Rebel Yell Read online

  Even fanned out over a quarter acre, many of the bereaved felt themselves to be invisibly tethered, each to the others, by the pull of the man in the coffin. In the church, this had seemed a consolation, evidence that some conservative ideal of a rainbow coalition of well-scrubbed, expensively suited, good Christians was a living reality.

  At the graveyard, connections felt over-taut and about to snap—leaving few links, if any—just as soon as Abel’s coffin was covered with dirt.

  Except for his co-workers from the Pentagon, all gathered felt out of place. Abel’s body belonged to no coherent community; obvious and powerful factions vied for place: Abel’s poor black relations and Abel’s affluent black relations; Abel’s poor white family and Abel’s powerful white associates; and finally there was Abel’s Washington group, affluent, powerful, integrated, conservative.

  As the area around the cars emptied, a wide rough circle formed around the tent. Sitting beneath the canopy, in the front row, with her little girls on one side of her and her big boys on the other, was the grieving widow of record.

  Sammie, in the clear light of autumn noon, looked exceptionally pretty in her pert navy suit with white piping and red wool coat. She was prissy and sexy at the very same time. And there was an air of vulnerability and kindness about her that this day gave lie to the nickname Ajay’s friends, white and black, had tagged to Sammie after just a very few brief encounters: Wicked White Stepmonster. The day of Abel’s funeral Sammie looked like a pretty little perfect small-town stepmom.

  Hope scanned the crowd, paying particular attention to the clumps of affluent black relations, looking for James Hall, Abel’s oldest friend. She couldn’t stand near her son, who was seated with “the family,” and just at that moment she didn’t want to stand with Waycross. She wanted to stand by James, to lean on James, but she wasn’t even sure he had come. She stepped closer to the tent.

  On this day she would indulge the metaphysical conceit of her widowhood, so that some day soon she could embrace the truth of marriage to Waycross unencumbered.

  There were so many things, too many things, in the queer construction of Abel’s funeral that left Hope feeling vulgar and contorted. At the center of it all was a realization that she had misjudged something significant about the man. On the surface was the claim Abel’s gaping grave made on her wife-ness.

  On Abel’s burying day, Waycross was for her a lover, a true love, but not the husband. She longed for the moment when no part of her would feel polyandrous or polygamist. Hope stepped away from her second husband and stepped closer to her first husband’s grave.

  The immediate family was telling why they had put what into the coffin with Abel— one of the boys said he had put a golf ball because he and Abel had liked to golf together; another was putting in a CD of the soundtrack of the movie Idlewild (they had been listening to Out Kast as they drove into the mountains). When Ajay put in fifteen backgammon checkers, Hope winced.

  The carved trench, above which Abel’s casket was suspended on some mechanism that would lower it fluidly down, was a rebuke and liberation. She saw in the dark maw of earth the promise of a true and final divorce decree. “Till death do you part,” their Episcopal priest had said at their wedding. And now Abel was dead, granting a dazing divorce.

  Sammie squatted down and put her wedding ring on the casket.

  Hope wondered what Abel had done with the gold band she had bought him. He had worn the token too long, for years after the divorce; then it had vanished and Sammie’s ring had appeared on his finger.

  Hope remembered throwing her rings, the band he had bought and the solitaire he had inherited, across the table at him the day she had known she wouldn’t stay married.

  “One thing’s for certain, I don’t love you anymore,” she had said, quoting the lyrics of a George Jones and Tammy Wynette duet. Abel had understood. He was that man who knew the lyrics to obscure country songs and the laws of many foreign lands, who loved Jane Austen and Bootsy Collins. He had not lost his equilibrium.

  He had had the sophistication to be amused. “I may be the only black man in America to have his wife announce that she’s leaving by quoting a country song.” He hadn’t thought she was going anyplace. She had promised and he knew her to be a woman of her word. He could afford to applaud the fine performance.

  He had gotten her to put her rings back on that day. Then he had slapped the child a third time and she had never put them on again.

  She had a settlement agreement the lawyers had worked out and a judge had approved; that notarized document bore little and no relation to reality. It was at best a crudely drawn map of the territory of relations between Abel and Hope, of the places where they would exasperate, confound, and betray each other.

  Death had parted them far more profoundly than the courts had. Hope had reason to be grateful. Abel’s death had delivered to her the annulment for which she had been unwilling to go to the priests. Her blood was mingled with his in a living child. She would not make that child a bastard. But now Abel was dead. Standing before his grave she felt like a widow.

  Just then, when she had stopped looking for him, James Hall found her. At Hope and Abel’s Washington wedding James had stood beside Abel as best man. Now Hope could stop holding herself as James wrapped Hope in a bear hug. “I used to be his best friend,” James whispered. “When you were his best friend, I was his wife,” Hope whispered back. James’s eyes were dry.

  “I don’t begin to know how to mourn a lawyer whose job it was, I suspect, to parse the crazy definitions and distinctions that allow for Abu Ghraib,” said James.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Hope.

  “Abel,” said James.

  Hope shook her head. She didn’t want to hear it. Not in that place; not at that moment, and not ever. She remembered reading somewhere that prescription drugs had ruined Scandinavian funerals. Everyone wore sunglasses and nobody cried. Xanax wouldn’t ruin southern funerals. Her mind was muted and breaking at the same time. And nobody was wearing sunglasses.

  Break my mind. That was the song Abel had sung at her trying to get her to smile and laugh and let him stay. But she hadn’t left a babbling fool behind— she had left the lawyer for Abu Ghraib? This did not seem possible.

  If Hope had had any inkling of what Abel would become she would have stayed and fought for him to become something else, something other, some black man who wasn’t even possibly the lawyer for Abu Ghraib and who wouldn’t end up buried in a southern white people’s cemetery.

  Or, was she misunderstanding again, under-reading him again, low-rating him again?

  Her train of thought derailed and landed in some harsh wilderness. She was thinking about the South without black people, of Abel’s New South, the South that the Agrarians and Fugitives had dreamed, a South of hardworking, self-sufficient rural white people. This was the South Abel had loved and abandoned. This was the South that had claimed him at the last: a Scandinavian South that had nothing in common with the blue-black Deep South of Memphis or Mississippi, the state or the river.

  Abel was being buried in a “white” cemetery where none of Abel’s black family had ever previously stepped. On the flip side of the equation, another of his signature consistent inconstancies, Hope knew for sure that one of the things Abel would have liked about the army was that it was a “colored” place. Ditto prisons and the second Bush White House. As sure as she knew Abel liked the word “ditto,” loved the movie Ghost, lusted for Demi Moore, and was highly embarrassed by Whoopi Goldberg, she knew he had a black and southern preference for places where black people were in abundance. She also knew he had a desire-dream of a lily-magnolia-white South, and being the one ink spot in it. So many contradictions.

  Hope was running her fingers through her curls, combing these knots of thoughts through her tangles as if she had lost her good sense, when she saw, standing alone, near a broken cross, someone she had never expected to see again.

  Nicholas Gordon—
a spook from her past. For a minute she thought it was a trick of her exhausted mind. Ghosts appear in graveyards. Somehow with the bending of fatigue her thought had distorted and fractured into images of sheets in the night: Klan sheets and bedsheets and Halloween ghosts collided, creating a mirage, an apparition of a man she had almost forgotten.

  She blinked and he didn’t go away. Nicholas Gordon was standing in Nashville.

  She closed her eyes, kissed James—whispering, “You’re wrong about Abel” into his ear—and then began making her way toward the person who appeared to be Nicholas Gordon.

  Hope was fully expecting to realize, as she approached, that the guest was just someone who resembled Nicholas. Or, rather, resembled her expectation of how Nicholas might look. How would she know what Nicholas looked like after sixteen years? If the man was Nicholas, she would get rid of him. Nicholas Gordon was not a person Hope ever wanted Ajay to meet.

  She made her way slowly. Most eyes were focused on the parson, the grave, on Sammie, on Ajay, or on the toe of the wearer’s shoes. It is easy to move without being observed. People are so self-absorbed. Hope remembered Abel telling her that. It was another of the many, but not enough, occasions on which Abel had been absolutely right.

  She reached the broken cross.

  “Nicholas?” asked the first Mrs. Abel Jones the third.

  “Hullo, dear girl,” said Nicholas as he reached for Hope’s hand. He lifted it and held it near enough to his lips to kiss, before allowing his eyelids to flutter shut as he inhaled the scent of Hope. Her smell had changed. He wondered if she knew.

  “I wasn’t sure it was you,” said Hope, snatching back her hand just after Nicholas, who appeared to be diving down to plant a kiss, sucked in the fat of the fleshy base of her thumb as if it were a tongue.

  It was an old and courtly gesture, suggestive yet decorous, with all the risk going to him. It was hard not to be happy to see the provocative geezer.

  Hope kissed Nicholas on one fine parchment cheek, then the other. When he leaned down to help her do it, she caught the distinct whiff of hemorrhoid cream mixed with aftershave, the aging dandy smell.

  Nicholas looked a lot like Keith Richards, grayer and blonder and tweedier, to be sure, but the bone structures were similar and the rebuke their ancient but reedy selves presented to her soft and spreading body was similar. Nicholas had been a dashing old toff and now he was a dashing ancient toff. She kissed her fingers and pressed the kiss to his cheek.

  “It must be the end of the world. You left Manila.”

  “Just the end of my life.”

  “You said you would never leave.”

  “Another of the promises I didn’t keep.”

  “I didn’t know you and Abel had stayed close.”

  “So much you didn’t know.”

  Hope’s face registered confusion. Nicholas didn’t wait for her to ask the question.

  “I’m here in a professional capacity.”

  Hope took a step back. She had a guess about what he meant. Years earlier, he had caused her more than a bit of trouble that she hadn’t rightly understood at the time. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty.

  “I’m here as the mother of a bereaved child,” said Hope as she moved to place her body directly between Nicholas’s and Ajay’s.

  “He looks more like you to me than you look like you to me. Except he’s taller,” said Nicholas, then he started to smile. His smile irritated Hope. It was inappropriate in the extreme. Classic Nicholas.

  “I’m not amused.”

  “Of course not. How did you come to survive?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The ridges between Hope’s eyebrows got deep. Nicholas smiled again. He liked it when women didn’t use Botox. Botox made his job much, much harder.

  It’s one thing, he could see her thinking, to have sickness lurking in the back of your life when your child has two biological parents. It’s another thing altogether to have sickness lurking in the background when your child is still young and one parent has already died. When your child is half-orphaned. Nicholas read wrinkles and furrows better than most people.

  “You don’t have lupus.”

  “Not now.”

  “You never had lupus, that’s just a lie the doctors told you to get you out of Manila. Once upon a time you were a dangerous girl.”

  “I wasn’t sick?”

  “You were never sick.”

  “Abel . . . ?”

  “Bored wives, intelligent wives, educated wives, idealistic wives: Wives are dangerous. A bored, intelligent, educated, idealistic wife with questionable friends is too dangerous,” said Nicholas, reaching for Hope’s hand. Hope drew her hand back.

  “Questionable friends?”

  “Me.”

  “You were KGB.”

  “Was.”

  “I figured that out.”

  “Eventually.”

  “Was I your target?”

  “Was.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “Are, we are friends.”

  Hope shook her head no. The day had been too much. So many choices she had made because she had thought she was going to die. Leaving Abel. Not having babies with Way-cross.

  “Did Abel know?”

  “Yes.”

  Hope wanted to snatch Abel out of the grave to put him back in it. So much exhaustion she had encountered fighting the fear of premature gloom. And all the time Abel had known it was a lie.

  Nicholas remembered feeling sorry for her when they gave her what he suspected was a false diagnosis. He also remembered feeling relieved.

  Manila in the eighties was a dangerous place: bad drivers; bad air in the scuba equipment; dengue fever; the occasional helicopter shot out of the air; drug pirates on the seas just beyond the bay where the rich locals sailed on a Sunday afternoon drinking calamansi soda; acquaintances who played kill or be killed, torture and release, so that others might be afraid. Manila was a place where kidnap, then ransom was a primary method of funding institutions and insurrections.

  Hope had been afraid of dying when she had left Manila. Nicholas had been afraid of her dying if she stayed in Manila. He wondered if Abel had had the same fear. Maybe there had been more than what Nicholas knew inspiring Abel to shuttle the wifey off.

  The funeral was getting to Nicholas just as he had gotten to her, just as once upon a time Hope had almost gotten to him. Had he approached her to turn her, or to get them to fear that he had turned her? It took him a moment to remember how it had been. Abel had been in the middle of it.

  Nicholas was wondering if Abel was really dead. It wasn’t a question he could ask in the middle of the alleged burial.

  “Are you around this afternoon? We could have a drink,” he said, affecting contrition that rapidly transformed into coquetry. “You could hit me. I deserve it and worse.”

  “I don’t play that,” said Hope.

  There was true grief in Nicholas’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was because they had reached the part of the graveside service where the casket was about to be covered in dirt or if it was something else.

  It occurred to Hope that Nicholas liked to be spanked. It occurred to her in a flashing moment that Abel might have spanked him. And then it occurred to her that if there had been spanking between them, Nicholas would have been the lap and Abel the bottom. How close they had all come to getting what they each had wanted.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The Hermitage.”

  “I’ll meet you in the bar at five.”

  Hope turned and walked back to stand with her second husband as her first husband was being lowered into the ground.

  FIVE

  AFTER THE FUNERAL in the church and the interment at the grave, there should have been, at the home of the deceased, at Abel’s house, a repass. The meal prepared by friends for family to be presented at the end of the day of burial is a sacrosanct southern-black burial custom. Sammie didn’t want it.

 
Of all the strange things Abel’s white wife did, black Nashville judged refusing the repass to be the strangest.

  She wasn’t blatantly rude. Whoever wished to come, everyone attending the funeral, was invited back to Sammie’s two-hundred-year-old house for a catered meal.

  Folk were shocked. So shocked preparations continued: shopping, cooking, and the getting down of silver-plated serving utensils. Discreet inquiries were made: at the visitation, on the phone, and even online. On the pretense of asking what to send in lieu of flowers, or what flowers to send, mentioned somewhere in the middle of those inquiries was the dish the attendee would be bringing. On every such occasion, dutiful dark ladies were informed— by one of Sammie’s sisters-in-law or brothers, or Sammie’s parents— that gifts of food were not welcome.

  If that had been the end of the message, the preference, most likely, would merely have gone unheeded. It is even possible some of the older ladies who had not yet developed an affection for Sammie might have begun to feel some small tenderness for Abel’s starving widow. Feeling sorry for somebody, as long as it is not yourself, is not the least likely way for love to begin. But “no food” was not the end of the message.

  The words “a catered meal will be provided” were tacked on. Those words stuck in the craw. Not one of the ladies who had been attached to Abel from the birth did what was supposed to be done, as it is supposed to be done.

  Instead the colored ladies, from the snow-white to the blue-black, from the most sanely bohemian to the crazily conventional, took their hams and casseroles, their cakes and pies, their sweet tea and rolls and monkey bread, to Abel’s grandmother’s house on Batavia Circle.

  There would be a repass. There would even be a widow. Hope. Black Nashville would begin to erase Sammie from its collective memory. She would be gone from Jefferson Street and gone from Batavia Circle, gone from Canterbury Close and gone from Nocturne Drive. Gone from all “our neighborhoods”: from the almost ghetto in the center of the city to the segregated enclave above the ghetto, from the rich and fancy booming integrated suburbs to the fading rich and fancy all-black suburbs, gone.