The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ptolemy was in his coffin. It was pitch black and the worms were wriggling between his fingers and toes. He opened his eyes, expecting to see nothing, but instead he found himself in the white bathtub under brilliant light. Someone was knocking at the bathroom door.

He remembered draining the tub and lying down in it the way Reggie was laid to rest in his pine box.

“Papa Grey?” she called again.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Robyn, Papa Grey. I took the keys to your front do’ but the bathroom do’ don’t have a key.”

“Robyn?”

“Yeah. Open the do’,” she said.

The old man fumbled with the lock for a minute or more. He panicked once or twice, fearing that he was locked in, but he got the door open at last. Robyn was standing there in dark-blue jeans and a light-blue T-shirt. There was a yellow ribbon in her hair and big bone-white earrings dangled on either side of her jaw.

“I died,” Ptolemy Grey said. “I died and was in my grave with worms and Coydog McCann. I was dead and gone like Sensie and Reggie and other names that I cain’t even remembah no mo’.”

Robyn put her arms around Ptolemy’s neck.

“It was a dream,” she said, cocking her head to the side and humming with the words.

“No, no, no,” he said, pushing his savior away. “It wasn’t no dream. Come on out here in the room and I can prove it to ya.”

“What’s this big plastic sheet out here, Uncle?” she asked. “It’s dirty.”

“It don’t mattah,” he said. “Just push it aside and, and, and pull up some chairs.”

Robyn did as he requested, frowning at the dust rising from the faded tarp. She sneezed and got his stool and her lawn chair set up in front of the door.

“Mr. Grey, can I turn off the TV and the radio so I can hear you?”

“Sure. I don’t care,” he said.

They sat down facing each other. Ptolemy’s eyes were bright. There was a grin on his face. He took the child’s left hand in his and gazed deeply, even thoughtfully, into her eyes.

Robyn stared back, seeing a face that she knew with a different man inside.

“Some things,” Ptolemy said. “Some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time.”

He went silent, waiting for more words to come, the words and the ideas behind them that were coming slowly but steadily from his mind.

Robyn nodded, her head like a pump priming a well.

“I had a tarp,” Ptolemy said, “this one right here, over all the things in my bedroom. All the books and carpets and clothes and glass jewelry. That was Sensia’s room, the wife that I loved the most ...”

Pitypapa Grey was aware of the silence in the room. The music had been hushed and the men and women talking about crime and killing were quiet at last. It occurred to him that before now, before this moment, the content of his mind was the radio and the TV, that he was just as empty as an old cracked pecan shell—the meat dried up and crumbled away.

“Papa Grey?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah, baby?”

“You just sittin’ there.”

“What was I sayin’?”

“That some things is in the world and in our hearts at the same time.”

He looked at her lovely young face and let the words wash over his parched mind.

“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “That tarp. That tarp was like the pall in my mind.”

“The what?”

“The pall. It’s a shroud what undertakers put over the dead until they get put in the coffin.”

“And this plastic sheet is like that?” Robyn asked.

“It was over that room, and at the same time it was in my head, coverin’ up all the things that I done forgot, or forgot me.”

The idea turned in on itself and Ptolemy lost his way. He brought his hands to his head and tried to remember. It was all there but not quite clear. Things jumbled together: Coydog’s funeral next to Artie and Letisha; the iron-banded oak box with its treasures and promises, its curses and death—hidden but still a danger; Reggie laughing and eating french fries in the sunlight through the restaurant window.

Robyn took his hands from his face.

“Look at me, Mr. Grey,” she said.

There were tears in his eyes.

“I got to get my thoughts straight, girl. I got to do sumpin’ before that damn pall is th’owed ovah me.”

“When’s the last time you et?” she asked.

Ptolemy understood the question but the answer was the white tail of a deer flitting through the trees. He shook his head and wondered.

“First thing we gotta do is get you sumpin’ to eat, Uncle,” she said.

“I had a can’a tuna day before, day before yesterday.”

The cheeseburger tasted good, better than any food he’d had in a very long time. They sat in the window seat at the fast-food restaurant, watching the black people and brown people walking up and down the sidewalk, driving up and down the street. The faces didn’t confuse him anymore but he was still confused. Not so much that he’d get lost in Coydog’s lessons down near the mouth of the Tickle River, where they had alligators that would carry off little boys and girls sometimes. He’d remember the purple skies of fall evenings without getting inside them, but he couldn’t recall where he’d put the treasure; he couldn’t put words to the one lesson that Coydog taught that he needed to know.