ERRANDS OF THE BROKEN-HEARTED by Robert Vivian
Ma Boy loved his mother so much he buried her in his own backyard despite the open outrage of neighbors who watched him dig her grave from their back porches. They gathered in threes and fours and watched him dig in the hot summer sun as she lay beside him in a painted white pine box he planed and leveled himself until word got out and people started showing up in droves. Before she died he bathed and took care of her and even washed her underwear, dunking her dentures in a sweet-smelling solution that made her breath clean as grass, her old lady whiskers curling up when she smiled from the front porch where they lived after he got out of prison. No son ever loved his mother more, though Ma Boy was seven feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds, with tattoos of naked, writhing women all across his back that sashayed like serpents doing their moon dance that almost slithered off his shoulders to come and jump your bones. He loved his mother though he got drunk or stoned every night, drinking whiskey straight out of a bottle as his mother sat next to him in her rocking chair, talking a blue streak at him that couldn’t be deciphered.
Ma Boy’s real name was Nathan Hightower, but folks called him Ma Boy behind his back on account of his tender regard for his crotchety and shriveled-up mama. Ever since he got out of prison he never left her side, taking her shopping and to the movies when she wanted to get out of the house, or any other errand she needed to have carried out. She smoked a clay pipe and couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, so they made an unlikely couple, like a mountain and a patch of stardust ending up together. Sometimes she beat him with a flyswatter, which was a pathetic sight to see. He’d be slumped over in his chair, blind drunk with his long blond hair hanging over his face and she’d pitter-patter over to him and start right in, waylaying him with all her might, the swats so loud you could hear them two blocks down on a quiet summer night. They sounded like a horse’s tail switching at flies, only faster and more insistent somehow. No one knows why she beat him, but she sure got a lot of mileage out of it, even though one of his forearms was bigger than the trunk of her whole body. Maybe she was doing it for old time’s sake, when he used to be a wild-ass kid always getting into trouble. Maybe her beating him was a kind of affection, her grazing blows like someone at a petting zoo, or maybe it was her main form of exercise, her rickety heart pumping away so she could squeeze out a few more years.
Sometimes if he wasn’t too drunk he’d give her something more substantial to beat him with, a stick he found in the yard and once even a two-by-four. She could hardly lift it above her head as it kept slipping out of her hand but Ma Boy fetched it for her again and again like a bird dog bringing back a decoy. I think beating him was good for her, good for her state of mind and good for the rest of us who watched their evening antics out of the corners of our eyes or through slightly parted curtains. He didn’t seem to take it personally none, more like something she had to get off her chest, an itch behind her ear that he helped her to scratch. And it was strange to see this little old woman beating her son who was no more affected than a slate of shining granite after drops of summer rain. She wasn’t very good at beating him, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was patient with her that way, and in every other way when it came to his teetering mama who had to be at least eighty years old with a handkerchief tied around her head to keep her hair from falling out.
He took her abuse as a kind of mysterious and ongoing love that didn’t seem to end, this from someone who’d been in prison for killing another man with his bare hands. In some way or another, it helped her to get the kinks out of her soul, each whack like a strike against bitterness. She set to with a fearful intensity, hitting him so fast and furiously it was like a mother hen lashing out with a hammer made of feathers. The music coming from inside the house was always the same, Lightnin’ Hopkins or Howling Wolf, or some other haunted figure out of the Deep South that gave Ma Boy his compass. Then after she was done, he’d pick her up like a baby and carry her into the house, her tiny fists raining down on his hulking shoulders. They were done for the night and sorrow descended on the clapboard house, each part of it sagging more like a woman in need who’d been left behind. So Ma Boy burying his tiny mama was a big to-do in the neighborhood and the town, a once-in-a-lifetime scandal that got folks to talking. He can’t do that, people said, but nobody wanted to say it to his face. Nobody was even sure if it was illegal or not. They’d say she belonged in the cemetery with other dead people, not in a scrabble backyard next to a clothesline. Because if he loved her so much, why he got to do her this way once she was gone?
Ma Boy was digging her grave with his shirt off in hundred-degree weather, his faded blue jeans covered with dirt and his black biker’s boots shining in the sun. He had a bowie knife belted to his waist. His Jesus beard was dripping with sweat and he had a red bandana tied around his head. He could have been out in the middle of nowhere for how rough he looked, working slowly and deliberately, like he had no time to waste. You remembered how he always did errands for his mama, going to the drugstore or the grocer’s to get her anything she wanted, prescription pills or a bag of M&M’s to munch on after dinner. He was known to scrub the floors on his hands and knees, all seven feet of him splayed out while she stood next to him with her arms crossed. He was even careful about the women he brought home at night, smuggling strippers and whores up the back stairs and paying them to keep quiet as he rode their bodies home on well-oiled bedsprings. He never let her see who he was sleeping with at the time, and this had the odd effect of getting people’s respect around the neighborhood, as if for all his hard prison time he still had manners he would not violate no matter how demented she became. Because she was known to fly off the handle more than once, not only beating him but also yelling at him in a voice no one could understand, talking about his past and the Bible as if they were mixed up somehow. And Ma Boy would just sit there and take it, like there was nothing he could do but endure her sudden outbursts of violence. She called him every name in the book and he’d slowly get up after a while and find her a new tool to strike him with, usually something light and wieldy that wouldn’t tire her out too fast. Wayne Boggs got the courage up once and asked him point-blank, Why do you let her beat you? And Ma Boy looked bewildered and confused in his response and only said, Because I had it coming.
But that still didn’t explain why he was burying her in the backyard when a cemetery would do. He didn’t care who was watching him as people started showing up from all around. Women dabbed at the moist hollows between the delicate bird bones of their shoulder blades with handkerchiefs, lips apple-red and getting redder at the sight of all that man throwing heaps of dirt over his shoulders. You knew sooner or later that the police were bound to show up, but until that happened we’d all just watch and see what would happen next. His mama was peeping out of the box and she didn’t look too good in that summer heat, more like rotten fruit circled by a dozen snarling flies. We kept whispering and talking in low tones about the errands he used to run for her, each one topping the last until they became legends in our eyes. The time he came driving down the street with a baby giraffe tied to his rumbling Harley going about 5 mph, telling anyone who asked that his ma had always wanted to pet one before she died. The time he went and found her a kiddy pool during a heat wave to soak her weary bones as he poured cool water over her from a chipped enamel jug, the time he got her a chocolate cake in the middle of the night or drove twelve hours straight to get her a special kind of tobacco she had always craved but never had, something only rich men could afford. He was forever running errands for her without complaint or so much as a frown, letting the screen door slap closed behind him as she cried out in her husky voice full of her old woman’s complaint.
No one could ever say that Ma Boy didn’t love his mama, that despite his rap sheet he didn’t do his very best to take care of her. That’s partly why we wondered why he’d bury her in his trashy backyard fit only for pit bulls and cockfights, a backyard with nothing going for it but a whole lot of black dirt. Her coffin was nothing special either, no way it could last out the summer or the month, nailed together like it was and only fit for storing tools. Nothing Ma Boy ever did before prepared us for this turnabout of events, his mama no doubt spoiling as she lay there in the hot August sun. He seemed to relish the digging too, as if he couldn’t get her in the ground fast enough. His body glistened with sweat so that every muscle in his back rippled like cables on a bridge. And when it came to put her in the ground he dumped her right in without ceremony so people gasped and moaned. How could he treat her like that after all he’d done for her the last few years? Where was the huge, abiding love we had witnessed with our very own eyes, a towering ex-con turning saintly in our midst? Maybe the grief of it got to Ma Boy’s head, maybe he felt he had to do her that way in order to get the dirt on top of her as fast as he could.
The sirens were coming for him but he didn’t pay them any mind, just another loud voice that would only eventually have something to do with him. That’s when the strange and surprising thing happened, the thing people would never forget because there was no way to explain it away or describe what it meant, both the shock of it and later, much later the outrage and confusion. Someone started clapping from another yard like her burial was a ballgame and pretty soon near everyone else watching on took up a slow applause, everyone except the widow Geraldine Sumner who saw about as much as she could take and marched right on over from her place to Ma Boy’s backyard. No one knows why people were applauding but pretty soon there was crying and outright sobbing as Lyle Hayes started in with his choked-up version of Amazing Grace to add a little soul to the proceedings so that there was applause and singing too and something like the gnashing of teeth as Geraldine Sumner commenced to beat Ma Boy about the face with the nearest thing she had to hand, a frayed strip of rubber tire, saying again and again, How could you, how could you. So people were clapping and Lyle Hayes was singing as Geraldine Sumner let him have it, picking up where his mama had left off like the continuing and unbroken string of sorrow that wrapped itself around the world, never to be broken by human hands. Ma Boy stood there like a statue taking another beating until the police pulled up in front of his house and turned their sirens off, slowly getting out of their squad cars with riot sticks held tight against their thighs.
No way was Ma Boy going to get a fair hearing, no way the police could understand where he was coming from, who couldn’t know that he grieved her every day of his life and she had grieved right back at him with a love that went on forever until there was nothing left but the naked truth. And the clapping went on like a mournful madness, each one of us suddenly pulling for Ma Boy in our cracking and parched throats because he never had a chance from the very get-go, even if he was built like a pro wrestler. We clapped for him and we clapped for ourselves like the deck was stacked against us, even Geraldine Sumner who was going at him nonstop in her outrage. We didn’t know why he wanted to bury his mama in a cheap pine box in his own backyard but that didn’t take away from all those errands he had run for her, errands each one of us would be bound and beholden to do if we were in his place, which many of us already were. We would have done the same thing he did, even if she ended up not using the thing she had demanded, trips to Wal-Mart on a whim and halfway across the state to appease her failing mind. We wanted Ma Boy to get upset and show us how a dangerous man like him could set things right again, but it didn’t work out that way. He was too broken-hearted, too weighed down by the heaviness of the world to lash out at anybody ever again.
The police asked Ma Boy to step back from the grave and take his knife belt off as Geraldine Sumner continued her rain dance on his naked flesh. Ma Boy did as he was told and held his hands above his head as our clapping slowed down and they cuffed each hand, one after the other, not even bothering to shoo Geraldine away. And that was the last errand Ma Boy ever ran for her, letting himself be slowly led away into the setting sun with his arms behind his back like he was fading into ghost and memory with the police on either side and Geraldine Sumner keeping up her whipping with that strip of rubber tire. The clapping eventually died down and stopped altogether, like a few clacking stones falling into the emptiness. Then there was only the uncovered coffin white hot in the grave, and the winding up and down of locusts crying out from the dry, knee-high grass. Then there was only the outraged voice of Geraldine Sumner calling Ma Boy names as they took him away, shaking her fist at the back of his bowed head, who one day in the long ago in a place nobody knew about must have taken his first beating like the bitter taste of the rest of his days and grown so accustomed to the abuse that he couldn’t live without it.
Robert Vivian is the author of a collection of essays, Cold Snap As Yearning (University of Nebraska Press). His prose has appeared in Harper’s, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Glimmer Train.