Lesley Kagen - Land of a Hundred Wonders

From atop the roof, Billy, slipping and sliding down the shingles, shouts, “Gibby, run!” and I almost do, but the blood from Janice’s head is gushing down her neck and onto her chest.

“Stay still, stay still,” I cry, hurrying to where she’s collapsed on the grass. Picking up her pointy-nailed hands and cradling her head gently in my lap, all I can think to say is, “Why? Why the hell did ya do that, Janice?” Amidst all the yelling and the distracting smell of fresh gun smoke, I can barely focus enough to hear her struggling to say, “The Boys.” She’s striving for, but not attaining, one of her snotty smiles. “I know ’em real well. They… they was gonna shoot Cooter for the reward no matter what.” A bubble of pink comes floating to the corner of her pale lips. “I had to stop them… I… every girl should have a daddy. My grandbaby is gonna have hers.”

Pressing my hands to the side of her head, I’m trying to push the blood back where it belongs. “For crissakes, don’t die, Janice,” I say, at the same time the awfulest keening comes from outta the house.

When I look up, there’s Clever standing in a broken-out top-floor window, Cooter by her side. Our desperate eyes meeting as she screams out, “Mama. I’m comin’. Don’t let her go, Gib.”

But after Janice in a barely-there voice says to me, “I told ya… I told ya I’d make it up to her someday, didn’t I?” I know it’s too late. With a flutter, like a petal falling from a flower, nothing more, Clever’s selfish, selfish mama is already gone.

With all her funeral-attending experience, Clever was able to pull together a real attractive one for her mama. She came to me a few days after Janice’s passing and asked, “Ya mind puttin’ some words together for her stone? Something nice ,” she tacked on, because she knew that even though I admired Janice sacrificing herself for Cooter, and her wonderful waitressing skills, I still got some leftover feelings about her overall poor mothering performance. Did the best I could.

Janice Lever

(1937-1973)

MAMA OF CLEVER

BATON TWIRLER

TWO-TRAY SERVER

HEAVEN DESERVER

Miss Florida musta baked a hundred pies. That’s what the coloreds do when somebody makes their trip to the Promised Land. Throw ’em a goin’-away food and music party. Janice Lever, if she hadn’ta been gunned down, woulda been Cooter’s and Miss Florida’s kin, so once Miss Florida got over her initial blood-mixing madness, she explained to me as we baked those pies together in her Browntown kitchen, “Since she ain’t got no other family, Carol has given us the go-ahead on buryin’ Janice the colored way.” So everybody was gnawing on pork ribs in their funeral best, keeping a beat to that lowing saxophone music after the ceremony at First Ebenezer, remarking how awfully attractive Janice looked in her old twirling costume, which Clever insisted on buryin’ her in, sparkling baton and all.

Clever and me are at the cottage, out on the pier, legs hanging long to the water, shooting skimmers in the dwindling light. Pink balloons are sagging off the dock after today’s shindig. We’re celebrating my belated twenty-first birthday and Rosie Adelaide’s one month. Cooter and Clever got to the hospital in plenty of time after the showdown for her to deliver a baby who resembles a box of colors with her burnt umber skin and cornflower blue eyes. She’s curled up in the cottage in her daddy’s arms. In Grampa’s old bed.

As usual, Keeper’s at my side. Snubby tail wagging at nothing I perceive. His back leg is still bandaged and maybe he won’t be able to use it again after he got it caught up beneath one of the Brandish Boys’ horses when he was trying to lead Cooter to the hospital. The fact he can’t bound into the lake and retrieve these skimmers is just about causin’ him to go blind.

“Tell me again what Mama said to you right before she passed,” Clever says, landing a three-skipper.

“She said that every baby should have a daddy and her grandbaby was gonna have hers.” I musta told her this story a bazillion times, adding on as I go, “And that she was sorry for treatin’ you like she did. And that you were the best daughter in all of Kentucky. And that she knew you’d be the best mama. And that you were extremely good-lookin’.”

I can practically see my sidekick’s smile coming clean through the back of her head when she says, “That really was something, her taking that bullet for Cooter like she did.”

“It sure was, Kid.”

I gotta admit, I was somewhat shocked by how broken up Clever was after Janice’s passing. More than I thought she’d be. But she’s settled down some now ’cause after they set her mama in the ground at Land of a Hundred Wonders Cemetery, her and Miss Lydia have become quite close, their shared interest in the dead being the thing they have in common. They’ve been spending a lot of time having VISITATIONS and discussing in depth:

WONDER # 12

TRANSMUTATIONS OF THE HIGHEST ORDER

“Ya think that’s possible?” Clever asks.

“Do I think what’s possible?” I’m remembering the last time we were out here on the pier. It was right after Grampa’s heart attack.

“Transmutation of the Highest Order,” Clever says, looking almost thoughtful. “Ya think a soul could crawl into another body so it can finish off any business it didn’t get to when it was alive?”

I haul back my arm and let loose, delivering a four-skipper. “Before I answer with what I think, why are you askin’ me?”

Clever looks sheepish. “I swear, sometimes Rosie reminds me an awful lot of Mama.”

“She’s not askin’ ya to pour Mr. Jim Beam into that baby bottle, is she?”

Clever cups her hands, moving into Indian burn territory. When I’m done swatting her off, she says, “Miss Lydia’s taken to wearin’ black almost every day. She’s missin’ ya something awful, ya know.”

“I heard she’s got Teddy and Vern managin’ the tobacco farm. That was smart a her.” After all, one of them is the Caretaker, and the other one reads. Once that hiring news got out, agitated Browntown relaxed.

“How do ya think the white folks are gonna feel ’bout that?” Clever says, knowing we’re not the only ones that enjoy throwin’ stones.

“What choice do they have but to at least pretend it’s such a fine idea, bein’ that Miss Lydia is the second-richest person in Grant County now?”

“Shoot. I forgot. She gave me something to give to ya.” Clever pops up dripping, runs off to the picnic table, and brings back a shoe box. “Open it,” she says, bossy as ever. I lift off the top, and beneath the white tissue paper there’s a bouquet of dried forget-me-nots held together with a purple ribbon. “She said you’d know what that meant.”

“Gibby?” Grampa shouts out. He’s making his way toward us from the old Fleming cottage. The one that damn Yankee Willard rented out. That’s where Grampa’s been living since he got back from the Houston hospital. That’s the way he wanted it. Said me and Clever and Rosie should stay in our cottage and he’d move over there. After he aired out the hemp smell. When they’re married, though, him and Miss Jessie will live at her farm. Cooter’s been bunking down with Billy for the time being in the tent in the woods. We’re all gonna have a ceremony right here on the cottage lawn when the maple leaves reach their reddest. This is what the Gazette headline is gonna announce in next week’s “ All You Need Is Love ” column:

Comin’ Soon…

A Trifecta Wedding!

We haven’t worked out all the details yet, where everybody’s gonna be living after we’ve tied the knots, but for sure it’ll be here in Cray Ridge and not Bolivia. Which is good, since Loretta Boyd from over at Candy World told me this afternoon when I stopped by to pick up a sack of chocolate-covereds that Senor Bender would NOT be available to do any Espanol work in the near future ’cause he’s run off with the Spanish Club’s treasury money. And Miss Darlene Abernathy. (I haven’t told Clever about that last part. She’ll be too disappointed. She stole a rusty shovel from somebody and gave it to me for my birthday, promising, “Tomorra we’ll head over to the hospital and beat that varmint Darlene to death on her lunch break.”)