excerpt from Chapter 7: In the course of getting more involved with his daughters' lives, Ennis reaches a cautious truce with Alma. In the meantime, David begins calling him regularly.
In
early September, he listened to the now-familiar voice telling about
his first visit back to Georgia since moving to Duluth. Gramma Alex
had died unexpectedly. “The way she’d have wanted it,” David
said, his voice sounding fatigued. “She had a stroke, lingered in
the hospital for a few days. I thanked Aunt Carol for bringing her
to the wedding, that was the last time I saw her. Saw a lot of her
when I was growing up, and I’d missed her since I moved North.”
“I’m
sorry to hear ‘bout that,” Ennis answered. “I just met her at
the wedding but she was a nice lady.”
“Yeah,
she was my favorite relative, I wish I could’ve got there in time
to say goodbye. But it might not’ve made any difference. The last
day, they thought she was conscious but she just kept talking to
herself, thought her son Kevin was there. I never met him, he died a
long time ago.”
Ennis
recalled the sweet, artless voice, telling him about her family.
“She mentioned him when we were talkin’ at the wedding,” he
ventured. “He was killed in Korea. She said she still thought of
him as a young man.”
“That
so?” David was silent a few moments. “You think maybe she was
talkin’ to him? Lotta my relatives at the funeral, they thought
she just wasn’t in her right mind but I’d like to think she was.
You believe in somethin’ more after you die?”
Ennis
thought of Jack’s hand in his at the wedding. “Yeah I do, but
who knows how it works. Not much way for us ta tell. Huh?”
“I
was raised Presbyterian,” David said, “they were all about Heaven
‘n Hell and who was going there and who wasn’t.”
“Yeah
I was taught that too.”
“But
it doesn’t make any sense. You could be the most mean, evil
bastard in the world and you win the big prize after you go ‘cause
you believed the right stuff about somethin’ that happened back in
the Roman Empire? And what would you do in Heaven all day anyway?”
Ennis
tried to recall his unmemorable Sunday School mornings. “Well, yer
supposed ta be spendin’ all your time praisin’ God. That’s
what they said anyway.”
“Yeah,
that’s what they taught us, too. But what sorta afterlife is that?
Sounds to me like spendin’ eternity going to church. Would ya
really want to spend eternity going to church?”
“Don’t
sound like much ta look forward to.”
“I
have an old school friend, Maggie – she believes in reincarnation,”
David ventured. “Pretty convinced of it. Never have figured out if
I believe that or not, but I gotta say it makes more sense than what
we were taught.”
“Isn’t
that where you come back as a bird, or a cow or somethin’?”
“No,
that’s somethin’ else. It’s when you keep gettin’ reborn in
another body. People talk about coming back as other people, having
a bunch of different lives, but Maggie says it’s all one life, just
different times ‘n’ places. I never have decided whether she’s
right, but I’d sure rather think of meetin’ Gramma Alex again
lookin’ like somebody else than her spending eternity sittin’
around kissin’ some god’s butt and listening to harp music.
She’d hate that.”
It
had been awhile since Ennis had been curious about anyone else’s
life. He wondered about the woman David had just mentioned, if David
liked both women and men but instead he just asked, “David, uh,
how’d ya move to Minnesota? Didn’t like Georgia any more?”
David’s
voice suddenly sounded cautious and strained. “Well, I went
through a bad time, someone died… Maggie came down to visit me in
Atlanta during that time, she lived there a few years but then moved
back to Minnesota. Not her hometown though, she’s from a little
place in the farm country, Madelia. I told her I was thinking of
moving but hadn’t made any decision yet. And she offered me a
place to stay in Duluth while I looked around, decided what I wanted
to do. I slept on her couch for a month or so, finally wound up
buying a share of a house she found that had got turned into two
apartments. So she’s still a close neighbor.”
Nathan
died,
but without trying to understand it, Ennis knew not to ask about that
at the moment. Even just listening to a voice over the phone he
could feel a kinship with what he heard in David’s voice, something
like a partially-healed wound just liberated from bandages.
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