Page 23 of Demon Copperhead

Maybe life, or destiny, or Jesus if you really need to put somebody in charge of things, had finally flung down one too many rocks in Mom’s road and she called it a day.

That’s option one. Or two, maybe she didn’t aim to die but miscalculated, to cap off her twenty-nine-year pileup of miscalculations, one of those of course being me.

I could spend the rest of my life asking which it was, suicide or accident. No answer on that line.

I’ll grant it did not look random, her clocking in as my mom and then out again on the same date.

To hit the mark like that would take some looking at the calendar and getting stuff together, you would think.

And that’s the thing, Mom was not a planner.

Plus I can’t be sure she even remembered it was my birthday.

Anybody that knew her would agree on that.

But now they were all sure she’d mapped it out.

The wake and funeral being throwdowns of shame for this girl that had gone and abandoned her child.

Bring on the fake nose blows, the eye-rolling towards me and shutting up if I came close.

The child mustn’t hear. Like I didn’t know whose fault this was.

Mom had promised to stay clean as long as I was a good enough son to make it worth her while.

Nobody was hiding that from me, I knew shit. I was eleven now.

Everything about the funeral was wrong. First of all being in a church, which I guess is required, but church and Mom were not friends.

This went back to her earliest foster home with a preacher that mixed Bible verses with thrashings and worse, his special recipe for punishing bad little girls.

Moral of the story, Mom always saying she wouldn’t be caught dead in a church.

And here she was, losing every battle right to the end, in a white casket from Walmart, the other place she most hated to be.

Jesus looking down from his picture on the wall, probably thinking, I don’t believe we’ve met, and girl, where’d you get that dress?

It was this ugly flowered one somebody put her in.

She was getting seen by half the town and buried in a stupid dress she only ever wore to work on Manager Appreciation Day, as her personal joke.

Now she’d be wearing it for the boss-appreciating days in heaven, so the joke goes on.

She probably would have wanted the dress Stoner bought her in rehab, but knowing him he saved the receipt and took it back.

Oh, but he was all tore up, was Mr. Stoner.

I almost didn’t recognize him in a tie, plus reflector sunglasses for the extra effect.

People lined up to pay their respects, with Stoner standing at the casket so the ladies could hug him and tell him what a tragedy to see her taken so young, and him a widower.

Then they’d walk away and say whatever shit they actually thought of Mom.

I could see their faces change, heads leaning together, hustling back to the living.

The church was not one the Peggots or any of us had gone to, except for some of Stoner’s family.

Sinking River Baptist. Maybe that made it Stoner’s home court, but I didn’t see how it was his place to be up there beside the casket.

He’d barely known Mom a year. It was me that had mopped her vomit and got her to bed and hunted up her car keys and got her to work on time, year in, year out.

I could have put her together one last time, but nobody was asking.

The Peggots did what they could. Came and got me from school, fetched my church clothes from over at the house, kept me over the weekend.

Mr. Peggot got out his electric trimmers and gave me a haircut, which I was needing in the worst way.

Maggot even more so, like years overdue, but out of respect they called a truce this once and didn’t have a hair war.

Which just made me sadder. Like, what had the world come to if Maggot and his pappaw couldn’t fight over a haircut.

Some cousins came in from Norton for the funeral, and normally with a full house there would be yelling over TV channels and the last chicken wing, a certain amount of soft objects thrown around.

But they were weirdly quiet. Eyeing me like I’d turned into a strange being that might break if you made any noise.

Mrs. Peggot for her part kept feeding me and telling me how Mom loved me more than anything in this world, which was nice of her to say, even if I was thinking at the time: Not really. She loved her dope buzz more.

I had roads to travel before I would know it’s not that simple, the dope versus the person you love.

That a craving can ratchet itself up and up inside a body and mind, at the same time that body’s strength for tolerating its favorite drug goes down and down.

That the longer you’ve gone hurting between fixes, the higher the odds that you’ll reach too hard for the stars next time.

That first big rush of relief could be your last. In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace.

And getting it. If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

But I would be wasting my shot, because the kid was in no mood to hear it.

I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.

Mad at everybody but mostly her, for marrying Stoner and then ditching us both, running off to some heaven where she could throw her shit anywhere at all, and nobody would ever lay a hand on her again.

And I’d have to go on living with what an asshole I’d been to her, especially at the end that I didn’t know was the end.

Last time I’d seen her at the house, did I even say goodbye, or let her hug me?

I can’t tell you. I’ve tried and will go on trying to see those last minutes again, pounding on them sometimes like it’s the door of a damn bank vault, but if there’s anything in there at all to be remembered, it’s not coming to me. Access denied.

Instead, I get to remember every single thing about the funeral.

That day sits big and hard in my brain like this monster rock in the ocean, waiting to wreck me.

I wish to God it would leave my brain. It stays.

All of it. The itchy black socks borrowed from Mr. Peg because I’d outgrown all but my gym socks.

The smell of sweat and shoe polish. The toothpaste green of the walls, a color Mom hated.

The sound of the quavery organ, old ladies stinking of perfume.

The wasps, this whole slew of them, buzzing and buzzing at the colored windows way up high.

It was a warm day for November and I guess they woke up. I watched them all through the service.

The people in the church looked like strangers.

Some or most I’m sure I’d met before, but I wasn’t seeing faces, just the rock-hard hearts.

All of them thinking Mom brought this on herself, and was getting the last ride she deserved in that cheap white casket.

A mean side to people comes out at such times, where their only concern is what did the misfortunate person do to put themselves in their sorry fix.

They’re building a wall to keep out the bad luck.

I watched them do it. If that’s all the better they could do for Mom, they were nothing at all to me.

What I had felt at the Peggot house with the too-quiet cousins wasn’t wrong: I was a strange new being, turned overnight.

Creaky liked to call us orphan boys, and I always felt proud inside for not actually being one.

So that was me doing the same, building the wall with me still on the lucky side.

Now I’d gone over to the side of pitiful, and you never saw a kid so wrecked.

At the start of the service they did that song about Amazing God, and I felt exactly the opposite: I once could see but now I’m blind, was found but now I’m lost.

The preacher and his sermon, the sin and the flesh, all that I won’t go into.

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my little brother being in that casket with her.

That part hadn’t dawned on me until I’d gone up to view her with Mrs. Peggot.

She patted Mom on her dead hand and said, “Poor little Mama, you tried your best,” and that’s where it hit me: my brother was in that casket. I was robbed. What a goddamn waste.

I’d had no intention of going to look at her with Stoner up there holding court, and anyway what kid wants to get that close to a dead body, let alone his mom’s?

My plan was to hang back and let other people do the viewing.

But Mrs. Peggot had her eye on me, and right before it was time to sit down, she told me I would always regret it if I didn’t go say goodbye before they closed the casket.

It hadn’t really sunk in that they were about to shut her in there.

Permanently. I let Mrs. Peggot take hold of my shoulders and walk me up the aisle.

And even still, I ended up not saying goodbye.

Too shocked. Not just by her being dead, which was expected.

And the part about my little brother, unexpected.

The worst was how pissed off she looked.

I’ve heard it said that the dead look peaceful after they’re laid to rest, but they’ve not seen the likes of Mom that day.

If I was burned about this, she was righteous burned.

It messed with my head, as far as my theory of her running off and getting away with it.