If some 70’s sitcom needed a funeral home scene, this would have been it. Alternating patches of white (or used to be white) textured wallpaper and veneer wood paneling with matching pews, pulpit and ceiling joists. An old place where largely-forgotten people were spoken over before being planted in the hard, red caliche of Northwest Texas, where Bermuda and buffalo grass clung to the ground, roots more like claws that dug in shallow and tangled. Small towns don’t have much watering budget for municipal cemeteries.
Three day before, Wallace called. It was November and bitterly cold. Wallace and I met in grade school and I suppose I took to him because virtually no one else did and those that did tended to beat up on him. I’m talking mean beatings and tricks that nobody should be subjected to. We’d hung out after school a few times, first he came by my house and then I started going to his. His mom was a nice lady who smoked Kools and worked outside the home, not shocking, but still unusual in mid-70’s Amarillo.
Otto Kortig was Wallace’s stepfather. He was a big dude, about 6’2 and 262 pounds; stout and strong. He could carry engine blocks like they were laundry baskets. He drank Wild Turkey, listened to Lefty Frizzell, drove live cattle in an 18-wheeler and lived to prove he was the toughest guy in the world – even when his object was his stepson. I’d seen Wallace come to school with black eyes and such but everyone, teachers and all, just supposed it was Wallace’s lot in life.
Otto would get this look in his eyes after the first couple of hours, intense but not in the same room kind of look. He’d sit at the dining room table playing those old country 78 RPMs and just randomly grin and blurt out phrases like “you’re more fulla crapt than a Christmas turkey!” Real poetry.
The more senseless drunk he got, the closer Wallace was to an ass kicking or a night of forced arm wrestling with some well beyond his physical strength. Some guys fished with their dads, Wallace got “what for” from his.
Wallace and his mom told me once his real dad had died under mysterious circumstances after being accused of some sort of crime. She even got out an old ‘True Detective” type magazine to show me a story that had been written about the alleged crime. Wallace just had poor luck with dads, I suppose.
Needless to say, over time we kind of drifted. Until the call.
“Hey, Wallace, what’s going on?”
‘Otto’s dead.” He went on without waiting for me to ask. “He was in a wresting match with a guy who lived a few trailers down. Then he just grabbed his chest and fell over.”
Perfect.
“Hell you say?”, was all I could get out.
So there I sat in the funeral chapel in Hereford, Texas, pallbearer for a man I despised, a man I never liked a bit and, further, about to be laid low, but not before I helped carry his nearly 300 pounds plus casket in a freezing, biting wind. The other pallbearers were all older and thinner than I and looked like they dug out their old wedding suit for the occasion Clothes didn’t really matter as nothing would have felt warm on that long trip from hearse to grave.
I walked with my corner of the casket, stiff and slow, my arm slowly pulling away from the socket, as a wind chill of -5F cut through us all. I knew for a fact that Otto never knew a minister personally in his adult life, at least not on purpose, but this one went on long enough graveside for one of the other pallbearers to say “Screw it” and go to hide in a tiny mausoleum, cigarette in hand.
The wake afterwards was a kind of southern/Texas/Irish with horrible food in those blue steel roasters, gallon wine, whiskey and enough cigarette smoke to choke me out and I smoked two packs a day.
It fascinated me to see Wallace’s real grief at the passing of a man who’d kicked his ass and called him “wimp” so many times in others’ company; I could never force myself to wonder what went on when no one else was around. But that’s the way it was then, you just took it, and if that was the kind of parent life brought you, well that was just tough. This was northwest Texas and learning to be a man included dealing with it.
Wallace come walking up halfway through the wake – you could hear the iced-over limbs from the Chinese elms around the house making cracking noises, moments from being no longer able to take the weight. Wallace had a drink in his hand and a dead flat gloss in his eyes.
He grinned that stupid grin Otto would get. “Boy, you’re more full of crap than a Christmas turkey!”
I knew right then he’d be just like Otto.