September Song Page 18

  Each state line was a Berlin wall, but with a difference. I both did and did not want to cross it. Not that I wished to tarry a moment longer in the one I was leaving. I blessed my lucky stars at having gotten through it. But the other side was enemy territory, too. Now I had it to get through. No one will ever know just how big America is until he or she smuggles mortal remains fast going bad across it.

  Once we were stopped by a traffic director at a crossroads to allow a funeral cortege to turn into our lane. The deceased must have been both prolific and popular, for the procession of mourners was as long as a freight train. Kelly and I coupled on as the caboose. I too switched on my headlights. We went at a solemn pace and the trip to the cemetery gates was long. But while I chafed at the delay, at the same time, following behind a legal corpse with a proper certificate I felt myself comouflaged, a duckling undetected in a hen’s brood. I was sort of wistful when they turned off to lay theirs to rest while I was left to carry on alone with mine, and with many a mile yet to go.

  Another time we were the ones at the head of a long line of traffic. We were in a No Passing zone and it kept lengthening until it stretched out of sight like a wagon train wending its way.

  At last we came to a spot where I could pull off the road and let them pass. What a parade went by! I counted four fire engines, two ambulances, six school buses, eleven cars that with a little restoration would have been called classics up north—all this on a secondary road!

  I fell in behind them and proceeded on my way. Pretty soon a line as long as the one ahead had piled up behind me.

  We came to the edge of a town. Above the street streamed a banner proclaiming this to be Windsor’s centennial celebration day. A man who would have scaled 240 was directing traffic. All one way. Nobody was leaving town.

  Seeing my license plate he stopped everything and came to my window. I rolled it down a crack. I could have heard him just as well through the glass, for he had a voice to shatter it.

  “Welcome to Windsor, stranger! Just go down there four blocks, turn right and follow the crowd.”

  Ahead of me at that intersection stretched an empty street. But I was not going down it any further. Nobody was. The traffic cop there had his arm out like the barrier at a railroad crossing.

  Now, as is well known, Southerners are hospitable folks. They have got that reputation to keep up. Southern hospitality can be downright insistent, you might almost say belligerent. A local offers to buy you a drink and you decline, he just may take offense and floor you. The last thing I wanted to do was draw unfriendly attention to myself and certainly not to stir up ill-will by treating these people’s festivities with disrespect. Let them think Windsor’s centennial celebration was what I had come all the way from New York for. If I tried to get out of town that day I might have been ridden out on a rail.

  I parked the van in the pasture at a distance from the other cars. This being a dry county, the first man I met offered me a drink from the bottle in his hip pocket. He inspected it after I handed it back. A token nip would have been an insult to him, a reflection upon my own manhood, and upon the honor of my section of the country, which I was there to uphold.

  I was passed from one to another.

  “Jeff, Cy, Rory, like you to meet my friend Yank here.” And out of the pockets came the bottles.

  The parade, with its majorettes, floats, marching band, antique cars, fire companies, after going past, turned down a side street, went around the block and came back and passed in review two more times. Then, after the barbecue, baseball history was made in Windsor that day.

  As an honorary citizen of the town, and having not so much as a fifth cousin on the field for me to favor, I was named umpire of the Little League game. I was strictly impartial. I hunkered and peered and whatever the pitch, over whichever of the plates I was seeing, out shot my left hand and forefinger and I yelled, “Ball!” Every runner was safe by a country mile. The only outs were made on caught flys. There were protests at first, but when I kept it up and the crowd caught on, my every call was cheered. Seeing that their parents were on my side the players played along. Kids are brought up to be respectful of their elders down there. Even the protestors addressed me as “sir.” I allowed the side to bat through the lineup, then in order to retire them and give the others their turn the next three batters went down on called strikes. The players’ short legs were worn out from trotting the basepaths. They were glad to quit when the game ended after three innings in a tie: 26–26. I was carried off the field to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The only umpire ever so honored. You could look it up.

  The festivities continued into the night. It would be another hundred years before Windsor again had something to celebrate. By early evening I was in no condition to drive anyway.

  Mighty hospitable people! I wished I had been free to ask, “You folks wouldn’t have a nice quiet little cemetery with a vacancy in it somewhere, would you? I’ve got a friend there in the van with me who could use one.” I feel sure they would have said that any friend of mine was a friend of theirs, and that they had no objection to dead Yankees.

  An old horse will find its way to the barn with the rider asleep in the saddle; my van was that way with yard sales. It would stop for the smallest—you never know. Now I had to keep a tight rein and spur it past them. But at one of the biggest I ever saw, somewhere in Virginia, it balked and would not be prodded on.

  I can flit through your average yard sale like a hummingbird among blossoms. But this one: you would have thought the Smithsonian had cleaned out its attic. There was scarcely an item to be passed over without consideration.

  “You ought to have been here last week,” said the lady in charge.

  That spoiled my day but not for long. There were still plenty of pickings. The anything-but-modest home was that of a First Family. Now it had been opened like King Tut’s tomb.

  There were coin silver spoons. Antique cameras. Old fishing lures. Cut glass. Paperweights. Decoys. Piggybanks. Mechanical toys. Model railways. Jewelry. Just for starters.

  Time was passing and I was conscious of it. But whenever I resolved to tear myself away and move on my eye was caught by something else. I wore a path carrying cartons to the van. I filled the space remaining in the trailer. I would have hitched on a second one if I could have. I filled the upper bunk and I wondered how I was going to get to the lower one through all that was stacked on the floor. The lady was half an hour totaling my purchases on her pocket calculator. And Kelly was half a day further from home.

  The bathroom in a van like mine was not designed for double occupancy. It was not much roomier than a telephone booth—or a coffin. But I was smelling mighty high myself, and my growth of whiskers, taken with my bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep, was enough to land me in a police lineup.

  I considered checking into a motel. But in the first place it would be wondered why anybody with a van would do that. Besides, I could not afford to lose a whole night, and any man who checked out of a room after just long enough for a shower and a shave would surely have been reported. Must have a corpse on his toilet: it shows how obsessed I was that this should seem to me the natural suspicion.

  I wanted a bath as never before. Enough to overcome my distaste at joining Kelly. I undressed.

  But when I opened the door I almost backed out and closed it. That was what anybody would have done who had intruded upon a live person in a toilet. To do so with a dead one seemed an even greater invasion of privacy. I felt like begging pardon.

  To bolster myself I said, “Whose bathroom is this anyway?” It came out sounding rather hollow. For the fact was it seemed to me that my guest had a better claim on it than I did.

  I had meant to shower quickly, shave, and make my getaway. But I felt dirty from the inside out, and that spray was a veritable baptism. I splashed like a bird in a birdbath. I sang like one. I sang:

  Ole man Mose done kick de bucket.

  Kick de bucket.


  Buck buck bucket.

  Ole man Mose done kick de bucket.

  Ole man Mose is dead.

  I sang:

  A dead man lay deep in his grave.

  He was all down and out.

  The worms crawled in,

  The worms crawled out.

  They crawled all over his dirty snout.

  What I was doing is known as whistling past the graveyard. Meanwhile my dead man did not lie in his grave.

  I defy anybody to shave with a corpse watching him and not emerge from the experience a changed man. I nicked myself in three places, I was that shaky. My face in the mirror seemed that of a stranger with a resemblance to me. Like the fugitive pictured on the Post Office wall. “Wanted.”

  Wondering when and where and what my own end would be, I felt sorrier than ever for Kelly. I felt sorry for everybody, but the indignity of it made his death all the more pathetic. He deserved to be stretched out in repose, not slumped on a toilet seat. He would have hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob if he could have. Yet I, whose efforts had all been to keep the body hidden, now felt an urge to exhibit it. Invite people in. Say, “Take a look. There you are. This is what it all comes down to.”

  I thought how unnoticed you were until you died. You got a moment’s attention then. Before stamping your passport and putting you out of sight and out of mind the world wanted to make sure your exit was legal.

  We were getting there. We were getting there.

  Then somewhere in rural Pennsylvania we limped to a stop with a flat as though we had stubbed a toe. I unhitched the trailer, jacked up the van, only to find that the air had leaked out of the spare. My own was pretty low by then too. I lugged the wheel to the filling station I had passed a mile or so down the road. On my way back I was given a lift. I have found the good Samaritans to be young men who drive cars with bodies as full of holes as a fishnet. This one insisted on changing the tire for me. When the work was done he said shyly, “Mister, I could sure use your john. You mind?” How I wished I could have said, “Make yourself at home!” Instead I had to say it was out of order.

  In North Nowhere, New Jersey, we spent an hour on a merry-go-round missing the brass ring, that is to say the entrance to the Garden State Parkway. After that every tollbooth hopper I tossed coins into was another prayer bead counted off.

  Crossing the Hudson I renamed it the Styx. Then, “Welcome to New York The Empire State,” said the road sign. I felt I had reached the Pearly Gates.

  But if the path to those gates is straight and narrow, getting through them is the real squeeze.

  My Saint Peter was a state trooper. I was barely over the line when he came after me from out of ambush among the trees. Told what my offense was, I went as rigid as Kelly.

  The trooper pointed to the little sticker in the lower left-hand corner of the windshield. It was yellow. It ought to have been blue—that was what they were wearing this year. I had forgotten to have the van inspected before going south.

  The justice of the peace in the next village to whom I paid my fine, after lecturing me on the seriousness of my infraction and entering it on my conviction card (one more and my driver’s license would be suspended), directed me to an inspection station just down the road. I passed it by. I found a secluded spot and there Kelly and I spent the day. For when your car is inspected the mechanic gets behind the steering wheel to test your lights, your brakes, your directional signals, and the presence in the van of something unburied was marked. We would travel the rest of the way by night. Laying up by day I was able at least to get some sleep.

  I have met people down south who have the notion that New York City is New York State. (I have met people from New York City who have that notion, too.) As a native son I can say it isn’t so. No matter how you slice it, New York is big. Kelly and I were still not home. We might be on the last lap, but that is the one for which you have to draw on your second wind. I was now both panting and holding my breath. I heard the wheels roll but in the dark you cannot tick off the familiar landmarks and it seemed to me that we were treading in place.

  We had had to wait out a few thunderstorms but otherwise the weather had been on our side. I kept in touch by radio with the forecasts, although I had once heard a five-year-old say to her grandfather, who was lamenting that their picnic was going to be rained out, “Papa, haven’t you learned yet that those fellows are always wrong?” One meteorologist I tuned in on said, “Well, folks, the temperature has risen twenty degrees in just the last hour and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.” First laugh I had had in days.

  One afternoon I was wakened by a noise like a tank battalion. I looked out to see the tail end of a snowplow. Some eight inches had fallen and it was still coming down thick. In upstate New York about the only time you can count on that not happening is mid-August. It was twenty-four hours before we could get going again.

  It will not be misunderstood, I trust, when I say that I enjoyed Kelly’s funeral. Not that I danced on his grave, of course. I was somber as befitted the occasion and the crowd and my standing among them. Our story had made the newspaper. The publicity drew a large turnout. They came not to bury Kelly but to praise me. I had become something of a local hero. To my supporters I said that I had done only what they would have done in my place.

  When I say “supporters” I refer to my ongoing battle with the law.

  The most serious suspicion was murder.

  “Kill him!” I exclaimed. “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe he snored,” said the police lieutenant.

  As I have said, he did. I colored.

  I waived my right to counsel. Why hire someone to defend me when I had nothing to hide? I was requested to take a polygraph test and, would you believe, I failed it! Just being asked such questions is enough to make your heart pound and your blood pressure rise.

  How I sweated! And sweating is one of the things they measure, being supposed to give you away as a liar. But practice makes perfect, and I passed the second test, which I requested.

  No motive for murder could be established. The police were disappointed but that count was dropped. Now I am charged with unlicensed transportation of human remains. Failure to seek medical assistance. Failure to report a death. Violation of the sanitary code. Endangerment to public health. Does this mean, I wonder, however I fare in New York, that I face these same charges in every state along the way on my next Dixie raid?

  Be It Ever So Humble

  ON GETTING UP in the morning the first thing Lily Harper did, even before putting in her denture, was to make the bed. She boxed the corners and smoothed the cover as neatly as a soldier. Lily was tidy by nature; she was also tidy out of terror. Her daughter Elizabeth might burst in at any hour, inspect the room like a sergeant in the barracks, and an unmade bed was all the evidence needed for her to declare that Lily was no longer able to look after herself.

  Not look after herself! If ever there was an “efficiency apartment” hers was it. Three hundred and sixty square feet of floor space: who could not keep that clean? The place was as cozy as a cubbyhole. Turn from the hotplate and there was the sink. After a meal of hers there was one pot, one plate, one knife and fork to wash. Waste disposal? She generated no waste. Nothing was ever left on her plate. Her laundry, which she did often, again both because she was naturally neat and out of fear of Elizabeth’s fault-finding, fit in the lavatory. As for the occasional cockroach, who in the city was free of those? One of Lily’s park-bench acquaintances reported seeing them in the most respected hospital. But just let Elizabeth spot one and it was, “Mama, you are no longer able to look after yourself.”

  Cockroaches led to her health.

  “Mama, you’ve grown thin.”

  “I have not grown thin. I always was. The one time I wasn’t was when I was carrying you. Much obliged for your concern, but I’m fine.”

  Moreover, she had Mr. Ellis to keep watch on her. There was his rap now, dependable as an alarm clock.
/>
  Through the closed door Lily said, “Good morning, Mr. Ellis.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Harper.”

  “How are you today, Mr. Ellis?”

  “Very well, thank you, Mrs. Harper. Yourself?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “Have a nice day.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Ellis. And you too.”

  The boyfriend down the hall, Elizabeth called Mr. Ellis. She suspected that Lily and he were in league to keep out of their children’s clutches. She was right, they were.

  This morning Lily was going shopping. Today it was to be the A & P. Unlike most housewives, who favored one market because there they knew where to find the things on their list, Lily spread her patronage over them all. For her, shopping was not a chore, it was an outing, an adventure. She never made a list. Nor did she shop, as did many on fixed incomes, adding up their purchases on a pocket calculator as they went along so as to stay within their budgets. She pushed her cart down the aisles taking from the shelves whatever suggested itself.

  Yet she was nothing if not choosey. Before settling on an eggplant or a head of lettuce she considered and rejected half a dozen. To win her approval a cut of meat, a ham, a turkey must undergo a thorough inspection. She was not immune to a bargain, but quality, not cost, was her prime consideration. She mistrusted off-brands.

  It was evident to anyone watching her that Lily was a savvy shopper. Her age too testified to experience. The assurance with which she selected items encouraged elderly men, new to keeping house for themselves, and indecisive young apprentice housewives to ask her advice. Being in no hurry, she was generous with it. When asked what one did with artichokes, avocados, parsnips, she explained at length. Although she herself was unconcerned about prices, she sympathized with those who were. This led to many friendly chats.

  Caravans of jet planes made of today’s supermarket an emporium that put the world at one’s fingertips. They had abolished the seasons. Somewhere on the globe, mere hours away, the blush was on the grape, the melon was sweet on the vine. There were fresh figs in February, tomatoes in March. There were potatoes from Idaho—ah, Idaho! snowpeaked mountains, ski lifts; dates from Saudi Arabia—sand, camels, veiled women. Danish trout, Polish ham, Dutch cheese, Mexican enchiladas. The market was like the Garden before the Fall, with all the tempting goods in reach.