Black Gold

‘A good time was had by none at the reading of the will,’ was her last thought before her skull smashed into the peeling laminate shelves.

I

“Upon the sale of my home, the proceeds after taxes in addition to those from the sale of my car and any remaining cash payment from my burial policy are to be donated to the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.

To my surviving children: my son, the male mistress; my daughter, his most sick and adoring devotee; and my second daughter who hates me, I bequeath whatever cash is in my wallet. There should be $6 for the carwash unless I died on a Friday and whatever I haven't spent at the Biscuit Bucket yet. Divide it amongst yourselves as you see fit. I don’t care. May God have mercy on your souls.

To my grandchildren: the homo, the convert, the three Nazis, the househusband, and the one who got away and never looked back, I bequeath whatever loose change you find in the cushions you sat on twice a year. Save yourselves—you still have the time.”

The incestuous elder siblings, the white supremacists, and the two kept men younger and elder were so unhappy you could smell it. The cousin who converted to Catholicism to marry the love of her life and the one escapee weren't present. The second daughter laughed when her line was read, and she gave the estate attorney a double thumbs up. Indeed she did hate him. The rest heard the quiet parts out loud for the first time and didn’t like it one bit. No one expected any inheritance, but they seemed surprised at his final words to them. Frankly Ly had expected worse, but she got off easy as far as his parting punches. She was "the homo."

A forklift driver working union hours with no children, and no commitments to any church, Ly went at the weekend to box up the house. She’d been there on the same mission fourteen years before, to break down housekeeping when her grandmother died. This hard and holy tradition is a somber duty passed from one woman to the next, and knowing the girl-child she worried for most would be doing her that last service motivated the grandmother towards the end to donate and discard as much as she could in advance to make it a little easier. She underestimated Ly’s devastation: every pair of stockings, every table cloth, every bag of peas and every pair of beige safety shoes with the backs busted down felt like holding a knife just pulled from the forge in her bare hands. In comparison, these two days work would be a walk in the park. One, because the house was half empty already from her previous tackle and two, because Ly didn’t care enough about the man most recently departed to feel much of anything at all.

The relatively empty rooms took no time to pack: the kitchen filled two empty stove boxes. The man at the appliance store always comes through for the bereaved left packing up and clearing out. One microwave box in the living room for books and knick knacks; all the furniture waiting for the hired boys to haul it off, with the lamps wrapped separate from their shades and a few pictures leaning on the coffee table. She’d wrenched the curtains down to bundle with the other linens that would need a good boiling before they’re donated.

From the bathroom a respectable pile of towels and bath mats piled up--the animal shelter has a standing request for anything like that one comes across for lining crates and wrapping little ones after baths and vet care. And it was in the bathroom that Ly took her one petty liberty, with his open personal products: even though the men’s shelter will take them that way, the dull thud of it all hitting the plastic yellow tulip trashcan one by one was such a sweet sweet sound. She’d send $40 over for them to buy all new ones instead.

The bedroom. It was as inaccessible to them all as the most sacred tomb below the Vatican but presumably dirtier. A king sized bed filled the room with its headboard half-blocking the painted shut windows on one wall and no room to walk on the other three sides between the treadmill on the right, the leviathan chest of drawers brushing the footboard with a cathode ray TV teetering on top, and on the left...the shelves.

Floor to ceiling and installed around a brutalized five drawer dresser, the homemade shelves predated store bought modular storage systems and stayed on the wall out of habit other than any sane force. More VHSs than anything, but there were bibles and cookbooks and a penny counter and jars of homemade Vaseline and tracts crunched in dry rotted rubber bands and cassettes and Jesus books and photo albums and yearbooks from no less than ten schools and bare film reels exposed to light and dust and Kodak slide boxes and at least a hundred other varieties of paper and plastic casings holding God knows what. Hundreds of pounds of nothing, anchored only to plaster and spite.

II

The first thing Ly saw when she opened her eyes were the thin metal brackets underneath. Bowed after forty years, fair enough, but really? ‘Really?’ One screw each in the three holed arms. ‘Cheap or lazy?’ The dried blood on her teeth peeled with the ragged breath of a silent laugh. ‘I'm cheap but not easy. Cheesy but not eat. Ate. Aten. Eaten.’ Would she rot into the shag carpet like a thousand other uncleaned spills? ‘Ew. Ouch.’

Her head hurt, like she’d been wearing a too tight hat in the sun all day and now that hat was on fire. Toes moved and fingers moved but there really was a lot, A LOT of blood. The step stool was sitting innocently where she’d left it. She must’ve fallen. She turned her head the faintest bit to the left. So far so good. To the right. Toes still moving. Dead or alive? You don’t have to watch your back when you’re laying on the floor and standing up sounded horrifying. Even so. ‘Let's do life. I'll die when I have to but I'm not dying on the set of Match Game '78 if I get a choice. Life it is then.’

A convenient majority of the shelves’ burdens could go straight in the yawning garbage bag. What could be donated in good conscience was piled on the stripped bed until she put some more boxes together. The videos provided the only ghost of warm feeling Ly had felt since the start. Mostly bootlegs, NONE in cases; there were war movies, and golf tournaments, and revivals, and plays, and news coverage of unfolding historical events dating back to the fall of the Berlin wall hastily recorded, but it was the dozen or so kid movies that reached out to dust the day’s labors with a bittersweet echo. Animateds, live action folk tale ballets. Without pattern or plan, Ly pulled this and that from here and there and chose the fate of each artifact without much consideration.

Then she saw a small black notebook with a handwritten label that said Crochet Patterns. Certainly her grandmother’s. But her grandmother couldn't crochet. She refused to learn how so she couldn't be forced into doing it.

Ly pulled the book down with no particular care and flipped the front cover because “The Homo” in fact can crochet. Quite well. And knit and weave. She can't sew, but like grandmother like granddaughter she’d wouldn’t learn how so that no one could make her.

But it was blank.

The spine made the noises of a spine never cracked and she flipped through the pages, knowing damn well she had no excuse to hoard another new journal she’d never use, of the highest quality or not. As the back pages met the others in her left hand, a loosed receipt fluttered the few feet to the floor, pressed flat as slate from its decades crushed on the too full, over-trusted shelves.

But it wasn’t a receipt. She crouched stiltedly to pick it up and it was a $50 bill. Old. If ever circulated at all it had passed through only a pocket or two. At any time, $50 was a lot of money in this house, always and even as she stood there. Where did the grandmother get it? For it was certainly her—he had never met a dime of money he could stand to hold on to for more than an hour. The bulbous-backed television and the shop tools and the pound and a half of overdue notices lately paid told a clear enough story of who was the spender and who was the saver. The soldier. The fixer, the payer. Granny was a saver. ‘Granny was a ...’

The tape label fell off the empty book as she stood with a grunt. She stared at it resting across her toes half hidden in the green shag. Slowly as a dying watch she raised her eyes to the chaos of the groaning shelves. All those black books. Salmon Recipes. Canning. Waist Trimming. Wet Sets for Hair Styling. Spencerian Method. No-Fat Salad Dressings.

“Son of a Pontiac…” his favorite curse snaked out across her slack mouth and for once she didn’t cringe at the racist acronym in the faux swear. “No.” Sewing on the Bias. “No way.” Growing Tomatoes to Fry. “No.” The next label too faded to read but maybe it had said Tummy Calisthenics once.

But before her arid eyes could seek them all out she knew. She knew it was true. The grandmother’s blood in her veins had run cold without her notice because it knew.

She reached for the notebook farthest from her shaking hand. Polishing Schedule. Small black notebook. Fine quality. A luxury. Unused. Label made out of the tape with the string in it. Unmarred cover, crisp pages. Two $10s.

To her right as far as she could reach, Spot Cleaning Upholstery. FOUR $10s. As high as she could reach…and on and on until there was a stack of money piling on the dresser high enough to topple and a heap of books on the bed the same size as an almost-dancing pile of raked leaves until she realized how she was handling them and stacked them neatly with due care in piles of four.

This room always set a soul off balance. Like you’re walking with two left feet and gravity is taking a nap and not working right. Ears ringing, she folded the money into a steno pad with half the pages ripped out lately doomed for the trash pile and held it to her chest. ‘There’s not a damn thing to do but give it away, surely? I could--’ her ponytail was ripped backward before her vision exploded when her head hit the wood and the world was black before she hit the ground.

III

The first thing Ly saw when she opened her eyes were the telltale strips ripped out of the plaster with practiced skill. Copper wire. They burn themselves harvesting it. Great risk and great reward if you carve up these old houses. Black gold. She remembered now. The scrap man that doesn't ask questions. The desperate forgotten hiding in the corners of a middle class that hates them. This day. This house. This money. The money.

‘I was waiting to die in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ But time enough left to choose.

Her skinny arms were locked around the bizarre treasure, cleaved to her unmoving chest. $20,000. Probably more. It was swollen like a leak behind wallpaper and caught in the frozen claws of her icy fingers.

She rolled her head towards the little black notebooks that swam then disappeared. Everything did. The peeling blood on the teeth should've been the tip-off: dead person dry mouth. Ew.

The last thing Ly thought was, “I'm glad I wore my glasses. My contacts are only dailies. Will I get to keep my glasses? They're Coke bottles. They'll survive the trip to hell.’ She closed her eyes and waited for the ferryman.

The grandmother called softly from the space where the door used to be, “Baby? Are you hungry?”

Ly turned her head without pain and felt her body become something different. Something better. Then frowned, ‘Why is my grandmother in hell?’ Realization dawned as everything turned to pure light and in a nearing distance sweet singing crept in, not at all all that welcome: ‘Oh. Heaven it is then. Ew. Ouch.’

Too late.