The woman in the Coast Guard dress blues walked to the front of the funeral home with a folded white bar towel held flat in both hands, the way a flag is carried at the funeral of a soldier. She was in her early forties, trim, with two rows of ribbons on her chest, and her face was set in an expression of such control that I knew it was costing her. She laid the towel on the casket of my uncle Sonny and smoothed it once. “My name is Commander Lena Ortiz,” she said. “On the twenty ninth of August, 2005, I was twenty five years old, and I was drowning in front of the bar of Sonny.”
A murmur went through the crowd of shrimpers, bikers, and old regulars in the pews. My father, the brother of Sonny, sat in the front row with his jaw set. He had told me that morning that Sonny pulled beer for thirty nine years and left nothing but a jukebox. “The storm surge came through Biloxi in the morning,” said Lena. “I was a rescue swimmer. We were pulling people off roofs. My helicopter lost a rotor on Front Beach. I went into the water with a broken wrist, and the current took me down Howard Avenue, past the casinos, past the churches, and pinned me against a wall.”
“The wall was the back of a bar. A man in an apron was standing in water to his chest in the doorway, holding a rope from the rafters. He saw me go past. He did not think. He let go of the rope and grabbed my flight suit and hauled me over the threshold with one arm. He put me on the bar. The wood was dry. He wrapped a towel around my wrist, this towel, and he said, Honey, you are all right now. You are in the safest place in Biloxi.” She touched the towel gently. “It was not. But it was the only dry place on the coast.”
A folded white bar towel was laid on a casket by a woman in Coast Guard dress blues and gave one niece the morning to bring her father back to the brother he had mocked.
“There were sixty one people in that bar by nightfall. Families from the apartments across the street, a nursing home crew with six residents in wheelchairs, three shrimpers, a mailman, two cats. Sonny opened the cooler. He lit every candle in the building. He found a camp stove in the back and made grits on the bar, with water from the melted ice. Nine days he fed them. He gave away every bottle of beer and soda, and the last of the whiskey went to clean wounds. He never took a dime. When a man tried to pay him, he said, Not today.”
I felt the room shift around me. I had been twenty five myself that summer, in Atlanta, and I had called my uncle in the hours before the storm. He had said he was staying. I had begged him to leave. He had laughed, and said, Britt, somebody has to keep the lights on. I had not understood. For years I had told the story at parties, a little embarrassed, an uncle who stayed behind to guard a bar. My father had always said it was the whiskey. It was not the whiskey.
Lena looked out at the room. “Seventy three people are alive because of that building,” she said. “I have pulled four hundred and eleven people out of the water in my career, and I have never forgotten the sound of a jukebox playing in the dark.” A soft laugh moved through the pews. “He had wired the jukebox to a truck battery in the back, and every night, at nine, he played one song, the same one, so that the people in the dark would know the world was still there. I will not say which. You know.”
She unfolded the towel. A stain on it, rust colored, had never washed out. “I have carried this through three ships and twenty years of storms,” she said. “I came to Biloxi last week to find him, and they told me he had died on Tuesday. I wanted to say thank you. I did not get to.” She held it out to my father. “I want you to have it. It belongs to the family.” My father stood and took the towel in both hands, and for a long time he could not speak.
“Sonny,” he said at last, to the casket, “I told everybody you wasted your life behind a bar. I told Mama you should have gone to college.” He gave a sound like a laugh that turned into a sob. “You went to a better college than any of us. You went to the college of the people who needed you.” He pressed the towel against his face. Behind him, one by one, the shrimpers and bikers rose from their seats. Some were big men with beards, in leather vests, who had slept on the floor of that bar in 2005. They bowed their heads.
Then somebody walked to the old jukebox, which stood in the lobby where my cousin had wheeled it that morning. The funeral director, a gentle man, did not stop him. A quarter dropped. The machine hummed, and clicked, and the neon came up, red and gold, and the room fell silent. It was the song. I will not say which. It was the one that had played every night for nine nights in the dark, and every person in that room who had been there with Sonny sang along, and every person who had not learned it on the spot.
The bar is open again. My father runs it, which no one could have predicted, on Howard Avenue, with the jukebox in the corner and the folded towel in a glass case beside the register. On the twenty ninth of every August, at nine at night, he turns off the lights and plays the one song. The Commander comes when her ship is in port. Last year she brought a rescue swimmer, a girl of twenty two, and the two of them stood together at the bar in the half dark, and my father poured them each a Coke and said, Not today.
