[title subtitle=”fiction: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Uncle Bud came running down the long path that connected our house to Grandma’s. He stopped at the gate, unhitched the rope that held it shut and didn’t stop to latch it back. If the cows got out, there’d be trouble. But that didn’t stop Bud. That didn’t even cause him to look back once over his shoulder.
I was watching from the pecan tree, where I’d climbed to the lowest limb. I swung down. Bud bounded the three rickety steps and landed on the wooden porch that shook beneath his considerable weight. I followed him inside – he didn’t stop long enough to knock – and trailed him straight to the front room where Mama was clipping coupons from the weekly flyer.
“Lord a mercy,” Mama said at the sight of Bud, all bug-eyed and breathless. “What in tarnation?”
Bud pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his brow and wheezed for a second. “Sister,” he said, “Mama just took a long distance telephone call. She sent me to bring you back to her house. Pronto.”
“What happened?” Mama asked.
Bud folded his arms. He looked at his boots. He shook his head. Whatever he knew, he wasn’t about to tell it.
“Someday,” Mama said, “I’m gonna get my own telephone and put an end to all this nonsense.” I looked at her hands. They were trembling.
“I’ll be back, Carolina,” Mama said to me. I had started to tear up. That’s the kind of kid I was.
“Dry it up,” Mama said. “And go outside and get the clothes off the line. Looks like it might come a rain.”
I watched Mama and Uncle Bud hurry away. Bud was her kid brother. Always in trouble. Never worked much. But he sure loved Mama.
When she came back she was with Daddy, who should have been at work at that time of day but somehow appeared just the same. When they came inside, they went straight to the kitchen. Mama sat on the edge of her chair, grim-faced, unblinking. She’d taken a butter knife, working it into the groove that held the two halves of the Formica table together, flipping toast crumbs onto the surface. Daddy looked at his lap and said, “Your Uncle Jake is dead.”
For a long time no one spoke. Then Mama took over. “Thirty-three,” she said, her voice too high. “Just like Jesus when he went to the cross. Thirty-three and never done a wrong thing in his life.” I didn’t know if she meant Jesus or Uncle Jake. “Don’t seem right somehow. Bud alive. Me alive. Jake dead.”
Daddy stared at her like she was someone he used to know but couldn’t place. I thought he would say something. Would tell us it was all a mistake. Would laugh the way he did when we didn’t expect it.
Instead, Mama said, “Happened in the chicken house over by his house in Hope, a bucket of feed scattered everywhere, them birds gobbling it up like it was their last meal. The doctor said Jake’s heart just blew up on him.” She looked away. “Always had the biggest heart.” She paused, rubbed her temples, frowned. “He did have the heart murmur. Kept him out of everything he ever wanted into. Even stopped him from playing football in high school. You remember that, Doyle?” she asked my daddy, and then didn’t wait for a reply. “Six feet tall and couldn’t play ball.” And then, finally, she started to sob.
Before that moment I didn’t know any dead people. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Jake lying cold and dead in the chicken house. I got to thinking. Uncle Jake dead at thirty-three, just like Jesus. And then I thought, Jesus with a J. Uncle Jake with a J. I felt like God was telling me to have faith, the kind of mustard-seed faith that moved mountains back in Bible times. He’d raised Jesus from the dead, that was true. And then doubt set in. Jesus was His only begotten Son. Who wouldn’t raise his own son? And then I remembered Him calling Lazarus back from the tomb, a man who was about as common as Uncle Jake. My own heart started to flutter.
I began praying right then and there. I could see Uncle Jake undead, raised up to all kinds of glory. At home, everything was covered in a mixture of sorrow and busyness. Mama scrubbed the linoleum. Daddy washed our car. Nobody said much of anything.
The night before the funeral, Mama had her hair done in town. Put up in a French twist with little wisps of hair straggling behind. She slept with a pair of satin panties on her head so she wouldn’t spoil it before morning.
She was wiping down the kitchen counter when Daddy started honking for her to get a move-on. I could see him through a wall of cigarette smoke in the Impala, a finger hooked inside his one dress shirt, trying to make room for his neck and his Adam’s apple besides. I watched them leave – at nine I was too young for funerals – and waited for the dust to settle.
I went to my room. I kneeled down by my narrow bed. I’d been praying for two days, quietly, covertly, but now I prayed out loud till my throat hurt. I thanked God in advance for raising Uncle Jake from the dead. I couldn’t stand the thought of him beneath the red clay earth, all alone in the darkness.
By the time the sun went down, I was waffling between faith and worry. I pulled a kitchen chair up to the front room window and watched the traffic on the highway a few hundred yards away.
It was another three hours before I saw headlights break through the front window. I listened for Mama’s footfalls against the waning porch, her heels clicking. In the distance I heard semis drum against the blacktop. I smelled the wild onions that had taken over the fence line. Daddy would be pulling them up once he came back to himself. A cow could die if it ate too many.
I ran to my bedroom and sat on the bed. Daddy called to me from the hallway and I sprinted toward the front room. I was so full of hope I felt like I might ascend to heaven right then and there.
But Mama’s face was puffed up, pink from crying. And Daddy was pacing, a cigarette in his right hand that wasn’t lit. He moved it like a baton. And then he spoke. “It was a miracle,” he said. “Plain and simple. Something I expect you’ve been praying about for a good long while, Carolina. Well,” he said, and stopped by the recliner, “now it’s done gone and happened.”
I was standing by the TV, wearing one of Daddy’s t-shirts like a nightgown. I picked at a mosquito bite on my arm. I shut my eyes tight, the miracle of resurrection racing through my veins. “It’s Uncle Jake, ain’t it? Jesus done raised him up from the dead. Didn’t he, Mama. Didn’t he?”
Mama let out her breath. “Don’t be silly, Carolina. Your daddy found the Lord.”
I went completely still. I had to force myself to breathe. I felt like every bit of air had been let out of me.
Daddy sat then, right beside Mama on the faded divan. He was usually a quiet man, but tonight he seemed to be busting apart with his story. “It commenced during the preaching,” he said. “There was your Uncle Jake laid out amidst the funeral flowers. Your grandma was crying to beat sixty. I thought she’d never make it through the whole service, and then your Uncle Bud slipped her a pill.” Daddy touched his throat. “Whatever it takes, that’s what I say. Your kid dies and whatever it takes.”
Daddy looked at me like I might agree with him. I didn’t say a word.
“That preacher was going on about dying in the Lord and the glory of it when I seen the rafters open wide.” Daddy pointed to the spot where the picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane hung above the TV. “There in the clouds,” he said, “was Jesus, just like in your Mama’s picture. I never seen nothing like it. I can’t recall much of the service after that. It was just me and Him alone in that church. He told me time had run out. If I wanted to get saved, then I’d better go ahead and do it. If not, I could burn forever in the Lake of Fire.”
The cicadas were busy that night, their sound so loud the whole house hummed. And somewhere farther away a horn was blasting.
“We didn’t even make it to the cemetery,” Daddy said. “I was trembling, pouring sweat. Your mama thought I was having my own heart trouble. I waited till we got out to the highway to tell her what had happened. She started quoting scripture, but it wasn’t right somehow. We drove back here,” he said, his arm arcing across the room to indicate our own little town, I suppose. “We drove on down to Brother Bachelor’s, me shaking the whole way, trying to keep the Impala in the right lane.”
Mama got up, walked to the kitchen and opened three bottles of Coca-Cola.
When she brought them back, I took mine and set it on the TV. Daddy took a swig and smiled. “I believe I was the last person Brother Bachelor expected to see,” he said. “But it didn’t take him long to get on the ball. He led me down the Roman’s Road, then wandered around in Corinthians, and finally landed in the Gospel of Matthew. I said the Sinner’s Prayer, but I didn’t feel a thing. Not a dang thing. So I made him do it over till he got it right.”
Mama was staring. At Daddy. Past Daddy. I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t sleep that night. And I sure as heck didn’t pray. But the next night I dropped off fast. And I dreamed. About Uncle Jake. He was sitting cross-legged on the rag rug by my bed. He looked the same, except his overalls were starched, crisp as a new dollar bill. “Uncle Jake,” I said, “I feel awful I couldn’t bring you back.”
And then he smiled at me. “Sweet Pea,” he said – he always called me Sweet Pea – “you did what you could. Nothing at all to be ashamed of.”
“I should have prayed harder,” I said, but he just shook his head.
“Nah, you shouldn’t have,” Uncle Jake said, and then looked around like somebody might hear. “I wouldn’t want you repeating this,” he said, “but I’d been seeing this girl who near about drove me crazy. Wanted me to fly on a airplane to Vegas. Wanted me to take dance classes.” He shook his head, and then juggled his feet a little bit. “Best thing about being a Baptist is that they don’t allow dancing.
“And the chicken business. Lord have mercy, it’s work from dawn to dawn. I was sick to death of chickens. Up there,” he said, and nodded toward the ceiling, “I fish all I want. Streams, rivers, the ocean. Whatever you can think of, you can fish. Can’t keep what you catch, but still,” he said.
I tried to reach out to him. I tried to touch his sleeve, but he rose then, through the roof, and he was gone.
I woke up early, and just for a second I thought Uncle Jake was alive. Then the neighbor’s rooster crowed and I remembered everything. I dressed quickly and went outside. The wind was rolling across our yard, the grass waving across the pasture. Soon my parents would be up, and then we’d be at the creek for Daddy’s baptizing.
I looked up. Somewhere Uncle Jake looked down. Faith, I was learning, was a complicated thing. Prayers got answered or they didn’t. I couldn’t say why. So I did the only thing I could. I climbed the pecan tree, way up to the highest branch. I leaned out as far as I could. I raised my hand to the air and waved as big as I could. I could almost see him up there, setting down his fishing pole, standing on the bank of a rippling creek, waving back as big as Christmas.
