Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

Uncle B. was distant, to me, so when he died when I was 8, I didn’t cry. I didn’t know him that well. Somebody in my family might remember him picking me up and hugging me or talking to me or something, but I don’t.

I remember him being big and gruff. I have his genes. Any 8-year-old who knows me now thinks of me as gruff -- some grown-ups, for that matter.

I know now that he was about 50 when he died, and that always seemed old, until recently. I am 40.

He was one of my dad’s brothers. Those around me in 1973, when he died, had bigger thoughts about him. His funeral was one of the biggest held in our church, I think. He was a farmer, a businessman and a penny-pincher known to be a miser.

I think, or I’ve been told, that he was one of those men who gruffly gave of his wealth to those who had none of their own, in little, anonymous ways that meant big differences. I don’t know.

I remember that lots of people came to his funeral , and some people remember him still, more than 30 years after he died – and that means something.

The day of his wake, as best I can recall, was one of those days that starts out fine but winds up dark. Seems like it was in the spring, but I don’t really remember.

I don’t remember whether the day I’m remembering was the day of his funeral or not. I just remember it was the day of what I learned later was a “wake.”

Seems like in history a “wake” was meant to give the dead time to “wake” from the dead. I don’t know that for sure, either. This tale is about what I remember, not what I know.

I remember a lot of people – mostly kin, with maybe just a sprinkling of others – at his farmhouse, in the Arkansas River bottoms in eastern Oklahoma. To me back then, even though at 8 I didn’t know anything, the whole place seemed old.

I think it was the first time, maybe the only time, I saw a genuine outhouse. I do remember going out to it, and I do remember there actually being a catalog of some sort – most assuredly a Sears catalog – hanging from the wall. I remember there being a hole cut from a board to sit on, and a door, I think, with a spring on it. I do not remember a crescent moon cut in the door, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there; I just don’t remember. I seem to remember that it was a one-holer.

I do remember that it was in what I then considered “the woods” east of the house, but that I now know to be just a handful of tall trees maybe 100 feet away. I do remember that, the whole long trip to the outhouse and back, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the northeast corner of the house, which is where the bedroom was that held the casket with Uncle B.

I remember the day dragging on, women with made-up eyes dried with eternal tissues pulled from heavy purses as big as doctor’s medical bags, men with stoic expressions smoking cigarettes and hawking into the yard to keep from showing emotion, kids acting subdued because, while there was loudness and some laughter, loudness and laughter, for a change, were not the reason we were all together.

I remember wearing a button-down sweater that was warm and itchy at the same time, and I remember it having some sky blue in it. Somewhere there is a picture of me in that sweater at this house in the bottoms; I’ve seen it, either in somebody’s shoebox, on somebody’s CD or in my mind.

It being a wake, the point was to walk by the casket and say your good-byes. No thank you.

The closest I got was the door between the bedroom with the casket and a closet leading to the bathroom. It was one of those bathrooms between two bedrooms – what they call a Jack-and-Jill bathroom now, but just an efficient use of space then.

The house I grew up in had one, which is why I felt fairly comfortable standing there, looking-but-not-looking, holding tight to the left jamb of the bathroom door, considering there was a dead man in a big box on a table in the next room, there were full-grown people in every other room of the house weeping or at least feeling very sad – and there was a storm brewing outside.

Uncle B.’s nose, forehead and the tip of his chin were visible over the edge of the casket from where I stood –if I stood on my tiptoes or jumped. No one else was around, so I looked hard, peaking from behind the safety of a frame and Sheetrock wall.

My breath was short. I clung to the door jamb, sweat gathering under my arms inside a too-warm sweater and dress pants on a cool spring day turned warm and muggy and stormy, made hot by a house full of people.

The thunder cracked. I flinched and gripped the jamb. The air seemed to evaporate. Another crack! It was dark outside the bedroom window, which was open a little to let the air flow, maybe three or four inches.

The dark grew darker. Lightning flashed!

A BALL OF LIGHT SWEPT IN UNDER THE OPEN WINDOW, WHIRLED AROUND THE ROOM, SEEMING TO FOLLOW THE OUTLINES OF THE CASKET AND THE MAN IN IT, THEN SHOT OUT AND UNDER THE WINDOW AS QUICKLY AS IT ENTERED.

A part of me fell on that moment in my mind, enveloping it, storing it away just for certain occasions.

Tonight, Halloween night, it seemed like time to drag it out.

I’ve read about “heat lightning” and “ball lightning.” Maybe that’s what it was. But maybe not.

Might’ve been Uncle B.’s heavenly escort, comin’ to dislodge his spirit from the casket and the house full of family who loved him.

Might’ve been him comin’ back to give me the hug I don’t remember him givin’ while he and I both walked this earth.

Might’ve been heat lightning. Might’ve been all that. Or more. Or less.

It most certainly was the closest I’ve come, or care to come, to livin’ a ghost story.

END