In the Graveyard Tent
Eddie Benoit drove his mother to the burial, her sitting rigid, hands tight on her purse. He parked behind the last car in the row, two wheels up on the asphalt, two down on the shoulder and caught the gray F-150 in the rearview as it eased in behind them.
“Mrs. Lefever just pulled up.” Eddie had learned to give his mother prompts like this to bring her into the present. He was sometimes successful but could count on only five minutes at a time. These days, she seldom left her house. He wouldn’t have brought her today but for Lettie Lefever’s urging. Even now, he questioned whether he should have been more forceful in keeping her at home. Watching her for a reaction, he jumped at the tap on his window, turned, and rolled it down.
Lettie leaned in. “Hello Eddie.” She looked past him to her friend. “Sabine.”
Eddie’s mother turned toward the voice, smiled. “Lettie? How are you?”
“Oh, fine, fine, just fine.” Lettie reached in and pressed Eddie’s shoulder. “You both look well.”
Sabine reached across to grasp Lettie’s arm and whispered, “Who’s dead? I can’t remember.”
“Marisa.” Lettie answered without elaboration and turned to Eddie. “We missed you at the church service.”
Eddie hesitated, unwilling to embarrass his mother by discussing the difficulties she’d begun to have leaving home. He settled on, “We ran late, so we came straight to the cemetery.”
“Of course.” Lettie stepped back from the car door so Eddie could swing it open. “I’ll wait and walk up with you.”
As Eddie stood, he noted the long line of cars down the curved cemetery road between them and the gravesite. He had no concerns regarding his mother’s ability to walk the distance. Sabine’s dementia had no impact on her stamina. Eddie’s interest in the number of cars related instead to the size of the turnout given the level of resentment Marisa had engendered over a long and selfish lifetime. He knew the crowd was there only because her lineage and wealth now empowered her inheritors. They would be present and would hoard all they saw and heard as fuel for the fires of hell they would rain on any who became enemies or irritants. Only Lettie, Sabine, and their respective kin stood untouchable, a testament to balance of power among competing bloodlines.
As Eddie walked around the car to retrieve his mother, he heard Lettie remark, “A lot of people here to pay their respects.” Eddie detected a possible hint of sarcasm, but dismissed it without comment.
Sabine held his arm as long as they were on grass. Once on asphalt, she let him go and stood steady.
“Down this way.” Eddie pointed and started them off toward the graveyard tent.
“How well did you know Marisa?” Eddie glanced at his mother for a reaction.
“Who?” Sabine walked with aging grace, no evidence of affliction at all.
Lettie picked up the thread. “Sabine and I stood up at her wedding.”
Sabine leaned forward to gain line of sight and spoke across Eddie, her voice harshened by factors he couldn’t know. “She only asked us because the others refused!”
Lettie’s delayed reply was directed to Eddie rather than Sabine. “That’s true, Eddie, but you mustn’t repeat it.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, your mother and I knew Marisa well enough that she could ask us, but we were never close enough to be her first choice.” They both glanced at Sabine, who appeared lost in memories. “If your mother says that at the gravesite, it would be like a final insult. Probably serve Marisa right, though. She was plain mean.” She poked him in the arm. “Serve her right. Your mother would think so, too.”
“Why did you agree to stand up at her wedding, then?”
“Oh, we were young, it was a chance to be in a wedding, to get all dressed up. I don’t know.”
Lettie’s mention of the wedding had clearly seeded resentment in Sabine’s mind. Eddie wondered whether Lettie had been preoccupied with other concerns and just not thought through the consequences of speaking about it. Worried about both women, he trudged down the road with them, toward the back of the tent.
Late June sun shone down hard from the Louisiana sky devoid of clouds. If birds were near, they hid themselves from the three walkers. Eddie heard only the sound of their steps, soft sounds delivered in unmatched cadences. Beside him, his mother had likely drifted into childhood memory, familiarity with the cemetery turning her thoughts to a death long ago or perhaps a visit with her parents to place flowers on a grave. Eddie often wondered where she went in those memories, what she saw, what she felt in being there. He had only the clues of her outbursts when she brought emotions back with her to the present.
“It’s a beautiful day.” Lettie’s voice rose emphatic as if to bring them all to heel in appreciation of it.
Eddie respected the effort to exert control, but remained concerned. “Mm-hmm” was all he could contribute. As strong a source of social order as he knew Lettie to be, Eddie saw trouble coming. Lettie could command a change of subject now, but intervention would be difficult when his mother heard Marisa’s name spoken at the gravesite. “Do you think we should avoid the crowd? Just drive back home?”
“They’ve seen you by now. People already wonder why you and Sabine weren’t at the church. I think it’ll be alright. I’ll stay with the two of you near the back, and we’ll watch her.”
Acquiescing, Eddie allowed his thoughts to pass to Marisa’s wedding. He knew almost nothing of his mother’s apparent dislike for her. Eddie added one more unknowable element to a past in which he had played no part.
At the gravesite, the folding chairs had filled and additional mourners stood behind, all shaded beneath the immense funerial tent. At their approach, a woman at the end of the third row spotted them and stood to offer her chair. “Sabine,” she called out, “You sit here.”
“Oh, I can stand.”
In the face of the offer, with the mourners’ eyes now turned upon them, to insist his mother stand in the back where he and Lettie could watch over her loomed unthinkable. Uncertain, Eddie looked to Lettie.
Seeming to accept a change in strategy, Lettie stepped forward to Sabine’s other side and whispered, “Honey, hush.” The third-row woman and Lettie gathered Sabine in between them and guided her forward to the chair, then stepped back a few rows.
Standing at the back corner of the tent, Eddie watched his mother and wondered at Lettie’s uncharacteristic forbearance at having her intentions denied. Did Marisa’s meanness intimidate her even in death?
No air stirred. The tent held off the sun, but the breeze—admittedly inadequate to the point of insignificance even during their walk—now abandoned them altogether. Ladies’ fans whipped with virtuosity toned by long practice in meetings religious and otherwise. Eddie’s mother carried one in her purse but had not brought it out. The woman to her right reached over and helped her find it.
As the pastor began to speak of their departed sister Marisa, Eddie’s mother’s voice rose to reach his ears, thick with emotion but unintelligible at his distance. The woman to her right leaned close, perhaps whispering comfort, perhaps placing a hand on his mother’s arm. His mother shrugged her away, leaned forward, pushed herself from the chair, found her feet. “She only asked us because the others refused!”
As Eddie rushed to his mother, he saw Lettie step in to embrace Sabine and draw her from the collective gasps. He saw it clearly then. Lettie’s face. The satisfaction in her eye.
© Richard Schreck
Richard Schreck is a Maryland writer. He is the author of over 30 non-fiction works and a former publication editor for TESOL, the largest professional association of persons who teach the English language. “In the Graveyard Tent,” as well as his fiction in The Mailer Review, Gypsophila, Backchannels, and Mollusk Lit explore a fictional world he is developing in Brain Game, a novel set in Baltimore and New Orleans in the years following Katrina. Find links to more of Richard’s short fiction at richardschreck.com.
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