Graceland

Darkness was falling as Benjamin Caesar Smith tramped from the Dunfield train station to his mother’s cottage on the village outskirts. Ignoring the pangs of a headache that had traveled with him all day, he scuffed his shoes on the faded welcome mat, careful to remove all visible mud and dead leaf fragments. He rang the doorbell. The door flew open and—“Hellohowareyou!” kiss, kiss, achoo!—Florence scarcely welcomed him before she sprinted away to tend to the shrieking tea-kettle. He left his shoes, heels pushed against the wall, on the mat in the small porch.

“Make yourself at home,” she called out from the kitchen. “Of course I don’t need to tell you that,” she chortled.

“No fuss, Mum,” he said. “Just a quick cuppa before I get on my way again.” He’d told her he was en route to a conference.

The front hall led to a parlor dominated by an oaken roll-top desk and a stone fireplace. He scrutinized the tongs, poker, and bellows that lurked beside it.

“Such a delightful surprise!” Florrie’s voice, rushed and breathless, had a quaver it never used to have.

In the fireplace, the log had barely caught fire from the blaze of kindling when wood-smoke began to billow into the room. “Oh! I forgot! I left the silly damper shut!” she said in a high-pitched voice. “Just open the damper, Benji, would you?” She trailed off in sneezes.

He bent to the fireplace, found the handle, and wrenched the damper open. He waved a folded newspaper to disperse the smoke, then eased his bulk onto the chintz sofa partially covered by a striped afghan blanket. It brought back memories of his mother crocheting during long nights whilst he toiled over maps and maths and metaphors. The afghan was covered with long white furs—dog fur, he guessed. A sharp pain flared above his right eye.

Florrie poked her head out of the kitchen. “Do take your gloves off, dear,” she urged. “The chill will soon be gone from the parlor!” After a coughing attack she apologized again for “my silly goof” with the damper.

Sounds of cupboard doors opening and shutting reverberated from kitchen to parlor. When she was particularly excited, like tonight, she sang a phrase or two of O Come Emanuel. In the St. Albans Boys’ Choir, young Benji had sung the piercing solo that opened the grand procession every Christmas and Easter, in a voice of such promise and purity it made the listener’s heart ache. Now his voice was but a raspy tenor.

Tonight, her out-of-tune whine and jumbled-up words set his teeth on edge. His eyes ran down the long silken cord of the drapes. How strong, exactly, was that cord?

Pushing the tea-tray with a rattle and clatter, Florrie appeared in the parlor, her wispy hair floating around her head like clouds around a mountain peak.

“My boy, my boy, you don’t come home anymore.” She settled on a chair near him. The tall silk-tasseled lamp cast a sepia glow over them.

“I’m here now, aren’t I?”

 “Why yes, you are.” She narrowed her eyes. “But you seem a little… different. Tired, perhaps?”

Clinkety-clink, her spoon stirred the leaves in the brown betty teapot. He winced.

“Oh yes. Tired.”

“Oh dear, the cream.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll just be a minute.”

His eyes roved the room. So little had changed. She had always encouraged his childish creativity, bringing home leftover materials from her work as a window dresser. The crumbling plaster walls were decorated with Benji’s lively paintings, gaudy watercolours, and meticulous sketches.  Faded and torn now, most of them.

But not the Mum’s Day poem, which held pride of place on the mantel. Busy little hands had created that extravagant floral tribute, inscribed in his wobbly script:

Dearest Mum,

I love you with all my heart.

I will buy purply flowers for you.

I will ride in a big shiny black car with you.

I will buy a wee patch of land for you.

           XOXO, Benji

He had illustrated it with Farmer Florence in her fantastical flower farm, standing beneath the knotty-limbed old apricot tree in their backyard.

“Ah, the old desk,” he murmured, rising and going to it. Many of his handicrafts still enjoyed daily use there, like the wooden-stick pencil holder, crammed with pens and the gleaming blade of a letter opener. The stone paperweight, coyly done up as a pet rock in another school project, squatted on a big pile of bills. He hefted it, noting how decisive it felt. He riffled through the top few bills, saw they were all overdue, and clucked his tongue. Constant cash-flow problems. At least the cottage was all hers.

She returned with a cow-shaped creamer. “Do you remember Clarabelle?” She held it up for him to admire. “Moo moo.”

“Must you?”

She chuckled as she resettled in her chair. “Looking at those nasty bills, are you?” she said. “I’ve left my position as a window-dresser, that’s what done it. Everyone’s buying online, you know, so the store closed down. I’ve taken up dog-grooming until the pension starts.”

“I thought you were allergic to dog fur.”

“I am.” She decorously blotted her nose. “But it’s manageable. I keep the grooming area clean, and I pop two little white pills whenever I get too—oh, never mind.” She poured tea into the wide-brimmed fine china cups on floral saucers. The lamplight caught the gilt edging of the cups and saucers, like saintly haloes.

“So, what have you been up to, my little Benji?”

“Oh God, stop with this ‘Benji’!” he said.

“Oh all right,” she said evenly as she set out the spoons and sugar tongs and a plate of biscuits. “Benjamin, then.”

“No,” he said. “‘Caesar,’ Mum. I’m dropping that wimpy first name.”

“But your father would be so—”

“Father? He’s dead, Mum!”

Florrie pressed her lips together in a thin white line as she plopped one sugar cube in her tea.

“Dead” was harsh, too harsh; he knew this. It was a word seldom uttered in this cottage. In the village of Dunfield everyone knew Benjamin’s birth and his father’s untimely death were tragically and inextricably linked. At the very mention of her late husband, Florrie fought for her composure, indeed sometimes for her very breath. So the villagers kept quiet about his death and spoke only of her remarkable son.

“Oh, you’re right. Your father—,” she began, placing a hand on her chest.

“Dead—dead, Mum! Face up to reality!”

“I should tell you what happened, Ben—er, Caesar.” She put three drops of cream in her tea and watched the miniature mushroom cloud explode under the surface of the tea. “On the day I went into labor, the nurses shooed your dear father away from the delivery room. That’s what they did in those days: no husbands allowed. His friends took him to the local pub to celebrate. He drank only ginger ale because he’d promised to get them all home safely that night. That’s the kind of man Winslow was, a man of his word.” She stirred once and put the spoon resolutely aside.

“And?”

“And he did. They were all home safely and your dear father was driving home alone. He was in his lane, driving at the speed limit—when the gigantic lorry veered into his lane.”

Her son set the cup down with a jarring noise. “The kids at school said I was a jinx,” he said softly. “Now I get it.”

“I was not cut out to be a single mother. However, you were a wonderful child. Couldn’t ask for better.” She blinked at him. “But don’t let it go to your head!”

“No, Mum.”

“Have some more tea.”

As they sipped, they fell into a contemplative silence.

“I suppose you want to see the suitcase,” she whispered.

The suitcase was central to the family lore. Throughout his youth, Benji had captained the football, ping-pong, and debating teams. Each grade, he had finished tops in his class. Fearing the continual accolades might “go to his head,” Florrie kept Benji’s shiny trophies, fancy certificates, and clanking medallions tucked away in a suitcase, as if to emphasize glory was a fleeting state that could depart at a moment’s notice.

“The suitcase,” he sneered. “Trinkets and trash.”

She drew back. “I’ve been saving it for you.”

“It’s worthless.”

“Who knows the value of anything these days? Bitcoin, is that the new treasure? I would rather have a plastic trophy with your name on it than anonymous cash.” She blotted her rheumy eyes and sighed. “Well, have a biscuit. McVitie’s digestives; I know you like them.”

“Jaffa cake, Mum!” he said.

“That must be Caesar’s favorite. It sure wasn’t Benji’s!”

She took a long, slow, unblinking look at her son.  “You come in here all loud and—and—kingly.” She struggled for breath. “Anyone might say… you’re… putting… on… airs. What has happened to you?”

And before she knew it, Caesar vanished—and Benji was wrapping his arms around his mum. Whoosh, he dissolved into hot tears as he described his final year at the Dunfield Academy.

The candles were barely cool on Benji’s 17^th birthday cake when he was appointed captain of the football team. Damien Battenbrawn, assistant captain, had been overlooked yet again for promotion. “Hey, mama’s boy,” Damien huffed. “Time to teach you a lesson!” He ambushed Benji in the locker room after everyone else had left. Benji never went to the authorities and cried foul; no, he sharpened his self-defence skills and learned to fight back. However, the secret beatings took their toll. Benji became a recluse with an acute aversion to noise and light. When the year ended, Benji chose to attend the college farthest from Dunfield. The headmaster sent a glowing letter of recommendation, and Benji was awarded an entrance scholarship. The next year his college grades plummeted as he experimented with all sorts of ways to dull his continual headaches, his recurrent panic, and his ever-deepening anxiety.

“I had no heart to tell you, Mum, that my scholarships had run out,” he concluded. He confessed, too, that he had not stayed extra years to write a thesis.

*       *       *

Being Caesar was simple everywhere except in his mother’s cottage, he realized, as pain knifed through his skull.

“There, there.” Florrie instinctively patted his back. “Good to clear the air.”

His eyes wandered around the parlor and settled on the final-year class photo. Right behind Benji, there was Damien Battenbrawn, grinning like Satan himself.

“Shall I freshen the pot, Benji?”

It was Caesar who roared to life in Benji’s braincase. Caesar who had coolly surveyed the place and its potentially destructive implements. Caesar whose eye now lit upon one new thing: the cushion. An ornately embroidered pillow, pale blue satin on an ivory-colored background bearing the word: Graceland. The pain knifed through his skull again. “You been traveling, Mum? Wasting money on airplanes?”

She cleared her throat. “What? My Graceland cushion?”

He picked it up and squeezed it with his fist. A grin widened on his face as he tightened the hold. “Lots of stuffing in this here … pillow,” he said, shaking it in her face.

“Careful now; it’s silk.” Her voice jittered as she reared back. “Don’t wreck—I didn’t buy—for heaven’s sake! It’s a… a gift!”

Caesar, with the pillow firmly grasped in two meaty hands, advanced on his mother.

*       *       *

In a borrowed suit, Benjamin Caesar Smith attended his mother’s funeral. Powerful sedatives coursed in his veins, smoothing out his responses to the hundreds of trivial social interactions forced upon him, the grieving orphan. The church still rang with her favorite song, O Come Emanuel— this time sung so perfectly by the current boy-soprano in the local choir that it had made Benji’s heart ache. His face was wet with tears and his nose was full of the scent of delphiniums and lilac that lay over Florrie’s casket.

He had followed that casket, borne by six pall-bearers, down the center aisle of St. Albans. The townspeople craned to see the local hero again—and, yes, he was still the local hero despite his years away—because Florrie had never let his memory grow dim.

Benjamin rode in the vehicle beside the remains of Florence Octavia Smith. The shiny black hearse floated like a barge, with the driver a seasoned ferryman piloting the raft as they glided down the black river of highway.

Dozens of slow cars followed at a respectful distance. The other mourners talked among themselves. Benjamin was clearly devastated by grief, everyone agreed. Which was a pity; the boy shouldn’t blame himself.  Florrie never wore the Medic Alert bracelet for her asthma and allergies, lest it drive away business.

Asthma was a sneaky killer—an attack could suffocate you when least expected—everyone knew that. Florrie should not have lived with so many dangers about, the neighbors said, not with all her asthmatic sensitivities: the pollen in her overgrown garden, the wood-smoke from the ancient fireplace, the dust and mold in the ramshackle cottage, but most recently the parade of long-haired animals she had recently taken up grooming. All known irritants to asthmatics.

The hearse entered Dunfield Cemetery. Soon the procession would reach the minuscule plot beside Winslow Smith’s grave. Benjamin had seen to all funeral arrangements; it was the least he could do—short of killing Caesar, which, in the long days that followed, he would contemplate.

But today belonged to Florence Octavia Smith. Nothing was too good for his darling Mum, he had promised her long ago. Here he was, riding with her in the big shiny black car. Here was the blanket of purply flowers, and here was the wee patch of land. Like his father, Benjamin was a man of his word.

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