The young man held his dead father’s hand and counted his own heartbeats, each pulse taking him that much farther away from his sire.
He couldn’t cry, wasn’t really sad. It was just that he could not imagine a world without Herman Jones.
Violet came into the room at four that afternoon.
“Oh my God he’s dead,” she said from the doorway.
Cornelius looked up at her and said, “Leave us alone please, Miss Breen. I’ll make the calls later.”
Over the next three days he didn’t answer the phone or knocking at the door. He didn’t eat or cry. He spent most of his time at his father’s side, holding the stiff dead hand.
When the police entered the room, after getting the landlord to let them in, they found Cornelius reading aloud from Herodotus.
“What do you want?” he asked the officers.
“You have to come with us, Mr. Jones,” one of them said.
He remembered thinking that this was the first time anyone had called him mister.
He was kept in a holding cell in the precinct where they brought him. Colette came to visit twice a day.
“They have to investigate the death because your father wasn’t that old and because you kept the body so long,” she’d said. “They’re supposed to put you in juvenile detention but I asked for protective custody — this is much better.”
“I see,” Cornelius said. “Thank you.”
“Can I do anything for you?”
“I’d like some books.”
“What kind of books?”
“History.”
On the day of his release Colette was there.
“What did they say?” Cornelius asked.
“Your father had serious heart disease. That’s what killed him. Was he being treated for something like that?”
“Only by Violet’s nephew-in-law. But by then it was too late,” he said. “Maybe if somebody in the hospital had told us we could have taken him to a heart specialist. We could have given him heart medicine. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be. I guess he was always going to die like that.”
“I told them that you were gainfully employed and that you supported the household so they’re letting you go back home,” Colette said.
She drove him in her Honda. When they parked in front of his building she touched his shoulder.
“Harry and I are getting married in the spring,” she said. “I’m pregnant with his child.”
Again Cornelius’s eyes played that trick on him. Colette seemed very far away. He felt that to talk to her he would have to shout and so he didn’t say anything. He just nodded and opened the door.
“I still want to see you, CC,” she said.
He nodded again, climbed out, then walked into the building without looking back.
11
He spent six thousand of the remaining fourteen thousand dollars on the funeral, which was held at the Baxter Chapel on Flatbush Avenue. The police released the body to Baxter’s and Cornelius didn’t want to move his father around any more than necessary.
“Bringing a man to his final resting place is a delicate dance,” Herman had once said. “The men carry him down but it is the women dancing who make sure his passage is a gentle one.”
There were no dancers at Herman’s end, no minister because even though Herman believed in a deified universe he had no truck with organized religion. There were obituaries posted in the Daily News and the New York Times. The coffin was pine for the sake of Herman’s Mississippi roots. Collingwood’s Idea of History was nestled under his right arm. The mourners numbered three: France Bickman, Violet Breen and Cornelius, but four chairs were set out at the younger Jones’s request.
The service was set to start at ten. They had fifty minutes to say their last good-byes. The three mourners, all of whom had arrived early, stood by the open coffin and communed with Herman’s clay.
Cornelius had decided to dress him in a torn white T-shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans that he’d found in the bottom drawer of Herman’s bureau. Both items were very, very old. They were folded into a brown paper bag that had Greenwood, 1957 scrawled on the side. The mortician’s makeup captured the faded character in his face.
The two passions of mankind are the ecstasy of childbirth and the inescapable tragedy of death, Herman had often said. Without these elements human beings would be no more than automatons wandering blindly through a world of wonders.
“We should get started, CC,” France said.
The two men went to their chairs. Cornelius looked at the empty seat on the far left, then at the door in back of the small chapel. When he turned to look at the coffin Violet was standing there attempting to master her grief.
Short with sturdy legs, wearing a dark blue dress and a black shawl over her shoulders, she wore no makeup. Her hair was wrapped in a dark green fishnet of some sort. Violet’s eyes filled with tears as she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again to swallow. She repeated the attempt seven or eight times. Cornelius thought that this alone was proper tribute to his father.
The cleaning woman stared at Cornelius gathering her strength.
“Herman Jones was a learn-ed man,” she said. “Weak of body but strong in his mind. He had no formal education, which would hinder most people, but Herman loved knowledge, collected it. Even though he was smart and well-read that is not why I will miss him. He was a most generous man. Not like some moneybags who gives his tithe to charity, but like a river that flows through a country village. All you had to do was come on down and he would take you on a journey, clean off the dirt or feed you if you were hungry. There was more life in that little man than in most children.”
Cornelius sat forward. He was surprised by the poetry in Violet, who he had known only as a cleaning woman and his father’s willing audience.
“... But his generosity is not why I will miss him either. What he gave he gave freely and so it had nothing to do with debt or sorrow. The reason I’m here is to say that Herman Jones was the only man I truly loved. A black man confined to a bed who never once spoke angry or coarse words in my presence, who recited poetry because we both loved it and who asked each morning about my family and my health.” Violet broke down crying and France hurried to help her to her chair.
After helping Violet, Bickman went to stand before the pine box.
He began talking, CC noticed, without ceremony or dramatic tones.
“Herman taught me forgiveness and humility. He showed me through conversation and by example that my college degree was worth less than a Sunday ticket to the Arbuckle. And if I could give up some of my eighty-two years to have him back here today I would do it without a moment’s hesitation.”
“Oh,” Violet said.
His hands clenched into fists, France Bickman returned to his seat.
Cornelius glanced at the empty chair. When France put a hand on his shoulder he stood up and stumbled. The only reason he didn’t fall was that France steadied him. He experienced a powerful connection with the old man in the soft gray suit. Then Cornelius took the five steps to his father’s coffin.
“When I was in the jailhouse,” he began, “I didn’t have any books at first, so I followed my father’s example and considered the road that brought me to my present location. Dad was always telling me things like that. When I was little I’d get impatient with him but he never seemed to mind. And when I got older I didn’t believe that I could ever be as smart as he was, or as kind. He made me the man he could never be and then set me free to be that man.