No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Bearing Pall

Mrs. Jayne went fast and it was a blessing, but she’s still dead and I still miss her. Unbeknownst to me, she had dutifully attended my college graduation twenty years ago, wearing her best church clothes in hundred-degree weather. She waited three hours to see me receive my diploma, except I didn’t go. I was already financing my departure by moving refrigerators out of dorms. Mrs. Jayne listened for my name being called without answer.

Today I sat in the front row of church, facing her casket as a pallbearer, and listened to her name being praised. In a jacket pocket I carried my class photo from 1964. Mrs. Jayne stood beneath the schoolroom clock, halted forever at 2:15. After the first day of school, I told my mother that I hoped Mrs. Jayne didn’t die of oldness before my brother went to school.

Many years later I sent her a copy of my first book. She told a local newspaper that indeed she’d taught me to write, but that I learned some of the language somewhere else. She said she sat on her breezeway and just stared at the cuss words. She’d heard them, but had never seen them in print. She said she learned to treat them the same as any word. She said that I’d taught her to read, too.

The service was short, the pews filled with her fellow teachers and people from Haldeman she’d taught, many older than me. We carried her out of the church and drove to a small cemetery and lowered the box into the ground. I lingered after everyone left and threw a handful of dirt in the grave. Her name was Mary Alice Calvert Jayne. She taught me to read and write.

I climbed the hill to a dogwood tree behind the small cemetery. All my life I’ve heard the cross that Jesus bore was made of dogwood, and the tree’s punishment was to be forever worthless. The blossom has four white petals with a rust-colored stain at the tip. These marks represent the nails that held Jesus to the wood, turned dark by encrusted blood. People in the hills understand that is why dogwood blooms near Easter. Only the flowers will rise again. Only the dead can reappear.

Relatives held a small reception at Mrs. Jayne’s house. They gave me my inheritance — a short lectern made by her brother. She kept it beside her desk. Each child stood in front of the class and read aloud. I drove home and set the lectern in my writing studio beside my desk. On it I placed a massive dictionary. My son James suggested I take the next book I wrote to the graveyard and leave it for Mrs. Jayne’s ghost to read. I hugged him and he wiped my eyes.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” he said. “She’s like a grandmaw and they always have to die.”

At the end of a visit with Mrs. Jayne, she often gave me a small item to make me feel special. She did it casually, almost as an afterthought, by saying, “Here, slip this in your pocket.” She always used the same phrase.

One of her last gifts was a bell, the stationary sort that sits on the reception counter of a roadside motel. Mrs. Jayne kept the bell on her school desk and when the class became too uproarious, she tapped the metal ringer for silence. Hearing it, we sat a little straighter, ready to listen. That bell is on my writing desk today. Its convex surface is dull with corrosion and the base is rusted. I have no desire to clean it. My memories don’t sparkle with polish and neither does the bell. I treat it with respect, using it only when necessary. Its clear sound is like a single season compressed. I ring it to clear my mind when I write. I sit straighter and try to focus. I concentrate on the sound as it moves away in waves of time.