Kudzu

Chapter One

July 24, 1987

It was an awful day for a funeral, as if there could be a good one as Mamma Lou was fond of saying. The temperature was hovering around ninety-six and the humidity made the air feel as thick as the kudzu that choked the very life out of the Eastern Kentucky landscape. The air conditioning in my ’81 Dodge Colt was blowing just a wee bit cooler than the outside air, but at least I could keep the windows up and keep my hair from blowing. Quite a trade-off, sweat for hair, but Mamma Lou always made a deal of a man’s hair. It was the least that I could do today, have good hair. Mamma Lou liked the boys. And I guess the boys liked her.

The Colt strained and groaned at pulling the long grades of the Kentucky mountains, and each incline seemed to steal a little more cool from the already laboring air conditioner. The mountains were beautiful, and from the four-lane highway that traced the tops of the ridges, I couldn’t see the mobile homes and beer joints and junkyards that followed the meandering paths of the county roads which lined the streams and valleys below. Except for the occasional horrible surgical scar from a long-forgotten strip mine operation, the mountaintops looked as peaceful and stately as sleeping lions.

I had left Nashville at daybreak. It seemed a lifetime ago. I had dreaded this trip for a while now, a journey I knew was looming. Nashville, Bowling Green, Elizabethtown, and Lexington, where I stopped for lunch: a Diego salad, Miller High Life, and an order of fried banana peppers at Columbia’s. The peppers weren’t as hot, the beer not as cold, nor the salad as crisp as I had remembered. Then Winchester, Campton, Jackson, and Hazard, and with each passing mile the dread building within me. It was indeed a bad day for a funeral, as if there could be a good one.

July 8, 1962

“In that deeeaaaruh old village churchyard, I can see a mossy mound . . .

There is whereuh myuh mother’s sleeping, in thee cold and silent ground.”

Travis Wicker and I sat under the splitting mimosa tree in the side yard of Jonathan Waddles’s house. Jonathan’s wife Zelda could be heard wailing in sorrow above the mournful strains of the brothers and sisters of the Ball Branch Old Regular Baptist Church, or the Old Regulars as they were called. The preacher was lining out the phrases to “The Village Churchyard,” and those gathered echoed in high and lonesome responses.

Jonathan was laid out in the front room of their small home and the neighbor ladies had all brought in coffee cakes and potted meat sandwiches for his wake. Earlier that afternoon the funeral home had delivered a sixty-cup coffee urn along with old Jonathan, twenty-five folding chairs, and a box of fans on wooden sticks, picturing Jesus knocking at the door. The preaching and singing would soon be over and the neighbor women would wash up the dishes and say their goodbyes. The men would gather in small groups, drinking coffee and telling stories, as they continued the three-day ritual of “settin’ up with the dead” while Jonathan lay corpse.

“If you don’t do it you ain’t got a hair on your lily-white ass,” Travis said.

“I will if you will,” I shot back. “Have you ever touched a corpse before?”

“Plenty of times,” Travis said, without so much as a change in countenance.

“Your lying ass. Travis Wicker you’ve no more touched a corpse than you’ve seen Becky Thacker naked.” The latter, another lie that Travis had perpetuated.

“I’ll bet you I have. When my grandpa died I snuck in the front room about two in the morning when nobody was around, and I went up to the casket and reached in and got a hold of his hand.”

“What did it feel like?”

“The thing I can best compare it to is a crocodile’s belly. You know, cold-blooded and tough feeling.”

“Horseshit, Travis. Now you’re going to tell me you’ve felt of a crocodile’s belly too? You ain’t never felt of no crocodile’s belly, nor no corpse’s hand, and you ain’t seen Becky Thacker naked. You’re as full of shit as a burning porch poke on Halloween.”

Mamma Lou was inside paying her proper respects. My older sister, Annie, was no doubt by her side, watching and listening as Lou held court over the body of a dearly departed neighbor. Lou wouldn’t be singing with the Old Regulars. Lou had very little in common with them, for they wouldn’t allow a woman to cut her hair, wear makeup, play the piano, or do many other things Mamma Lou was fond of doing . . . much less get married, divorced, and remarried. And Mamma Lou had a history of that.

Soon Mamma Lou emerged from the screened-in porch, Annie at her side. Lou dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, attempting to absorb the tears while keeping the eye makeup intact.

“Lewis Ray, you and Travis get in the car,” Mamma called.

Mamma Lou had named me, her second-born and what would turn out to be her only son, after herself. Why she didn’t name Annie some variation of her own given name was beyond me, but I had come to be known as simply Ray or Lewis Ray, but never just Lewis.

Travis was pretty much a fixture at our house. Most of my friends’ parents wouldn’t allow their children to sleep over at my house, but Travis was the exception.

“Sweet Jesus, roll down them windows. This is a terrible day for a funeral,” Mamma Lou lamented, “as if there could be a good one.

“It is some kind of hot this evening. They’ll be lucky if they can have an open casket for the service. I thought Jonathan looked a little bloated already. It’s hard to keep ’em up very long in this weather, unlike February when I had to bury Mitchell in the cold frozen earth. Oh my Lord, it seems like yesterday, and if I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget the sounds of them blasting caps they had to use when they hit rock. Them booms echoed all over Stone Coal. God, that was an awful day for a funeral, as if there could be a good one.

“Shit it’s hot in this car and my ass is sticking to this seat like it’s flypaper. Travis, excuse my French and don’t tell your mommy how I talk. I know I ought to do better.”

Travis and I were too busy pondering our late-night return to Jonathan’s house to be concerned with Mamma Lou’s lack of decorum. Besides, it hardly merited an acknowledgement for it was as much a part of Mamma Lou as was the hair and makeup.

“I’m going to stop by Whip ’n Sip for a cold Nehi. Annie, do you want a Tab? I’ll get you boys a snow cone.”

“I’d rather have a Pepsi, Mamma,” Annie said softly.

“I know you would honey, but you’d better have a Tab.”

Later that evening, just as darkness was settling in the low lies of the creeks and valleys and fingering its way slowly toward the hilltops, Mamma came into the front room of our cramped trailer, obviously dressed for a night of carousing.

“You all don’t think about leaving this house. I’ll be back a little after midnight. If that nosey bitch Miss Haggard calls, tell her I’m at choir practice or something.”

Mamma didn’t look anything like she was going to choir practice. Annie and I knew she was going to Cooley’s Nightclub over in Lothair. And a little after midnight usually meant two or three in the morning. At least that’s what I had come to count on. Annie always did just as Mamma said and didn’t leave the house . . . ever. I, on the other hand, took the opportunity to grow up way too soon. I knew things no twelve-year-old boy should know.

Mamma’s car sputtered as she eased out of the gravel drive and onto the blacktop road. We lived in a rented trailer that was perched like a bird on a wire in a graded-out flat spot that overlooked Route 80 just west of Stone Coal.

As the last hint of day disappeared from the valley, I sat alone on the big rock at the edge of our yard. It was about the size of a couple of pickup trucks and was the perfect place to sit in the cool of the evening. Often Travis and I would camp out there. We would take our quilts and pillows and lie on our backs and stare at the sky. When Mamma Lou would turn the porch light off, the stars would look like a million lightning bugs. Sometimes Travis and I would pretend we were up looking down instead of down looking up. If you stared long enough you began to feel like you were going to fall right off of that rock and into the night sky. We would play a game, imagining where we would land if we fell off of the rock and into the sky. The rule was, when you fell into the sky you would turn upside down and do flip-flops among the stars until you got so dizzy you couldn’t stand it any longer. Once you closed your eyes you would fall back to earth somewhere. Sometimes I would land over in Bosco or on top of Ball Mountain, or up on the High Rocks that overlook Stone Coal. Travis always landed in faraway places. He would land on the beach in Normandy where his granddaddy died or on top of the Eiffel Tower where he could see the White Cliffs of Dover in the far distance. Once, he landed in Rome on...