Death, even when familiar, brings with it the shock of recognition-and no matter who it is that lies there, death bestows a dignity that arrests those who look on and forces them to recognize that though they are not dead, still their fate and that of the dead person's is one and the same. In the apartness of the dead, none can fail to see that what remains, the clay body, has been mortal and that the end, though required, can be submitted to, but not without affront to every being caught up still in the heat of living. I'd first felt the full weight of this separation between the living and the dead as an ice upon my lips when I'd bent over to kiss Gramma in her casket. I was shocked and made suddenly afraid for this fate I'd seen come to animals and now to Gramma; darkness and a palpitating formlessness rose within me. I saw death again, but nothing prepared me for the awful moment of seeing Mama dead. Pain ripped through me, tearing me flesh and touching me intimately; I curled into myself against this final consummation. Recovery took years, and in those years it was the voice of Mama inside me that talked me through my pain, reminding me I was alive and had to bear the responsibility of living, that I had a husband and children, that though I fainted within, I must bear up to the suffering life demanded. In my first denials of death's finality, I resurrected memory after memory of Mama and my childhood.
One day, I helped Mama weeding; Mama had on her straw hat, a paper towel rolled up under the band to catch perspiration; her face, flushed. She had high blood pressure, and it worried me to see her working in the late morning sun. I remembered afternoons when, after a tiring day spent on her feet ironing for minimum wage in a nearby shirt factory, Mama 'd walk up the mountain, reaching home breathing hard and heavily flushed; only home a few minutes, a choking cough that brought up huge clots of black blood seized her. I'd stand by helpless, tears welling up as I watched Mama. Chronic bronchitis weakened her lungs over the years, and she was forced to take regular penicillin shots to prevent infection. Today, Mama and I heard the dull clopping at about the same time and looked up from the flowers to see who might be riding up the gravel road. Nearing us, Uncle Quint, Mama's youngest brother, pulled up in his saddle, dropped his head, stiffened his neck, and stared stolidly ahead. Mama kept working quietly until he was even with us, then spoke, "Hello, Quint." Silence resounded. As Uncle Quint moved on past us, still in hearing distance, Mama's voice rung out, "Speak, ass; mouth won't." I was surprised, then tickled; Mama looked at me and we both started laughing. Quint, if stung by the laughter, never let on.
Mama came from a large family, her birthplace within a mile of our home now. Quint was the youngest child of eight. After Gramma's and Gramp's death, the old home place was sold, but Quint refused to cooperate; he made it a habit not to speak to family members. This went on so long nobody was disturbed any more; in fact, we all laughed about Quint and Aunt Edna.. Aunt Edna worked at a shirt factory; we kids dubbed her "the frog," referring to her stiffness when their car passed our house in the early afternoons. She kept her neck poker-straight, stiff, refusing to look toward the house. This would not have been strange anywhere except in a country setting, where neighbors are curious and sometimes downright nosy. Uncle Quint's going and coming after Aunt Edna served as a clock; he would leave every day at four and come back by at four-thirty. We'd always know he was coming, for we could hear a car turn up the mountain road and labor until it passed the house and died into a dusty echo.
My sisters and I would usually be sitting in the porch swing, bare feet hanging; or we'd be scuffling back and forth until we were warned, "Behave yourselves" in no uncertain tones. Failing to heed that voice often got us a good switching. Mama kept a switch handy, a hickory or peach limb, young and limber, skinned of its leaves-if we hadn't found and thrown it away. Uncle Quint and Aunt Edna were people to torment. We would sometimes stand by the road and wave or call out to them, with them just stiffening even more overtly. One time, Mama never found out about this until they were all married and on our own, we built a roadblock and put smack dab in the center of it an "Old Black Joe" fertilizer sack. This joke didn't carry racial innuendo; at the time, all we kids were thinking was that Uncle Quint would have to stop and unblock the road to pass; hiding in nearby bushes, we covered our mouths to muffle the escaping glee. Another episode with Uncle Quint wasn't funny all. We were plenty scared when he lifted his rifle and shot above our heads. This time, we went running to Mama and Daddy and told them. That, of course, didn't do too much to set things better; everybody stopped talking.
What adults said to do wasn't always what kids did. Almost every evening, my sisters and I would slip halfway down the wooded hill separating our house and Uncle Quint; there, we would perch on large, obtruding limestone rocks and sit talking with our cousin Anna Mae. Anna Mae was in high school and seemed to know just about everything. We rode of the same bus in the afternoon, but then, she'd be sitting and talking with the older kids, not even letting on she knew any of us younger ones. When she met us in the woods each afternoon, there was no other competition, and we would swap what was going on in both houses. Those evenings on the rocks were good times, and we would sit there eating and talking-mostly about growing up- until one parent or another would come outside and yell for us to come in. One time, when Anna Mae had finished wetting and was pulling up her panties, she remarked, "You know, it smells worse the older you get."
I probably would not have remembered that remark--it seemed out of place and unlike Anna Mae-if it had not been I learned its truth over the years. Something about life brings people closer and closer to its mortal smells and to the realization that they inevitably wage a losing battle--that the smells win out in the end. As a child, I'd stumbled upon bloated, rotting animals, so I knew the smell of dead flesh. I'd been particularly unhappy with my own body chemistry as I grew up. My discomfort began early, in the smells of one kid or another's having wet the bed, the rancid odor of urine in a chamber pot, and the smell that lingered even after I'd changed my panties and which I kept denying. Mama urged us girls toward bodily cleanliness, teaching us the importance of washing often and doling out to us some of her own powders and perfumes.
Anna Mae moved off the mountain after she got married, and we didn't see much of her after that. The years, in fact, started changing all of us. My sisters stayed home and went to high school there, but I struck out on my own, wheedling until Mama and Daddy let me move across the mountains to live with an elderly woman and a home missionary. I'd argued I could work at a restaurant and support myself, that I needed some courses for college. I had other reasons, though, for wanting to leave, reasons I can't fully share; I knew intuitively--even then-- I would never be able to escape myself completely, but I'd learned to run from the festering wounds, darkness and obliteration that haunted me. Mama sensed the disturbance in me and watched me retreat inside myself; she hurt for me, but she knew she could not do what I was going to have to do in time for myself-bear up under the pain inside me. Mama knew the same kind of pain, and it didn't come from anything one could put a hand on; it just welled up inside a tender heart.
I regretted the physical separation between me and the family. That first step lead me farther and farther away until a haze covered my memories of family and home in much the same way it covers the mountains on a summer's August day. I've often wondered how life might have been different if I'd spent those last two high school years at home; two years out of life is a very long time indeed; they can never be undone, no matter how much regret might fill the rest of life. I knew, though, that the separation was necessary, that without it, the darkness inside me would have engulfed and possessed me in entirety.
In college, I learned Aunt Edna died. Her name aroused a guilt in me for all that had come before. I remember Anna Mae's saying the stench gets worse as you get older. Aunt Edna had died of stomach cancer left her bloated, smelling terribly, begging to die.
After Aunt Edna died, Uncle Quint married another woman. Talking to Mama and Daddy now, he and his new wife would walk up the hill and visit. Mama'd said, though, "Quint's still as ornery as ever; he keeps gettin' in trouble with jest about ever'body here on the mountain." Daddy just stopped having any dealings with him; but even then, Mama said, he'd "come totin' a gun up t' hill, threatenin' t' shoot for this reason or that. Most times, if'n y'd jest let him have his say, he would cool off and go away." Mama always defended him in quiet tones that made me realize she still loved him as the baby brother whose diapers and pants she'd changed, who still needed protection. At one point, Mama told me, he'd even had himself made deputy sheriff; "he'd git out in that little car of his'n and drive around with that blue light a-turnin,' pulling over this'un and that'un." Talk had it that he had hardened arteries, just like the old man, and that he wasn't really responsible for what he was doing; still, others just shook their heads and said he was "an ornery cuss and needed t' be put outta his mis'ry."
They finally sold Mama's home place, its timber being cut and hauled off, leaving the mountains much barer than it had been when we were children. Uncle Quint held on to his eighth stubbornly-but never seemed to be sure just where it was; he cut timber all over the mountain. Daddy told me he would hear Quint's chainsaw going most every day. What he did with his money after he sold the logs he cut was a mystery. Like his daddy before him, he didn't believe in banks.
The day came though when the mountains no longer echoed of chainsaws. Uncle Quint had been hoeing in the garden, I learned, when a single blast from a high powered rifle exploded his heart. He dropped dead instantly, the hole where the bullet entered, a purplish blue around edges that disappeared into a gaping blackness. His wife had rushed out to see what the shooting was about and found him dropped down among the onions. Hysterically, she'd run up the hill, falling into Mama's arms, sobbing, "Somebody's shot Quint." She stayed with Mama while Daddy and one of my sisters ran downhill to see about him. Daddy rolled him over but knew from the weight he was already dead. Reba told me later, "What was horrible was his eyes, wide open, all rolled back in his head. I'll never forget that f'r as long as I live."
Somehow or another, they all got through the rest of that day. An ambulance took away Uncle Quint's body. The newspaper reported the story: Quint W. Mullin was found shot in his garden and was dead upon arrival at General Hospital. He had one daughter, Anna Mae Denton, who lives with her husband and son in Crawford. He was preceded in death by Edna Mullin and is survived by his wife, Margaret.
"For a while," Mama told me over the phone, "ev'r'body in them hills was jumpy, ev'r'body suspecting ev'r'body else.." I learned the shot had come from a high-powered rifle, and obviously from some distance. The killer had evidently waited, sighted through binoculars, then fired at just the right moment. Where he went from there, no one ever discovered. An old gray car had been reported as tearing off the mountain in a powerful hurry, but no one had thought much about it, not until later. Everybody seemed to think Quint had been killed due to some kind of grudge, but that made everyone a suspect-they'd all had grudges of one kind or another against him. Most everybody agreed, though, "It jest ain't right t' kill a man in cold blood like that, no matter what he's done." Mama was mostly quiet-just told me over the phone in between long pauses, "It makes me feel real bad. Quint didn't mean t' be t' way he was. He always wanted t' be t' center of 'ttention. Had t' be recognized. Makes me feel like I can't trust nobody no more."
Eventually, days after Uncle Quint was buried, in a grave next to his mama's, the talk died down. Anna Mae was ordered by court to pay for some of the timber her daddy'd cut. I saw her at the funeral and was surprised how much she'd changed, looking like an old woman in the face. I thought maybe it was the strain of grief working inside her. We didn't get a chance to talk, just recognized each other in glances across the church. I remembered Mama's telling me later that Uncle Quint's chickens had taken to coming up home and roosting after his death and that Anna Mae'd told her, "Keep 'em. Daddy would'a wanted it that way."
After the funeral, I returned to college. A sense of enormous distance between myself and my childhood stole into me, and I was unprepared for the sadness invading me. I wanted to reach out to someone, but instead, I sat before my dorm window and looked out into the night. The college clock tolled eleven, and a full moon danced off the reflecting pool. I felt filled with insupportable wonder at the touch of death this far removed from me. Deep in the dorm, I heard subdued voices, finding an irony in their unacknowledged destiny with death. I felt myself coming of age, realizing I was much nearer my own death, although it had not reached out for me yet. I pushed the thought from my mind, but that night as I slept, I saw Uncle Quint lift his rifle, and this time I felt the bullet tearing through my heart and woke in the panic of my own death.