She managed to get Samuel on the phone, and he said what she knew he’d say. That he was going to get in the car and come back. He should be there, with her and the kids and Calla. Willadee wouldn’t hear of it. He needed to be right where he was. There were enough menfolk around to handle things, and if he came up, he’d just have to turn around and go back, and it was all too much driving, too dangerous, and she couldn’t stand it if anything happened to him, too.
“How could he do this to all of you, Willadee?” Samuel asked angrily, but she pretended not to hear.
After she hung up the phone, Willadee didn’t know what to do. The body had been taken into Magnolia, to the funeral home. Friends and neighbors had pitched in to clean up the mess John had made. People were milling around in the yard. There wasn’t a private place anywhere to sit down and think. Willadee wondered briefly whether she should find her children and comfort them, but there weren’t any kids in sight. Someone must have gotten them out of there, taken them home with them, and would bring them back later, tomorrow morning probably.
Alvis came over, and put his arms around her, and said, bitterly, “That old man.”
Willadee rubbed her forehead against his shoulder, then turned away. It bothered her for everybody to be so upset with her daddy for what he’d done. His life was broken, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so he’d just killed the man who was responsible. She picked her way through the crowd. Every way she turned, there was another sympathetic face. Someone telling her to just let go and cry it out—when she was dry and crumbling inside. Someone inquiring about the arrangements. What a word. Arrangements. What was left of John Moses to arrange? He was dead. He would rot. He had been beautiful once, and now he would rot, but not before arrangements were made, and a profit taken. Arrangements were expensive, even in 1956.
Finally, she found her way into the bar and locked the door behind her. It was dark in there. Murky and stifling hot. But she didn’t want any lights. Didn’t want to open doors and windows to let in air, because then that sea of people outside would begin to seep in, and she would drown for sure. She felt her way along the bar, thinking about her father and the night before, and the talk they’d had, and how she’d gone to bed thinking it was all right now, everything would be all right. She stood there, holding on to the bar with both hands, not even aware that she had started crying. Great, gusty sobs. After a while, she stopped, and just laid her head against the scarred wood. That was when she realized that she was not alone.
“I never once set foot in here, until today.” It was Calla talking. She was sitting way back in a corner, at one of the tables, all by herself. “I was so mad at him, all these years. I keep trying to remember what I was so mad about.”
Calla Moses spent the night at the funeral home. Ernest Simmons, the funeral director, said the body wouldn’t be ready for viewing until the next day, and that she should go on home and get some rest, but she informed him that she didn’t come to view the body, she came to be close to it, and she wasn’t going anywhere.
Willadee and her brothers all offered to stay with Calla, to keep her company. She said she didn’t want any company.
“You don’t need to be alone right now,” Willadee insisted.
“I’d feel more alone at home,” Calla answered stoutly. “And don’t any of you get the idea that you can start telling me what to do now that your daddy’s gone. You never had the nerve to try it before, so you’d best not start now.”
Everybody backed off except Toy, who refused to leave. He was just as stubborn as his mother.
“Bernice can sleep at your house, so she won’t be by herself,” he told her. “You won’t hardly know I’m here.”
And she didn’t. Toy saw all the others off, then spent most of the night standing outside smoking one cigarette after the other and staring at the sky. Calla took a seat in an empty viewing room and closed the door, and thought about the life she’d had with John Moses.
“It was a good life, John,” she whispered into the stillness. “We had our rough spots to go through, but it was a good life, mainly.”
Then she demanded, fiercely, “Why the hell did you give up on it?”
They didn’t close the store for the funeral. Calla said “Moses Never Closes” had been such a tradition for so long, and you know how Papa John was about tradition. Swan couldn’t help thinking that Papa John had pretty well played the wild with tradition by shooting himself, right in the middle of a family reunion, but you didn’t go around saying things like that. Besides, they didn’t make any money that day, didn’t charge for anything, so it wasn’t as if they were staying open out of greed. What if somebody in the community needed a jug of milk, they said. Or a jug of whiskey. Anybody had a touch of flu, there was nothing like lemon juice and sugar and whiskey to put them out of their misery while it ran its course. It wasn’t exactly flu season, but you never knew.
Toy kept the store. He didn’t like funerals anyway. Said they were just more examples of people trying to fit other people’s expectations. When Walter had died, Toy had slunk off into the woods with his .22 and taken potshots at squirrels while the rest of the family was doing what was expected of them. He figured his brother’s spirit was still close—maybe with a few things heavy on his mind that he’d been meaning to say but never got around to. So Toy went to the woods, and he listened. He and Walter had hunted those woods together since they were towheaded kids. They were close, the two of them. More than blood close.
Toy knew all the stumps and fallen logs where Walter liked to sit down and have a smoke, and just enjoy the peace. So that’s what Toy had done. For an hour or so at a time. Then, when the peace was too much for him, and he couldn’t take it anymore, and his chest would feel like it was about to bust from the tears he’d been holding in, Toy Ephraim Moses would shatter the peace with a shot or two from his rifle. If he hit something, fine. Toy hoped Bernice would outlive him. If she should happen to die before he did, that was one funeral he’d have to go to, and he was afraid he’d turn out taking potshots at the mourners.
Swan found out early the morning of the service that Uncle Toy wasn’t going.
“Uncle Toy has no respect what-so-ever for the dead,” Lovey had said at breakfast. Lovey was Uncle Sid and Aunt Nicey’s youngest child. Ten years old, and spoiled rotten. She had insisted on sleeping over the night before, mostly so she could rub it in to Swan and her brothers how much better she’d known Papa John than they had, and also, so she could shame them for not crying as much as she thought they ought to. They had squeezed out a few tears, but nothing like the gallons Lovey produced. They hadn’t needed to grieve, because Papa John had lived and died a stranger.
“You hush your mouth, young lady,” Grandma Calla had said to Lovey. “Your uncle Toy has his own ways, is all.”
Swan had been hearing about Uncle Toy and his “ways” ever since she could remember. For one thing, he was a bootlegger—not that Swan had a clear idea of what that meant. She knew it was against the law, though, and that it could be dangerous. If Uncle Toy wanted to break the law, why not just work in Never Closes with Papa John? That sure seemed like a safe proposition. But it was like Grandma Calla said. Toy had his own ways.
He’d been in the war, and was decorated for valor. Something about going through enemy fire to save a comrade. A colored man, no less. He got shot doing it, too. Got one leg blown clean off. That was why he walked so stiff-starched. His artificial leg didn’t have any give to it. But bootlegging when he could have been working in the bar and getting his leg blown off to save a Negro weren’t
