Missing May (3 page)

"She gave you that picture?"

Cletus nodded. "I was dying to take home every one of them, but I didn't say nothing. Just picked through the lot like I was sampling chocolates from a box.

"I stayed on for hours in her living room, going through all those pictures.

I don't think she planned on giving me any, but finally I guess she figured it was the only way to get rid of me. So she let me take this one."

I stared at the floating baby.

"Did she choose it, or you?"

"I did. It was just too surreal to pass up."

I shook my head.

"I can't believe you planted yourself in that old lady's house like some fungus mold till you got a picture out of her."

Cletus took one last look at the photograph, then stuck it inside his math book.

"Aw, she had a good time. She don't ever get any company."

I shook my head again in disapproval. I'm always shaking my head at Cletus, as if I have some need to keep reminding him that his presence in my life is something I neither intended nor arranged.

"So how's Ob?" Cletus asked.

I thought of Ob, this particular mid morning, not even bothering to fix his usual cup of cocoa when he got out of bed. He made sure I was up, and had my lunch fixed, and was out the door on time. But he didn't have his cocoa.

"Fair, "I answered.

Cletus looked longer at me, maybe hoping he could fathom Ob by seeing him inside my eyes. But I didn't have any deep truths to tell Cletus about Ob.

Well ... none except that visit from May, and Cletus wasn't about to get that out of me.

Which didn't matter anyway because he got it straight from the horse's mouth that very night after supper.

"You believe in an afterlife, Cletus?" Ob asked, handing Cletus a cup of black coffee. Cletus had dropped by on his way home from prayer meeting.

Cletus told us he didn't go there for prayer. He went there for the doughnuts they always had alter the service.

I looked up from the paper on women suffragettes I was writing for history and held my breath.

"Sure, I do," Cletus answered, sipping at the coffee, a strand of his stringy hair nearly dunking itself. "Even been there once."

Ob's face lit up just as mine went dark.

"You don't say," Ob answered.

"I was maybe seven years old," Cletus began to explain as he settled himself back into the La-Z-Boy. "My grandpa had been real sick and he'd finally died the night before. Next day people were preparing for the funeral and ignoring me in their bereavement, so I just decided to go on down to the river by myself, thinking I'd skip Fame stones till everything had passed over.

"Well, I'm standing there on the riverbank skipping rocks when next thing I know I'm drowning. I mean drowning. My foot must have slipped or something, and in I went. And I never was able to swim a lick.

"And here's the God's truth, Ob. .. ."

Ob set down his coffee cup and straightened up to listen.

"I passed on. I did. I remember this light ahead of me and reaching out to it. I went after it, and suddenly everything was brilliant white and, I swear to God, my grandpa was there smiling at me and--you won't believe this part-my little dog Cicero who'd been dead three years, he was with me, too."

Cletus stopped talking long enough to take a few gulps of his coffee, and while he drank, Ob and me had our eyes glued to him like a bomb set to explode. Nobody said a word, waiting.

"So I'm there hugging Grandpa and petting little Cicero and feeling just fantastic when I hear this voice say, 'Cletus, go on home now.' I swear that's what it said. Told me to go on home.

"And Grandpa and Cicero started fading away and this awful coldness and heaviness come over me, like I was wrapped in sapping wet rugs, and next thing I know I'm there throwing up like crazy and my uncle Willy is threatening to beat me to death for nearly drowning."

Cletus grinned at us both.

Hell, I thought miserably.

"Heaven!" Ob said out loud. "You went to heaven and back, Cletus!"

Cletus nodded his head.

"No doubt in my mind," he answered.

"Then maybe it's you who can talk to May for me. She's been trying to reach me, but I ain't too good at communicating on her new wavelength. I need me an interpreter."

Cletus gaped at Ob.

"You heard from May?"

"Couple of times," Ob said.

A couple of times? I had known only about the one time, the first time, when I was there, making bird feeders. It suddenly hurt me that Ob hadn't told me about the second--and that now he was revealing everything to Cletus instead of me. I felt more than ever cut apart from him, sent off on my own while he took off on his, while he made plans to set aside this life we both knew so purely to try to make it to another one he knew nothing about except that somewhere in it he might find May. I didn't know how to keep him tied to me. Already he was starting to live among the dead.

"Well, I'm no psychic or nothing," Cletus told Ob. "I feel a connection to the spirit world because I've been there--sort of like remembering a place where you once went on vacation. But I never get any supernatural messages or anything. I don't know any ghosts--personally, I mean."

Ob shook this off.

"Don't matter. You must have something special about you, if you've been over to the other side. Maybe just having you in the house'll help."

Holy crap, I thought. The last thing I wanted was for Cletus to have an excuse to hang out at the trailer any more than he already did. Now Ob wanted to keep Cletus here like he was installing some afterlife antenna on the place.

"But May didn't even know Cletus," I said lamely, making a puny attempt at party pooping.

Ob smiled at Cletus and patted him on the knee.

"She don't have to meet him in the flesh to know this bay, Summer," he said, looking at Cletus's interested face. "May's been looking at them pictures over our shoulders all along. She knows Cletus, and I'll betcha she even knows his little dog."

Ob's smile then slowly disappeared, and he wiped a hand across his eyes.

In an instant he looked more tired than I'd ever seen him, and my heart sank.

Cletus and I just looked at each other.

CHAPTER FIVE

The first thing Ob did when the after-life antenna came around again was to take him out into May's empty garden. It was a pitiful sight, the three of us in our overcoats and boots, standing among the dead stalks of winter, hoping for a sign of life from the woman who once had kept everything alive on that soil. Including some of us.

I really didn't expect May to show up, but Ob's enthusiasm was so desperate, so sincere in its belief in miracles, that a part of me held out just a little hope that she might fly her soft spirit over us and come gently into our midst. May had never let us down when she was alive, she'd never not shown up when she was supposed to be somewhere, and it was the memory of her reliableness, I guess, that fueled our wide-eyed optimism.

What Cletus thought about it all I can't imagine. For once he was quiet, let Ob do all the talking and explaining, and like a little child let himself be led among the dead beans and broccoli toward the heart of a woman he never even met.

Ob must have thought that by talking about May there in that place, painting her before Cletus's ignorant eyes, he could flood the garden with the vibrations needed to draw her to us. Like that old joke of talking about someone till his ears burns.

So there we stood, hands dug deep in our pockets, Ob looking at Cletus, Cletus looking up at the sky, and me looking down at the ground. Ob talked about what a good wife May was and all the sweet things she'd done for him--for up while she was living. I was kind of surprised at the things Ob picked to talk about. I figured he'd choose the big ones--like her secretly saving up for three years in a row to buy him that expensive plane saw he was coveting over at Sears. Or the year she stayed awake thirty-two hours straight when fever from the chicken pox had me full of delirium, so sick I wanted to die.

But these heroic gestures of hers were ignored, and he chose instead to mention the simpler things: how she had rubbed down his siting knee with Ben-Gay every single night, not missing one, so he might be able to stand on that leg when he got out of bed the next morning. The way she had called to me through the window when I was little and playing on the swing set, saying, "Summer honey, you are the best little girl I ever did know," then going back to whatever she was doing. (I had not remembered this about her until that moment.) And a series of other sweetnesses that Ob had obviously cradled in his memory, looking for some way to bring them to life.

Cletus watched the sky and glanced at Ob now and then, nodding his head to let Ob know he was listening. Cletus was wearing his hat with the fake fur earflaps, and once I got a crazy urge to giggle when I thought of those flaps happing and Cletus rising up like Charlie Brown's Snoopy and flying across the garden and away.

But his hat behaved itself, and he stood patiently, allowing Ob to say all he needed to say. It almost felt like a funeral, like we'd just buried some beloved pet in the cold ground of the garden, and in some ways, it was more comfort, more real, to me than May's true funeral had been. Seems once people bring in outsiders who make a career of bereavement--undertakers, preachers--their grieving gets turned into a kind of system, like the way everybody lines up the same way to go in to a movie or sits the same way in a doctor's office. All Ob and me wanted to do when we lost May was hold on to each other and wail in that trailer for days and days. But we never got the chance, because just like there are certain ways people expect you to get married, or go to church, or raise kids, there are certain ways people expect you to grieve. When May died, Ob and me had to talk business with the funeral parlor, religion with the preacher, and make small talk with dozens of relatives and people we'd hardly ever seen before. We had to eat their food. We had to let them hug us. We had to see them watching our faces for any sign of a nervous breakdown.

May's funeral turned Ob and me into temporary sort-of socialites, and we never really got the chance to howl and pull our hair out. People wanted us to grieve proper.

So standing there in that bleak and empty garden listening to Ob make May alive again, that seemed to fix something in me that had needed fixing ever since the funeral. And in the oddest way Cletus became what we'd needed all along from the undertaker and preacher and visiting relatives. He became the perfect consoler, because he listened to every word Ob said and kept his fat mouth shut. Cletus had some gifts--I was learning this bit by bit--

and knowing when to talk and when not to was turning out to be one of them.

Ob finally drained his cup of praises to May and grew still. His eyes looked with Cletus's to the sky, and I couldn't keep mine from following.

Nothing but 8 black crow passed overhead. And no sound but Ob's heavy breathing and an occasional snort from Cletus, whose nose had started to run.

Neither Cletus nor I was willing to make a move until Ob did. We watched him turn his head this way and that, like adjusting the dial on a radio. Then finally he gave a great sigh, and we knew May had not come to him. He shook his head wearily and walked away from us toward the empty trailer.

We watched him go over the hill and through the front door. Then we looked at each other and we, too, let out our own sighs of disappointment.

"He's going to make himself sick or crazy, one," I said to Cletus, suddenly feeling a big lump in my throat, a wetness in my eyes.

Cletus shrugged his shoulders and gave me one of his strange smiles.

"Least it gives him something to do," he said. "Gets him out of bed in the mornings."

I shook my head and remained silent. I didn't want Cletus to know the pain this caused me, that I wasn't enough to bring Ob to life each day. That it wasn't enough he had me left to still love.

Cletus looked at me.

"You don't really believe he feels her, do you?" he said, almost like he was accusing me of something.

I gave him a sharp look.

"Why? What's it to you whether I believe it or don't.'"

Cletus shrugged his shoulders.

"Ain't nothing to me. I just figured you to have more imagination than that, you being a writer and all."

"I'm not any writer."

"Oh, the heck you're not," Cletus answered with a look of total impatience.

"Cletus, don't preach at me." I was beginning to think I might yell or cry and I didn't want to do either. What I wanted was for him to stop pushing at me.

He looked off toward the woods. "That's probably what she gave him," he said matter-of-factly.

I straightened up.

"What? What did she give him?"

Cletus squatted down to pick at a dry broccoli leaf.

"Well, you know Ob won't just make a whirligig from something we can understand. He don't carve out little doggies and kitties. Because he don't care about thing concrete. Ob's not making yard decorations. He's making art. I can understand why he never put the 'gigs out in the yard. He never meant to entertain the neighbors.

"I just figure May gave him permission to have some imagination."

Cletus looked up at my face. "Ob's got visions, Summer. Just like you, except you're always fighting yours off."

And when Cletus said that, I felt like I couldn't ever win anymore, I couldn't ever come out on top of anything in this life. I couldn't even remember what it was about Cletus I used to hate so much. I couldn't even stay ahead of him.

I turned and walked away. I felt lost. I might as well have been spinning in a round metal tub, in a twenty-foot wall of water, washing dawn off that mountain. Just lost forever in Deep Water.

CHAPTER SIX

I did not stay lost for long. Guidance cane to me in the form of a greasy-haired lunatic, and now, desperate, I am passing him the torch, hoping he can lead us out of this infernal darkness, this place none of us can anymore call home.

The day after May failed to make her appearance, the day after Oh trudged miserably one way while I trudged miserably the other, was what they call in English class the denouement. All our stories took a sharp turn because of what happened that next day, we were put on a different road, and like Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, we are all hoping that there really is a wizard of Oz. And that in that Emerald City we will find what it is Ob needs to finally rest his soul.