As the first clumps of dirt thudded atop the coffin I began to think, What a shame. Looking at that sad, tall figure as she bent over to be kissed by my Great-Aunt Ruth and my Great-Uncle Zeke and as she shook hands with a cousin here and a cousin there—never a sister or daughter or son—the magnitude of my crime washed over me. How much I could have learned from her. She had raised her fist to her home, to her God, to her people, and chased after her heart . . . and lived. What had she seen? The scars were evident to me. I saw them in her hands, in her neck, in her stance, in her face. How had it changed her? For she could never return home. What had she come to understand of love and sex and lust and freedom, of violence and betrayal, of evil and hypocrisy, and all the naked pain I am sure she endured? Does knowing those things make living easier? But I would never know, for as Pharaoh I could hear my heart ossifying within my living breast. It would break before it would soften.

It was late September. Fall was coming, and a heaviness was in the trees, whose deep green leaves testified to the season and hung low in the heavy air. The family cemetery was at the edge of a field in the shadow of one of the three family tobacco barns. As we walked from the grave to our cars, she approached me. I searched for Jonnie Mae in her face, and was discomforted that I found only Rose.

“So they tell me you’re a preacher?”

“Yes.”

“I bet she died proud.”

“I bet she did.”

She said nothing more, not I’m sorry to hear about your wife, not Goodbye, not Take care of yourself or Fare-thee-well. She merely took one measured step back, looking me up and down, slowly, while pulling on her gloves. She smiled at me and nodded, nodded and turned, walked to a car, a rented Ford, got in and drove away, never looking back, not once.

A preacher.

December 8, 1985 12:30 pm

December 8, 1985

12:30 pm

—But I do love you, Ruth. You know that, don’t you? I always did. I always did and I always will.

—You don’t love nobody, you old liar. You never did and you never will. You don’t love nobody but self . . . your own self. And you know what? You don’t really love you, neither.

She is old now. Once she was young, not long ago, really. Only a few days, it would seem. A few sunsets, a few sunrises, a few childbirths, a few deaths. But she has been old for some time now. This she knows; this she feels; this she hates. When she was young, younger, so full of life and living, so impatient for tomorrow, so hopeful of hope, she did not reckon she would be old for so long.