Jefferson Pomeroy's Grave

To try and drum up some support for the roleplay game I've played for about three years I joined a roleplay directory/ community of other roleplayers and about once a month they have a story contest for some free added publicity for your roleplay site.

This month, you had to write no more than 1000 words using a specific colour of your choice as the theme for the short story. I chose brown. I am also pleased to say that with a whopping three votes (not three votes more than the second place story, three votes altogether) I won the contest this month with 'Jefferson Pomeroy's Grave'

Honestly, I thought it was hokey and trite but people always lap that shit up. Also I didnt realize but apparently I stole the surname from one of my best friend's boyfriend...I was wondering why I had that name in my head, it seemed kind of random! Sorry Dom!

Story under the jump break. 




Jefferson Pomeroy's Grave

They buried Jefferson Pomeroy at the furthest end of the graveyard. The tree on the outer edges blocked out any hint of the sun from the grass that tried to grow over the earth on his grave. All through the year, the other grave sites were green and well kept but Jefferson’s was always the ill brown colour of dead grass and the dirt.

He had his last, fatal stroke on the fifth of February 1985-my twenty first birthday. And at the time I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday gift. I didn’t go to his funeral but in the thirty five years or so since, I’ve visited his grave. The first time I went, I spat on the earth.

I’d been to a funeral before- my mother’s when I was eight. The flowers were fresh and alive then, bluebells were her favourite; they matched her eyes. My daddy’s eyes were tortoise shell colored and I remember that his palms were sweaty as he held his hand in mine. After the funeral, he buckled me in to my grandparent’s car and kissed the crown of my head. I never saw him again.

And Chuck had black eyes, the darkest I’d ever seen. He wore his trousers tight, shirt open and unbuttoned on to his chest. When I was fifteen he looked just like Jimi Hendrix.

Jefferson usually fell asleep drunk on his barcalounger at eleven and, when he did, a fire wouldn’t wake him. I’d smear on makeup and inch myself into a pair of tight denim shorts. In Clarksville, there was a bar where the bartenders didn’t check for I.Ds, I would walk there, or hitch a ride if I could, and change from my scuffed black pumps into heels at the door.

I saw him around a few times before I ever had the nerve to even catch his eye. But with a belly full of whiskey and coke, a brown fizz in my head giving me liquid courage, I danced in his direction one night. I think Pat Benatar was playing; it was a slow dance. He came close and put his arms around me.

“What’s your name?”

“Dorothy Pomeroy. Everyone calls me Dolly.”

“Like Parton?” he sung a few lines to Jolene in the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard. “I dig it. I’m Chuck.”

He was nineteen and set on joining the army- he jotted down my address in the blank front page of a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz he kept in the glove compartment of his station wagon .So he could write to me, he said, when he went away.

That night we got high on top of that station wagon. The air was hot, and heavy, and I could feel the sweat forming on the back of my knees, mixing with the brown dust that the wind kicked up onto the roof.

I lost my virginity on the backseat to him and I looked out for him every time I snuck out of my grandparent’s trailer into Clarksville. As far as I was concerned, that summer in 1979, I wasn’t going to dance with anyone else ever again.

After about the seventh time we made love in his station wagon, I was feeling grown up and coy and I asked him how many girls he’d had in there and if that was why he loved it so much. He just chuckled and said,

“No, girl. It’s just you.”

It was the closest anyone ever came to telling me they loved me. When summer was over, Chuck went off and joined the army. He never did write to me; must have left his copy of the Wizard of Oz in the glove compartment.

In the spring of the following year I gave birth to a girl on the floor of my grandparent’s trailer. She was small and wet, red at first, screaming to try and outdo my grandma. But then she settled in my arms and her skin turned the golden brown of Demerara sugar.

Jefferson took one look at her and flipped out.

“Who the hell have you been messin’ with?” he hollered, only not as polite, and plucked her from my arms.

She wailed and beat her little fists against her naked chest and I cried for her back. He cut the cord with a kitchen knife- it took a few tries. The blood from the birth soaked into the carpeting, turned from crimson to brown. He wrapped her in a towel and left in his pick up.

When Jefferson came back, he didn’t have my baby with him. I heard him tell grandma that he’d dumped her in Clarksville, wouldn’t say where.

As soon as I was ready to, I borrowed a neighbour’s paper to check if there were any reports about babies being found in Clarksville, alive or dead, but there was nothing. It wasn’t newsworthy. Maybe it would have been if she’d been white.

Life went on without her like it had done without Chuck and all the blossom on the trees in spring got trodden into mush on the ground. There were autumns and winters, and I got a job at a hairdressers. To save up for a station wagon. Each time I cut into someone’s hair I imagined Jefferson at my baby’s umbilical cord, I imagined my scissors at his throat.

The stroke happened quickly; a spurt of blood from his nose crusted brown onto the hem of his wife beater. Outside of the trailer while my grandmother watered the dying plants on the porch she heard him moan. And that was that; Jefferson Pomeroy wiped from the face of the earth like toilet paper over a shit stain.

Now, the Universe said to me, you are a free.

Last year, I decided to leave something on Jefferson Pomeroy’s grave. I cut the heads off a bunch of flowers and waited for the leaves to wilt. I hope he liked them.