In a Shallow Grave by James Purdy

Author:James Purdy [Purdy, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0854490930
Publisher: GMP Publishers Ltd
Published: 1975-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

We took the bottle of rye along in case one of us (this was my idea) was taken bad, I wasn’t sure which one would be first, and we got into my used cream-colored Oldsmobile, and we drove to Three Oaks, which though not too far is a place I had never been to. Actually, all it amounts to is a gasoline station, a church, four houses, a silo, a big field of something wavy and green growing, and this Civil War cemetery full of blacks they claim fought on the side of the Confederacy.

Quintus’ mother’s house was the best house of the four. They had black crepe all over the pillars, there was gladi­olus on the front porch in big silver vases, an American flag waving, and inside in the front sitting room was the orange casket, and lots of white-haired black ladies in big hats sit­ting on camp stools.

Quintus didn’t greet anybody, and motioned me to follow him into one of the rooms off the hall. I could see by the way he didn’t speak to anybody what I had feared from the first might happen, that is he would go all to pieces, and I hoped to God I would not have one of my spells and let both of us down. If only he would cry, he might get through the funeral, but no he wouldn’t. So I made him drink some more of the rye right from the bottle, and then we went back to the mourning room and sat down on camp stools.

“Quintus,” I said after having started to speak twenty times, “you have got to go up and look at your ma in the casket, you can’t just sit here with me a stranger.”

“By and by,” he said.

My eye was running over the flowers, which I guess had been mostly sent by white folks his mother had worked for all her life, and all of a sudden I saw this big bouquet of roses and lilies with the card Georgina Rance, with deepest sympathy.

While the choir in the back of the house was singing one of the many hymns they comforted us with, without a word, I sort of lifted Quintus up by his arm pits, and then led him up to his mother’s casket. Everybody else had their eyes closed in prayer, they didn’t appear to notice. Quintus looked down on his mother’s face, but he couldn’t look more than once, and he took hold of my hand as if he was falling from a precipice, it was that kind of grip, and we went back to the camp stools.

I think we was in that room for four hours, only it seemed fifty, but gradually sort of, to my relief, though I knew this augured ill, Quints got just like a rag doll, I never saw anybody change so, and his forehead which had been as smooth as a sheet that morning suddenly was wrinkled and careworn like an old man of eighty.

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