The Green Turf

The Green Turf by Grace Cash I got a taxi from the Pulaski Bus Station to the Altamont Cemetery where they were to have graveside services for Joe Dan Mathews. The town now had high-rise apartment houses, and motels galore like all other towns had acquired during the past thirty years. Of course, I already knew that. I had been to Pulaski less than a year ago, after Joe Dan and Lori got a divorce. At that time I had seen only the backside street where "nice girls" didn't go when I lived in Pulaski, going now only because I heard that Joe Dan was drinking himself to death. The funeral came on a convenient day— Thursday—when Charley visited Mrs. Jenkins. My mother-in-law was still in her 55 "right mind" which meant if Charley didn't visit on Thursday she had fits. Anyway he didn't want to attend Joe Dan's funeral. He cared nothing about Joe Dan's record as a high school football hero, still less about his smoldering dreams of becoming a professional football player. What Charley knew about us—really knew about us—he kept to himself. Charley thought what I felt for Joe Dan was a passing phase, thinking as everybody else did, that he was bound for life to Lori Bailey, the girl he married. We all thought that till they got a divorce in 1979. The 1940-41 class was already there when the taxi let me out at the cemetery, a limegreen grassy flatland marked with numerous tombstones newly erected and others older than the town itself. Hazel Bridgeman, who had been class valedictorian, met me with a woeful face. We approached the grave, gaping wide, hidden by green turf, and an abundance of flowers, arranged in altars and crosses. The turf looked like the lining of a crepe paper box I once carried to a box supper at the Pulaski gym. I remembered the day last fall when I went to see Joe Dan. That day I had the car and drove down, sixty miles from Addison. I chalked off about five more miles before I located the rooming house on South Pine, where he lived. I climbed the dusty creaking steps to the second floor and went down a wide hall, smelling of wine and urine and onions to Room 204. He came to the door, holding onto a chair. His tattered bathrobe matched the wine dripping from a discarded bottle on the grubby rug. I had expected him to look—well, at least like he did, working in the barber shop he inherited from his father. That was after Joe Dan tried professional sports and couldn't make a comeback. The South Pacific campaign had taken its toll. He couldn't perform with his former strength and agility on the field. He finally settled in at the barbershop, there on Granger Street, back of the Federal Building, going toward Main Street. Seeing him like that, his face screwed up like a dried apple, like a pig's face, his black eyes dull and embedded behind folds of flesh gone to whelps, froze my feet to the bilious green welcome mat at his door. He looked uncertainly at me and he said, "Come in," his voice slurred. I was remembering all that when Hazel said, "They're divorced but I thought wives attended their Exes' funerals. Strange they had only graveside." There was no time left for reply. They had come, the pallbearers weighted down with the hundred-and-fifty pounds Joe Dan had become, the minister holding tightly to his Bible . What he read from the Book of Psalms, how man's life is "swifter than a weaver's shuttle," and a few words about the sorrow no man escapes, just about comprised the graveside services. Rory Blackwell strolled over to where I stood. His wife hadn't come, Rory saying she had to attend a benefit bazaar. He seemed pleased with her community activities. She had never been enamored of Joe Dan, nor of anyone, except Rory, sort of standing out as a person of rock-like character. "Where's Charley?" Rory...