As we drove by, I read the sign in front of the Immanuel Salvation Southern Baptist Church: MAYBE YOUR SOUL PURPOSE IN LIFE IS TO BE KIND TO OTHERS.
“Shit,” I muttered. There are few things as annoying as badly attempted double entendres.
“What?” Gayle called from the front seat.
“Huh?”
“Did you say something?”
“Uh? No.” I was too busy thinking that I’d walked into one of those Dateline reports covering snake handler’s wives with bee hive hair, little old ladies who sing off key in the church choir but have an uncannily perfect green bean casserole recipe, and dirty deacons with a quiet penchant for young boys.
We hadn’t been back since we moved west. The absence was largely deliberate; at least on my part. I wasn’t from there, but the unusually large number of churches in a geographically small area reminded me of the place I grew up. Once, when I was a kid, I counted the number of churches in my hometown. I counted 35. I hadn’t made an actual count since we hit the incorporated limits of Harkenville, Kentucky – but I had seen at least seven in our short time on Main Street. All Baptist churches.
Our visit, however, wasn’t a vacation. We’d been planning a vacation – ok, we’d been TALKING about planning a vacation – when she got the phone call that her grandmother had died.
“We need to go,” she said, the tears welling up in her big blue eyes.
I didn’t argue. I understood. Her grandmother had done more to raise her than either of her parents. When we first got together, it was Grandma’s approval that was important – and luckily, I must’ve been having a good day when I met her. This was typically not the case. The parents of every girl I ever seriously dated, going back to high school, always eyed me with a suspicion bordering on contempt. But Grandma liked me, and so, as a result, I was a little soft on her. She was, in her way, a sweet old lady of the Old Time Religion who believed that bar codes were the sign of the beast, that the democratic party was trying to turn America into a communist country, and that most women who were not married were either homely or whores. But she was also wonderful cook and I learned early to never turn down food when I was there. After I proposed and Gayle had what some called the shortsightedness to say yes, her grandma beamed with pleasure. Her granddaughter, the apple of her eye, would be settled down, married, and respectable.
We found the quickest flight we could – which meant frantically packing and finding somebody who could come and feed the cats. The trip would take most of the money we’d managed to put away for the vacation we were trying to take – but we would be able to save money by staying with her uncle and his wife. We also decided against renting a car – also to save money. Besides, I told myself, it’s not like there will be any place to GO.
Gayle’s grandma’s funeral was not the first Kentucky funeral I had experienced; so I had a fairly good idea of what to expect. I went simply to be supportive and because that’s what you do when someone in your close family dies.
The problem I had, of course, was the same old problem I’ve always had. I have never known how to behave at funerals. Not because I haven’t been to enough of them. But because there’s something about the entire event that hits me funny. Not maudlin or sad. Funerals, I learned a long time ago, have nothing at all to do with the person who died. They have everything to do with the people who are still alive. This means that regardless of the wishes of the newly not living, most funerals have certain things in common. Hymns.Prayers. Talk of heaven. Regardless of what kind of person the corpse in question was alive, the basic assumption is that he or she is in heaven with Jesus. One of the common questions people in that part of the country ask people when someone is near death is “Are you right with Jesus?” There are variations on this. But they all mean the same thing.
I understand how I’m SUPPOSED to act. But that does me little good. My problem with funerals is that generally, I think people attend them, not to grieve, but to make sure that the person in question is actually dead and not simply trying to get out of paying taxes. Death makes vultures out of otherwise barely tolerable people; circling and watching to make sure the corpse isn’t alive and taking up good breathing air and space that somebody else can use. Once, at the funeral of a good friend who died in a car accident, I had to restrain myself from breaking out into laughter. At my own grandmother’s funeral, I audibly growled at certain extended relatives who were there to vulture and not to grieve. I treated my own father’s funeral like it was a stand-up act, trying to tell bad jokes and flirting with all the cute girls from my high school who’d come out in their cute and clingy dresses because their parents knew my parents. I copped my first under the sweater feel in the back hallway of a funeral home.
We were in the car, on our way to the Fifth Avenue Laurel Baptist Chapel – the family church. Gayle and I were supposed to get married there – but the stress of all the planning and intruding of future in-laws made us change our plans abruptly and run off to a JP to get married. It was a decision neither of us regretted, but one we ended up having to explain several times. Gayle’s grandma died in early Feburary – which meant Kentucky was cold, snowy, icy, and gray. I’d forgotten just how gray everything looked in the winter. The trees were all devoid of leaves. Except the evergreens, but they got lost the background of snow and shit colored sludge that lined the streets and backroads. The cold crept into my bones and stayed the entire time we were there. I was sitting in the backseat of the white, four door Oldsmobile. Gayle was sitting up front with her Uncle Clay – Grandma’s second oldest son out of four. His wife, Vera, was sitting in the back with me. I liked Vera as much as I like anybody; but I had dodged her questions as to my status with god several times. I was only hoping she wouldn’t use the funeral as an evangelizing moment.
One of the things I liked about being back in that part of the country in the winter was the smell of wood burning stoves. Her uncle used a wood burning stove to heat the house and save money on the electric bill. The smell brought back every positive memory I had of living in the land of ice, snow, and biblical determinism. My large collection of warm and fuzzy sweaters. The winter nights I spent indoors with friends, drinking and making proclamations about our future greatness. A few girls came to mind – ones who I probably hadn’t treated very well, but who were very kind and giving towards me on cold nights. Winter afternoons in the university library digging for books that nobody bothered to read anymore. (That was before I realized most of them weren’t still read for a reason.) The early years with Gayle. Nice times.
“You sure are quiet,” Vera said, shaking me out my thoughts.
“Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping very well.”
Vera nodded and looked concerned. “It’s not the bed, is it?”
“No, no,” I said. And I wasn’t lying. The bed was fine. The only problem with it was that it wasn’t mine. Also, I was stuffed and sluggish from all the food. Whenever someone dies, people feel the need to bring food to the grieving family. We were working our way through a dozen different kinds of casseroles.
“What are you saying, honey?” Gayle called back from the front seat.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“He was just saying that he hasn’t been sleeping well.” Good old Vera.
“I’m fine, really,” I explained. “The time change just throws me off.”
Gayle didn’t respond. I figured she had other things on her mind.
Fifth Avenue was a lane and a half wide trail that somebody had decided to pave. It was curvy and uneven, the way Eastern Kentucky roads are, which made it impossible for the ice trucks to clean very well. All the trucks managed to do was get the top layer of snow off – which took away any chance we had at having traction. I kept my eyes off the road in front of us. If we were going to slide off into one of the massive ditches or culverts, I didn’t want to see it coming.
We made it to the chapel in one piece. The preacher was there to greet us. He was a kindly old man with a gnarled face and a permanent stoop in his back. If I didn’t know any better, I could swear he was wearing a toupee. He greeted us solemnly. First he shook Clay’s hand. Then Vera’s. Then some kind words for Gayle and a few anecdotes about knowing her from the time she was “knee high to a grasshopper.” Gayle introduced me to him. When he shook my hand, I had to be careful not to squeeze too hard; he had that preacher grip that came from shaking hands with a lot of little old ladies.
I walked up to the front of the small sanctuary with Gayle so she could look at the coffin. This particular funeral tradition always struck me as gruesome and odd. The open casket. The religious insist the body be interred so that it can rise again on That Final Day. Funeral directors make their living off of embalming corpses and selling overly priced hermetically sealed coffins to grieving families. Preachers use the opportunity to talk about heaven and hell and the importance of being redeemed before death. Redeemed. Hearing the word always made me think of grocery store coupons.
Gayle leaned on me as she looked the body. Clay and Vera were there, too. Clay wasn’t much of a talker – men of his generation and of that region rarely were – but I heard Vera whisper, “She looks like she’s sleeping.”
Fuck, I thought. Sleeping? Really? It made me wonder what Vera thought sleeping people looked like. Grandma looked like every other embalmed corpse I had ever seen –shoved into an expensive wood box, overdressed, and over painted. When my own grandmother died, my mother had to reapply the lipstick because the beautician (there are stylists who specialize in the dead) used a bright red color that, when she was alive, my Grandma referred to as “hussy red.”
Gayle clung to me. I was determined to be there for her – whatever that happened to mean. I wasn’t really sure what she would need. Mostly, I figured she would need me to say very little and hug her when she needed me to. I was fine with that. There were some more words with the preacher. Then people started filtering in. Friends of the family. People who had known Gayle when she was a kid. Then the extended family. After about 45 minutes of mulling around and socializing, everybody sat down so the service could begin.
The service began with the reading of the death notice, then a warbly rendition of “In the Garden” by a member of the church choir who might have been wearing as much caked on make-up as dear old Grandma. Then the beagle-faced preacher stood up in the pulpit and gave a funeral sermon about the shortness of life and the permanence of heaven. It could be worse, I thought. Then the warbly singer got up and sang “Love Lifted Me.”
That was when it happened. Gayle noticed immediately, because her hand was sitting on my leg. She kicked me. I looked over at her, and I couldn’t tell if she was mad, or just incredulous. I was sitting in a church pew with her on one side and Vera on the other side and Clay on the other side of her, and I had somehow managed to develop a raging hard on. In the particular pair of pants I was wearing, it felt like the king of all erections. Everything I could do was making it worse. I tried to cross my legs so that Vera wouldn’t notice. That only made the fabric rub. I tried shifting my weight. No good. I tried to think of things to make it go away. Baseball scores from the Big Red Machine. My high school social studies teacher who always smelled like cat shit. No good. I thought of dead puppies. Nothing. The only thing to do was to put my coat over my lap and hope for the best.
Gayle shook her head and turned back to face the front. When the warbly singer stopped, the preacher got up and prayed. After the prayer, everyone sat in silence. After a few minutes, Vera whispered, “I think they’re waiting for us to leave.” Shit. Even with the coat, I was afraid I’d poke somebody if I walked too close. We stood up. I kept the coat close in front of me. We had to walk the from the front pew, back the length of the sanctuary, to the door that led outside. From there, we would go to the car and drive to the cemetary for the burial. It was small chapel, but it was still full. Lots of old ladies and small children who were forced into going and so were entertaining themselves on Gameboys and Pocket Playstations. I stayed close to Gayle and didn’t look at anybody. As we neared the door, Gayle put her coat back on. I kept mine folded in front of me. Gayle opened the door and the cold air hit me. It was snowing again. I kept my coat off until we got to the car.
