Women weigh large in my life, I come from a matriarchal line, we track ourselves through the female. Women own the story in my line. Men are gloried, women carry the blood and history.
Pearl’s second live child was male, named junior after his daddy, everyone in the family just called him Bud. He was a handsome boy, blue eyed and black haired. The child had a raft of intelligence, a cunning gift for smelling the tide. He was large and quick, the pride of is mother’s loins, a ready weapon against his feckless, absent father. He was the apple of his mother’s eye.
Bud developed a few unnatural tastes under the warp of his mother’s loving hand, his little sister felt the brunt of those incestuous affections, bearing the full weight of her brother’s attention by the time she raised her small hand in second grade. She finally found the strength to run at sixteen.
Her mother knew. Her mother knew. Her mother damn well knew and let it happen.
My recent suggestion that we chuck Granny’s ash filled urn into the nearest bayou was met with shocked silence by my mother. My stepfather chuckled.
There has been some dissension among certain family members recently on where exactly to lay the remains of that vile old woman. I fail to see the problem, she’s been collecting dust in mother’s living room, hardly noticed, for the past several years. The folks stirring up this mess haven’t been to pay their respects once. Hell, they didn’t bother to visit the demented crone when she was alive. I can’t believe my mother keeps this evil bitch’s bones in her house.
The initial plan was to put her in a graveyard down in Bond, Louisiana. A four corners, moss covered, middle of nowhere, forgotten southern kind of place that her kinfolk founded well before the civil war. Relatives still occupy the town and my mother occasionally shares words with one of them, a genealogist of ambiguous sexuality. I believe he may be a hermaphrodite. I’m not sure if that burial plan was her exact wish or my mother’s preference, Granny may have assumed that she’d be welcome on someone’s mantel, passed down through the generations like some accursed heirloom. That my parents haven’t yet made the trip to plant her gold box six feet under has more to do with lackadaisical procrastination than any desire to continue living with her remains, a state of mind they may be regretting with the recent family dust up.
You see, my aunt, the beloved younger sister of my mother, was buried on her husband’s property nearly fourteen years ago after a hard case of cancer. He’s planning on selling now and Edith obviously can’t remain in stranger’s hands. The man thought it would be a good idea to bury the mother and daughter side by side in a nearby cemetery, a disgraceful and disgusting idea of monumental proportions. My stunned reaction included inappropriate suggestions about where to fling the ashes of the twisted sow who tried her damnedest to ruin the two most important women in my life. Prayers for the dead? Not a one will ever leave my lips for Pearl Bond Byrd.
My mother, a more accommodating woman than I will ever be, tried to find an arrangement that would suit her brother-in-law wishes. A price tag that ran into the low five figures nixed that abomination of an idea and it looks like Granny will be heading off alone to the place where her misery took root nearly a hundred years ago.
A fitting place for the wrecked legacy of our family to finally be buried, in my opinion.
Pearl Bond Byrd could have been my own grandmother, Juanita Jewel Bunn. She died, hated by her own, living with her criminal son in Yreka, California, not a few years back. She was a hateful, bitter woman to all her own children, especially my mother, whom she had institutionalized so she could steal her inheritance by having her declared mentally incompetent. My father finally got mom released and we all moved away from Kansas City, and settled in Montana…away from her mom. It was the one year of happiness my mother ever had.
My mother died, aged 29, after a botched C-section in ’70, and JJ Bunn, true to form, ordered hundreds of dollars for the funeral…against the wishes of my father…who got the bill.
You mentioned Louisiana. My grandmother was from Baton Rouge, and my mother was born in Greenville Texas. Batshit crazy pollutes the blood for generations. I am now seeing the bipolar…the new euphemism, starting to wreak havoc in the lives of my daughters, after leaving me alone, mercifully, for the most part.
At least I had other perverse slings and arrows to keep my sanity occupied when I was a teen. I did everything I could to keep my life from repeating itself in the lives of my children. Now they have new monsters to fight in their 20s.
Oops…preview is my friend… Grandmama ordered hundreds of dollars worth of floral arrangements for my mother’s funeral….and billed my father for them.
That story would fit comfortably inside a Pat Conroy novel. I know I’ve said it before, but when you write about your southern roots and family dirt, you really remind me of Conroy. I could read this type of stuff all day.
Sounds to me like you should haul her ashes to some good Yankee state in New England, and scatter them in the nearest landfill.
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Of course there is always burial at sea (but flush twice)
I understand the sentiment, but I can’t relate to the dissension over the remains. I know most folks have an attachment to burial sites and ashes, but to me, it’s all worm food after the soul is gone.
My instructions are to find the cheapest creamation available, and dispose of the ashes in the nearest large body of water (presumably the Mississippi). The latter is not legally binding, as it’s mildly unlawful, but I figure that a couple of pounds of sterile calcium won’t hurt Gaia, not really.
I love southern culture. But man, there is something about the southern matriarch that endows an amazing capacity for creating evil inside the family.
We had incest in the past, too, and it was a woman back a ways who draped the titanium threads that bound the whole thing through two generations.
When she died, I rejoiced openly. Now, a decade later, others are letting themselves speak the truth about that cowardly monster. True, you can go too far the other way, airing the dirty laundry in public; but I’ll never for a minute forget what “keeping it in the family” cost my baby daughter.
I’m with buckskins rule, and if you need a place, I live in Vt, I can provide it
midtown invoked Pat Conroy, a writer unknown to me. I’m thinkin’ more along the lines of Tennessee Williams, who ain’t got nuthin’ on you, Daph.
Buckskin, New England is way too beautiful for her, alive or dead.
I keep her ashes in my living room because I can look at that box and rejoice that she is gone. Maybe I am afraid that, without the constant reminder, I might begin seeing her in my dreams and around dark corners. Watery places sound good as she was terrified of water but my father’s ashes are in the water and I don’t want their ashes to have even a chance of meeting. He wasn’t a saint but…..
For an update, though – I am taking her to the family cemetery in the next few weeks. Without telling you the whole, sad story, please rest assured that it is a most apt place for her. I will avoid, for the most part, most of my mother’s inbred family.
My decision was made now to forever shut the door to any conversations with my brother-in-law about placing my sister’s ashes next to our mother. I can’t bear the thought and can’t begin to know what he is thinking. Who can ever explain another’s thoughts and feelings? His wishes certainly did get me off dead-center and on with the business at hand at last.
That’s one (more) nice thing about being male – I was spared both the bone-slashes and the minor irritations of the family “secrets”. I became aware of some of them well after I reached my maturity, so didn’t have to deal with them, hormones and adolescent Sturm und Drang at the same time. My sister was not, I found out later, so fortunate. Some of those secrets came to me via pillow talk with my wife, who relates very well to her sister-in-law, well after my mother’s death. Women “share”. It’s a strength, but not cost-free.
I’m sorry for your stress, but grateful for your catharsis, because it helps me understand my female relatives much better.
@Buck: I perceive not Williams, but Faulkner. Or perhaps Eugene O’Neill.
Mom, when my husband’s cousin killed himself, his mother was so angry at him, she wouldn’t let anyone know that he’d topped himself, and when she cremated him, she just wanted to dump his ashes in the trash. We didn’t go to the funeral, since there wasn’t one.
Amazing writing once again. Thank you so much for sharing pieces of your life with us. Stories from the heart – fueled by either anger or by love – always make the best reading.
Most problems dissolve in muriatic acid.
Put her away and do it quickly. Pass her by and never look back. Better gone and forgotten than reincarnated by memory and anguish.
My best wishes and prayers to you both.
Definitely shades of Faulkner.
Or Garcia Marquez, if you ask me in Spanish.
@Buck: I perceive not Williams, but Faulkner. Or perhaps Eugene O’Neill.
Faulkner works for me, too.
Goodness. It makes me wonder how some people manage to remain sane, given their experiences.
Life’s rough, Paul. But there’s no need to lose your mind over it.
The compliments have been generously kind, thank you all, I wish I was half as good as the genius writers y’all tossed off in comparison.
My sentences aren’t nearly as long as Faulkner’s, that man could write without taking a breath. Same with Marquez. I do love both of them, they are particular favorites of mine.
“No need to lose your mind over it” is sensible, solid advice.
:o)