Little known facts about Vincent include that he was Carolynne's marijuana supplier back in the seventies, and that he was the one who dug up Huhu's husband for her one spring night, twelve years after he'd been buried there in Benvenue Cemetery.
That first fact may not have been the hugest secret at Midas Touch Beauty Saloon where he delivered the goods by bicycle to Carolynne and Marlene on Thursday afternoons in a Baggies Alligator bag stuffed inside a fancy tea tin his father had always used for storing Earl Grey tea. Vincent actually mixed a little tea in the baggie, then topped off the can with more of the same, and the curler-headed ladies remarked approvingly after every toke that the oil of bergamot imparted such a delightful high note in contrast to the exotic bass note of Sri Lankan black. Vincent was most popular with the tint-and-perm crowd! Yet not even Motsie dreamed he was supplying weed to her mother, nor did Carolynne ever imagine that Vincent had gone and dug her dear dead daddy up for Huhu.
Who ever could have believed such a feat from Vincent, the namby-pamby little redhead who fainted at the sight of his own blood and never ate meat, even before that became popular with the beautiful-people set, and not due to ethical conviction, but to disgust for the idea that there was blood involved? Yet he had carried tools to jack open the metal vault and casket, a regular old hammock and a clothes-line pulley to get Odell's earthly relic out and up into the cruel April air, a bedspread to wrap him in, thereby disguised as some other inanimate objet d'art protruding from the hatchback of his brand new yellow and black '76 le Car, filled the grave back in, and rolled the sod back over it like nothing had ever happened here people, move it along, nothing to see.
That Saturday had been Huhu's 75th birthday, and she had ridden up to town with Motsie who was coming home from college, but Vincent got roped into driving her home when Carolynne and Motsie had gotten into an argument, Motsie heading for Wrightsville Beach, all mad, and Carolynne taking to the divan in her room, both well laden with their personal stashes of pot kept totally secret from each other. The forty mile ride to Huhu's went from dusk to dark to bright moon, four days from being full. Huhu didn't stop talking for even an entire minute gathered up in one batch the whole way, about how she declared she wished folks would just get along, and how she declared she was lonesome for the old days when families were as one and never did have a single problem, and she declared she would lie awake again like every other night frettin' and prayin' over the sad state of her family, and she declared she did wish she could have one more happy birthday, surrounded by loving family but, she declared, they were all but dead, and the live ones, well, she just heaved a sigh and declared some more. Lord have mercy got thrown in a lot, too, just for spice, and Vincent was thoroughly sorry for Huhu. That's pretty much the only reason why Vincent agreed to do such a thing, pure pity and wanting to make one old lady happy with him. She wasn't even going to pay him, and he wouldn't have done it for money even if she had offered.
Since Vincent's adoptive dad had run off with his secretary at Westinghouse, and his adoptive mother was well into year five of her slut decade, there was nobody at his house when he crept up around 9:45 and loaded the items he would need into the back of his le Car, and even though there were no electric lights in the cemetery, the nearly full moon had risen high enough for him easily to find one of the spots most favored by Motsie and Cousin Garnet forat reunion every year "Reuning" with him and their dead relatives.
The houses nearest by the cemetery were inhabited by slow walking rural black folks who wouldn't dare come around, even if they heard Vincent just digging away for a fare thee well behind a row of cedars. That's what he kept telling himself. One thing would be to get caught by the law, but another thing entirely would be to get run up on in the moonlit graveyard by a drunken passel of country colored men. Sure, Sampson was a mouth-watering chunk of milk chocolate back in town, but these out here were rural black folk, entirely distinct from the sort who'd gone to school with Vincent. The difference between these and those would probably be as big as the difference between himself and those crazy weirdos in Deliverance, and unlike his other best friend, Lindsey, who grew up like a white dot on a domino over there in Cottendale, Vincent wasn't accustomed to the ways of this other race. He was pretty sure any country black person willing to come into a white cemetery around midnight with an almost full moon spying through the trees stood to be voodoo folk, for all he knew. "No no no no no," he thought out loud. "Don't they call those folks spooks because they're scared of white ghosts?" He cast his eyes through the branchy shadows all around him, and thought he heard a banjo for just a minute, but decided to believe it was more likely a bunch of katydids, crickets, june bugs and tree frogs.
Huhu climbed on her step stoo and pulled down the striped Hudson Belks box stored on the top shelf. Inside was a baby blue pure silk pajama embroidered with pink and yellow birds, that she had bought ten years before to look pretty someday in her open coffin. She laid the pajama out across the heavy acorn bed and pressed it flat with her gnarled and spotty old hands, left it to air awhile before she'd put it on.
Huhu waltzed down the hall to the kitchen and set the whistling kettle on the stove, ready to fix Vincent some tea, and sat in her recliner with the black and blue afghan she was crocheting for Motsie, and turned on Johnny Carson with a satisfied smile.
Vincent originally planned never to mention any of this to anyone, ever. Huhu had given him her word as a Christian Baptist never ever to tell on him if somebody, someday, were to discover what she hesitated before naming her "arrangement." He was pretty sure a person might go to jail for digging a body up, even with spousal consent, and he felt confident that he wouldn't last a night in any jail. The thought of how jail might be if he were in it made circle trails in his imagination while the practical side of his thinking cap worried about pulling the corpse into multiple sections. He was relieved that that didn't happen, and took it as a good omen. He carefully avoided actually touching any part of what had been in the ground for the last twelve years, that would be really gross, he thought. The hammock, the bedspread and his gardening gloves were always between all that and the actual skin of his hands.
The touchiest part was when he had to pull the chenille bedspread down into the grave with him right before prying open the lid of the coffin. He was concerned about the smell, and tied a section of the chenille around his face just below his eyes, Frito Bandito style, and held his breath while he pulled out the pins and rolled to the hinged side of the lid while he opened it up. Of course it slammed shut with a shotgun bang on the first two tries, and he was sure somebody would hear and call the law. He wound up having to open the lid by standing up on the hinged side and pulling with the tire jack he got from the car, then climb in and practically lie on the body with only that thin chenille between himself and Rest In Peace, while he did a sort of tuck-and-roll maneuver with the hammock to get it around the body right. Climbing out was a breeze using the edge of the opened coffin door as a step, and he set up the pulley and clothesline from a low oak branch. On the ground between the hole and the le Car, Vincent made the whole shebang into a nice cocoon, and turned his le Car to a slightly better angle before giving the cocoon a few practice swings that banged the bumper, then the rim of the tailgate, and finally made a clean sweep into the car. Mostly. He did have to push it the rest of the way in, like a drawer, and part of it still stuck out, but he used the clothes line to secure it well enough it wasn't going to fly out on the street going back to Huhu's.
By the time Vincent ensconced Odell's remains on the love-seat in the cedar closet and sipped a nice cup of tea with a few sugar wafers and a little bowl of Cheetos, it was four in the morning. Maybe he was just as bold as those incest people in deliverance, after all. He shuddered at the mere notion. Shuddered and shook it off. He didn't feel up to going home, and ACC was only half the distance from Huhu's that Visitation County was, so he drove the other way to spend Sunday with his other best friend, Lindsey, who was dealing with some juicy secret issues of her own from the day before. Neither one ever told the other a word about their secrets, so Vincent's stayed between him and Huhu for almost a quarter of a century after that, right up til about halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1999. Lindsey's secret, however, was not as well-kept but that is altogether another story.
Love it! Great start, you've got me hooked! :)
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