Lewis Perdue: Perfect killer

"What did you talk about?" Rex's voice had an odd tone, not fear but not simple curiosity.

"Mostly I read to her from the Bible, especially Psalm 121, over and over."

"That's it?"

I nodded and his usual poker face showed me something like relief. Something like a secret that had not been divulged. That confounded me and I put that down to yet another artifact of stress, like the person who wasn't by the magnolia.

"Yeah." I felt the regret. That was it. When the light from the window got too dim to read by any longer, I told her I needed some sleep, because I didn't have any on the redeye from L.A. I kissed her, gave her a hug, and told her I would be hack in the morning."

He gave me a knowing look, as if he already knew what I had said and what I was about to say.

Movement interrupted my thoughts. In the distance, a hearse turned into the cemetery off Highway 7. It glided to a dignified stop behind Rex's truck.

"Nothing more until the phone call from the hospital at maybe four thirty in the morning to tell me she was dead." I stopped and looked at Rex closely "They told me she had apparently gotten up to get a cigarette, lost her balance, hit her head as she fell in the darkness."

Rex stopped and looked back at me.

"She died all alone on the cold, hard linoleum floor." I shook my head as the image tore through my heart again. "You cannot possibly imagine how many times I have prayed that she had been knocked out by the blow on the way down. I can't stand to think that she ended up on the floor, conscious for a long time, dying all alone in the dark. I wonder if she called for help or simply gave up, closed her eyes, and let go?"

The detail in Rex's eyes gave my stress-worn nerves the impression that he somehow knew the answer to that.

In the distance, an older, four-door Chevrolet sedan with clergy license plates pulled into the cemetery behind the hearse. A bent, old gentleman in a dark suit climbed painfully from the sedan, his ragged white hair stirring in the wicked wind. Rex and I turned toward him.

"Mama stage-managed everything you know," I said. "Right down to the last detail."

Rex raised his eyebrows.

"Right there in the safe-deposit box with her will," I said. "She'd paper-clipped a note to the prepaid funeral papers and specified everything she was to be dressed in right down to hosiery and undergarments, which pastor to call, and what Scripture he would read."

I couldn't help but smile as I thought of her lifelong theological rebellion against one of the foundations of Christianity.

"What's so funny?" Rex asked me.

"The note was very clear that when we recited the Apostles' Creed during the service, we would absolutely, positively not say the part about Jesus descending into hell." I shook my head. "No matter how much she ragged on me about my heretical religious beliefs, she never managed to accept her personal savior spending time in hell."

"You mean Hades," Rex corrected me.

I smiled again at the memory. To Mama, hell was profanity and she was always too much of a lady to say those sorts of words.

As we drew closer to the hearse, two large men in dark suits got out of it and met the bent, old man at the rear of the vehicle. I pegged him as the minister rustled up by the local funeral home.

The funeral attendants were well dressed and professionally bland. The minister's face was chapped and red, patched all over with scars I recognized as from a workmanlike removal of skin lesions. I counted at least a dozen more precancerous patches in need of treatment. His left hand clutched a cracked and worn leather-covered Bible. His free hand was cupped gently and trembled faintly like a farmer sowing seed.

I shook the trembling hand and thanked him for coming and introduced Rex.

"I remember your mother," the minister said "And especially the Judge-but then, who doesn't? — particularly during the spring floods of 1929 when the levees threatened to burst, all of them except the ones the Judge built when he was president of the Levee Board. Yessiree, he was a man all right."

The well-practiced funeral home functionaries interceded then and pulled the old preacher back to the present. Rex and I slid Mama's pewter-finish casket-the one she had picked out herself God-only-knew how many years ago-out of the back of the hearse and carried it to the gravesite and placed it on the aluminum structure over the hole. Rex and I stood silently during the brief ceremony. Psalm 121 again, and the usual dust to dust. During the final prayer, as I closed my eyes and tried without success to visualize Mama in any other setting than the hospital or in her casket, I heard a car pull to a halt on the gravel access road behind us.

When the minister said the last amen, the men from the funeral home tripped some hidden lever and Mama descended into the hole.

Rex and I stood at the side of the hole as the sound of the backhoe grew louder. I picked up a handful of dirt and tossed it on the top of the coffin. The impact of the dirt, the hollow, dull sound the frozen dirt clods made as they rolled off the metal, tore a membrane in my heart, and suddenly I saw nothing for the tears. I swiped at my eyes with the cuff of my new suit and cursed at the sky for not showing even a little sunshine for Mama. I thought about cursing God as well, but I've never been much for existentially futile gestures.

Finally, I turned and saw that Rex had walked away and stood with his back to me, head bowed. On the other side of the dirt mound the backhoe idled restlessly. The two men in overalls looked expectantly at me. I nodded, then turned and made my way to the minister, who stood discreetly at a small distance. I thanked him for coming, mentioned that he should have his face looked at closely by a competent dermatologist, then slipped him an envelope containing two hundred-dollar bills.

As he walked away, I saw a tall woman with mocha skin climb out of a bright red Mercedes sedan parked behind Rex's truck.

"Well, I guess the bodies are spinning in their graves now," Rex said as he stopped by my side. He nodded at the woman walking toward us. She looked awfully familiar to me.

"Meaning?"

"Dude. This is a cemetery for white folks," Rex said. "Even the labor with shovels're white."

I resented Rex's comments, wanted nothing to do with skin-color irrelevancies right now. But I turned toward the backhoe anyway and realized he was right. What's more, the men stood stock-still, their heads tracking the woman as she made her way toward us. Likewise, the two funeral home attendants and the minister were shocked into immobility by the sight of a dark-skinned woman in a white cemetery.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but the disappointment tasted like dirt. I hadn't been here to Itta Bena in twenty years, and that absence from Delta reality had allowed me to construct a convenient little fiction of self-congratulation that my modest efforts in the civil rights movement and the phenomenal dedication of many others had changed things here into a culture of meritorious equal opportunity. But clearly, life here in the Delta, more than in the rest of Mississippi, more than in the rest of the Deep South, and more than most any other where in America, still revolved about a deeply rutted axis of race, class, and misunderstanding.

I started to verbalize this to Rex when my heart stopped: the woman walking toward us was Vanessa Thompson. The Vanessa Thompson, moneyed securities attorney former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose striking face had made the cover of Time magazine when she'd shuttered her lucrative New York law practice to move back to Mississippi almost ten years ago to use her money to provide legal services for the state's poor, because "it was time to give back." But I also remembered quotes in the article from some of the more cynical observers who thought her move was "more like payback than give back." I still had that copy of Time in a drawer in my living room in Playa Del Rey.