Gray Dawn

35

Funerals wear on me. I’ve been living through friends’ and relatives’ last rites for nearly fifty years. First my mother, then my father, and the numbers just rose from there, like levees that are bound to overflow.

I had experienced an entire war zone of dying, and so the marriage between Millicent Roram and John the bartender was a necessary pleasure. Everybody was there. Mouse and Vu Von Lihn; EttaMae and her white servant boy turned lover, Peter Rhone; Jackson Blue; Jewelle Blue; Lynn Hua, the Hong Kong movie star who happened to be in town for a new film; Melvin Suggs, Mary Donovan, and Anatole McCourt; the disbarred lawyer — cum — bail bondsman Milo Sweet; Paris Minton; and Mama Jo in one of her rare public appearances. Fearless Jones was there, of course, along with a hundred and fifty other sundry souls.

Bertrand Hollis and his nine-piece jazz band played the old kind of jazz, not the kind that made you think but the underground rumble that came before, the music that forced you to dance.

Bourbon flowed like water and there was so much food that you couldn’t make up your mind. There was fried chicken, barbecued ribs, chitterlings and hog maws, three kinds of greens, corn bread, macaroni and cheese, white rice, turtle soup, and pies of all kinds.

The full range of humanity was there: eighty- and ninety-year-old men and women, at least three dozen squealing kids, beautiful ladies and their decked-out men. Charcoal Joe came accompanied by a small, well-dressed entourage. My sons, Jesus and Hannibal, wore matching blue suits. Violet and Benita and Feather wore silver dresses.

Amethystine was tightly bound in a white silk gown that had been tie-dyed with an entire rainbow of hues. She was the most beautiful person, next to my child’s-eye view of my mother, I had ever seen. When she smiled at me, I felt an emotion I would have sworn, before that day, that only women could experience. The feeling caught in my throat, brought my left hand to my chest. All the deaths I had known were with me then, telling me to live harder, better, brighter.

“You’re looking very handsome,” she said to me.

I guess I could have said something like that to her, but instead I grunted and let my eyes do the talking.

“You look happy too,” she continued.

“I’m happy at all of John’s weddings.”

“You don’t think this one will last?”

“Nothing lasts.”

She smiled at that dark sentiment, telling me, in a way, that we’d come from similar places.

“So, then,” she said, “can I be one of your wives?”

I wanted to say yes but instead I took her hands in mine and squeezed. She rose on the toes of her high-heeled shoes and kissed, then bit my lips.

“Well?”

It was John’s day, but still, I felt like the luckiest man in the world.