Bill Baker was never satisfied that he had properly appeased his lord, the God of Hard Labor.
In March or April, ten years or so ago, one of the first warm days: Bill was clearing away things at an old building he owned. June, a few blocks away at home, was cooking his lunch when, without Bill’s noticing, the fire from the trash hit something flammable. A blaze began, spreading rapidly. Bill started to choke in the smoke; he couldn’t see clearly or get out. During his attempts to escape, his hands and arms were badly burned. The fire even singed his face, and as he lost his balance and fell, he suffered a heart attack and died. I went to the funeral for June’s sake. Bill and I had barely spoken during the previous few years. He had stopped addressing me at family gatherings, wouldn’t look me in the eye. On the phone, when I tried to engage him, he said almost nothing. Once he told me explicitly, “You don’t have to come to my funeral.”
I didn’t, in the moment when he said that, feel anything. I was a master at monitoring reactions, not having them. I wished he hadn’t said it, but I knew why he did. When I was driving June home from somewhere, she pointed out the home of friends, people who had done business with Bill for years. “Their son died of AIDS. Bill wouldn’t go to the funeral,” June said, “but I did.”
In his casket, Bill was outfitted in white gloves to camouflage the burns on his hands. After his funeral in Mexico, we went to Madison, where he was to be interred, and all the cars on the other side of the highway turned on their headlights to salute the hearse, something that is always done here. It was a rainy day and there was more than the usual traffic and it seemed to me that the trail of passing headlights went on for a mile or more as we drove past the fields, too wet and muddy for the farmers to get in and plant yet. In Madison, as June stepped out of the hearse, a man who had worked for my uncle for years at Mexico Equipment told her he thought he would never hear tell of Bill Baker riding in back of a black Cadillac with white gloves on.
I carried in the centerpiece for June, that night after the wedding. She had grown attached to it, as if it were the bride’s bouquet and she had been the one to catch it. All I could think of that night was what would become of my mother and aunt. That the time was coming. It was my turn to step up. I told myself that whatever happened, I would do this one thing right, better than I had ever tried to do anything. Because even though my life was different, I wanted a place in the tribe. I still do.
. . .
Across the street from our church is the undertaker’s. As I wait for the end of the service to go into the sanctuary and help my mother gather up her music, I realize that the boy who was murdered in Mammy’s house may be lying inside. In the house on Olive Street where the shots were fired and the young man died, Mammy and her kids played cards in the kitchen and ate popcorn. They loved a game called rook. According to Miss Virginia, Betty had a fit if she didn’t win. “No one could tell Betty Baker what to do. She’d fly out and slam the door hard enough to be heard all over the neighborhood. Then came Harry, running out to chase her with Bill running behind him. Then came Marge. All four of them would be chasing each other around the house and I’d think, ‘Well, I guess Betty didn’t win the card game.’”
. . .
A few years ago, it became apparent that my mother’s boyfriend, John, a diabetic, couldn’t really take care of himself and Betty couldn’t see to everything. He moved to Monroe Manor, and although I took them out for steaks when I came home, Betty knew that their time was over. Last winter he had a stroke and died about a week later. My mother said his death was a blessing, a mercy. Bob, his dog, the beautiful German shorthair that my mother had fallen in love with, had gone to live with some people on a farm on the highway outside town. Betty worried about him, out there on the highway. Dogs that live by roads don’t fare so well here where the cars and trucks whoosh by without paying much attention to animals in their way.
Betty took him bones and scraps, even on bad winter days, and never complained when he jumped up to greet her with his dirty paws. Then one night, after John was gone, in the midst of a terrible winter, my mother called to tell me that Bob had died. He had gotten loose from his pen and wandered into the woods and somehow frozen to death. There we were, my mother and I on the phone, not crying, but knowing that if we were people who cried, we would be doing it at that moment.
“They say that freezing is the easiest way to go,” I told her.
“Maybe,” she said, “I will just lie down in the snow.”