Уинстон Грум - Alabama Noir

She heaved Aunt Sip’s head and shoulders up onto the top of the pit’s wall and rested a moment. Russell took no notice except to cut his old slit eyes toward them and stay still. After a little rest, Betty took hold of Aunt Sip by her fleshy hips, like grabbing a giant sack of tough blubber or something, and shoved her a little more over the wall, so that now Aunt Sip’s hands touched the dry floor where the pit’s water had receded in the heat. Russell blinked. Betty rested again, then took Aunt Sip by her wrinkly, discolored knees and heaved her so that most of her went on over into the pit, then pushed at her old horny feet and fell hard onto her bony bottom from the effort. The silence just after was huge, the scuff of her nervous sneakers on the concrete as loud as the scratch of some great beast at the door. But then there was a thrashing noise from the pit and she looked up to see Aunt Sip twirl rapidly through the air, and heard another little splash, and a crackling, ripping sound, the pit walls getting knocked so hard they might crack and fall over.

Betty backed away from the pit on her bottom so as not to see inside there, until she reached the door, got up, and went inside without looking back. She walked through the apartment and into the museum. She stopped in front of the Je’sus diorama. Looked at the mummy boy standing there, holding his little spear, ever in between whatever had summoned him to stand and what would’ve come next. A hunt, maybe, or some kind of a dance. “Would you want me, Laughing Boy?” she said aloud. “Would I be a holy woman in your tribe? Or would y’all just sacrifice me to the gators?”

She went out into the shell parking lot and across the still-deserted highway, debris and sand skittering along it from the wind picking up hard from the gulf, the sky full gray and beginning to boil. She made her way to the beach. No one was out, not a soul down toward the public beach or east toward Perdido Pass. The waves white-capped and thrashing, brown, seaweedy, wind whipping her thin, limp hair. Windblown sand stinging her bare legs and face. It was a big storm coming in, maybe the worst she’d ever seen.

Shelby County

Building a coffin is a demanding but satisfying project for the ambitious carpenter to undertake, and entails a number of skills, including edging, corner joinery, trim, and finishing. You don’t have to be an expert carpenter, but the more experience you have the stronger the coffin will be. The last thing you want is for your coffin to fall apart. Ninety-four pounds may not seem like a lot, but if the corner joinery is weak you can bet on disaster. You can bet on catastrophe. Better safe than sorry , as my wife would say.

Choosing the wood. Hardwood veneered plywood is made of thin slices of hardwood, including oak, birch, maple, ash, or cherry, that are factory-glued to a soft, plywood substrate. You can buy this at any lumber store. Depending on the time of year it may have to be special-ordered, so it’s a good idea to start the process a week or two before you’re actually going to need it. You may find this difficult: building a coffin while its future occupant is still alive presents a number of questions, among them being, You’re not God, how do you know for sure she’s going to die? Well, just look at her. She weighs ninety-four pounds! You think she’s going to live? You hope so, sure, but hope was something you gave up last month, so the most productive thing you can do now is to build a coffin. It’s a good — and practical — distraction. Just hope she doesn’t hear you hammering.

Corner joinery. I know: I’m a broken record when it comes to corner joinery, but it’s by far the most important part of this project. You can use fluted dowels or plug-covered screws. Screws are especially attractive for three reasons: they don’t demand special equipment; they act as their own clamps by drawing the sides and ends together; and they are ideal for caskets destined to be shipped long distances, if, for instance, the future occupant insists on being buried in a plot in California, beside her mother and father, even if she moved to North Carolina years before, following her husband, who could find work nowhere else. One thing to take into consideration here is if this decision, this desire , to be buried so far, far away was made under duress, or if her mind was muddled by medication, or maybe the chemo. In those instances it should fall to the husband to decide, regardless of what other family members might think. But just in case, use the screws.

Trim and finishing. Moldings make an enormous difference to the look of any do-it-yourself casket. As a general rule, put the largest moldings along the bottom, smaller moldings around the lid. Personalizing your coffin, of course, is one big advantage of the handmade option. Create a design. Carve her initials on the side. You can add custom cushions to the interior, or maybe just wrap a favorite quilt around some bed pillows. Are you really going to keep those pillows anyway? They’re covered in hair, her hair, hair as brown as it was the day you met her. What kind of life would that be? Especially if you fulfill her last request, which is to remarry. The new wife can’t be expected to sleep with that quilt, those pillows, in that bed — not that you have plans to remarry, but who knows, things might change. Things will change. That’s the thing about things: change is all they do.

Summary . That about covers it. Following these instructions will ensure your coffin will be the best possible coffin you could build, a box you can be proud of — or a box of which you can be proud, for those of you, like her, whose goal in life it was never to end a sentence with a preposition. I don’t mean that. She had other goals, many, among them: to be kind, to love me with all her heart, to live a longer life. But what can you do? Nothing, it turns out. You can’t do anything, so you might as well build her a coffin. In a way it’s like holding her forever — like that, but not that. Nothing is like that. Nothing nothing nothing.

I remember the old man perched in his second-story window, milky behind the wavy glass, glaring at all us kids like we were the mice and he was the hungry hawk. We played in his yard sometimes. I never met him. I thought — in my nightmares — that one day he’d pitch himself through the window and grab one of us, hold us in his arms until we crumbled, sucking our life out through his withered chicken-skinned body and dragging himself back inside, appearing at the window again, waiting for another one of us to drift into his gaze, living forever. He didn’t live, though: one day he died. It happened the way it happens when you’re young: on a different plane, like clouds. I just remember wearing the coat and tie I never wore, the shoes so tight my toes bled, in a church we never went to, surrounded by the smell of the strange and old. We headed back to his house after, and I went inside for the first time. His ancient wife shivered in a big green chair on an Oriental rug, not even crying: I think she was all dried up. I ate a little sandwich, then I went outside to see if he was still there at the window — and he was. I knew he would be. He waved, all friendly now, and I waved back, I don’t know why. My throat felt strangled, my eyes so dry I thought they’d crack. Then he disappeared, fading back into the dark, and I never saw him there again. I didn’t tell anybody. How could I? I didn’t know what it meant, or could mean, because even that young I knew I didn’t believe in anything. I told my wife about it, though, twenty years later. We were in bed in the dark. Just married, our lives ahead of us — so far ahead we couldn’t even see them from where we were. I wanted to tell her everything, though, everything about me, and so I did, and part of the everything was this. It had stayed with me all these years. The story scared her, of course, but not the way it had scared me. I asked her what she thought it meant. It means you’ll be a ghost one day , she said, and so will I, and she cried as if this was the first time it had ever occurred to her, because she never wanted to think that even this — all of this, our brand-new world together, the love so big we almost couldn’t bear it — wasn’t going to last. It means I won’t be with you forever , she said, and she was right.