bright orange spiked hair was pushing the gurney. It was obvious that whoever was on the gurney was dead. A sheet had been pulled over the head.
”Step back, sir,” the paramedic said as I approached.
”Is that Maynard Bush?”
”You need to step away and mind your own-”
I reached down and snatched the sheet back from the head. Maynard’s eyes were wide open, frozen in what must have been a last moment of terror. His tongue was black and swollen and sticking out of his mouth at a macabre angle. There was a dark bruise across his throat. I’d seen enough ligature marks to know what it meant. Maynard had hanged himself, or, more likely, someone had hanged him.
The orange-headed paramedic was glaring at me.
I flipped the sheet back up over Maynard’s head and glared back.
”He was right” was all I could think of to say.
”He was right.”
I walked into the courthouse to tell Judge Glass I was leaving. He didn’t bother to thank me for representing Maynard or say anything about Maynard’s death. He just nodded his head and grunted. When I got back out to the parking lot, I noticed Caroline’s car backed in next to my truck. The door opened and she stepped out. Her eyes were red and puffy.
”I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, baby,” she said. ”The nursing home called right after you left.
Your mother died a little while ago.”
July 17
10:20 a.m.
We went up to the nursing home to clear out Ma’s room the day after she died. Jack had flown in on a red- eye the night before and he helped me carry the furniture out to the truck. Then Caroline and I went to the funeral home while Jack and Lilly took the furniture back over to Ma’s house. A tall, slim, bespectacled man who spoke in a quiet voice with a slight lisp showed us into the room where the caskets were kept.
About twenty caskets were spread around the room, mahogany and teak and oak and stainless steel. The man led us first to a round table in the corner.
”Please, have a seat,” he said. ”Can I offer you something to drink? Some cookies, perhaps?”
Cookies. I didn’t want any goddamn cookies. I gave him a look that would have silenced most people, but he just smiled. He set a pad of paper down on the table and produced a pen.
”I’ve read a lot about you, Mr. Dillard,” he said,
”but I didn’t know your mother. Tell me about her.”
”Why?” I knew he didn’t care about her or me.
He just wanted to get as much money out of me as he could.
”We take the responsibility of contacting the newspaper on your behalf for the obituary,” the man said.
”I just need some basic information. Try to think of all the good things you remember about your mother.”
”She was a tough woman. She raised my sister and me all by herself after my father was killed in Vietnam. She worked as a bookkeeper for a roofing company and did other people’s laundry for extra money. She wouldn’t accept help from anyone. She didn’t say much and thought the world was a terrible place. How’s that?”
”Where did she go to church?”
”She didn’t believe in God. She thought the Christian religion was a global scam set up to control people and extract money from them by making them feel guilty. Do you think they’ll print that?”
”Did she have brothers and sisters?”
”One brother. A jerk who drowned in the Nolichucky River when he was seventeen.”
”And her parents?”
”Both dead.”
”Would you excuse us for a minute?” Caroline said. She reached over and took my hand and led me out the door into the lobby.
”Why don’t you let me handle this?” she said.
”I hate these jerks. Preying on other people’s misery.”
”You look tired. Why don’t you go out to the car and nap while I finish up here?”
”I can’t sleep in a bed. What makes you think I’ll be able to sleep in the car?”
”Please? Just try to relax. You’ll feel better. I’ll be out as soon as I can.”
I was beginning to think I was going insane. I’d been half-jokingly telling myself I was nuts for years, but with everything that had happened over the late spring and summer, beginning with Sarah’s release from jail and subsequent return, I’d found myself falling deeper and deeper into a mental abyss. No sleep. No appetite. No exercise. Nothing seemed to give me pleasure anymore, not even music. My attitude was becoming more and more fatalistic and hopeless. I had no enthusiasm and no particular interest in anything, including sex. It was as though I’d become a passionless robot, simply existing from day to day without feeling.
I went back out to the car and sat in the passenger seat for a while. I closed my eyes a few times, but I couldn’t doze. I finally wrote Caroline a note, got out of the car, and started walking towards home. It was at least seven miles and my legs felt like lead, but I thought the exercise might help and it would give me some time to try to sort things out. At first, I tried to force myself to think pleasant thoughts. I envisioned Jack hitting home runs, Lilly dancing across the stage, Caroline’s jubilation when I brought her a quarter of a million dollars in a gym bag….
But after only a few minutes of walking, my mind began to flash images that were much more sinister, the same images I was seeing when I tried to go to sleep night after night. Johnny Wayne Neal being gagged and dragged out of the courtroom. The bubbles rising in the headlights of my truck the night Junior Tester pushed me into the lake. The look in Tester’s eyes when he said I’d taken his daddy from him. The fantasy of clubbing him to death. The bruise on Angel Christian’s face in the photograph. David Bowers’s blood on my shirt. Maynard’s smirk, and the terrible image of his tongue sticking out of his mouth. My mother, wearing a diaper and lying helpless in a hospital bed with spittle running down her chin. And finally, Sarah. Always Sarah, when she was young and innocent.
By the time Caroline rolled up next to me and pushed the passenger door open about two miles from home, I’d reached an entirely new level of self-loathing. I hated myself for putting Sarah in jail and for not being able to break through with Ma. I hated myself for helping monsters like Maynard Bush and Randall Finch and Billy Dockery and a long list of others. I was a whore, a pathetic excuse for a human being.
”I love you, Joe,” Caroline said as soon as I got into the car. Caroline is intuitive, especially when it comes to dealing with me. I knew what she was trying to do, but the words bounced off of me like a rubber ball off concrete. I didn’t feel a thing.
”Did you hear me? I said I love you.”
”I know.”
”Do you know how much your children love you?
Jack worships the ground you walk on. Lilly thinks you’re the greatest man who ever lived.”
”Please, Caroline, don’t. Not right now. I’m in no mood to be patronized.”
”What are you thinking? What’s wrong with you?”
”You don’t want to know what I’m thinking.”
”You’re mother just died, baby. You’re grieving.”
”My mother and I weren’t even close. All those years, all that time together. I grew up in her house.
She
”You’ve been through a lot in the past few months,”
she said. ”We’ve all been through a lot.”
We rode the rest of the way home in silence. Jack distracted me for a couple of hours by taking me out to his old high school baseball field. I didn’t hear her say anything, but I felt sure it was at Caroline’s suggestion. I’d
