Written by Celia Miles – (Mature theme) – 

“The sound of frying meat and the truth–them’s two things you never heard in that holler.” Her cousin Gordie’s comment took her back. God, how it took her back. In Spokes Funeral Home viewing room, semi-strangers drifted by, murmured to her, “Good to see you,” and to Gordie, “It’s for the best, son.” They cast their eyes toward the bodies of his parents, Myra’s great uncle Seth and aunt Sue, double deaths by carbon monoxide. As swiftly as a hawk swoops up a baby chick, Gordie’s words erased her $500 suit, her Italian leather pumps and purse, and put her in bare feet and ragged overalls. She was back near the head of Hard Hill Holler.

At hog killing time and later when her mother opened the jars of the sausage she’d put up, and when a scrawny old rooster was axed and gravied, the Bledsoes heard the sound of sizzling protein. Still, those meals lifted their household a notch or two above old Ben Conner’s, farther up the holler. Nobody in the holler put much beef on the table, mostly squirrel stew or wild turkey, lots of cornbread, lots of biscuits, lots of beans. Myra had escaped that poverty, escaped long before her parents died. Now she came back home only rarely, for a funeral. The second part of Gordie’s sentence snared her. The truth. The truth in that holler? The truth that never was in that holler.

The alchemy of words did not succeed in transmuting much of her childhood experience into the believable: her mother saying of a neighbor, “He beats them boys for their own good;” her daddy vowing, “I’ll get a job when times get better;” Gordie insisting that rabbit tobacco cigarettes tasted good; teenage friend Maudie declaring that white lightning would ease the pain of cramps and rejection. And ultimately, the preacher declaring that God would forgive “all our transgressions” on (especially on) the inevitable deathbed: “God don’t turn nobody down. His credit’s always available.”

So thirty years ago, after old Ben Conner’s fall in the barn and pneumonia, at the funeral, young Preacher Otis said old Ben had asked for–and a loving God had obliged–forgiveness for his “crimes agin nature.” That’s the way the preacher phrased it, right out loud. Maybe that’s the way old Ben breathed his last admission, maybe that’s what choked him. Or maybe that’s the way he actually thought it.

Now, at this funeral, nodding when Gordie introduced her to some newcomers who’d delivered Meals on Wheels to his folks, craving a Virginia Slim but not lighting up as some of the men had, Ms. Myra Bledsoe called old Ben’s crime “sexual abuse.” The law, the county sheriff, if informed or interested, would have called it incest. The grownups around the holler, Myra’s parents, neighbors, the upstanding churchgoers and the drunks, she wondered, what had they called it? Had they ever named it at all? Myra fingered the packet of cigarettes in her purse, remembering Preacher Otis railing against the disgrace of women smoking.

After old Ben’s funeral, a clean white car with white-uniformed nurses bumped over the road up to the Conner house. His daughter Raynene, then almost eighteen, was taken away to the state hospital in Morganton.

“Why?” Myra had asked. “Is she sick?”

Raynene had wispy blond hair and the plump, pinkish-pale skin of one who’d never been expected to help with the outside chores, feed the hogs, carry in wood or hoe in the new ground. Except for her cornered eyes, she looked like the vacant-faced porcelain doll Myra admired in the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

“It’s for her own good, honey,” Myra’s mother said. “For her own good.”

“What’s wrong with her? Is it polio?” All the kids had heard about the horrors of polio but nobody in their school had it, only somebody’s cousin over in the next county.

“No, no,” her mother whispered. “She’ll be safe there. Better late than never, I reckon.”

But it was not better late, and Raynene was not safe. The news came within six months. Raynene had been all tore up and strangled on the grounds of the state hospital, her body found in the Althea bushes near the fence. Her mother and uncles went down to identify the body and bring it home for burial two plots over, next to her grandmama, not next to her daddy’s barely grassed grave. And they talked on and on about how beautiful the grounds were at that place, the mowed lawns, the groomed shade trees, the painted benches, the peaceful feel inside the fence. Young Myra thought it sounded like The Garden of Eden, right out of the Bible. She heard, “It’s for the best. She was ruined for any other life. For her own good….” Even then, Myra reckoned Raynene’s fading mother could not feel that way. But maybe that’s the only way she could manage: Believe it’s for the best. Preacher Otis’s hand raised above Raynene’s grave had trembled, though his reedy voice did not: “It ain’t for us to know the ways of God.”

Remembering, Myra’s face twisted into a duplicate smirk of the one she turned toward the pulpit that day. She and Gordie, squirming stiff in their best clothes, on the last pew, had rolled their eyes toward God’s heaven as Preacher Otis intoned, “God don’t make no mistakes in His account book. Amen.”

Now Myra stood in her fancy clothes, surrounded by people whose names she knew, whose faces she hardly remembered. The room felt claustrophobic. The twin pearly-gray caskets were open, banked by flowers. Visitors went by, some pausing long, a steady stream to view the two old people, good people, gone by their own choosing, preferring death before nursing home. When Gordie had called her, he said, “They couldn’t take care of themselves, Myra. You should see the house, the filth, and I, well, I told them I couldn’t take them in, not with Elaine’s condition as it is.”

Gritting her teeth at the funereal civility, Myra wanted to scream. But then surely someone would pat her shoulder and whisper, “Don’t they look so good, honey? It’s for the best.” She wouldn’t scream and she wouldn’t smoke. But she could do what she had been doing–sneak out to Gordie’s truck for sips, swigs, gulps of good vodka, having refused his offer of moonshine. After her head stopped swirling, she could return, assuming no one smelled anything other than intense antiseptic and rose-sweet cut flowers.

In Ann Arbor, she had learned to ask for white wine or scotch, quite acceptable choices. She never drank vodka. Tomorrow on the plane she’d sip a Chardonnay, but for now, vodka went well, very well, with the sound of frying meat.

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Celia Miles, a retired community college instructor, lives and writes in Asheville, NC. She is author of several regional novels, and with Nancy Dillingham has co-edited three anthologies of Western NC women writers. Her latest novel is The Body at Wrapp’s Mill: A Grist Mill Mystery.