Minerva the Liar, page 15
A few moments later, Minerva walked to the door and peered outside. She felt superstitious checking, but it had been a strange night, and she thought she’d make sure that there was nothing lurking outside ready to rap on her door again.
That was when she saw it. A long-tailed grackle. He was sitting in a tree just outside her window and appeared to be looking in. She didn’t know how she knew exactly, but she felt certain it was the same bird she’d seen earlier right when she’d first arrived. He was closer now than before.
His sharp yellow eyes were trained on her as before, but from the shorter distance, she noticed something else: There was something familiar about them. A little something quite familiar around the eyes.
It wasn’t quite human, not quite bird. She opened the door and stepped outside to get a closer look, but the bird flapped his wings, thrust into the air, and flew away.
“Did you find what you were looking for, Change?” she called to the darkness, feeling more than a little foolish.
There was no response.
The Return of the Body
It turned out to be a very good thing that Minerva and her mother grabbed those few hours of sleep.
There was a lot of commotion in the house bright and early that morning. The funeral home called to announce that they had finally “found” her father’s body. That it had been there when the director arrived to open the building.
They still weren’t sure what had happened to it, only that there had apparently been some sort of mix up at the morgue.
But all was right again. The funeral could proceed as scheduled.
“Right on time,” Minerva’s mother said. “I was this close to telling everyone I knew and ruining their business.”
As Minerva prepared for her father’s funeral, she noted that everything seemed a little out of phase. Death had a way of doing that, she noted. Of making real life seem like a dream.
Later she would not remember showering or changing into her funereal clothes, a smart black dress with a ruffled collar paired with a suit coat, a pair of black nylons, and chic but sensible low-heeled black pumps.
Her recollection of the day would later start with the memory of staring at her own legs as she sat in a car with her mother. Her uncle was at the wheel.
The door would open shortly afterwards, as they reached the funeral home.
She would at first be glad for what she had chosen to wear while in a daze, noting she looked quite elegant but had kept her options open, wearing shoes that were formal but also suitable for traversing the graveyard at the interment. Spikier heels might have risked tearing up the lawn and ticking off her relatives in the short term and riling some innocent groundskeeper down the line.
However, as she strode into the visitation, she immediately felt out of place. Her cousins stood in their work boots and jeans. Shooting a quick glance around, many of her relatives weren’t even wearing black. Instead, the most common choice seemed to be black and red check gingham paired with denim.
“Well, aren’t we fancy?” a waiting cousin teased, wrapping her in a hug. He smiled at her from underneath a baseball cap, which he wore backwards, with the tabs facing outward.
A thin layer of muck seemed to cling to him. And yet Minerva was the one who felt embarrassed.
Minerva shrugged, not sure what to say to him. She didn’t consider herself fancy.
“I guess they do things a little different down in the big city, don’t they?” he joked.
“I guess,” Minerva said.
She did her best to blend into the crowd, but she didn’t have a lot of options. Removing her jacket still left her looking rather formal and drew more attention than she’d like due to sexiness, since her cleavage was now fully exposed.
She suddenly regretted not bringing another pair of shoes. The pumps that had looked sensible before now looked like over-the-top glamor.
But as Minerva looked again to her mother, she realized it didn’t really matter what she was wearing. She realized that being overdressed was a trivial concern in the grand scheme of things. Her mother was clearly struggling to walk, kept tottering as though her knees were going to give out any time she had to move. She needed help to stand, especially when she got to the casket and peered in at her late husband.
Minerva looked around for her grandmother but couldn’t spot her. Well, that was alright. Nanny June could join them when she got here. It wasn’t like Minerva and her mother were hard to find. They were at the front of everything today, playing the role of Grieving Immediate Family.
Her aunt caught Minerva’s shoulder. “Everything happens for a reason, dear,” she said to Minerva.
Minerva suppressed a groan. She’d always hated that saying. “Everything happens for a reason.” It was meant to soothe, but provided little comfort.
Of course everything happened for a reason – but that didn’t mean that everything happened for a good reason. And having a reason didn’t mean that the reality was any easier to deal with.
No. To hell with “everything happens for a reason.” Everything that happens has a lesson. That was what was truly important, knowing what that lesson was and getting the most out of an experience — not trying to understand why horrible things happened. Who cared why they happened? They happened. The question was what happened next? And that’s where the lesson came in.
As Minerva wound her way to their seats at the front of the room, she had to stop several times to receive condolences and hugs from other family members. She tried her best to be gracious but found she was already sick of people’s pity. This did not bode well. It was too early to feel that way.
Minerva made her way up to view the body, feeling unsteady. As she stood at the side of her father’s coffin, she noted that he didn’t look as though he were dead but merely sleeping. This was the mortician’s craft, after all, transforming the unsettling and foreign face of death into something more palatable, more compatible with our memories of life. A mortician was a kind of interpreter. They translated a confusing message into one we could better understand, even if something were lost in that translation.
Minerva realized, however, if she really strained that she could see the face of her father as he had visited her in the dead of night. She could discern the profoundly unhuman visage that lie under the skillfully applied mask.
Once she saw it, she found it difficult to unsee. She tried to focus on her father’s heavily made up face in peaceful repose, but the memory kept leaping into her head unbidden, superimposing itself upon what she was seeing.
She turned away from the casket.
She felt angry. Angry at how much her parents had built themselves up when she was a little kid. How they had made her feel like she was defective and inferior to them as a person.
Angry at how they had acted like minor gods. And angry at herself for believing them.
When it came to life and death, what really mattered, they erred just as obviously as anyone else would have. Her father had waited too long to go into hospice and too long to say goodbye.
Even though her father had been ill for quite some time, no one had told her, and her mother hadn’t made any funeral arrangements until the moment he passed. Minerva had a feeling that her mother had been in denial about his illness and was now in denial about his death. It would be a long while yet before her mother would realize he was gone for good and never coming back. It would hit her weeks or months later on some night that was a bit too quiet, once all the sympathetic people had left with their long parade of “sorry for your loss” casseroles and offers of “if there’s anything I can do.”
It would all happen too late.
As Minerva contemplated this, she felt the anger burn her veins. Her parents were fallible just like she was, just like anyone else. They’d just made her think otherwise.
It was the Big Lie. And it was completely infuriating.
She would later not remember the eulogy at all. Most of the day would be gone from her memory, not erased exactly, but absent – as though it failed to encode in the first place. There was something unreachable about her on the day of her father’s funeral, something that made it so that most of what she saw and heard just didn’t connect with her.
She’d have brief flashes of memory. The scene in the graveyard would remain like a still shot. Again, she stood out in the crowd, feeling like an extravagant black-plumed bird in her funeral getup, surrounded by folks in the country attire of hard work and harder play. They wore clothes that were meant to be dirtied, strained, and challenged.
She felt like she was wearing wrapping paper at a time when it would have been better to wear armor. That was what her namesake wore, after all. The goddess sprang to life in a suit of armor.
And she wouldn’t speak to her mother until they were back at the house for the evening, dropped off there by her uncle, who left immediately after helping them bring in an astonishing number of lidded casseroles.
“Well, you won’t starve,” her uncle had joked, before wishing them a good night.
“Can you help me with these?” her mother asked her, gesturing to the army of dishes.
“Sure,” Minerva said. She walked over to the refrigerator, opened the door, and peered inside. “I think I can fit just about all of them if I shift some things around.”
“Okay,” her mother said.
Minerva crouched before the fridge as her mother handed her each casserole in turn. It was rough going at first, like solving an unfamiliar style of puzzle, but as she worked each successive dish in, it began to become more natural.
When all was said and done, there was a single casserole dish that wouldn’t fit. A pan of lasagna.
“Guess I know what we’re having for dinner,” her mother said.
It only took a few minutes to serve it up onto plates, and they sat down for dinner, or at least for the ritual of dinner. Minerva realized she wasn’t actually all that hungry. She looked across the table to find that her mother was sitting there idly poking her slice of lasagna with a fork but not doing anything that could be called eating.
“Is grandma okay?” Minerva asked.
Her mother frowned. “Minerva, please, don’t.”
“What?” Minerva said. “I looked everywhere today and didn’t see her. I expected her to be sitting up with us.”
“Are you feeling okay?” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Minerva said. “Why?”
“Sweetie, your grandmother has been dead for years,” her mother said.
Minerva’s head suddenly felt much too heavy for her. “Oh,” she said, feeling ill. For a second, a vision flashed into her mind, of chatting with her grandmother the night before. But as she focused on it, it faded from her visual imagination. It felt more like a dream than a memory.
Maybe her mother was right. It had been a long day. She was probably exhausted. And her memory wasn’t really that good anyway, especially not lately.
When Minerva met up with her cavalcade of boyfriends the next morning to make the long drive home to Skinner, she was glad that no one asked any questions.
Russ Minot and the Biggest Lie in 254 Counties
It was the weather’s fault, Russ Minot reflected. That was the whole reason he’d gotten here. The entire reason he’d managed to claw his way up out of a life that many of the other people around him would never escape.
He couldn’t bear to be controlled by the weather. Couldn’t stand to be fenced in by something so arbitrary.
He’d grown up seeing the farmers do everything right and still have nothing to show for it.
One year there’d be too much rain. The next there would be too little.
And no matter what happened year to year, everyone else was in the same situation right there with you, with all your competition laboring under the same capricious sky.
Farming was no better than gambling, really, and arguably worse. Because at least you didn’t stand at a craps table for months before walking away with nothing like a farmer did when entire fields of crops withered.
The gamble that the farmers took made Russ think of an entire casino crowded with hundreds of people making the same exact bet, waiting for months, and then walking away empty handed while some unseen enriched banker chafed his hands red raw, rubbing them together, celebrating bankrupting everyone.
Russ had learned early on that it was better to devote your time and energies to something less controlled by luck. Farming was hard work and took a lot of effort, but effort only went so far. It wasn’t like effort beyond what the work required at baseline could take you to an exceptional place.
The extra work couldn’t make it rain more or rain less. Extra work couldn’t make the winds calm down. It couldn’t keep storms from rioting.
Russ knew early on that farming wasn’t for him. The kind of profession Russ had always wanted was one where he could work hard, harder than anyone else, and one day find himself in an exceptional place because of the extra labor he’d kicked in.
He wasn’t sure exactly what that would look like when he was a little kid. Whether it would unfold in the incomprehensibly brown but fertile expanses of his home state – or whether it would take him around the world without the expectation that he’d ever come back.
As it would turn out, Russ would have been safe with either bet. Later, he would look back and laugh at that, how he’d originally framed it in terms of “or,” not knowing that his own destiny would turn out to be “and.” Here and away. The country and the city.
And everything in between.
No “or” about it.
“Or” was for a different sort of person. For a person who prioritized. Who was satisfied with only taking part of it.
This was not Russ Minot.
He wanted it all.
That alone wasn’t all that unusual. There were plenty of ambitious people out there, especially in the hungry country where he grew up. People wanted to get ahead. And they would probably always want to get even farther ahead, no matter how elevated their position became.
The difference between them and Russ Minot was simple: They were willing to do just about anything to get it.
Russ Minot, he had limits.
And paradoxically, those limits that should have held him back, didn’t. It was those limits that drove other people to respect him and want to do him favors. An extra hand here and there. To elevate him.
Out of pity.
To help “poor Russ Minot,” the naïve Boy Scout who actually thought hard work would get him somewhere. Who honestly thought that he could afford to cater to his principles in one of the poorest areas of the country.
So, they threw him crumbs. And crumbs. And even more crumbs.
Each person who paid pity on him thought they were the first and the only person to help him. But Russ knew different. And he didn’t say a damned thing about it. He took the honest help and didn’t let on that there were plenty of folks who had helped him out.
And he pushed himself to work even harder, even with all that charity from others. He saved every penny that he earned and every penny he was given, reinvested it in himself, and stayed poor and shabby looking.
He didn’t let on to others that he was getting anywhere.
No, that would become known much later and suddenly. The pauper would rise and create a company seemingly out of nowhere. A man who lived with his young wife in an unfurnished apartment sustaining himself on the lowest rungs of Depression food—Hoover stew and lard sandwiches—would hire a staff of polished young professionals to work for him one day. Lease an expansion office space. Revolutionize technology.
Just as everyone else was counting him out.
Some of those who helped him in his earlier years would be angry later. They’d be spiteful when they discovered that Russ had made good.
One would accost him on a crowded street. “Russ, it’s me. It’s your old neighbor.”
Russ greeted him warmly. But a warm exchange was not what the neighbor had in mind.
“You old bastard,” the neighbor said. “You weren’t poor at all. Why didn’t you refuse our help?”
Russ thought about this as passersby stopped and listened. Finally, he said, “You never asked if I were poor. You only assumed. Who was I to correct you?”
The neighbor shouted obscenities.
Later, Russ would send along some money to the man’s family with a note: From one poor soul to another.
Because that was the way it was, Russ noted. He felt that way as a poor man and continued to feel that way when he became rich. There really wasn’t anything separating a poor man and a rich one. Nothing meaningful anyway.
A lot of people acted as though amassing wealth were a great moral accomplishment, but it never felt that way to him. And besides, a lot of people who worshipped the wealthy would have been amazed to hear the kind of trash that came out of their mouths when they thought they were surrounded by like-minded people.
People who were wealthy and always had been were by and large some of the most despicable people Russ had ever met – and these folks were also blissfully unaware of their own depravity.
Russ was new money of course – and as such, he was suspect. But they still managed to assume that he felt the same way as they did. That he viewed rich and poor people as being fundamentally different. That he thought as a rich person he was superior to those who stayed poor.
No, no, that wasn’t it at all.
People were people, regardless of how much money they had.
But his new “friends” kept on assuming he felt like they did and unknowingly embarrassing themselves with all their arrogant, superficial grandstanding.
But they never asked how he felt. And who was he to correct them?
