vituperation

November 27, 2002

Last week, Robyn and I were watching TV (Bernie Mac, I think) when our phone rang. It was my dad, calling to tell me that his brother - my uncle Ralph - had died from a stroke and subsequent hemorrhaging. I didn’t know my uncle well because he didn’t come to many of the family gatherings I went to; I’d seen him maybe five times over the course of my life. He had four children, only one of whom I’d met (and even then I only met her once, when I was about twelve).

There was no magical summer at my uncle’s house when I was twelve. That was all fiction.

At the time there were no arrangements made for the funeral, and my dad wasn’t sure what the final days and times would be. We hung up and I returned to the den. A few minutes later the phone rang again, and again it was my father.

“Hey,” he said, “do you still have a white dress shirt from when you were big?”

I wasn’t sure if I did or not, and as I walked upstairs to search the closet my dad explained why he was asking. My uncle lived a simple life and had no occasion to have dress clothes, or at least a white dress shirt. My aunt wanted to bury him in a white shirt, his Alabama Crimson Tide vest, blue jeans, and an Alabama baseball cap.

My uncle loved Alabama football. As a matter of fact, at the funeral his son spoke on behalf of the family and in his eulogy said that his father enjoyed the finest things life had to offer: Alabama football, bass fishing, and watermelon. Funny, but touching. After the funeral, the rest of his family was going to go home and watch the Alabama-Auburn game - probably the most intense rivalry in all of college football (Alabama lost, unfortunately) - to celebrate his memory.

I digress.

The burial outfit was planned out but there was a small problem: he didn’t own a white dress shirt. Hence the call from my dad, checking to see if I had an old white shirt before he went out and bought one. In my fattest days, I was much larger than my uncle but my father assured me they could “bunch up the extra” underneath his body and no one would be able to tell the shirt was too big.

After digging in the closet for a couple of minutes I found that I did have a super-sized white shirt (I thought I’d gotten rid of it, actually), which I pulled out to run through the washer to clean off dust and whatnot. The thing had been untouched for a good two years, so it had dust on the shoulders. The shirt was right next to a suit that I thought was my old ‘fat’ suit.

I spent the rest of the evening thinking about how my uncle was going to be buried wearing one of my old shirts. When Robyn and I laid down for our talk-time right before bed, I was still freaked out by the idea of a dead person wearing my shirt. Yes, I am a mature adult, thank you for noticing.

“Damn,” I said, “that’s just plain creepy.”

“What?” said Robyn.

“They’re going to bury a dead person in my old shirt!“

“What’s creepy about that? I think it’s kind of sweet that your dad asked you.”

“Sure, it’s sweet,” I said, “and I’m honored they asked. But it’s a dead person! In my shirt! I mean, what if he comes back for the rest of the suit?”

Time stopped.

“Heeeeeeeeeeey,” I said, slyly, “I think I just got an idea for a short story.”

A great discussion ensued as we hashed out the basic plotline: guy gives shirt for uncle’s funeral only to have uncle return for the rest of the suit. Robyn pointed out that the main character needed to be an asshole, someone you’d want to see get his comeuppance. I suggested that my dad - we were discussing it as though the main character were me - could ask for the whole suit and I could lie and claim to only have the shirt just because I didn’t want to give up the suit.

The conversation shifted slightly to the fact that this story idea is reminiscent of Stephen King’s Father’s Day, something that just proves the adage that there really is nothing new under the sun. It was in the middle of this discussion that Robyn said the best thing ever. We were talking and she suddenly got excited and rolled over onto her side to face me.

“What if he came back for your skin?” she asked.

That just made the story ten thousand times better, didn’t it?

And it fit perfectly with the idea that the main character’s skin - his suit, if you will - was too big for him. More talk followed, with the story fleshing out (no pun intended) into Gerald having refused to give Phil a coonskin as a child. Thus was born a reason for Phil to be assholish about the suit and the introduction of the knife and Gerald’s skills with it.

An interesting side note, when I tied the knife to WWII I had no idea my uncle had been in the army. As a pallbearer this past Saturday I got to see my first military funeral, which was basically just as I wrote it for Sunday’s section of the story. I was lucky with that, because there would have been a glaring hole in the story if Uncle Gerald hadn’t had a military funeral after having had killed Nazis and I hadn’t even considered making the funeral scene a military one.

And yes, I really did almost burst out laughing in the middle of the funeral when everyone jumped each time the honor guard fired their guns.

With any story (good or bad) come some thanks, and this story is no different:

First off, thanks to my wife Robyn for the extra super creepy ending idea, because that ending was much better than the original. She also quick-proofread each of the three pieces for me to make sure I didn’t write anything too bad.

Thanks to: Keith Guyse, a deputy chief at the Alabama Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, fielded an odd call from me regarding hunting deer on one’s own property. Phil was at Gerald’s in the summer, remember? I thought it would be nice if they hunted deer together, but wasn’t sure of the legality of doing that outside of deer season. It’s illegal, even on your own property. When asked what someone might hunt in the summer months he told me about woodchucks and coyotes and referred to it as “varmint hunting”. I never knew Alabama had coyotes, but Keith told me they were in all 67 counties of the state. I added the possum bit on my own, because people down here really do eat possum.

Thanks to: The funeral director at my uncle’s funeral, who stood a ways away from the family with me and answered all my weird questions about the speed of decay without batting an eye. More interesting facts: a well-embalmed body sealed in a casket in a steel case can last up to 30 years before serious decay sets in. Also, the amount of blockage in your arteries controls how quickly you decay - a person who has a lot of blockage can’t get the embalming fluid everywhere it needs to be so they decompose more quickly.

Finally, I need to reluctantly thank ogrish.com and rotten.com (neither of which I’m linking to out of good taste) for providing me with endless photographs of human bodies in various states of decay so I could get my descriptions of Uncle Gerald more or less accurate.

So now you know the story behind the story. I hope you enjoyed it; I certainly enjoyed writing it.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you on the flip side.