When I was in college, my mom told me that she had a cousin who had drowned, a cousin they all thought would be raised from the dead. Mom only told part of the story. It was one summer night when we were cleaning the kitchen together that she mentioned it.
“Randy, Jr. was never embalmed,” she said.
“What?!” I asked.
The comment had come from nowhere. My hands were plunged in lukewarm suds, and I glanced over my shoulder to see scenes from Bones flick across the small kitchen TV.
“That’s because his body was too far gone when they took him from Ethel Mae’s house,” Nana had called from the dining room. “I still remember the stench.”
“Mother! Have some sensitivity,” Mom said. But then she said no more. I asked her to tell me the story, but she just shook her head and continued to wipe down the counter.
I had to pry the details from her that night, like gently loosening rusted hinges on an ancient door. She kept dodging my questions as if something compelled her to keep the whole ordeal buried deep. But after a few hours she came out with most everything. Or at least with everything I will ever know.
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Nana and Papaw had taken Mom and her brother to see Randy, Jr.’s body. Her aunt and uncle had laid Randy, Jr. in the guest room in the back of the house and left the sliding glass door open so the stench could air out. Mom and her brother wouldn’t go in. They swung listlessly on the rusting playset in the backyard and watched the gossamer curtains wisp in and out of the room of the dead. All they could hear were the creak of the swings and the wails and heavenly tongues of Aunt Ethel Mae.
Randy’s incident had happened on a Friday evening in the early summer of 1980. He and his sister Misty had been at Red Creek Park late, though the gates closed at sundown. According to Mom, no one was surprised they were there. We still don’t know who was there with them. All we know is that they didn’t stick around.
I don’t know how Misty contacted anyone. I can’t imagine her panic when her brother didn’t reemerge from under the dock. The fear of jumping in the stinging night water and squinting through the black to see his lifeless body thudding against the algaed post. She must’ve broken into the ranger’s station for the phone, risking the sirens and sobriety tests. Blind with fear. I’m not sure at want point the other presumed companions fled. Whether they feared the authorities or Aunt Ethel Mae, I can’t deduce.
Randy, Jr. had been laying in the guest room for at least twelve hours by the time my grandparents arrived with my mom and her brother. God and Misty are the only living people who know how Aunt Ethel Mae convinced the paramedics to leave him. I don’t know if they grew tired of the bereaved woman’s protestations or if they really believed that he’d get up from the bed.
Mom and her parents were the second in a long string of wailing guests, crying and bringing food and interceding in mystery languages. Mom’s grandma, Mamaw Mason, had been first. I can see her beehive crushed under a satin scarf because she had skipped her hair appointment. She wore no make-up because she didn’t believe in it. She knelt beside Aunt Ethel Mae, not quite prostrate, mumbling in her prayer language, yearning with her daughter that Randy, Jr. would live again.
This is what Mom saw of the body. Her and Uncle David could only handle so much swinging, especially against the backdrops of groans and heavenly tongues from just beyond the stinking curtains. After a somber, bored hour, Uncle David had tumbled from the swing to the rough brick side of the house.
“David!” Mom told me she had screeched, just above a whisper. “Get back here! We’re supposed to stay outside. This is serious. And you’ll get your shoes dirty. They’re Buster Brown.” Uncle David didn’t move. He crept through the unweeded flower bed and stained his baby-blue sailor pants with loam. “David!” Mom pleaded. “David come here!”
But he didn’t, and Mom went to him. I know she would have stayed out of the flower bed as long as possible until she needed to trespass and dirty her shoes to avoid being seen.
Mom has told me that where they hid against the wall, she and David had a straight line of sight through the curtains, across the bed, and to the door’s threshold. That’s where Aunt Ethel Mae and Mamaw Mason knelt.
Well Aunt Ethel Mae didn’t kneel. She laid full on the floor, groaning in unintelligible syllables, grabbing fistfuls of shag carpet as she writhed. Apparently, the curtains couldn’t muffle the sounds she made. The only word Mom could make out from Aunt Ethel Mae was a caterwauling “JE—SUS! JE—SUS! JE—SUS!”
Mamaw Mason rubbed her hand gently up and down Ethel Mae’s back, over her wrinkled nightgown. She hadn’t changed since she’d been awoken by the tinny ring of the landline at 1:00 a.m. from the Ranger’s Station. Mamaw Mason did not wail. She knelt with closed eyes and trembling lips, swaying softly with the rhythm of her prayer.
Nana and Papaw sat behind the pair, engaged in similar intercessions. Next to them sat Randy, Sr. and Misty. But I have a hard time imagining them. I can’t see past the grieving mother. I doubt Mom could get past her either.
Or get past the bed.
That’s where Randy, Jr lied. They’d had the decency to cover him up. Mom has not (and will never) described the sight to me, but I can imagine the loose white sheet making Randy’s drowned body a faceless mummified death mask. His nose and hands and toes the only visible markers showing he was still human. I wonder if Aunt Ethel Mae ever raised her eyes from her supplications to watch for the sheets to move, for the white death mask to tremor again with the breath of God.
The sheets never moved.
After ten minutes, Mom dragged Uncle David away from the curtains. He came willingly. After another ten minutes, my grandparents took them back inside. They sat in the living room the rest of the day as a greeting party for the family members and church friends who came to pray. Aunt Ethel Mae’s wails hollered throughout the incessant rotation of supplicants. They would disappear into the hall, some for five minutes and some for an hour, but all eventually rotated out amidst the endless backdrop for JE—SUS! JE—SUS! JE—SUS!
The only guest Mom mentioned specifically was Francine Stanfield. She came early in the afternoon. She apparently hadn’t skipped her hair appointment that day because Mom remembers the toilet paper enshrining her beehive. What Mom recalls about Francine still seems to haunt her, devils her with the question of whether they all had truly missed the mark. Because Francine stayed longer than any other guest. She had brought a twelve-quart pot of pinto beans and flung herself between the hall and the living room with every new guest. She took each of their hands in crepe-paper bones and demanded,
“Now you believe God can really raise him, don’t you?”
She checked everyone’s faith that day, trying to rally enough belief to move Randy’s bedsheet sarcophagus. She’d asked Mom the same thing, taking her ten-year-old hand into those skeleton fingers. “You believe God can really raise him, Elaine?” Mom never told me her answer.
But I know what it’s like to be asked that question. For proof of your faith to be demanded in the face of absolute absurdity and fear and sorrow. Why do you hesitate to believe and desire the supernatural? Why don’t you devote everything inside of you to it? Why don’t you fling yourself to the floor and wail begging and pleading and mortifying yourself until God pulls through?
I’ve thought about this question and this whole story more than warranted. Thought about how much that group of people really thought Randy would live. How much they wanted it and how much they felt compelled to it, felt that it was what God wanted them to want. I’ve thought about what I would do in my mother’s shoes. Thought about what it means that Randy is dead. About how they called the funeral home Sunday night after the two church services dedicated to prayer didn’t make the white death mask breathe again and how they carted Aunt Ethel Mae’s baby boy to be drained of blood and covered in fine powder and clothed in his father’s suit and paraded about among the same supplicants, who had wailed with her in the hallway who wailed with her again in the cushioned sterility of the funeral home and again as he was lowered into the vault of earth that still holds him.
I want to judge Ethel Mae for the whole ordeal. I think it still haunts my mother, like the question of if they all did enough still itches at the back of her brain. I want to be angry because she put so many people through such grief because she couldn’t let her son go. But that’s the part I can’t imagine. I have stretched my empathy to its outermost boundaries to understand this story, but I think I’ll only ever know rather than feel that when your son drowns, you drown with him. That maybe even I would believe in miracles to stop the dead from drowning and to stop myself from drowning with the dead.
Maybe that means we’re all united in grief—the believers and cynics and apostates. That religion is not our burden in sorrow, but the language we use to express it.
I told Mom something like this about a week after she told me the story. I think she was confused about how it had fascinated me. “Faith is the language we use to communicate our deepest desires. Like sadness or grief or sorrow or whatever.” I was holding back from saying the prayer vigils for Randy were more about grief than belief. I was afraid Mom would feel guilty again for not believing enough.
After I told her this, she stared at the TV and the shifting images of other decayed corpses on Bones. “Hmph. I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
Elliott Lay is a high school English teacher and graduate student from Caryville, Tennessee. His writing has been published in Duck Duck Mongoose, Speaking of Marvels, and Whale Road Review.
** Marcus Dan–Unsplash, cropped