THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

The Funeral of Cousin Elijah - 1977

202 1977 The Funeral of Cousin Elijah I am going back to Black Hawk Ridge to watch them bury my older cousin, Elijah. I say I am going to watch them—I’m not going to help, I’m not going to attend the wailing funeral service that I know will be held in the old slab-sided Baptist church. I’m going to watch them dig the grave, watch them lower the box into the black earth, listen as the dirt hits the top of the box. And then I’m going to get out of there, just like I did before, before the pull of the raw earth can rip at my heart. The black earth. On Black Hawk Ridge when we turned the earth to grow the scraggly corn and the thin runner beans the dirt was gray, sometimes black, and always loaded with stones polished by the wearing down of mountains and the wearing down of men. At the edge of the small fields and into the woods there didn’t seem to be any dirt, just layer upon layer of the The Pale Light of Sunset 203 stuff of which forest floors are made, the refuse of hundreds of years of the grinding turn of life in the near-darkness of dense stands of Appalachian hardwoods. The woods made their own floor, their own dirt. The dirt of Black Hawk Ridge seems sometimes downright personal. Like the dirt they take, now, out of the grave when they bury old Cousin Elijah. Cousin Elijah died with his face between the legs of one of the widow women from down on the lower end of Turkey Creek. His heart gave out at the very time the widow woman was giving out and Elijah began to thrash and twist, driving his face harder into the crotch of the widow woman, making sounds like the grunting of a pig, his head almost buried inside her, jerking. She had never known anything like what Elijah was doing and in her eagerness to help she raised her legs and wrapped them around Elijah’s head. All summer long the widow woman had plowed her own ground and worked her own bottom land, walking the long furrows behind the mule, and her legs were like bands of iron around Cousin Elijah’s head. Elijah died just like he wanted to, and just where he wanted to. Some said it was his heart. My uncle said he suffocated. When they dig Elijah’s grave, the men swing their mattocks against the black earth in the hole, then shovel it out into the pale light just beside the grave. In the hole the dirt had been alive, black with loam and time and all manner of living things. But as it dries in the sun it turns gray, the right color for being stuffed back into a grave. The next day, when they bury Elijah, the rain mists through the trees and into the grave, turning the gray earth black again and then making it thin. A small rivulet of the runny dirt spills down and spurts into the grave, splashing into the dark water already gathered there. And then Lee Maynard 204 more earth slides in and then more and the preacher is afraid the grave might cave in, so he cuts the preaching short and the men just grab the long wooden box and try to slide Cousin Elijah into the hole but the rain sluices through their eyes and the black-slick mud climbs their legs and runs into their stiff Sunday-meetin’ shoes and they stumble against themselves like corn stalks twisting together in a high wind. The soft edge of the hole gives way under Cousin Inis’ feet and he flops, arms flailing, into the grave in front of the coffin. The other men, already sliding the thick pine box into the grave, drop it in on top of him. It takes them a while to get Cousin Inis out and he nearly drowns in the liquid mud before they do. They have to put a rope around the box and raise one end of it, and one of the men stands on the coffin in the process, adding his weight to the coffin and dead Cousin Elijah, all pressing down on Cousin Inis, who is screaming from underneath the coffin that he can see the devil...