A Green Burial
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
Certain aspects of Charlie Overton’s funeral service were so characteristic of the man that one could almost believe he’d planned it himself. I say “almost,” because Charlie inhabited the present moment more completely than anyone I’ve known, and it simply wasn’t in him to think that far ahead.
But he lived most of his life in Taylor Creek, a college town with progressive ideas about the environment, and the choice of obsequies was hardly surprising. It was to be a “green burial,” where the deceased is not embalmed, but wrapped in a cloth, then interred by a cohort of friends and loved ones, the grave marked with a simple brass memorial plate, leaving the most minimal impression on the landscape. There was only one green cemetery in the area, several miles out of town, and the invitations were strictly word-of-mouth.
Charlie and I had been roommates at the university, and had remained close, despite the fact that I’d been living in Seattle since the turn of the century and we hadn’t seen each other more than half a dozen times in the last twenty years. But I hurried back to Florida after his widow, Leslie — the best and most devoted of his three wives, in my opinion — informed me of his suicide and asked me to be at the service.
I was both shocked and unsurprised by the news. Clinical depression was the Overton family curse, and it didn’t help that he’d refused, after initial compliance, to take anti-depressants, instead choosing to treat his condition with alcohol and isolation. This pharmaceutical skepticism had its costs: two failed marriages, reckless business decisions, and strained friendships.
We’d last spoken a few months before, when I called him on his fifty-fifth birthday, and I remember thinking that his assumption of the sardonically funny persona he seemed to think was expected of him sounded rather forced. Without being specific, he hinted at a recent run of “bad luck on several fronts,” and that he’d “trusted the wrong asshole.”
At the time, his blue mood hadn’t seemed unusual. Charlie was one of those people to whom lovely and terrible things happened with exhausting frequency, and it had always been a close race between his love of life and his talent for self-destruction.
On a blindingly bright, already-warm Sunday in April, I flew into Jacksonville Airport and picked up a rental car, then drove the seventy-five miles southwest to Taylor Creek. The service would be taking place at the Willow Creek Cemetery, about ten miles southeast of town next to a county forest park.
I had lunch downtown, then headed out on Hawksbill Road, through Taylor Creek’s poor-as-ever east side, into forested wetlands unchanged since I’d lived here twenty-five years ago. As in the past, the signs of poverty and neglect were hard to miss: a long-deserted fruit stand, the signless skeleton of a gas station, and in a weed-grown parking lot, a decaying antique shop listing sideways.
A vulture cruised low over the ordered rows of a pine tree farm as I passed a one-legged man with a crutch scrounging for aluminum cans on the boggy shoulder, and I felt the old downward pull of this place, where so much of my twenties and thirties had been misspent. It was as if the countryside knew I was lying to myself by trying to live elsewhere, that this no-longer-small college town with its revolving crop of haves and eternal understory of have-nots was once again reclaiming me for its own. Everything I saw dragged me back here, even the wretchedly pot-holed dirt road leading to the cemetery. It was finally sinking in that I’d come to bury one of my oldest friends.
My mood wasn’t improved by the dozen or so cars in the dirt parking lot. It was hard to believe that Charlie’s circle of friends had so shrunk so drastically since I’d lived here, but except for that birthday phone call we’d been out of touch for three years, and my information was dated. There was no discernible trail or walkway, so I carefully threaded my way among the barely marked graves, toward the mourners gathered under a big live oak at the far end of the cemetery.
I’d only attended conventional funerals before this, and although aware that green burials often dispensed with coffins, I was still unprepared for the sight of a six-foot-deep hole in the ground, beside which lay the cloth-wrapped body on a wheeled, flower-draped bier. A large pile of white sand, in which several shovels had been planted upright, awaited the end of the service. I quietly slipped into a folding chair in the empty back row.
Though my gaze was magnetically drawn to the shroud-wrapped corpse in our midst, it was the mourners on whom I tried to focus my attention. There was no minister — Charlie was agnostic on what he called “the unknowables” — but several people rose from their chairs to deliver eulogies and, because these woods were well off the highway with only a slight breeze and few birds calling, a microphone was unnecessary.
I knew some of the speakers fairly well and others slightly, but several were strangers to me. Leslie was sitting alone in the front row — none of Charlie’s three marriages had produced children — dressed in black mourning, the right side of her half-veiled face partially visible to me.
I hadn’t seen her since the last time I’d visited Taylor Creek, five years ago, and if there was more gray in her thick, brown braid, her straight-backed slenderness edging toward gaunt and her profile even more raptor-like than it had been in her prime, what had changed most about her was her expression. The warm, gentle, quietly penetrating gaze was gone. This was a woman, as far as I could tell from my oblique angle, whose grief had manifested as anger. Her black-gloved hands were clenched in her lap and she was leaning slightly forward in her chair, staring intently at the shrouded figure of her late husband, as if trying to will him back to life and was enraged by her inability to do so.
Charlie had always been catholic in his tastes in friends and devoid of snobbery. He treated everyone the same way, with equal parts generosity, abiding warmth and heedless neglect, from panhandlers invited to dinner on a whim to his first wife, Heidi, daughter of one of the wealthiest landowners in the state.
But it seemed to me that the eulogist of the moment was, even by Charlie’s democratic standards, a fairly rough character. He was a big, burly, hand- and neck-tattooed, patchily bearded man in a badly fitting suit, his heavy face ravaged by hard living and too much sun. Barely suppressing tears, he said his piece:
It was a bad time for me and my family. I was on parole, my kid was in jail on a B&E charge and, in order to bail him, I’d stupidly gotten myself into debt at a loan-shark interest rate with a certain person whose name I ain’t gonna dirty this gathering by mentioning. I’d done a good bit of handiwork on some of Charlie’s properties and, out of desperation. asked him for a loan to pay off the other loan, but only because he’d told me some months before that if I ever needed help, to come see him.
Well, he sure did help. Handed me eight thousand in cash out of his safe, no paperwork necessary between friends, he said, and told me not to worry about paying it back until I was out of the weeds. A few months later, things had improved for me, and I went to his office, handed him the eight Gs and thanked him. He said it was nothing, that he was glad he happened to be flush enough at the time to help me. Didn’t ask for a penny of interest and wouldn’t take it when I offered it.
Well, with one thing and another, we sorta lost touch after that, and I’m real sorry to say I didn’t see Charlie Overton alive again. But I’ll never forget what he done for me. It’s the kind of man he was.
Several heads nodded in sympathy as he sat down. Leslie turned her head and gave the man a grateful nod, then she noticed me sitting in the back row. She smiled and motioned me to come and sit beside her. I shook her hand and whispered condolences as she pulled me into a hug and whispered, “I’m so glad you came, John.”
“I had to,” I murmured and sat down beside her.
The next person to stand was a woman I barely recognized as Charlie’s longtime lawyer, Rhea Engstrom. She was grayer and much heavier and, though obviously grief-stricken, spoke calmly about the man who’d been her client and friend for twenty years.
A lot of people who loved Charlie also thought he was his own worst enemy. And it’s true that he sometimes made choices that from a business standpoint, weren’t always in his best interest. But that’s only because he cared more about people than he did about money.
And everybody here knows that he had an enemy a whole lot worse than himself, who doesn’t deserve to be named in the same breath with Charlie Overton. Charlie wanted to trust everybody, and it usually took him a while to accept that some people just aren’t worthy of it. Which is where I came in, his hired disillusionist.
There was a muted laugh or two.
He’d known this man since grade school, and if there wasn’t much love lost between them, he still considered him enough of a friend to accept a partnership in a real-estate investment opportunity that seemed to offer minimal risk and a lot of potential profit. I was against his going into business with this man and told him so, because I knew him only by reputation, which was shady, to say the least. But Charlie refused to believe that a man he’d known most of his life would stoop so low as to cheat him on a deal sealed with a handshake.
To think a handshake between gentlemen was as good as a notarized contract tells you how old-fashioned Charlie was, but sadly, this guy was no gentleman. Charlie was only one of many investors, though he’d put most of his liquid assets into the deal. Long story short, a lot of people lost their life savings on what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme.
And then, that same man, not satisfied with robbing decent people blind, implicated Charlie as the mastermind of the whole set-up. And unfortunately, he’d signed his name to several key documents, probably without even reading them. It was Charlie’s blind spot: he simply couldn’t comprehend the criminal mind.
He was never the same after being indicted for fraud. And when that rodent in human form turned state’s evidence and testified against Charlie, who got five years, for which this man was rewarded with a measly six months...
She stopped as a sob welled up.
Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Greene
