Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,3
full choir, with an organist brought in from Baton Rouge, and a whole gang of priests and servers in red and white robes swinging censers. After the service we followed a sleek black hearse and three rented limousines to the cemetery, where we watched as the beautiful coffin was lowered into the ground below an elaborate white marble memorial of a life-sized woman in classical dress reaching out to pluck a rose from a vine. The Suzy Prejean funeral was such a big event in Zachary that year, in fact, that people who barely knew the Prejeans, people who didn’t really give a good damn about them—people like my mother—turned up in their best Jacqueline Kennedy outfits at St. Aloysius Catholic Church to be a part of it. Funerals were especially popular in those days.
The extravagant service, though, still wasn’t enough to redeem the character of Jack’s wife in the eyes of the town, or at least in the eyes of my parents. Even when we found out it wasn’t syphilis but ovarian cancer that had killed Suzy Prejean, my parents still figured, in their own mean way, that the Prejeans had got what they deserved.
“All the flowers in the world can’t buy salvation,” was how my mother put it.
Two years later when Tim and I began seeing each other, a vague cloud of disgrace still hung over his family name. Tim himself seemed quietly ashamed of his mother’s death, and his father’s poor downtown shop, and their camping trailer out in the woods. So when he invited me to come visit, it was as if he was offering to reveal to me a secret part of himself, like a wound on his person, and I felt privileged and trusted.
Tim borrowed his father’s service truck to take me to their place late one Saturday afternoon. “It’s not much,” he warned me as we drove out Highway 19 toward Slaughter. “I hope you won’t mind.” We turned off the pavement past Kleinpeter Dairy onto a red clay road where a few small houses stood scattered here and there among the trees. You know the kind of place: dirt roads, dirt yards, dirt gardens. Frustration and anger and sadness turned inward to become poverty.
Mr. Prejean—Jack, he told me to call him—was desperately hospitable. Shaking my hand, he said how much he’d heard about me and how pleased he was to meet me. Like his son, Jack was thin, almost scrawny. He had on a neat gray repairman’s uniform and black-rimmed eyeglasses, and wore his black hair slicked over to one side. Jack had set up a metal camp table for us under the pines, where he served me and Tim RC Cola and mixed nuts in plastic bowls with paper party napkins. He kept apologizing for the lack of amenities. I think I was the first houseguest they’d ever had.
What did we talk about? It couldn’t have been much; I was only fifteen, Tim only seventeen, and Jack an unpracticed host. We talked about homework, I remember. Jack was up late nights himself these days, he said, studying to become an insurance sales agent, so he knew what it was like for us kids. He kept offering me more RC Colas, and I kept accepting just to be polite, until I had to go to the bathroom. Jack pointed me to the toilet in the trailer. I couldn’t miss it, he joked—just go through the entrance hall, past the master bedroom, and I’d find it opposite the kitchen. Shout if I got lost.
The tiny size of the trailer and the sight of the few belongings the men shared (Old Spice, Brylcreem, Popular Electronics) made the space feel unbearably intimate. Coming out of the toilet cabinet I paused, trying to imagine what it must have been like for them to live there. An empty aluminum pot sat on a two-burner hot plate; beside it on the counter were three unopened cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup—dinner, I supposed. At one end of the trailer was a built-in bed; three steps away at the other end of the trailer was a fold-down table covered with Tim’s schoolbooks and Mr. Prejean’s study guides from State Farm Insurance. The only decoration in the whole trailer was a framed color photograph on the wall above the table. I bent in for a closer look.
It must’ve been taken before her sickness. Suzy Prejean was leaning back on a swing, her long black hair hanging down, her bare tanned