Hickory Goes To Heaven

7:00 am

The Little Sisters of the Poor

Hospice Care

Mobile, Alabama

July 28, 2013

Where’s the Blessed Mother?

She wasn’t available, so they sent me, the man sitting on the foot of her bed looked just like her late husband, Rappy. He sounded like him too.

Alyce could hear this man perfectly, but her grown children and everyone else around her bed were just mouthing empty sounds as they prayed the rosary led by the oldest nun in the bunch.

Those priests at St. Mary’s told us if you made the Five First Saturdays, the Blessed Mother would appear at your bedside when you’re dying. So, where is she?

A lot of what they told us isn’t … uh, accurate, he murmured.

And I don’t find out till I’m on my deathbed! What’re you doing here?

You’re dying, so they sent me to escort you across the Divide.

If you’re who I think you are, you died sixteen years ago.

Indeed, I did, but they won’t let me cross over yet. They have me in the Great Waiting Room to apologize to you.

Apologize for what? her eyes widened with suspicion.

For giving you such a hard time during those sixty years we were married.

What’re they talking about?! We had a lot of good times.

Well, hurry up and die so we can get out of here. Any minute those nuns are gonna surround your bed and sing hymns.

I hope I’m out of here before that starts.

You never were sentimental. One of the things I liked about you.

You’re Rappy, aren’t you, and we were married a long time, right?

Over sixty years, he shifted himself on the bed, realizing she might take longer than he had hoped to leave with him.

It was sixty-four. And you never forgot our anniversary.

They tell me you celebrated your 100th birthday last January.

And you didn’t even make it to your 90th! Those cigarettes and whiskey did you in, she chided.

Now, Hickory, I made it to 89, plus a month!

Only because I took such good care of you, even though it liked to have killed me!

I’ve forgotten a lot of that Catholic stuff, so tell me again. What are the Five First Saturdays? And what does it mean to ‘make’ them?

You go to confession and communion on the first Saturday of the month, for five months in a row. And you say the rosary and meditate and other stuff.

"And the Blessed Virgin Mary will not forsake you on your deathbed? Rappy hesitated to ask.

That’s what they say, but it doesn’t work. I was expecting the Blessed Mother, and they sent you!

She might turn up. You certainly have enough faith for her to indulge you.

Did you say ‘indulge’? I’ve never heard you use words like that.

In the Great Waiting Room, I’ve been reading a lot of books these past sixteen years.

Don’t they have a television set? You ought to see the big wide screens everybody has since you died. Why didn’t you watch sports while you were waiting all these years? I’ve seen you glued to stuff like European soccer when you couldn’t find anything else to watch. Don’t they have any cable channels?

They won’t let us watch sports—only the news. And they keep it tuned to Fox News, so I’ve been reading a lot of books. I guess it’s improved my vocabulary.

As long as you’ve stopped cussing, Rappy!

They don’t let you cuss while you’re waiting.

Did you know the Catholic Cemetery tried to bury you in the wrong hole?

The Catholic Cemetery

Mobile, Alabama

September 23, 1997

11:45 am

Alyce wasn’t about to leave the cemetery while her husband’s coffin lay poised over the wrong grave, a gaping hole which was freshly dug the night before. She sat in the backseat of the funeral limousine with the window rolled down while the cemetery manager, an obnoxious bleached blonde in her sixties with dark roots and bad teeth, gave a half-hearted apology for trying to bury Rappy in the wrong family plot.

It’s not my fault, Miz. Pee-rez, the woman’s breath stunk of tobacco as she poked her head and her clipboard through the car’s open window. You can see where I clearly marked on this map to dig the grave in the PEREZ plot, right next to your boy, Billy… Look! See where I done circled Plot #327?

I don’t like supervisors who begin a sentence with ‘It’s not my fault’! Alyce decided that at age eighty-four she had earned the right to show irritation with middle-managers who want to wield authority but refuse to accept the responsibility that goes with it.

They dug it in the dark last night, the woman continued with another lame excuse, so they had a hard time reading the map.

"You should’ve provided them with a flashlight. I mean, you< are the manager, aren’t you?"

Couldn’t find a flashlight in the dark. Now, this morning somebody done run off with my backhoe—they’re way yonder in the Old Cemetery and we can’t dig the new hole until the backhoe gets here.

How long will it take to get my husband in his own grave? Alyce clutched her purse lying on her lap to keep from being ugly to the stupid woman.

It’ll be late this afternoon before we get him buried.

It’s noon! … You can’t leave my husband in this September sun while you wait for a back-hoe! Alyce wished Rappy was there to deal with the woman. By now, he’d have charmed her into getting results. He was good at it.

Mama, they’re not gonna leave Daddy there, Little Rappy stuck his head through the limousine window. Radney’s gonna take him back to the mortuary and keep him refrigerated and bury him later this afternoon.

"This afternoon?! … You tell Archbishop Lipscomb I don’t like the idea of my husband being carted all over Mobile because that silly woman dug up the wrong grave," Alyce held her ground.

You wanna wait till they get him back in the hearse? having just turned sixty, Little Rappy suffered under the Gulf Coast humidity, sweat streaming down his graying temples.

I’m gonna sit here until I see that coffin slide back into that hearse! she pointed at the vehicle in front of the limousine.

You should go on to Laurel Street now—you know how many people will be dropping by—I’ll wait here to make sure they get him out of the sun and back to the mortuary right away.

Y’all are lucky I got out of this car and agreed to have the graveside services, even if it was in the wrong plot and the wrong hole! she snapped.

We’re grateful, Mama, that you didn’t make the Archbishop come back this afternoon to perform the service. He blessed the coffin and threw a handful of dirt on it, and he did the ‘ashes-to-ashes’ thing, so he can go home now.

I guess it doesn’t matter that he blessed the wrong hole. I don’t want him to come back this afternoon—I’m certainly not coming back. You and your brothers can make sure your daddy’s buried in the correct plot, right next to that tombstone that says ‘PEREZ’. That’s easy enough.

Little Rappy hustled away to find the Oscar Lipscomb to give him the good news that Alyce wasn’t going to sue the diocese for mental cruelty.

I shouldn’t have let two of ’em give eulogies for their daddy at that Funeral Mass in the church. After the Archbishop’s eulogy and after that mob of people traipsed back and forth to receive Communion, I was ready to leave and get Rappy buried. It would’ve been better to allow just a single eulogy from one of the children representing the other nine. They could’ve drawn straws to see who was gonna give the eulogy and the other nine give the speaker index cards with something written down they wanted mentioned about their daddy. . . Of course, Little Rappy thought he should speak cuz he’s the oldest. But then David got up there and told his funny stories about Daddy. That’s when I heard somebody in the back say Don’t tell me all TEN of ’em are gonna talk! Get the hook!. . . Well, at least neither one was sad and teary. And I did like the idea of the grandchildren stuffing flowers in the casket. They all knew how their Paw took such good care of his flowerbeds. When he retired from the bank, I thought he was crazy for digging up the whole backyard for his flowerbeds and vegetable garden. And there was that huge watermelon vine snaking out from under the picnic table where somebody spit out a seed at a backyard barbecue and Rappy wouldn’t snip off that burgeoning vine cuz he wanted to see how big it would get cuz he said, I just like to see things grow!… When the first tomatoes came in and tasted so good, I no longer minded that he had taken over the backyard. And I stopped complaining about those rabbit cages along the back fence. Once he learned not to feed the rabbits lettuce and table scraps, that manure stopped stinking. As long as he fed ’em the store-bought dry food, that manure didn’t smell at all. And he didn’t have to convince me that the secret to his juicy vegetables was the rabbit pellets. . . All in all, he was a great man. And I’m not leaving this cemetery until he’s on his way back to Radney’s refrigerator. I owe him that.

Shifting her weight on the limousine’s backseat, Alyce tried to relax until the coffin was back in the hearse. She glanced around at the gravestones surrounding the PEREZ plot and noticed that a few of them, not many, boasted an engraved inscription on the granite surface.

Maybe I should’ve had something engraved on Rappy’s tombstone when I ordered it yesterday. I’m sure it’s not too late. I’ll think about it tonight while I’m trying to go to sleep and call those Tillman people tomorrow. . . I wouldn’t know what to put on the stone—certainly nothing sentimental or gushy cuz Rappy wouldn’t like that, and me neither. I remember a couple of years ago when young Tommy-Two was visiting from Louisiana and Rappy took him shrimping cuz the cardiologist said he could no longer go alone, and after a few draft beers while watching the Braves game that night, Rappy said what he wanted on his gravestone was… He Never Sold a Single Shrimp!

He talked something awful about that guy around the corner on Hannon Avenue who went from door-to-door selling shrimp he’d caught in the bay. Rappy enjoyed giving away his shrimp when he had enough to share. And sometimes he’d bring home 50-60 pounds—if the Coast Guard hadn’t caught him for exceeding the limit, or arrest him for trying to bribe them with a six-pack of beer—and maybe six dozen crabs, and he’d call relatives and neighbors to come and get ’em!… But I’d never put something like that on his gravestone, He Never Sold a Single Shrimp!… What would people say!

Alyce glanced at her hands resting on her purse in her lap. She noticed how dry they had become, especially her fingers. She stared at fingers which had spent half her married life washing dishes with a bar of Ivory soap before the luxury of Dawn dishwashing detergent, and emptying out dirty diapers in the toilet before Pampers, and standing over a #3 washtub between Little Rappy and his daddy while the three of them headed shrimp in the backyard until midnight. Heading shrimp is murder on a girl’s hands.

If Mama was visiting the house when Rappy pulled in the driveway with the boat on the trailer, she’d roll up her sleeves and join us around the washtub of shrimp and crabs. She was a big help. . . And Josephine! She could head shrimp faster than any of us. But Rappy always put her on the fish cuz she could clean a flounder in a minute. Or a sheepshead. She was never surprised by a strange fish Rappy pulled up in his net from the bottom of the bay. . . Josephine. I wonder where she’s buried. Betty Jo said they took her back to Conecuh County to be buried with her family. I just hope they didn’t bury her in a slave cemetery. I know her grandmother was a slave, but Josephine’s mother was born free. Rappy tried to find out when he was untangling her Social Security mess, but she didn’t even know the exact year of her birth. She was a mess, that Josephine. Lord help us!

Friday, August 10, 1979

1706 Laurel Street

Mobile, Alabama

Rappy, why don’t you come with me to Josephine’s funeral? Alyce chuckled at her silly question. At 10:00 in the morning she knew Rappy wasn’t about to leave his precious vegetable garden, not if it meant taking a shower and putting on a white shirt and necktie. Ever since he retired from the bank six years ago, he never put