Jolly Page 4

  Jolly saw the granite pillars of the gate long before he reached them. Walking along the high gray wall had depressed him—made him wonder if he should have come. Maybe only grown people could go into graveyards any time they wanted to. He wished he had asked about that, but then there had not been anyone he could have asked except his mother and she would have either murmured an indecisive answer or questioned him pointedly.

  Once inside the black iron gates, swung open and locked to stone posts, Jolly hesitated. No one stood guard to send him away. He studied the beauty of the graveyard. Grass covered everything; the gently sloping hills—and the smaller hills—the mounds. Pines stalked the graveled walks that curved every which way among the white stones. Urns and sprays of fresh gladiolas and roses celebrated among the important-family plots nearest the main roadway. The effect was soothing and friendly.

  Jolly was happy he had come.

  He turned to the left along one of the wider paths. He was not surprised at all he saw; it was just as he remembered it to be. The nasturtiums, too, which seemed revived and relieved to be standing again, rollicked their heads as their bearer sunned his grin upon two men and a woman he met on the path. The three suffered the smile from a boy in checkered shirt and overalls without comment.

  Near the center of the graveyard, upon the highest swelling of the ground among a circle of castellan pines, stood the arrogant and solemn mausoleum, the navel from which all the paths twisted on their daily rounds. Jolly stood for a long time and gazed at the mausoleum. It was as he remembered, only somewhat less awesome. Jamie had instructed him in the mysteries of the mausoleum. In there, Jolly had learned, they buried rich people right in the walls in drawers, and if anybody wanted to look at them, they had only to slide open the drawers.

  “Mausoleum,” Jolly said. It was a good word.

  He turned his back to the granite building and faced the path he knew would take him, if he bore to the right some, to the grave he had come to visit. After five minutes of walking, he saw the grass less green. This, too, he remembered but had hoped was not so. The grass stopped completely and gave way to ever-lengthening horehound and to wild safflowers whose deranged yellow heads shook in disorder. He stopped to touch these plants that had been familiar to his every day when he had lived in Skull Valley, in the country. He was in no hurry to finish his journey, and, like in church, you weren’t supposed to hurry too fast in graveyards, anyway, he reflected. He was a little sorry the weeds and wild plants were so tall because it made it hard to tell if you were walking on someone’s grave.

  There were no imposing white headstones in the section where Jolly walked; probably, he supposed, because it was a pretty new part. Instead, each grave was, or had been, designated with a small tin marker that framed, behind isinglass, a browned card that gave the vital statistics of the occupant beneath. Many of these had fallen over. Jolly stooped to straighten the ones nearest his path. He tried to read the names on some, but of those he could distinguish he did not know the people, and some were too faded to read at all.

  He saw before him, near the path, two Mexican women standing so still they could have been taken for statues placed eccentrically to keep vigil over the grave by which they bowed, their hands clasped loosely in front, were it not for the capricious flutter of their black lace scarves in the breath of the noon day. Jolly hoped they would not pray too long, because a person cannot walk about when others are praying.

  As he watched, each woman moved her hand vaguely about her face and chest, one more quickly than the other, and he saw that they had finished. When they lifted their heads Jolly saw they were old, like his mother; his throat welled up, and he knew he would be doing right to let them know that he understood and shared their troubles. He stepped to them with determination. The two pairs of mothery eyes watched him absently.

  “I’m looking for my father’s grave,” he said clearly. “My father’s buried here, too. I’m going to put these nasturtiums on his grave.” He was proud that he would make them feel some better.

  One of the old women began to whimper loudly into her shawl, and the two, arm in arm, bent back down the path and soon disappeared among the pines, leaving on the grave a Mason jar of red and blue wax roses.

  “Well,” Jolly thought, “I reckon I never said it right.” He felt at last that he did not want to put off finding the grave any longer. He was in about the right place, he calculated, so he began his search in earnest, bent far over, straightening and reading the tin markers as he went.

  He searched for an hour an ever-widening area before his tired back and the afternoon sun signaled it had been so long. He believed, stoically, that he would soon find the right tin poster, but as he rested his back against the hurt there, he saw stretched before him in every direction an endless maze of little markers slanting insanely among the weeds.

  The boy paused for a second time before a mound that had no marker at all. He worried, briefly, that they might forget who was buried there and then how would anybody ever find out again?

  He was glad when the first cloud slid over the west-slanting sun. He wondered vaguely what Mama would say because he had not been home for lunch. He fought against the panic and fury that arose in him because it was taking too long to find the grave, because maybe he hadn’t remembered exactly as he believed.

  “Ma’am?” he addressed another tired figure on the path, the first to whom he had spoken since his failure with the Mexican women. “Have you seen my daddy’s grave? His name—” The woman passed on down the path, her head bending monotonously in order to better read the markers.

  Jolly began his search all over again. Once he wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “Darn it,” he rebuked himself. He came to the unmarked grave again but hurried past, shaking his saffron head. When next he raised his eyes, he stood before the mausoleum once more. The façade with its low grilled doors, its windows high on either side, blocked his path stolidly and impersonally. He scowled and saw the polished monster blur and grin.

  Again he turned his back to the giant tomb and took bearings on the graveyard. As he moved on the path he was not running exactly, but maybe fast walking was all right. When he found the nameless grave he dropped the wilted bouquet gently and without looking back scuffed purposefully away toward the gate and the road home.

  As the broom-haired boy paused on the steps before his house, preparing to meet the rage of his mother, the sun dripped red over a swooping granite wall, the pines reached blackly against the sky, and orange and yellow blooms settled curling and scattered among the weeds.

  That all happened half a life ago. Jolly, now nearly sixteen, yet remembered the day and the grave. He had never reapproached it beyond his mind, but he knew the direction it lay from wherever he and Luke obscured the pick-up—or at night, the car—among the pine groves. There would be a time, he vaguely knew, when he would face the unnamed grave’s taunt, but not yet. Not yet. That is not the sort of failure one risks twice.

  FOUR

  AFTER Luke turned sixteen he spent the remaining two months until Jolly’s birthday impatiently calculating how best to initiate Jolly to the mysteries of the preparation room. Of course, Luke had been allowed in there for several years, but George Meaders would not consent to his friends visiting farther back than the music room. After months of cajolery, he had promised Jolly the privilege of almost free rein—under Luke’s tutelage—of the mortuary, a rein that had in actuality long been free, with the exception of the preparation room. Jolly himself, as his birthday approached, had oscillated between the pleasant prospect of driving legally, and the disquieting abeyance the thought of the preparation room brought to mind.

  Luke did everything within the limits of an expansive imagination to create suspense as the day approached. “Wait’ll you see the trocar in action,” he taunted.

  “What’s a trocar?”

  “Oh, you’ll see.”

  “Thanks.” Jolly waited, knowing Luke would expand the subject, g
iven time.

  “A trocar is this very long sharp instrument, see. It goes right about here.” Luke poked a finger in the general area of Jolly’s navel.

  “Don’t jab. What’s it go there for?”

  “How else you gonna get fluid in the cavity?”

  “I give up.”

  “Smart-ass.”

  “Besides,” said Jolly, “I’m not putting fluid in anybody’s cavities.”

  “I’m going to ask Dad to let you do it, first thing. You’ll probably get sicker’n hell, or something.”

  “You ever see me get sick? Except the time we drank that lousy pint of your dad’s whiskey.”

  Luke smiled. “Yeh, as a matterafact. What about that movie, Mom and Dad? They practically had to carry you outa there on a stretcher.”

  “Well, that’s different. I don’t expect to be watching any goddam Caesarean births in the preparation room, for chrissake.”

  “You never know, you never know,” intoned Luke mysteriously.

  There was no business at the Meaders Mortuary on the day Jolly turned sixteen. Luke was in a funk about it and would have sulked at home had not Jolly insisted he drive his car to school so he could borrow it for his driver’s examination after school. The thrill ordinarily expected with the acquisition of a Temporary Operator’s License was to a great extent immolated to Luke’s insistence that they remain that evening within range of the mortuary telephone.

  “We going to sit here all night waiting for somebody to die?”

  “Damn it.” Luke cracked his knuckles. “Somebody’s bound to die tonight, what with polio and all.”

  “You’re crazy. Who’s got polio?” Jolly shot another paper clip across the office with a rubber band.

  “It’s Friday night. Somebody’ll get killed in a car wreck. Then you’ll really see something. And stop flipping those goddam paper clips, can’t you? You make me nervous.”

  Jolly shot two more clips at the wastebasket before he stopped and began searching the floor for them, collecting them in their blue box. “You’re nervous! What about me? I’m the one who oughta be nervous. Trocars in your cavities. Jeez.”

  “Cavity, moron, not cavities. It goes in your stomach.”

  “Not my stomach, dad. And speaking of morons, what’s your grade average at this second?”

  “All right, all right,” Luke waved his hands in exasperation. He walked the length of the room and back. “Your big brother get here? Jamie?”

  “Yeh, he got here yesterday.” Jolly picked up a crystal-ball paperweight and turned it over.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” The little snow chips swirled and began to settle around the figure of an ice skater.

  “Well, I don’t know. What’d he have to say?”

  Jolly swirled the snow again. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “Whataya mean, you haven’t seen him? Isn’t he stayin’ with you?”

  “No.”

  “What’s amatter with you now?”

  He set the crystal snow storm down on the desk top. “Nothing. He just came in yesterday while I was at school, that’s all. I don’t know where he’s staying. If he’s staying at all. Probably with some goddam woman.”

  “Well, it looks like—” Luke began. “I mean, your own brother, for chrissake. What’s he like, anyway?”

  “Pale.”

  “What?”

  “Mom says he’s pale, and that’s all the hell I know about it. So why don’t you just shut up.”

  Luke flopped into a leather chair and picked up a magazine. “You’re so gay and joyous you oughta be on the goddam stage.”

  “I’m sorry, Luke.”

  “Aw, screw yourself.” Luke flicked the pages.

  “Luke?” Jolly leaned back in the swivel chair at the desk and began shooting paper clips at the wastebasket again.

  “Yeh?”

  “You know what I’m going to do when I die?”

  “Go to hell, for one thing,” answered Luke morosely.

  “Maybe, but anyway, I think I’ll go to Andersen’s to be embalmed.” He leaped from his chair in time to dodge the ash tray flung across the room.

  “All right, sourpuss. I’m going to play the organ.”

  “Whose organ?” Luke grinned.

  “Your organ, friend.”

  As he passed into the chapel, Jolly ceased his laughing and walked slowly down the center aisle of the long room. He paused at the front and gazed into the casket of the tired-faced old lady who lay there and who had lain there for three days awaiting the convenience of her kin. Since no relatives had come forward, she would be buried by the county the following morning at the expense of one hundred and fifty dollars. Her head rested as if weightless on an over-sized satin pillow, her face composed above a pink frothy gown of the type furnished by funeral parlors and of a kind she probably never wore in life. Nestled among the ruffles at the bottom of the bodice were her hands, the left over the right, dark-veined and mottled. A single gold band shone thinly in the light of the chapel. Jolly bent over the diminutive form and curved a white lock of hair back into place above her forehead, and he turned her head a half inch more toward him, where it seemed to rest comfortably. He straightened and surveyed the cheap velour-covered casket whose only ornamentations were three stainless steel handles near his knees.

  “I’ll play you a funeral, old lady,” he whispered.

  He turned down the lights of the room until they glowed grayly from their indirect hiding places, then he drew back the drapes between the chapel and the music room.

  With the switch on, the ancient black organ began its perpetual hum. He began playing from memory hymns of the type which he supposed all old ladies would like at their funeral.

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee;

  Through the opening in the drapes, he watched the old lady’s casket. He could just see her face above the edge. Her head, tilted toward him, seemed to take on an attitude of listening.

  When I draw this fleeting breath,

  When my eyes shall close in death,

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee.

  He played “Nearer My God, to Thee” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” which were the only two others he could think of as being at all appropriate, before coming to the one he had reserved for last—one that he had never before played but knew well. He lowered the volume pedal and adjusted two of the dozen stops above the single keyboard. He played the song through once, experimentally. The second time, his eyes following his fingers, he began singing in a clear voice that had earned him the constant harassment of the church choir director.

  He speaks, and the sound of His voice

  Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,

  And the melody That He gave to me,

  Within my heart is ringing.

  At the refrain he lifted his eyes but did not focus on the old lady’s casket; rather, he watched a place on the wall of the chapel, near the ceiling, from whence glowed one of the hidden bulbs.

  He finished the song as quietly as it had begun and reached to switch off the organ.

  “Jolly.”

  “Luke! You scared the—you scared me.”

  “Jolly.” Luke stood in the curtained doorway that led into the room where the families sat at funerals. “Thanks.” He spoke strangely.

  “For what, Luke?”

  “That was a nice thing to do. You know she doesn’t have no family or anything. That was a good thing to do.”

  Jolly swung his body around on the bench and faced Luke. He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his sleeve. “Don’t be crazy, Luke. I was just practicing on this damn old organ.”

  No one died in Cortez on Friday night, May 17 of that year. At about the time that Luke, muttering over the inconsistencies of people’s dying, let Jolly out at his house, Mandis Patterson opened the door of her apartment and felt her way to the dresser to turn on a d
im light. She held the sleeping boy in one arm against her hip and talked to him.

  “I wish you’d be awake,” she said. “But it don’t matter. He’ll like you. When he knows.”

  She put the child in his crib and tucked his blue blanket carefully around him. “I wonder if he will come.” She bent to kiss the child. “He’ll like you. He’s got to.”

  She hurried about the room straightening the cover on her bed, flinging stockings and her hair brush into a drawer of the peeled-veneer dresser. She unbuttoned the uniform and stepped out of it in the middle of the room and then hung it in the closet shielded by two short, flowered curtains hung from nails hammered into the top corners of the material. From a single plastic cleaner’s bag she carefully removed the blue dress, and holding it by one shoulder she spread out the skirt with her other hand, then laid it across the bed.

  She smiled at the blue dress. It was a good dress. It had cost twenty-five dollars on sale three years ago, and it had seen a lot happen to her. The first time she wore it was to her high-school graduation dance, and her corsage had been squashed and left a tiny stain on the shoulder that never would come out, but the big gold and rhinestone pin that looked something like a twelve-legged spider hid the spot. She wore it the first night she went out with Jamie, too, and she had to hide it in the back of her closet at home until she could mend it before her mother saw it. She had been wearing it the last night she saw Jamie. He told her then that he was leaving, and she had taken that pretty well and didn’t know then that she was pregnant. When her father told her to leave home she had worn the dress so it wouldn’t get crushed in the one suitcase he let her have. She hadn’t worn it since.