card table which had been set up at one end of the room in an effort to give him some air of authority. Lee and Kathleen settled into the sofa next to Aunt Lydia as Lee began filling a corncob pipe with pot from a plastic baggie. Ruthie made a quick pass at freshening up her makeup and brushed some cornbread crumbs off William’s coat sleeve.

  Bubba removed two rumpled pages of illegible scrawl from a manila envelope and began reading in his best courtroom voice.

  “I, Winston Weatherford Abernathy, being of sound mind and ... “

  Lee coughed in the middle of a long toke on his pipe – a reaction probably to The Old Man’s claim more than the quality of the stuff he was smoking. Bubba glanced up over the top of his reading glasses and abandoned his attempt to decipher every word in the will.

  “Etcetera, etcetera ... do hereby make my last will and testament. To my eldest son, Hiram, I leave six barrels of sour mash hidden in the basement.”

  The bequest may or may not have penetrated The Colonel’s haze. Ruthie was relieved, although she was not surprised. The Old Man had never succumbed to any doubts about the worthlessness of his first offspring.

  “To my youngest son, Wilbur, I leave my gold pocket watch.”

  Bubba looked up from the papers with what seemed to be a look of genuine pride and delight. Lee jumped on the bandwagon and flashed him a big thumbs up. Ruthie seemed to feel the deck creaking a little.

  She usually assumed that the bulk of the estate would be left to Bubba since he was the only one who had survived childhood at Bellevue well enough to function effectively in the real world.

  To my daughter, Sarah, I leave the family Bible; and to my daughter, Lydia, I leave my mother’s rocking chair.”

  Ruthie couldn’t believe that The Old Man was sophisticated enough to set up a trust with his will, but it had occurred to her that he might be so absent minded that he would just forget to leave the real estate to anyone in particular.

  “To my nephew, Jack, I leave the steam tractor.”

  “Hot damn!” Jack’s eyes lit up as he squirmed around in his seat smiling from ear to ear. Lee and Kathleen could appreciate the form of his enthusiasm if not the content, and Lee raised his corncob pipe in a salute to his good fortune.

  “To my grand nephew, Lee, I leave all my clothes; except for my underwear, which is to be burned.”

  “Far out.” Lee put his arm around Kathleen and leaned back proudly as though the acquisition of The Old Man’s wardrobe bestowed upon him the irrevocable status of Southern Gentleman with all the rights and privileges attendant thereto.

  “To my faithful servant, Jesse, I leave one rifle and one shotgun of his choosing in the hope that he will put them to good use. And to my grandniece, Ruth ... “

  Bubba seemed to be having trouble with The Old Man’s handwriting again. He held the pages up close to his glasses and turned them sideways a bit.

  Ruthie thought she saw him glancing at her over the edge of the papers and suspected that the real reason he held the paper up closer to his face was to hide a smile as he deliberately taunted her. He knew perfectly well that she had hopes about the disposition of the estate, although only in her wildest fantasies did she think that The Old Man could have known that she was the only relative capable of taking charge of the property. Sometimes she had sensed from a look in his eye that The Old Man recognized in her the same strength of will with which he had ruled Bellevue Plantation for over 85 years, but she had never let herself really believe that he might actually turn the place over to her directly.

  “I leave twenty-five jars of blackberry preserves.”

  This felt like a slap in the face which Bubba administered gleefully on behalf of The Old Man, but Ruthie just smiled sweetly as though she thought it was cute and waited anxiously to hear the rest. There couldn’t be much more since Bubba seemed to be at the bottom of the second page. The Old Man had probably just forgotten about the plantation, which meant there might have to be some legal proceedings, but at least she was mentioned in the will on a par with all the other relatives so it shouldn’t be too hard.

  “The rest of my possessions including Bellevue Plantation and whatever revenue it yields I leave to my long lost grandnephew, Stephen Foster Abernathy … “

  A gasp escaped from Ruthie’s mouth before she could stop it.

  “On the condition that he not sell the plantation and that its doors shall always be open to as many of my relatives as the house can physically accommodate.”

  William laughed out loud, but he was quickly silenced by a glare from Ruthie.

  Bubba put the pages down on the table with a gesture of finality as though that was all there was to it and he was quite satisfied with the will. Sister Sarah felt moved by the Spirit.

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. “

  Sister Sarah’s ministrations enabled Ruthie to regain her composure. She spoke to Bubba as though her only concern were the welfare of the family.

  “Do you think there’ll be any problems probating the will?”

  Bubba took her question at face value, but Ruthie felt sure he was laughing at her.

  “No. Everything seems to be in order.”

  He turned the pages over and examined them as though the physical condition of the paper on which the will was written had some bearing on its legality.

  Ruthie tried to appear pleased, and she checked her desire to get up and walk out of the room. She settled back in her chair and whispered to William.

  “We’re spending Easter vacation here.”

  “I thought we were going to Disney World.”

  “The children will have more fun here.”