Beneath the Green

The Road That Only Appears After Funerals

The first time Jesse Pell saw the road, he was eleven years old and his grandmother had just been put in the ground.

It came up out of the kudzu where no road had any business being. A two-track of red clay, narrow as a deer trail, running into the pines behind the cemetery. The dirt looked wet, though it hadn’t rained in two weeks. His cousin Marlon saw it too, and they looked at each other the way kids do when they’ve both noticed something the grown-ups haven’t, and they pedaled their bikes toward it before anyone could call them back from the reception in the church basement.

The road did not want them.

That was the only way Jesse ever knew how to say it. The road did not want them, and they understood this without being told, the way a dog knows not to climb into a particular chair. They braked at the edge of the kudzu and stood there straddling their bikes, and the road went on into the pines for maybe forty feet and then was just gone, like the world had given up on it.

Marlon said, “That wasn’t there yesterday.”

Jesse said, “I know.”

They went back to the basement and ate ham sandwiches off paper plates and never spoke of it to anyone, including each other, for twenty-three years.

Jesse was thirty-four when his mother died, and the road came back.

He had not been home in nine years. The town was named Cluett and it was the kind of place that GPS sometimes refused to acknowledge, a wide spot off State Route 19 with a Dollar General and a Sonic and three churches and a cemetery older than the county. His mother had stayed. His mother had always stayed. She had run the front office at the funeral home for thirty years, the same funeral home now responsible for putting her in the ground, and at the reception in the church basement Jesse stood holding a paper plate of ham sandwiches and felt the past fold itself around him like a wet sheet.

Marlon was there. Marlon had stayed too. He was a county paramedic now, broad in the shoulders, gray coming in at the temples, and when he saw Jesse across the basement his face did something complicated and he came over and put a hand on Jesse’s arm and said, “I’m sorry about your mama.”

Jesse said, “Thanks.”

Marlon said, “Did you see it on the way in.”

Jesse did not have to ask what.

“It’s at the cemetery still,” he said. “I saw it from the car. I wasn’t going to say anything.”

Marlon nodded slowly. “I figured you saw it. The way you came in.” He looked at his paper cup of sweet tea. “Jesse. We need to talk.”

They walked out behind the church, where the kudzu grew up the chainlink and the air smelled like honeysuckle and old rain, and Marlon lit a cigarette with the focused care of a man who had quit ten years ago and started again that morning.

“How many funerals you been to in your life,” he said.

Jesse thought about it. “I don’t know. Granny. Uncle Pete. The Hatcher boy from school. Mr. Lemons. A few from the army. Mama, now.”

“Eight, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve been to a hundred and forty-three,” Marlon said. “I keep count. I started keeping count after Granny’s. You remember that day?”

“I remember.”

“The road was there. After Granny.”

“I remember, Marlon.”

“It’s there after every one. Every single one. I’ve checked. I’ve gone out to the cemetery the day of every funeral I could get to, for twenty-three years, and the road is there every time, and it’s gone the next morning, and nobody but us ever sees it. I’ve stood next to people. I’ve pointed. They look right through it.” He drew on the cigarette. His hand was shaking. “I need you to come with me tonight.”

“Marlon.”

“I never went down it. I never did. I stood at the edge a hundred times and I never went down it because every time I got close I could feel it not wanting me, the way it didn’t want us when we were kids, and I always turned around. But your mama, Jesse. Your mama told me something before she died.”

The honeysuckle smelled suddenly very sweet, sickly sweet, the way it does just before a thunderstorm.

“What did she tell you.”

“She told me she’d been down it. She told me she went down it the night her mama died, when she was eleven years old. The same age we were. She said she went down it and she came back and she never told anybody. She said there was something at the end of it she wanted me to know about, in case.” He stopped. He pulled on the cigarette. “In case I ever needed to.”

“Needed to what.”

“I don’t know. She died before she finished. She just said, in case you ever need to, Marlon, the road remembers. She said, the road remembers, and then she was gone.”

Jesse looked at the kudzu. The kudzu looked back at him the way kudzu sometimes does, which is to say it did not look at him at all, and that was somehow worse.

“I’ll go,” he said.

They went at dusk, because Marlon said dusk was when it was easiest to see and hardest to lose. They parked Marlon’s truck at the cemetery gate and walked through the headstones in the long blue light, past Jesse’s mother’s grave with the dirt still mounded and the flowers still fresh, and the road was there waiting for them, narrow and red and wet, running into pines that should not have been pines because Jesse knew for a fact that behind the cemetery was a soybean field owned by a man named Renfro.

The pines were there anyway.

The road did not want them. He had forgotten how strong that feeling was, how physical. It was like walking into a held breath. Marlon stopped at the edge and Jesse stopped beside him, and they stood there for a long minute, and Marlon said, “Your mama said the road remembers.”

“Yeah.”

“I think that means it remembers people. I think that’s why it doesn’t want strangers.” He was talking himself into it. Jesse could hear it. “I think if we go down it together, the way we saw it together when we were kids, it might let us. Because it remembers us.”

“Marlon, what do you think is at the end of it.”

Marlon was quiet for a while.

“I think it’s where the dead go,” he said. “The local dead. The ones that get buried here. I think there’s a place at the end of the road where they go for a little while before they go wherever they go after, and I think the road only opens on the days we put them in the ground, so they have a way to walk there. And I think your mama went down it when she was a kid because she wanted to see her mama one more time, and I think she did, and I think she came back, and I think she remembered, and I think she’s down there now.”

Jesse did not say anything for a long time.

Then he said, “Have you ever heard of a thing like that being safe.”

“No,” Marlon said. “I haven’t.”

“Me neither.”

“But she came back.”

“She came back.”

“And she lived a whole life. She raised you. She ran the funeral home. She was a good woman, Jesse. Whatever’s down there didn’t keep her.”

“Or it let her go because it wanted her to remember.”

Marlon looked at him. “What does that mean.”

“I don’t know what it means.” Jesse rubbed his face. His hands smelled like the church basement, like ham and coffee and the cheap soap in the bathroom. “I’m saying I don’t know what we’re walking into. I’m saying my mother spent twenty-three years not telling anybody about this except you, and only at the end, and only because she thought you might need it, and that doesn’t sound like something that lets you go for free.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I’m coming.”

“Jesse.”

“I’m coming, Marlon. Shut up.”

They walked into the pines.

The road did not want them, but it tolerated them, the way a tired host tolerates guests who have shown up uninvited but bearing food. The clay was wet under their boots and the pines were taller than pines and the air was colder than it had any right to be, and somewhere off in the dark something was singing, not loud, not words, just a long held note that rose and fell like breathing.

Jesse said, “Do you hear that.”

Marlon said, “Yeah.”

They kept walking.

The road went on longer than it should have. Jesse tried to count his steps and lost count somewhere around three hundred. The cemetery should have been forty feet behind them. The cemetery was not anywhere he could feel. The world had narrowed to the red clay and the pines and the singing and Marlon’s breathing beside him, and Jesse thought, this is how people disappear, this is exactly how, and the funeral home runs an obituary that says lost in the woods and the family knows better but they don’t say.

Then the pines opened and they were in a clearing.

It was not a large clearing. It was about the size of the church basement. There was no light, exactly, but Jesse could see, the way you can see in a dream. The ground was the same red clay. There were no trees in the clearing, only a low stone wall at the far end, knee high, made of fieldstones stacked without mortar, and people were sitting on the wall.

Jesse counted them before he understood what he was counting.

There were fourteen of them. They sat along the wall like people waiting for a bus. Some he did not know. Some he did. There was Mr. Lemons from the hardware store, who had died of a stroke when Jesse was sixteen. There was the Hatcher boy, still seventeen, still wearing the football jersey they had buried him in. There was a woman Jesse did not recognize, very old, in a Sunday dress.

And on the end, closest to them, was his mother.

She looked up when they came into the clearing. She did not look surprised. She looked tired, the way she had looked the last time he had seen her, in the hospital, with the IV in her arm and her hair flat against the pillow. She was wearing the dress they had buried her in that morning. Her hands were folded in her lap.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to come down here.”

Jesse could not speak.

Marlon said, “Aunt Ruth. You told me, in case I ever needed to.”

“I told you in case you needed to, Marlon. Not in case Jesse needed to.” She looked at Jesse. Her eyes were very kind and very far away. “Baby. You have to go back. Right now. You can’t be here. The road remembers the people who belong to it, and you don’t belong to it, and if you stay too long it’ll start to think you do.”

“Mama—”

“I know. I know, baby. I know what you want to ask me. I asked my own mama the same thing when I was eleven years old, and she told me what I’m going to tell you, which is that I love you, and I am all right, and I am not going to be here long, and I do not know where I am going next but it does not feel bad, it feels like sleep, and you have to go home. You have to go home, Jesse. Now.”

He was crying. He had not noticed when it started.

“Marlon stays,” she said. “Marlon, you stay. Just for a minute. I have to tell you the thing I didn’t get to finish.”

“Aunt Ruth—”

“Jesse, go. Walk back the way you came. Don’t run. The road doesn’t like running. Just walk. I love you, baby. I love you so much. Go on now.”

Jesse stood there. He could not move. The Hatcher boy was looking at him with a kind of mild interest, the way you look at a stranger’s dog. Mr. Lemons had closed his eyes. The old woman in the Sunday dress was humming, very softly, the held note that filled the pines.

His mother said, “Jesse.”

He went.

He walked back along the red clay road and he did not run and he did not look back, and the singing followed him for a long time, and then it didn’t, and then he was out of the pines and standing in the cemetery in the dark, and Marlon’s truck was at the gate, and the road behind him was gone.

He sat down on the ground next to his mother’s grave. The flowers were still fresh. He sat there for a long time.

Marlon came out of the kudzu about forty minutes later. He was pale. He had been crying too. He sat down next to Jesse without saying anything, and they sat there together until the moon came up over the pines, and finally Marlon said, “She told me what she wanted to tell me.”

“What was it.”

Marlon did not answer for a while.

Then he said, “I can’t tell you, Jesse. I’m sorry. She said I can’t tell you. She said it’s the kind of thing that if you know it, it knows you, and it’s already got enough of you for one lifetime. She made me promise.”

Jesse nodded. He understood. He found he was not even angry, which surprised him.

“Is it bad,” he said.

“It’s not bad. It’s not good either. It’s just a thing I have to know now. So I can do something. Later. When I have to.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Marlon.”

They sat there.

After a while Marlon said, “She said to tell you she loved you. She said to tell you to sell the house and move further away. She said the road remembers you now, even though you didn’t stay, and the further you are the less it’ll think about you. She said don’t come back for any more funerals. Not even hers, next time the day comes around. She said she means it.”

“Okay.”

“She said one more thing.”

“What.”

Marlon’s voice broke a little.

“She said the coffee in the church basement is mercy. She said you should have had a second cup before you came out here. She said next time somebody you love dies, drink the coffee, and stay in the basement, and don’t go looking. She said that’s the whole trick of it. The coffee and the basement and the people. She said that’s what keeps the rest of us from going down the road.”

Jesse looked at the cemetery. The headstones were silver in the moonlight. Somewhere a whippoorwill was calling.

“Mama always did make good coffee,” he said.

“She did,” Marlon said. “She really did.”

They sat there until the moon was high, and then they got up and walked back to the truck, and Marlon drove Jesse to the motel on Route 19, and Jesse checked out the next morning and drove nine hours back to the city where he lived, and he sold the house through a realtor without ever going back, and he did not return to Cluett for any funeral, ever, for the rest of his life.

He thought about the road often.

He thought about his mother on the stone wall, with her hands folded in her lap, looking tired and kind.

He thought about the coffee in the church basement, and how his mother had poured it for thirty years, hundreds of cups, thousands, for everyone who came in grieving, and he understood now what she had been doing, and he understood that she had known, and he understood that she had been a kind of saint, in the small unglamorous way that the world sometimes allowed, and that nobody had ever told her so, and that she would not have wanted them to.

When he was old, and his own time came, he asked to be cremated, and he asked for his ashes to be scattered in the river that ran past the city where he lived, very far from Cluett, very far from the red clay road, and his wife did as he asked, and the river carried him away.

He did not know if it was far enough.

But he had drunk the coffee, every time anyone he loved had died, every single time, for the rest of his life. He had stayed in the basement. He had talked to the people. He had eaten the ham sandwiches off the paper plates.

He thought, at the end, that it probably was.