Nola's Ashes

  NOLA’S ASHES

  By Deborah Smith

  The heart’s dead are never buried.

  —Samuel Hoffenstein

  Like most southern women, I was often the referee for two opposing teams—Mama’s side of the family, and Daddy’s side of the family. We abbreviated the terms and rolled the key words together as a shorthand to make the distinctions easier. Mamaside. Daddyside. For example, my mama’s mother used to say: The young’uns on your Mamaside never think to poke things up their noses for fun. But the young’uns on your Daddyside will stick a dadblame crawfish up their snout if you let ‘em.

  Great Aunt Nola was from Daddyside, the eldest of my grandmother and her five sisters. She, Grandmother, and the rest were all ill-tempered and domineering, but as their ringleader, Nola had no equal in the bad-mood sweepstakes. She was the worst-case example of my hard-headed Daddyside kin. Nola, Grandmother, and their sisters had, on average, a good seventy five years of things to fight about. Who got to wear the nicest dress to the revival meeting one summer. What really happened the night in 1942 when Cousin Seeton got hit by the train? Had Papa’s favorite mule been named Glory or Beau? When Uncle John came home from Korea, who was he happiest to see? They went round after round by phone and mail over those and other issues, both lesser and greater. Since my grandmother lived with us, we regularly heard the loud, unpleasant phone battles from her bedroom.

  “Thank God,” my mama said. “All but two of the old biddies live out of state. I can’t imagine acting that way with my sisters.”

  You see, on Mamaside there was civility, kindness, and true camaraderie among siblings. Mama and her four sisters never even raised their voices to each other. So the rantings among the women of Daddyside not only distressed Mama, they disgusted her. Not that Daddy approved of his mother’s relationship with her sisters, either. He dreaded the rare occasions when one or more of his aunts came to visit Grandma, because invariably the visit would break down into a yelling match within hours, and then Daddy would have to get the car and load up the visiting sisters and drive them back to their homes or to the Greyhound Bus station. I can’t recall a single visit in which a sister actually ended up spending the night as planned.

  This kind of nonsense wore thin over the years. Daddy died young of a heart attack, leaving Mama to deal with Grandma and her sisters alone. I decided to help her as much as I could, so after I married and moved nearby, I ran interference as often as possible: intercepting phone calls, chauffeuring angry visiting sisters back to the bus station or the airport, and writing obligatory birthday and Christmas cards Mama refused to send. She blamed Daddy’s early heart at tack on stress induced, in part, by Grandma and her sisters.

  Mama watched with quiet glee as three of the Daddyside sisters died off. Then Grandma passed away, leaving only Nola, who was eighty-seven and lived in a small apartment an hour’s drive away, in Atlanta. Nola had divorced her two husbands decades earlier, never had any children, and for the past twenty years had refused to travel farther than a mile from her apartment building. Which meant that whenever I had been pressed into service driving Grandma to visit Nola for lunch, we could not eat at Grandma’s favorite place, the Picadilly Cafeteria, because it was on the other side of the intersection that marked the boundaries of Nola’s territory. And every time, Grandma and Nola would argue about Nola’s eccentricity.

  When Grandma died, I thought, I’ll never have to hear about the “twenty damned feet of concrete between here and the Picadilly,” again. I sent Great Aunt Nola money for her birthday and Christmas, and every month or so during the rest of the year, with cards saying, “Have a nice lunch on me, and call me if you need anything,” so Nola wouldn’t bother Mama. Nola started calling me at least once a week to fill me in on all the issues she and Grandma and the sisters had argued over. I felt sorry for her. She couldn’t stop arguing, even if there was no one left to argue with. She was a prizefighter swinging gamely in the middle of an empty ring. I wasn’t good for anything but listening—no yelling, no slinging the phone—but I would do for practice.

  “You stay out of Nola’s business, because I’ve already done my duty and you’ve done yours to all the old ladies from your Daddyside,” Mama said regularly, never suspecting that I was paying Nola hush money and diverting her punches.

  One day, Nola died. Just died in her sleep, nothing extravagant about it, and I was grateful that my duty had finally ended. But then I realized that because she had no blood relatives other than me—a great niece—I had to take charge of the funeral. Nola had attached a note to her will, saying she didn’t want any ceremonies, she just wanted her body cremated, and she wanted me to pay for it, but giving no other instructions. When Mama saw the will, she said in disgust, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Nola left all her apartment furnishings, her small savings account, and her ’67 Buick to an old man who lived in the apartment next door to hers. I didn’t know if she considered him her boyfriend or not, and I didn’t ask.

  “Lord, lord,” he said when I told him about the legacy. “That car hasn’t been out of the garage in ten years. She sure didn’t like to travel.”

  “Would you like for me to send you her ashes?” I asked hopefully. “I mean, to keep in an urn, in honor of her memory, or maybe to sprinkle in the shrubs outside your building, or something like that?”

  “Oh, no,” he answered quickly. “The Buick’s enough for me.”

  When I told Mama, she snorted, “I’ll be damned,” again.

  She and I had to go down to the funeral home and set up the paperwork for the cremation, and we had to identify Nola’s body as a matter of formality. Mama preceded me into the viewing room with an unlit cigarette clamped in her lips. She squinted at Nola’s corpse, which had been wrapped artfully in white sheets. “Yeah, that’s her,” she growled to the mortuary director. As we walked out, Mama said to me, “She looks like all the old ladies on your Daddyside. Good and dead.”

  Unlike Mama, I regarded my Daddyside duties with stoic neutrality. I was just glad Nola wouldn’t be calling me anymore. I merely wanted to disperse her ashes and pay off her phone bill. I called some of her elderly distant cousins, and I called her few remaining old friends. Surely one of them would feel honored and compelled to accept Nola’s dusty remains. No sale.

  After a week or so the impatient funeral director called. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t store your great aunt’s remains any longer. I’ll ship them to you by regular mail.”

  “I have an oversized m-mailbox,” I stuttered in surprise, “but I’m not sure—”

  “We do this kind of thing all the time. The remains will be safely packaged in a small, plain-brown box. They’ll fit.”

  I began to watch the mailbox nervously. Four days later, the package still hadn’t arrived. My husband and I lived on a secluded country road. With a certain amount of grim humor he pointed to an article in our small town weekly newspaper. Post Office Reports Mail Thefts In Some Areas. Oh, no. Maybe someone had stolen Great Aunt Nola.

  “They probably mistook the plain-brown package for dirty movies,” Mama said.

  Two weeks later, the post office located the package in the mailbox of a recently vacated house trailer on the other side of the county. Our new 911 system had instituted new street addresses only a month before, and my address and the other were only one digit different.

  At any rate, when I retrieved the package from the post office I suddenly realized how strange it felt to hold a small cardboard box, knowing that, in a very real sense, Great Aunt Nola was inside. I could remember all her pettiness, and all the bickering of the Daddyside sisters in general, all their disregard for simple civility and larger purposes, and how much misery they had caused Daddy. Bad feelings seemed to
gather around that box like a smell.

  I couldn’t bear to store it in my house until I decided what to do with the ashes. My husband refused to take it to his office, saying his secretary dutifully opened and unpacked every package she found near his desk and wouldn’t like the surprise if she accidentally dumped Great Aunt Nola on the carpet. So I set the box in the back of my Explorer and drove over to Mama’s.

  “The old lady’s ashes don’t worry me,” Mama grunted. She pointed to a wheelbarrow in her garage. “Just set ‘em over there.”

  “I can’t just put Great Aunt Nola in the wheelbarrow!”

  Mama rummaged in a closet then handed me a glossy, green, Rich’s Department Store bag. “Put it in that first,” she ordered. “Then anybody who walks by will think I’ve been shopping.”

  I gave up. The box went into the bag, and I set the bag in the wheelbarrow. This just wasn’t right; it wasn’t decent; it wasn’t respectful, I told myself. Yet I was glad to get the box out of my vehicle and safely stored in the garage.

  Where, the next day, it was stolen by Joey Abercrombie, the boy who mowed Mama’s lawn.

  She noticed the bag missing not long after Joey cut the grass. He was only eight years old, and not mean, just not particularly bright. Mama called his mother, who shrieked, “He did what?” and then in the background Mama could hear the sound of her flailing Joey, and Joey yelping.

  When Joey’s mother returned the box—un-opened, thank goodness—she told Mama that Joey thought the box looked like it might have dirty movies in it.

  I couldn’t take this grisly and bizarre responsibility any longer. I decided to transport Great Aunt Nola to the small town at the south end of the state where she and all of Daddyside had been born. It was a five-hour drive, but once there I’d locate the old town cemetery and sprinkle Great Aunt Nola’s ashes on the graves of her parents, my great-grandparents. Mama insisted on going with me. We went on a summer Saturday, with thunderstorms crossing our path between alternate periods of hot, damp sunshine. It was late afternoon by the time we reached Daddyside’s hometown and found the cemetery. It had the quiet, pastoral look of all old rural cemeteries, where the grass is faded and a little bare in places, and the old headstones are surrounded by lovingly tended shrubs or ornamental fences.

  I carried the box to a pair of worn gray tombstones with my great-grandparents’ names on them. Mama kept her distance. This was not her blood family; this was not her sentiment. When we’d left that morning she’d offered one last suggestion: “If you won’t tell anybody,” she said, “I’ll flush Great Aunt Nola down my commode, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  But I insisted on this small propriety, and so she had come along for my sake—but chain-smoking, grimacing, and turning the car radio to loud and profane stations she never listened to ordinarily. When I wrestled with the box’s tape, she tossed me the penknife she kept in her purse. “Just cut it,” she said. “The wind’s coming up.”

  Something unfurled inside me. With our duty to Daddyside almost done, I stopped cold with the half-opened box in one hand, faced my mother, and said something I had held quietly in my heart for many years.

  “You’ve let them turn you into a bitter woman,” I told her, and began to cry. “You’ve turned into a Daddyside person, and I want you back the way you ought to be.”

  She began to cry, too, and came to me, and we hugged, trying not to squeeze the box full of Aunt Nola between us. “It’s over,” she promised.

  I nodded. There was nothing else to say about wounds so deep.

  Big dark clouds were puffing on the horizon, the scent of rain was in the air, and yes, the wind was pushing us. I opened the box and saw a cheap plastic container inside, wrapped in a clear plastic bag. Feeling a little queasy, I set the box and bag in the back of the Explorer then carried the plastic container back to the grave. With Mama chain-smoking and wiping her eyes, and a storm coming, I didn’t know what ceremonial words to speak, and whatever I said, I needed to hurry.

  “I’m sorry there’s not much to talk about,” I said aloud to Great Aunt Nola. “And I’m sorry you had to travel so much before you got here. Now go rest your soul and leave us alone.”

  I squatted down and pried the container open. The wind whooshed gray ash into the air. I jumped back, barely avoiding a face full of Great Aunt Nola. “Don’t get her in your eyes,” Mama yelled. Rain began to spatter us. I quickly spread the feathery pile of ashes across the graves, then rushed to the Explorer and thrust the empty container into the plastic bag. My hands and face felt dusty. My stomach rolled.

  “There was a Taco Bell just off the highway,” Mama said.

  I drove quickly.

  In the restroom of that fast-food restaurant I washed some small fraction of Great Aunt Nola down the sink. I rinsed and soaped and rinsed again—hands, face, neck, face, again. My duty to Grandma and my Daddyside great aunts had been fulfilled, but they’d always be with me, under my skin where I couldn’t wash them away, and probably didn’t want to, anyway.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Mama handed me two soft drinks and a bag of burritos. “Go get us a table,” she said. “I’ll take care of the rest.” Then she went out to the car with the rain peppering her, got the box and the bag and the dusty, empty plastic urn, and I watched through the restaurant’s giant, wet plate-glass windows as she stuffed everything in an outside trash container. She flashed me a satisfied smile as she came back inside, then she hurried into the bathroom. She came out a few minutes later with her hands and face scrubbed pink, like mine.

  I could manage a wan smile of my own, now. “Let’s eat,” I said.

  Although thunder boomed around us so hard that the restaurant windows shook, we ate our burritos in contented silence. I had Mama, and Mamaside was finally free of Daddyside. Finally peaceful. Outside, the wind moved in great, long gusts, picking up God-alone-knew what, or who, in its path.

  Great Aunt Nola was still traveling.

 

 

  Deborah Smith, Nola's Ashes

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