hen Bobby Moon volunteered to drive a group of teary-eyed mourners to the grave side of his Uncle Carl, he never expected anything so awful could happen to him. It was a Saturday morning. Rabbit and squirrel season in Babylon, Tennessee, a small town where everybody knew everybody else. But on the way to the cemetery Bobby got lost. He took a wrong turn. It was an honest mistake anyone could make.A rather small departure from the funeral route which, as best Bobby could recollect, accounted for the hostility.

"Is that the idiot who drove you?" a lady asked one of Bobby Moon's passengers.

"Uh-huh. That's him."

"Who does he think he is?"

"Can't you follow the car in front of you, buddy?" a man remarked with a haughty voice. He jabbed Bobby in the necktie with his index finger. "Huh? Can't you do anything right?"

"I asked for directions at the gas station," Bobby said coolly. "But they'd never heard of the cemetery."

"Why didn't you ask the people you were driving which turn to take?"

"I did!" Bobby insisted. He felt relieved the man had lifted his finger from his necktie. Though the man was now shaking his head, a motion of disgust over the whole matter. They had arrived late to the funeral, missing it by a good half-hour.

"You never opened your mouth," a lady who had sat in the backseat offered up. She grimaced at Bobby.

"I asked for help!" Bobby said, "But all I got from the backseat was moans and sobs."

"Moans and sobs?" the finger man repeated.

"Yes," Bobby told them. Bobby told them all, "Everybody was crying so loud I couldn't hear myself think."

"You never had a thought in your life!" a lady charged.

"Yeah. You're right on the money with that," the finger man said. "He hasn't got a brain. Have you a brain?"

"I've got one," Bobby squeaked out. It wasn't a nice thing to say to someone who was trying to help.

"How old are you?" the finger man wanted to know.

"I'm seventeen, sir."

"Oh, you're seventeen, are you?"

Bobby nodded his head

"What grade are you in?"

Bobby cleared his throat which was dry as a lunar landscape. "I'm a senior in high school," Bobby answered

"It figures," the finger man said, his arms folded.

A few moments later, mingling with the last mourners, Bobby felt his shirtsleeves loosen and droop. In those days he had the terrible habit of biting the buttons off his shirt cuffs and sucking on them like dinner mints. It wasn't something Bobby did consciously. It just happened. He bit things. His fingernails, pencils, match sticks, paper clips, bottle caps, but mostly he preferred buttons. They have a nutty quality.

"Who's the woodchuck?" Bobby overheard a lady inquire.

"He's the nephew," the man standing beside her said.

"The one who couldn't find the funeral?"

"Yeah. That's him."

"That must surely be the dumbest boy in east Tennessee."

Bobby cleared his throat, real loud, his uh-hum registered. But it did little good. There was no stopping the mourners they were glaring at him, and each of them held it against him, like he had deliberately taken the wrong route.

"They don't mean nothing," Uncle Hank said. He could see Bobby was taking it all pretty badly. Nobody was heaving any rocks. But the bad-mouthing was picking up steam, rolling down a mountain of blame.

"They hate me," Bobby said.

"Nah," Uncle Hank shook his head. "Nobody hates anybody in Babylon."

"They got real mean looks in their eyes."

"Nah. They all Christians. Born again. They just don't like missing a good funeral. Folks like to see the dearly departed off. You know they kind of sentimental."

"I feel real bad," Bobby confessed. "Real god-awful rotten."

"Don't take it so hard."

Bobby wandered off. He threw the keys in the car and took off through the cemetery. There were flowers scattered all over. Baskets. He murmured to himself. His thoughts long and sad and dark. And, in an attempt to comprehend it all, knowing every manner of affection and familiarity account for little more than empty gestures; as all words fall short, and seemingly the more good a person attempts for the dear departed the less they accomplish, for what was intended as appropriate may not merely be deemed inappropriate, but indifferent, far-fetched, reckless and not in the least bit accommodating or cordial.

He felt drunk with sadness. He least expected this. How could it have happened. The sad mourners and their blubbering tearful whimpers played in his ear. The mourners of all their genuine selves—perhaps more repugnant, more disrespectful for the bargain—the thing one should never forget he told himself over and over was that no matter how intensely one grieved one should feel even more deeply for those left to carry on.

When somebody is born in the next world, when a person leaves this one, having no more use for the human body, feeling so light- headed the spirit jumps up there in the sky, a high-flying soul, it's all pretty much printed all about it in the local paper. How somebody went peaceful or not. How it happened and all.They write the prettiest words about people that ain't around anymore. Everybody in Babylon felt so sorry that people were gone and all.

There were those that take it plenty hard, and there are others that don't feel much. Those that do experience an interval of dysfunctional turbulence. An absence of mind, the body, too, sometimes found itself at a terrible fierce loss, irretrievably dumbfounded, while they spirit was rendered most feeble. Broke by sorrow, and the inner-self draws its strength from thoughts of escape, and the presence wears thin, ghostly, so transparent one's efforts pretty much nearly all the time—fall short, and all that remains is the haunting—the touching of hands, the sad whispers, the knowing glances born in the corner of the eye and vanishing when needed most. When meeting the gaze of others, wishing to impart some meaningful fragment of ourselves, and finding we have only our grief to share, don't help none.

Some folks don't give in to grief. Some folks bumble. Bobby decided he was a bumbler. And bumbling was a thing of beauty, derived of that brainless state of mind. He meant no harm to anyone. So he didn't jump off Watauga Bridge and drown himself, like he had wanted to do. When he got home he didn't shoot himself with his shotgun. He didn't eat rat poison or take a bath with the electric fan going. He ate a pork chops and biscuits and gravy. He went outside and gazed up at the stars and saw the moon was great big round and fat and pretty shining down on east Tennessee.

He felt so good he drove over to Millie Chambers' house and knocked on the door and when she come out he spoke in a squeaky voice and asked her if she would be his girl. She being the prettiest and smartest girl in east Tennessee, and she said she'd think about it. And that he should come back sometime wearing a necktie and not them ugly overalls that smell like old stinky fish.

(from Grape Poetry —-a portion of Mr. Slyman's novel)

© Ernest Slyman