Installment 3 - Martin's Palm Sunday incarceration and a wake

Martin tossing his fluids in the dough

Scandal of Lindsey's frolic hoisted the cross from Martin's shoulder like a derrick after his Palm Sunday fiasco, and blurred the reality of the open coffin in the living room. He and Motsie even stifled some undignified giggles and encouraged Vincent's story with "I betcha" supplements. It didn't hurt Martin's mood that all the banter about Lindsey conjured fond images of her in a halter and hot-pants, Cottondale's teeny-bopper version of Stevie Nicks, on graduation night with the Five Points' version of Cher, standing next to him now. Motsie's laughter tickling his neck hairs whet Martin's thirst, and he fished for more, baiting the hook with jail-life tidbits about sharing cigarettes with a carney, giving his cornbread to a stabber and sleeping on the top bunk right above a goat raper, all lies, but Motsie and Vincent were instantly enthralled, having no idea until this very moment that Martin had spent even one moment behind bars.

"No, I'm not kidding, I really did. I only got home like an hour ago, and then I had to, y'know," he gestured to his clean suit and fluffed the back of his hair, still a little damp, "get ready for all this company."

Motsie was the first to unslacken her jaw and ask, "Well, what the hell were you arrested for?"

"Not for what I'd expected it would be for," Martin winced and looked around, "which was on Saturday night at PTA. Old man Faulkner ordered me to soil a pizza. I felt like it was the wrong thing to do, but..."

Motsie interrupted, "Soiled? A Pizza? Did you sprinkle ant poison on it? Why?" Martin saw she was fascinated and let her swim with it a little so he could stare at her face from very close.

"No, I had just taken an order for the Manager's Special for one of the Kurtz brothers, only I just called it out as 'nickel-bag deluxe for Kurtz,' and that's when Faulkner went ballistic. I didn't want to, but, well, he's the boss, and all, so..."

"Do what, Martin? What did he make you do?" Motsie had the hook, but Martin wasn't ready to yank the line.

"Faulkner said Kurtz owed him for a nickel bag from last month, and he was going to get even with him, 'the usual way,' he said, 'plus some extra,' he yelled, and he looked meaner than usual, grinding one of his fists into the other palm." He looked over at Motsie who was just standing there, mesmerized, and thought it was worth waiting for another minute.

"See, we had a standard procedure we called 'the usual way,' for carefuly hiding one pubic hair under each pepperoni, but the 'extra?' Well, Faulkner sent me to the wash room with a Pixie cup and ordered me to fill it up, and I was pretty sure that part was illegal."

"Oh my Lord, Martin, no!" It was Vincent who took the hook. Motsie was still on the line, though.

"I got inside, and hollered through the door how much of my specimen he really needed, and he yelled back 'not so much the dough won't rise, but enough to get the message to Kurtz he can't rip PTA off for a pizza and nickel bag without repercussions,' Then he made me knead my own, you know, fluids into the ball o' dough and flip it around in the window like nothing was the matter with it, like nobody walkin' by was gonna smell it. I kept thinkin' a person might die from that, and it would be my fault, and Faulkner would sell me right down the river."

"That's just gross, Martin." Lindsey stepped away from him, and he figured he'd given too much line, and needed to tighten up just a little.

"But y'all know how bad I've needed my job, especially since... you know..." His eyes went to the coffin area where all the ladies were comforting Mrs. McCrary, and Batboy was standing on one foot, uselessly scraping at the corner of the coffin near his daddy's feet. Martin felt Motsie's sigh on his collar, and yanked the rod.

"After the pizza went out, Faulkner looked at the order and realized it was the wrong Kurtz, and blamed me for being, get this, 'ambiguous!' He sent me home, and all the way I was sure the cops were coming for me.

"When I got here, Daddy was breathing his last breaths. You'll never guess the very last thing he ever said to me." He looked only at Motsie but he could plainly feel Vincent's eyes burning into the side of his head. Motsie's eyes brimmed and Martin figured now he could reel her right on in.

"Oh, it's too painful to repeat," he exclaimed, slumping towards Motsie, who consoled him with a long hug.
"And now I'm a convict!" Martin sobbed into Motsie's neck as Vincent patted his back assuring him that everything would be fine, Vincent would always stand by his friend, and Martin tried to flick Vincent's hand off his back without breaking free of Motsie's hug.

"No, honey, you're no convict. You're our best friend, right Vincent? And it'll be fine, sugar.  So, did old man Faulkner call the law on you, sweetie?" Oh wasn't she getting mellifluous on him now! Hook, line and sinker!

"No no no. I had stopped at Cow Drive-thru on the way and got a six-pack to share with daddy. It was about the only thing he could still bother to enjoy. When I got home, he wasn't in the Lay-Z-Boy where he'd spent the last few months, y'know, since he couldn't breathe right if he laid down flat. Batboy had found a hospital bed by the dumpster behind Saint Mary's, and put it in the kitchen, and that's where he was. I cranked him up we had a Schlitz. Well I had one. And then... he asked me to please look after my little brother." Martin stepped aside and wiped his face with both hands. "I had another beer, and didn't go anywhere, didn't call anybody in, until after I'd had all the beer. He wasn't breathing anymore.

"When the church wagon got here I ran back for his quilt, and then I got in with him and covered him up so he wouldn't be cold. I wanted to ride with 'im over to the funerarium, and they wanted me the hell out. They started pulling me out by the feet, so I got all bowed up and kicked that driver in the face. I think I broke his nose. I know I knocked his front tooth out, 'cause it says that on the warrant.

"They had to call the law on me, and I wouldn't get out until they told me they had their guns drawn and I had to. That other fella was all covered in blood, getting into the ambulance when they were handcuffin' me and puttin' me in the patrol car. I don't know who ended up drivin' daddy in the church wagon. Maybe Batboy. I'm not even allowed over there by the open coffin, they gave me a restraining order keepin me at a distance of ten feet from that casket til whenever it's closed, and two car-lengths from the church wagon whenever we go to the burial."

"Oh, well believe me, Martin, there's really no need to get any closer to any coffin than where we are right here." Vincent sounded very convincing.

"Honey, your daddy knows you're near and you'd be right next to him if you could.  We could go get my ouija board if you wanna tell him so right quick before he all the way in heaven and caint talk back?"

Vincent was dead set against the ouija in spite of Martin's wanting to try it in time, so Motsie made a different suggestion.  "Wouldn't you like Vincent to drive us around for a smoke, then? Maybe just thirty minutes?  You'll feel a whole lot better, sugar. Maybe over to the bamboo or Galilee Orphanage?" And then she touched his hair as though a lock of it might have been out of place, and called him by the name they both knew melted him into submission every time; "You pick, cousin Martin, for old times' sake."

Installment 2 - how Lindsey was sent Straight to the Lord (and from there to hell in an Easter basket)

Tar River Lindsey and Sarah went down and found a man in the canoe

The whole Lindsey-the-Lezbo rumor got started on the weekend Vincent went to see her at Atlantic Christian College after leaving an amazingly well-preserved (for twelve years buried) corpse propped on a love-seat in Huhu's cedar closet. Three quarters of a refrain from Brotherhood of Man's Save your Kisses for Me was skipping, skipping, skipping through the half-open first floor window of their dorm room. He rapped several times before he rattled his way through the already damaged and filthy metal Venetian blinds to discover Lindsey and Sarah in a sort of dog-pile formation on one of the twin beds, all four bare feet on a camel-back trunk. They jerked upright when he lifted the arm of the record player. Sarah made a fast break for the shower, halfway asking permission with a nod and a raised eyebrow before grabbing a jar of Queen Helene hair dress that must have been Lindsey's.

"Oh, Chaka Khan; Chaka Khan," giggled Vincent, deflecting his nervousness. "So why y'all dressed up like Miss Kitty and her best girl?"

"From in here. Check out this trunk load of stuff Sarah's grandma brought last week from Pulleytown! Can you even imagine having a whole town names after your family? All this was Sarah's great-grandmother's stuff, when she was married to John Williamson, remember the slave guy that became a legislator?"

"Why would I know that?"

"He was in our history book!"

"Whose? I don't remember him."

Well, we sure learned about him at Cottondale High. I don't know what you people in Five Points learned. History o' NASCAR? He served six terms, for the love o' God! Look at all this cool stuff in here. He musta got rich before he was through."

Lindsey already had the trunk splayed wide open. She rummaged through letters in pale envelopes with faded cursive flowing across the fronts, and metallic photographs of very shiny black faces whose grim expressions like Vincent had seen in other old metallic photographs, convinced him that oral hygiene had not yet made its formal debut in polite society. Removing the top shelf, Lindsey pulled out beribboned laces and taffetas that exhaled a musty combination of lavender and mold.

"This is where we got these outfits, Vincent. Aren't they all gorgeous?" Lindsey's dress was minty colored and had a bustle. A bustle! The top came up around her throat and had a big glass bead sewn on where a man would've had an Adam's apple.

"Y'all look like those girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock."

Lindsey launched a rapid-fire version of her previous day, but the scent of Sarah's great-grandparents wafting from the coffin-like trunk took his mind back to where he'd just come from, and what all he'd been doing there, so he let her ramble, able to insert himself only into bits and pieces of her story between fits of memory.

"You want some Kool-Ade? Sarah made some grape yesterday." He did, so Lindsey got a Tupperware pitcherful from the mini-fridge and rummaged through a bucket of beer mugs, identical to the ones at Pizza Hut, to find the least dirty one. Vincent received the probably stolen glass and drank it down a bit while Lindsey talked at the speed of light.

It had been beautiful, according to Lindsey. Spanish moss dangled over the muddy Tar River, often sweeping long vee-shapes aimed against the current. She fake-whined that they had to take their Norton's Anthology texts along to study for an upcoming midterm, and Vincent understood his friend's back-handed manner of boasting.

She had always loved Romantic poetry, and would have chosen it as a minor if she'd been able to follow her dream of majoring in Marine Archeology at ECU. He'd teased her about it before, reading the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Jacques Cousteau in the Calypso's minisub. She was trying to tell him more, and he started humming the John Denver Calypso song in a high voice through his little red mustache until she swatted his shoulder and ordered him to shut up.

Lindsey extended the pause in her story with a raised index finger while she swished her skirt, or as Vincent retold it, hustled her bustle, over to the door to gauge her length of safety for the next morsel, "Sarah's brother? That huge Apollo Pulley you met here last November? He seriously announced to us on the boat before he'd let us go ashore? That from here on out, we are hereby on 'notice,' he said, the he is to be addressed by no other name than, get this, Tiger Lilly!"

She fell over laughing into her bed pillow, and Vincent's eyes and nostrils grew three or four sizes before he snorted his laugh of tardy belief.

"Tiger Lilly and his, uh, I guess his consort du jour, the fabulous Dani Daletto, current Miss Drag USA no less, wearing waist-high waders were waiting for us in the shade under Greenville's Iron Bridge, bottles of Mad Dog sticking out their shirts. They climbed in and Tiger Lilly guided the boat through a maze of knobby kneed cypress trees I'm positive were brimming with snakes and alligators, to a hidden landing on the swampy north side of the river, oh, wait, I mean 'le Rive Gauche,' is what that Dani boy kept saying it was called."

"I'm sure the French would be flattered."

"I'm pretty sure the French are never flattered, Vincent. I know I never flatter 'em, anyway."

Vincent's mind wandered from Tiger Lily and Dani, right through le Rive Gauche to French I at Five Points High and Mme. Erlick welcoming them every Tuesday and Thursday, "Bienvenue, mes etudiants," and he was back to the night before. There was something about a visit to the Paddock Club disco with a thirty foot dance floor and a dozen pool tables, an image of Lindsey taking shotgun hits off a joint from a female lumber-jack whose lip was oddly prickly to Lindsey's, and then he was back, joking that it was probably Lindsey's own top lip she'd neglected to shave. She hit him for that, and he was still snickering when Sarah came back in a beach towel and plastic cap. Lindsey segued effortlessly into a middle-of-the-night ride back to Wilson "au plein aire" in the back of a powder blue Ranchero, a million stars overhead , the smell of fresh dirt and chlorophyll in their nostrils, Vincent was back in Benvenue Cemetery while the girls, real and wannabe, were detouring through a roadside cow pasture out from the Voice of America towers near Farmville for some fresh psilocybin mushrooms.

"And that's why we were crashed out here on the bed when you came. We probably hadn't been here more than an hour, and our brains less than that."

In the version Vincent told Motsie and Martin at Mr. McCrary's wake the following Tuesday, the girls had taken a moonlit canoe ride down the river, while in Lindsey's subsequently corrected account, they had gone in a bass boat Saturday morning with a ride waiting for them at the Iron Bridge. In Vincent's version, the girls were reading the poetry aloud to each other, while in Lindsey's they were both cramming for an exam. Both stories had the girls dancing at the Paddock Club, which Vincent knew to be a gay bar, but didn't repeat that, and which Lindsey protested was a popular country music dance hall. Vincent sure made light of Sarah's brother insisting with complete seriousness that everyone address him as Tiger Lilly, and Lindsey didn't refute it, but pronounced Dani's name more like Donny, and din't mention the word "fabulous," much less "Miss Drag USA." About the only part both versions shared was riding back to ACC in the back of a Ranchero, whether snuggled under a canoe, as in Vincent's version, or pulling an uncle's borrowed bass boat along behind, as in Lindsey's.

What Mr. Pearce heard after three or four repetions by some very busy Visitationites, was a gracious plenty, mainly about his daughter going to town, merrily merrily merrily down the stream, romantic poetry, a man in a canoe, and maybe something about hunkering down in the back, whatever that last bit might have meant. He loaded up his bolt action M-1 and sped Pastor Mozingo directly up to Wilson for an impromptu intervention, and then he sent Lindsey to a well-known retreat for homosexuals called Straight to the Lord, right on the New River between Glendale Springs and West Jefferson. The whole problem for Lindsey was that, in contrast to Vincent, no secret about her ever lay still for long before people got ahold and began pulling the facts all out from the middle like salt-water taffy, until they turned it into something way more sinfully delicious and colorful than whatever it had started off being.

Pastor "Little John" Gautier at the retreat saved Lindsey from the frying pan of chatter that lasted from Maundy Thursday that year until right around Christmas, but flipped her right into a pure hell-fire of steamy gossip that passed from lips to lips in every congregation from Ashe County to Cottondale when she showed back up as the heavily laden Blessed Virgin in the A.M.E. church's living nativity. The evil born of that encounter followed Lindsey for the next several decades like a very long thread trailing out of her sock.

Installment 1 - where Vincent digs up Huhu's dead husband

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.