In the South, funerals are big-ass affairs, because our mothers taught us to honor the dead. The admonition applies to everyone’s dead, but is most sacred when the funeral is for your own, like John Fleming, my wife’s first cousin.

Most of my wife’s family attended. They claim a Darwinian link to the Mayflower, the ship that birthed America. The family has lived generations in Roanoke City, a small coastal town, where streets bear their name and family crests hide holes in their brittle plaster walls. The family once had money but lost it long ago. Even so, not one of the latest twenty generations has been allowed to sink visibly below the level of the ancient ancestral one that had prospered. Pretense is reality to my wife’s family, so they cultivate eccentrics while my family produces ordinary people paying their bills.

My lineage is Norwegian, Dutch, German, and Scotch-Irish. We are third-generation Americans, nomads (Iowa, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina), travelling streets named for others. In my family, no generation rises above the one that had the worst failure.

The funeral was for Dead John, who had lived his youth in Roanoke City, schooled at Chapel Hill, and married rich, into a Maryland family of exotic fabric traders. His wife, Cissie, beautiful and privileged, had never known she was either, because she had always been both. When John moved to Maryland, the family elders feared he would become a Yankee. To them, that is far worse than a “Negro,” as being Yankee is premeditated. But moving was forgiven because John was smart, handsome, and now rich, so his success refueled the myth that the whole Fleming species had money. He gave away far more than the rest of the family hoarded.

My wife, Lesley, was raised in the family town. She lost her given name to a shorthand one, “Les.” The new name was an inheritance from her father, who was also Lesley, but he clipped his to “Les” while he fought for the Marines at Guadalcanal. Respecting our dead, we called him “Papa Les.”

Papa Les had married into the “damn” family. When he was alive, he regularly led his daughters in military school, mischief operations intended to deflate the family arrogance. He took Les and sister Biddie grocery shopping where he would fart in an aisle, then hide and giggle with his daughters while shoppers wilted in the noxious area. He would sometimes binge drink – his destination vacations from the larger family.

Dead John’s father, Jack, is part of the family royalty in Roanoke City. He has lived there all his life, with the last twenty years being a dismal, Shakesperean misery-moan about the death of his wife, Alice. The family said that Alice was a saint and Jack was her “behind.” His mouth moves like it is full of loose marbles and oatmeal, so every word is grinding and muffled. I never met anyone better at wide-mouth lecture, displaying teeth smeared with the white bread sandwich that he’d eaten for lunch. Filled with hot air, Jack inflates himself above all others, into the blue sky, like the dirigibles that are stationed at the town’s Coast Guard base. It is good that he likes himself because no one else does, including Jesus and his family.

Sadie is my wife’s mother and Jack’s sister. She has been angry-celibate for three decades, since Papa Les’ heart attack death at age fifty-six, which some said was self-inflicted. Sadie is a devout Episcopalian club member, so long as God does not meddle in her life and He tethers her Rector to twenty-minute sermons while she reads the newspaper. She has ample opinions about everything from Kotex to skin color. She often accuses Cousin Edwin and others of stealing her “valuables.”

Cousin Edwin is Les’ cousin. Edwin lives mostly outside his robust body, gulping life like it is whiskey. He can’t read music but can play the piano so well that he must be the love child of Liberace and Jerry Lee Lewis. Before I married Les, the family had a reception in Roanoke City. At the tail end of the party, Edwin cornered me and said, “Thirty years from now, you will hate everyone in this family but your wife and me.” The prophecy came true, except the thirty-year part and the fact that I still liked Uncle Booty.

Uncle Booty is Edwin’s father, the family’s reluctant savior, and its only concession to humility among the senior members.

Although wrong about Uncle Booty, Edwin was right about “Worthless Bud,” who married Jack’s only daughter Pam, then grossly violated the heritage by dragging her lifestyle well below that of the most afflicted generation of the family. Without Pam, Bud would starve to death under a bypass bridge. If you Googled illness, he would claim every one of the results. He fake-hobbles on a cane and smokes endlessly. He is a hunched-over, beaten dog, fearful of eye contact.

Here’s a recap. Dead John is being buried. Cissie is his lovely wife. Jack is the deceased’s father. Sadie is Dead John’s sexually shriveled aunt and my heroine wife’s mother. Les is my wife. Edwin is our cousin (my wife’s but I claim him). Worthless Bud is married to Pam, Jack’s remaining, living child. Booty is Edwin’s father and John’s uncle.

The funeral took place on a dreary, rain-splattered March day in Chapel Hill. Before he became Dead John, John retired there. The attendees lined up to get into the sanctuary of John’s rich church, while the rain sloshed our feet and dampened our underwear. As the family approached the door, Worthless Bud shivered in the church rose garden, crouched under a sickly, black umbrella, bent over his cane lighting a cigarette. He was in pitiful, plain view of the ant line entering the church. I wondered if he was coming in, but was told by the family that he couldn’t. I didn’t know that funerals had their own purgatory, but this one did. Jack had barred Bud’s entry, because dogs were never allowed inside, especially those that had peed the family heirlooms. I started to find Jack to tell him that Jesus, the head of this church, had invited His betrayer Judas to the Last Supper, but was told not to interfere.

I don’t recall much of the funeral except that the church was full of important people—none being from the family. Some cried, and Jack wailed like a pubescent hyena while my mother-in-law Sadie read her newspaper.

I saw Poor Worthless Bud (PWB) later, when we Gypsy caravanned into the parking lot of a sparkling country club – plantation Tara before the Yankee burn. It was the last stop of John’s funeral day because the death train went nowhere from there. PWB was lurking behind his tired old Buick, so I went over to talk to him.

“Hey, PWB. How are you?” I asked.

“Not well, rain bothers twelve of my diseases,” he said.

“Are you coming in to the reception?”

“No, I think I’ll just lie out here in the parking lot.”

“Can’t you come inside and eat some food?”

“Jack says I can’t.”

“Damn Jack,” I said under my breath.

Jesus cringed at what I said and PWB slink-disappeared behind parked cars in the lot.

The cavernous entrance to Tara had ghostly lighting hanging from the walls and a twenty-foot-wide chandelier suspended above it all, like a giant squid. The squid was attached to a rotunda ceiling that didn’t depict the sea, but a blue Carolina sky. It was a bad architectural metaphor, as if the pirate Blackbeard had designed it. A curved staircase led to the second-floor veranda, where all the food had been splayed out. A huge patio expanded just beyond the veranda, where the bar was located.

The place was full of Negro employees dressed like mannequins in a shop window, mouthing, “Yes Suh” and “No Ma’am” to the funeral troupe. Most of the crowd hustled out to the patio to chug free liquor before they vultured the food, but not my mother-in-law Sadie.

She stabbed her cane at others as she slowly climbed the stairs towards the veranda food. Never hungry a day, Sadie swore that the Great Depression got its start right in her childhood living room. That was like everything else in her fairy tale that America’s heritage was invented, birthed, or discovered in Roanoke City. That included orgasms, slavery, apples, Apple Computer, Andy Griffith, table manners, and electricity. Although Thomas Edison died when Sadie was eight, she insisted that he was in the third grade with her, and that the “little son of a b****” once tried to look up her dress. Over the years, we all miserably confronted the reality that no mound of evidence or tower of Christian thought would overcome Sadie’s salt pillar of ideas, so we just closeted her.

She used her cane to fence her way to the front of the food line without first stabbing a plate. With her satchel purse wide open, Sadie began spilling shrimp, bread, crab cakes, desserts, and hors d'oeuvres into the carefully planned napkin layers of her jumbo purse. The goal was to mourn Dead John for the next week while consuming the booty from his funeral, a seven-day “Last Supper.” After all, she “wasn’t going to any damn funeral” without getting the lion’s portion of food. She had “starved as a child.”

Cisse and progeny smiled and greeted everyone while Jack chorus howled the double sadness of being a victim of wife Alice’s twenty-year-old death and John’s recent departure. He asked everyone, “Wha um I ghunna do?” through the marble and oatmeal barrier tumbling in his mouth. People spread away from Jack, like a bluefish school fleeing a wide-jawed shark. But not Cousin Edwin.

I got caught in the squeeze and ended up alone with Jack and Edwin.

Jack asked, “Do ya think folks will throw a funeral like this when I die?”

Without even a courage breath, Cousin Edwin said, “No, Jack, because you’re an a**hole and your son was a nice man.” With that kindness, Edwin military turned and walked away. I was left standing guard over the smoldering corpse of Jack’s Kevlar self-image. I had a sudden urge to pee, so rode that as my excuse to leave Jack’s ashes.

When I returned I looked for Les because this episode at the asylum was winding down and my nervous left eye-twitch, always a signal of stress. As I searched for my wife, Sadie caught my arm and said, “Take this and put it in Edwin’s car.” It was her laden food bag, but she had another empty one and headed back to the veranda for an encore load. I did what I was told and wafted the bag right past PWB’s nose on my way to the car. He sniffed at the food cache as I offered some, but then just lit another cigarette without saying a word.

Back inside, the event was headed for a stop so I found Les and we said our goodbyes to Cissie and others, while Sadie pulled food from the trays that the “Negroes” were removing from the veranda. I was thankful that she didn’t wound anyone with her cane.

Outside, Cousin Edwin was writhing at the prospect of “carrying” Sadie, Jack, and Uncle Booty back to Roanoke City in his cream colored, vintage 1977 Lincoln Continental Sedan. The car was certain proof that Edwin was in fact the love child of Liberace and Jerry Lee Lewis. After all, the trunk would have held a baby grand piano, if it hadn’t been filled with Sadie’s grocery haul. Sadie spy-eyed Edwin as he loaded “her” food, sure that he would steal some of it. Jack was wail-sniffling as he carefully fumbled an urn of complimentary Dead John ashes, destined for spreading in the Pasquotank River that slithered by the edge of the family town. As always, Uncle Booty smiled sunrays on the tornado mess trail of his beloved family. As Jack and Sadie’s younger brother, he had spent his life cleaning up the debris of his siblings’ bad behavior.

After cripple-loading elderly bodies, the ashes, and the food into the Lincoln, Edwin whisked them away. Roanoke City lay three dangerous hours ahead on narrow rural roads, but the treachery was inside the car.

We had been home about an hour when Les’ phone rang. It was Edwin, so the phone immediately put itself on speaker, as even it knew this story would soar to the family front pages.

“Lesley, it's Edwin.” Cousin Edwin always called Les “Lesley,” as that was her childhood name before the renaming.

“Oh my God, you won’t believe what happened on the ride home!”

“Wait a minute,” Les said. “Let me get a glass of wine for this one.”

I ran and got another beer.

“OK. What happened?”

Edwin continued. “We weren’t out of the parking lot when Jack began his dirge: ‘Wha am I gonna do! Oh Gawd, just wha am I gonna do? Oh Jesahs, wha am I gonna do!’”

“By the time we hit US 64, I told Jack to shut up, as I wasn’t going to listen to his marble-mouth moaning all the way home. We weren’t fifteen minutes further along when your damn mother announced she was hungry and ordered me to pull over so she could peruse the trunk groceries. I told her I would do no such thing. Sadie told me that I was an ungrateful little S.O.B. and I’d damn well better pull over now or she wasn’t paying her carefully calculated $ 4.58 share of the gas bill.”

“Well, at this point I’d had it with the whole friggin family so I swerved off of 64 and screeched onto Exit 51 towards some little damn town crammed further into the earth’s belly-button than the nowhere we were going. I slammed on the brakes, which woke Booty up smilin’ and tellin’ everybody to calm down. I got out of the Lincoln and opened all the doors and told them to get their fat old asses, canes, food, urns and other crap out of my car and to thumb home!”

“You want to know what happened next?”

“Oh please,” Les said, as she smiled at me, rolled her eyes, and took a dose of her Chardonnay.

“Those S.O.B’s began to fight and argue about some dumb-ass thing that happened seventy-some years ago. Jack accused Sadie of taking his baseball cards and giving them to Booty to sell. Booty said ‘he didn’t sell the cards but used the Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio cards to wipe his ass ‘cause he always wanted to “s**t on a Yankee.’”

“Jack said, ‘I knew it. I knew it!’”

“He went on to tell that his whole life became a free fall to hell the day his baseball cards went missin’ and that he reckoned that was the cancerous root of Alice’s death and John’s demise.

“Then Sadie told Jack that ‘Alice just up and strangled her own breath’ because she was so tired of putting up with him.”

Edwin said, “I finally screamed at all of them that the ride home had gone from $ 4.58 each to $ 40.58 if they said another word! They got real intently distracted and quiet, just like they do every Sunday when the offering plate is passed, and then they fumbled back into the Lincoln.”

“So, we got off of Exit 51 and back onto 64 and it wasn’t ten minutes later that Jack farted and Sadie hit him with her cane. She recognized the moment as one to relieve some of her own pressure, so she rolled her window down. Well, Jack reached over to roll her window back up and damned if he didn’t spill the urn. Booty rolled his window down too, saying the ‘thumpin’ inside the car hurt his ears. By then, we had a crosswind, so John’s ghost ashes took off flyin’ all throughout the car, plastering the inside of my Lincoln and all of us with his remains. You ought to see my dashboard!”

“Jack yelled, ‘Oh Gawd, Oh Gawd, Dear Gawd, my poor boy’s ashes are all over Highway 64 and not going into the Pasquotank River!’”

“Sadie said, ‘Jack, you're paying for my share of the gas and for dry cleaning this brand-new dress, you stupid S.O.B.’”

“Les,” Edwin said, “ I know of at least ten funerals where your mama has worn that same dress.”

By the time Edwin ended his rant, gulped air, laughed, and said “Goodbye,” Les and I were choking tears. I hadn’t realized it was a two-episode day of the asylum series until partway into Edwin’s phone call.

Later that night, I lay in bed thinking that Les’ family considers the four-year Civil War an irritating pause in their five hundred years of family fighting, like an intermission at a saga movie. Today had been a splendid fight day at a big ass funeral, making the family as miserably content as they have all been since the day their ancestor stepped off the Mayflower. I am counting the days until the next installment.