Fiction

The funeral home clutches the side of the highway outside of town, about ten minutes past the Tastee Freez. The attendees consist mainly of Dwight, forty-two and newly aware of his own mortality, and his family—his wife, Marie, and their two children, Jordan and Luke—the preacher, whom the funeral home had called when Dwight revealed that his father hadn’t been in church since the Truman administration, and the large, black nurses who stand silently behind their lolling, wheelchair-bound VA hospital charges. An old private with a trucker’s hat covered in pins complains that he needs to go to the bathroom. His nurse tells him to hush and be respectful. He grumbles a response.

Dwight at the podium. The eulogy is largely biographical. His father had spent the Depression shooting rabbits and squirrels out in the field for his mother to boil that evening. A few years later, he took his talents to occupied France, where he found that the profile of a German head was larger and generally slower than what he’d been accustomed to. He came back to Kentucky with a bronze star, which he kept on his nightstand until the day his name was added to the great register of souls claimed by bacon and egg breakfasts. Dwight does not mention the womanizing that caused his mother to pack a steamer trunk and catch a Greyhound east when he was still a boy. Instead, he spreads praise on his father’s fidelity to traditions. How he used to watch his father sharpen his straight razor on a leather strop that his own father had given him. Seated in his heavy wooden chair with a shaving cream beard, he looked like a gaunt Santa Claus caught in an unguarded moment.

The longest part of the eulogy—which all told runs for nearly twenty minutes—is another story, about how the weekend after Decoration Day Dwight and his father would drive south for two hours past blasted fields and peeling billboards, until they found a squat, white building just off the Goodlettsville exit, a converted convenience store made of cinderblock, with the garish, tear-streaked clown face on the side. How inside they were always greeted by a smiling fat man in a gray, pinstriped suit and porkpie hat who called himself Wailing Willy and met everyone who came into his store with the enthusiasm of a boisterous second cousin who knew that he liked you even if you weren’t sure he could remember your name. How Willy began every one of his sentences with “Well, hell” (here Dwight can’t help but laugh as he assumes Willy’s oversized accent, with i’s as country as an engine backfiring). How, if you asked him, “What’s good this year, Willy,” he’d answer, “Well, hell, it’s all good!” Or if you asked, “Willy, you got any of those cherry bombs you were talking about,” he’d say, “Well, hell, I got bushels of them—let me cut you a deal.” How, in the evening, they would return home with the trunk sagging so low that if you hit a bump it would smack against the pavement and spray sparks all over the roadway on account of all the big, brown paper sacks of aerials, rockets, mortars, fountains, and spinners stuffed inside. How on the appointed evening (here Dwight begins to stammer) his father would gather up the whole family—cousins included—and take them up to their spot on top of the hill overlooking Jeff Davis park, where they would grill hot dogs over the built-in fire pit and shoot fireworks late into the night. How Pop would light all the fuses personally, surrounded by cousins drunk on beer and hollering from lawn chairs. How Dwight wished his children could have known their grandfather in that way.

Marie, built like a pillar, looks concerned if slightly confused. She likes to think she knows her husband, but has never heard this story before. When Dwight takes his seat, she puts her hand on his shoulder but does not say a word. Jordan, twelve years old and fresh from learning long division, has already lost interest and looks eagerly toward the window, as if he thinks he can spot the Tastee Freez from where he’s sitting. Next to him, Luke, barely six, is in tears, not from the story, but because he sees a half dozen Wermacht soldiers without heads seated in the folding chairs around him. The preacher takes the podium and makes his closing remarks. During the Lord’s Prayer, the old private loudly announces that he has gone and shit himself. His nurse wheels him from the visitation room.

The Kentucky-Tennessee border is desolate country. The pre-noon light catches the country by surprise—no one has yet come by to clean up what look like the remains of a scorched earth march in the middle of the night. Occasionally a skeletal barn rolls by. A pair of cows. An abandoned Ford with pink and blue and yellow stickers affixed to the windshield by the highway patrol. A wire fence, tracing a line gently undulating that doesn’t quite run parallel to the muted ground. Mostly it’s just ground, though. The border crossing threatens to go unnoticed, marked only by a faded sign that rises up from the ground and then races by before you’ve had a chance to anticipate it.