Unprinted
Gene Fant, short story
Gene Fant, in his own words, "An alum of ODU's graduate program in English, Fant teaches creative writing at Union University in TN. He has contributed to five books and published almost 100 essays, stories, and articles in academic and popular press publications. This summer he will serve as the writer-in-residence at the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond. He grew up in Hampton, where he graduated from Kecoughtan High School."Sonny Greer’s Lapel
"He’s already been buried once, you know," J. J. said. "Part of him, anyway. Did you notice that he was missing two fingers on his left hand? His wedding band sits on a one-inch stump. He got distracted in his shop one day and cut ‘em off with the bandsaw. From what I heard, he didn’t even cuss when it happened. He just shook his head, lit up a fresh cigarette, and walked into the house with an old oily t-shirt wrapped around his hand. Then he poured some Morton’s salt into a bowl and jammed the stumps into the salt to burn it out."
The two men were in a long black hearse, bobbing down a country road to retrieve the corpse of Sonny Greer. The driver, Bob Hayden, was the local mortician; the passenger was the Rev. J. J. Jackson, pastor of the Sweet Tea Baptist Church.
"That’s just bizarre," said Hayden. "I can’t believe that anyone could do that. Man, it hurts just thinking about it. So you buried the fingers?"
"Yep. I got a call from Miss Margaret who said that her sons were just insistent that I perform some sort of funeral for the fingers. When I got there, the boys had gotten a scrap of satin from her sewing box and had lined a cigar box with it. It was an open-box funeral, with those fingers lying there just as stiff as you please, with Sonny trying his best not to laugh. We buried them under the chinaberry tree in the side yard. The boys made a little cross out of popsicle sticks, I prayed, and I read from First Corinthians about the parts of the body being part of the whole. Then we went into the house, where Miss Margaret served us finger sandwiches. I didn’t know until then that she even had a sense of humor."
For all appearances, the Greer family was just a normal, average family. Sonny was a hard-worker; Margaret was an equally dedicated worker at home, even with the small swarm of children that had descended upon them through their married years. Sonny was one of those stern-faced country men who smoked until the church service began and never wore a tie, only a tight-fitting dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up regardless of the season or the weather of the day. J. J. had never seen Sonny wear a tie, even though Margaret always wore the finest dresses she could afford. The children too were well-dressed and well-behaved in public, even if they were cover-alled and half-feral back home, not unlike most of the children in J. J.’s congregation. The eldest boy was named Junior, after his father, and the remaining boys each held the name of a Roman emperor; the solitary daughter was named Dorcas.
"Preacher, you think the widow’ll be okay?" Hayden asked as he made the last turn off the main highway into the long dirt drive that ran back to the house. He drove especially slow now to avoid raising the dust.
"I believe that she had a pretty penny of insurance on Sonny," he said. "His cousin sells it, and I think that what with all those children, they thought it was a good idea."
Sonny had dropped dead of a heart attack at age forty, just as had all of the other men in his family. At age thirty-five, he had made his peace with his Maker and his family and was ready to go at any time, even yesterday morning on his way to his workshop where he fixed things for a living.
The doctor had come and gone well before noon, and Hayden was there at half-past eleven and gone by twelve-thirty himself, with Sonny in the back of the hearse. Margaret had made him promise to bring back the body for sitting up with that evening, and Hayden had obliged. Most folks didn’t sit up with the body anymore. It was a country custom that had gone by the wayside a decade previously, but Margaret had insisted and Hayden agreed. He’d driven over with one of his men at eight o’clock in the evening and laid out the body in its casket. Sonny looked a sight in his dress clothes; all shaved and clean against the white satin of the compartment. He lay right in the middle of the quietest room in the house, just off the entryway, in front of the small spinet piano that was near the gas heater.
"Miss Margaret," he’d said, "I’ll be back to fetch him in the morning ‘bout eleven. Give me a call if you need me in the night."
At five past eleven in the morning, the hearse crept down the rutted dirt driveway.
"Preacher," Hayden whispered, "that Miss Margaret is a bird, ain’t she? When I dropped off Sonny—Mr. Greer--last night, she immediately got out a comb and said I had his hair parted on the wrong side. She didn’t say a word fu’ther, she just combed it back straight, split a part into it, and recombed it. I’d put a suit on him. You know how he was, he didn’t own a proper suit, so she’d sent her sister over to Fine Brothers yesterday afternoon to buy him one, but she’d accidentally left the tie behind, so I had just buttoned his shirt up to his collar. Miss Margaret pulled the tie out at the house and clipped it on his collar and then pinned a little red rosebud onto his lapel. Teeniest rosebud I’ve ever seen; I think it came off’un one of those bushes to the side of her porch."
"Yeah," J. J. replied softly, "she’s a stickler for perfection, as much as she can be with all of those children running around. Never known a woman so particular about her dress, her hair, and her house, at least the part you can see from the entry hall." He almost added, Never known a woman so worried about keeping up appearances, but he thought better of it.
He remembered for the first time in many years how Margaret’s own mother, Emily Jefcoat, had done the same thing, so the story goes, during the Depression. Miss Jefcoat was the only daughter of ruined Southern gentry; her kin were from Mississippi, though her mother and aunt had grown up just across the border in Pushmataha, Alabama. Her aunt Lydia had followed in the footsteps of a great many other aunts, never marrying but passing along the family traditions through nieces rather than daughters. Lydia was the kind of woman who had lamented the passing of china painting as basic training for young women.
Mr. Jefcoat was the local postmaster, so he had a job during the leanest years, but he was not able to sustain the social pretense Miss Jefcoat had undertaken. At one point, she started making her husband load up a piece or two of furniture into the car to drive up to Tupelo and sell by the side of the road, praying the whole time that no one from home would see him. She finally had sold every stick of furniture and furnishings in the house except for those materials in the rooms visible from the front entry hall. The entire family had slept on the floor on quilt pallets for two years until things turned around for them. Miss Greer’s own heavy parlor furniture had come from her mother’s post-Depression furniture buying binge and had been passed down almost twenty years later to the daughter whose own house needed "furniture of substance," as Miss Greer’s mother’s will had termed it.
As they pulled into the yard, Hayden and J. J. both assumed the same professional look on their faces, more somber and more comforting at the same time. The yard was filled with junk and scrap lumber, but the porch and the path to the house were absolutely orderly. A series of impoverished, squatty rosebushes hunkered down along the length of the porch, looking as though they feared for their lives with the boys hovering so close by. Four of the boys were on the clean-swept porch, looking miserable in their Sunday suits. Each was a little bleary-eyed, which was to be expected given the circumstance.
"Howdy boys," said J. J. as he got out of the car. "Your momma doing alright?"
"Yessir, reverend" said Junior, who was approaching seventeen and would likely take over his daddy’s shop business. "Right as rain, I guess she is."
Out the door came Margaret, dressed as if she were headed for a night out on the town in Meridian. Her hair was perfect, her earrings and necklace were shining, and her black dress was impeccably pressed and spotless.
"Preacher? I wasn’t expecting you!" she said, looking almost irked at his presence.
"I’m here to help Mr. Hayden and to check on you all. I hope that you had a tolerable night last night."
"Made our peace. Prayed our prayers. Took care of unfinished business, as they say. We appreciate you stopping by. We appreciate you anyway, but now it’s especially comforting to have the encouragement of your presence right now."
They all went into the front of the house. In the parlor, Hayden went over to the casket, as did J. J. They both looked into the casket before Hayden closed it and steered the bier toward the door, using the scissor-legged cart to go down the stairs with minimal help from the preacher. Both of them pushed the casket into the back of the hearse.
Miss Greer took J. J. by the elbow and softly asked, "Preacher, you got the message ready? I’m looking forward to it. I’m sure you’ll do it up right. I appreciate you doing this. I know Mr. Greer would have appreciated it too."
Hayden started the hearse and shifted it into gear. Neither man said a word until they got to the end of the red ruts to make the turn onto the highway. Then Hayden paused for a minute with his foot on the brake pedal and looked at J. J.
"You know something preacher," he said, "she really did look like she’d made her peace. Him too. Looked right peaceful before I closed the casket. He really must have been ready to go and she really was ready to let him."
J. J. nodded in assent and they headed the short distance up the road to the church to finish making everything proper and ready.
Three hours later, after a short funeral service at the church and a few more words at the graveside over at the county cemetery, Sonny Greer was in the ground to await Judgment Day. It was a short day. It had been a relatively short life after all, so it seemed fitting.
J. J. had a sort of policy when dealing with bereaved congregation members. On the one month anniversary of the death, he and his wife Caroline would visit the widow and pray with her. They headed over to Miss Greer’s on the specific date, calling the day before as a courtesy. When they pulled into the yard, the children were nowhere to be seen, though he could hear them yolping in the woods. J. J. got out first to walk around to open Caroline’s car door; at the same time, Margaret opened the door to greet them from the porch.
"You all come on in," she sort of whispered softly. "Thanks for coming by. It’s been a fast month, hasn’t it? Even though it’s been hard."
They all three walked into the front hallway and turned the corner into the parlor. J. J. sat down on the settee as if he had been there a thousand times, but Caroline had never been to the Greer’s place before, so naturally she wandered her eyes around the room.
The parlor was decorated in what was a backwoods concept of luxury: framed magazine covers, a heavily damasked mahogany settee and side chairs with matching burgundy drapes, and a hand-carved mantelpiece that supported a collection of odd flea market collectibles and Avon cologne bottles. The room itself was stale and dusty, a room-sized eye in the midst of the domestic hurricane. On every ledge in the room were photographs, a blurry black-and-white genealogy of Margaret’s people. Old men with long beards and grey suits and uniforms. Middle-aged women with complicated hats. Solitary old women with scowls and rows of pearly buttons running to their throats. No more than two children in any of the ancestral frames.
Margaret stepped into the kitchen to fetch her silver(plate) tea service and the cookies she’d baked that morning. As she came back into the room, she saw Caroline looking at a photograph on the rustic side-table. The side-table was actually an antique vanity that Margaret had inherited from her mother, who had inherited it from her mother’s mother. It had become separated from its mirror long ago, so Margaret simply used it as a tri-level side-table to display her most prized photographs. On the two side levels were a dozen or so school photos mashed into three or four simple black frames, each small portrait labeled with "School Days 1967-68" and other dates beneath the wild-eyed and uncomfortable faces of the Greer children. Alone on the low middle platform was a family portrait, sitting atop a faded piece of tat work.
"I see," Margaret half-whispered proudly, "that you are looking at our family portrait. That’s the last photo we had taken as a family; my sister Marilyn took it for us. I’m awfully proud that we were able to have it taken before it was too late."
The photograph itself was in a cheap, gaudy gold frame, one bought at the five and dime over at the Square. It was the kind of $3 frame designed to appeal to women like her who had never been outside of her home county except through the pages of homemaker’s magazines and, more recently, the snowy shows on distant television stations. The photograph itself was in black and white, and had the grainy appearance of being enlarged from a homemade snapshot’s negative.
There were seven wild children in the portrait: six boys and one girl. The boys all leaned into their father in the photo, each boy awkward in alternately undersized and oversized worn suits (for each suit was a hand-me-down except for that of the eldest boy). Dorcas, all curls and ruffles, had an oversized bow in her hair that half-obscured her mother’s face. The mother peered around the bow: her face was drawn and tired looking, but she had neither hair nor pin out of place. Next to her was Brother Greer, in a stiff-looking suit that was obviously new, with a tie that was crooked against his collar. Pinned to his lapel was a barely perceptible rosebud. His eyes were closed against the chaos that surrounded him.
J. J. looked at the portrait for a few moments and then actually blurted out, "Oh my soul!" before adding, "What a wondrous family portrait!"RETURN TO TOP
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