After a while Meg starts to cry. I rub her shoulders and back for the longest time, like Daddy always did if we didn’t feel well. Afterwards, I close my eyes and think of the river, its waves lapping against the shoreline. In my imagination, a water bug skims on the top. They keep their balance no matter what the water is doing underneath them. I try to be that water bug and let the waves of emotion pass under me without getting capsized.
Meg’s crying keeps up until her breathing finally deepens into sleep. In a room filled with sisters, I feel totally alone. In my loneliness, I think of Jesus on the cross when he asked God why he abandoned him. For all I know, I’ve been praying for miracles from somebody that doesn’t even exist. Too tired to question things anymore, the worst day of my life ends when, at last, I fall asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
The morning of the funeral I smell breakfast before I open my eyes. I smile at the thought of Daddy and Mama in the kitchen with their first cup of coffee, then I remember that he won’t be there. When I walk by the door to their bedroom it is closed, like he is still sleeping. But the nightmare of the day before is true. The accident really happened. He is really gone.
When I come into the kitchen Aunt Sadie gives me one of her big, strong hugs. She has made a breakfast of eggs, bacon and biscuits.
“I want you to drink this,” she says. “It’ll keep your strength up.”
A glass of something dark green sits on the kitchen counter. All of Aunt Sadie’s concoctions taste like tree bark and grass mixed together, but I don’t argue with her, I just drink it and hold my nose while I swallow.
We all sit around the kitchen table as if we are in a daze. Jo looks like she’s been crying again and Amy is quiet, as usual, and Meg stares into her coffee cup. Even Mama has stopped her busyness and is nursing a cup of coffee. Despite all the sadness weighing down the room, the smell of the bacon reminds me of how hungry I am. Before I know it, I’ve eaten two eggs, three strips of bacon, and two biscuits with butter and some of Horatio Sector’s honey on it.
Just as I finish breakfast a knock comes at the front door and Mama answers it. Men’s voices fill the living room. Some of Daddy’s friends are here with a pine box in the yard behind them. I smell the wood all the way from the living room.
“I was up all night making it,” Silas Magee says. “I think it’s the best I’ve ever done.”
Silas is the best carpenter anywhere. He made practically everything we own. Between him and Daddy our family has enough wood and kindling stacked next to the porch to get us through two hard winters.
Mama thanks Silas and the other men but has that faraway look in her eyes again like she might climb in the box with Daddy if given half a chance.
“We need to get him down the hill,” Silas says. “Doc Lester has that contraption he bought waiting on the road.”
Mama steps aside as the men carry the coffin into the house. Her eyes are fixed on the pine box and when I try to follow the men she holds me back.
“Come on,” Jo says from behind me. “Let’s go pick flowers for the church.” As the oldest, Jo has taken over Mama’s job of telling us sisters what to do.
Meg and Amy follow Jo and me out the back door to the path into the woods behind our house. As we walk, I picture Daddy being carried down the hill by the same men who carried him up.
“Will they take him right to the church?” I ask Jo.
“I believe so,” she says, locking her arm in mine.
“Will Mama go, too?”
“Probably,” she says. “At least for a little while, to make sure everything’s set up the way she wants.”
We walk to the sunny side of the hill to search for flowers. Early that summer there were daffodils in bloom, and crocuses, white trillium and crested irises. But now, in early fall, there is only snakeroot, goldenrod, asters and witch hazel. A few crested irises risk a late bloom but they are scrawny compared to weeks before. We gather what we can find, along with fern fronds and take them back to the kitchen and put them in water. Amy will arrange them since she is good at things like that.
The men and Daddy are gone when we get back to the house. For the first time that I can remember, Daddy is on his way to church without us, and something about that makes a lump of grief lodge in my throat.
Every Sunday, rain or shine, freezing cold or summer heat, we walk as a family to the Katy’s Ridge Missionary Baptist church, the only church in Katy’s Ridge. The cornerstone outside the church kitchen has the date 1911 chiseled into it. Rocky Bluff, the biggest town close to us, has four churches: one Methodist, one Presbyterian, and two more Baptist churches—one being a Baptist church for colored people. Aunt Sadie says the colored people praise Jesus by singing, clapping their hands and dancing in the aisles. That comes closer to my idea of what a church should be. But the coloreds and the whites stay apart in these parts, except for Aunt Sadie who goes to worship with them every now and again, whenever she’s invited.
In the past, on days when the temperature fell below freezing, I didn’t see why we couldn’t skip the freezing walk and just talk to God from in front of our warm wood stove. God made winter in the first place, so why wouldn’t he understand? Daddy could have led us in some hymns and Mama could have read from the Bible, some of the good parts that Preacher never got around to, like what love meant to the Corinthians.
Most Sundays, Preacher talks about Satan and the evils of sin and how we have to repent. He says we are all sinners and no matter how hard we try to be good people we can’t keep from sinning. What I never figured out was if people were so horrible already, what was there to aim for? Daddy didn’t like it when I questioned Preacher, especially to his face. But I could tell he didn’t go along with everything Preacher said, either. Sometimes he would doze off right in the middle of the sermon. When this happened, I was supposed to nudge him awake before Mama noticed.
I am glad it is fall because the church in winter is always too hot or too cold, nothing in between. Preacher’s nephew, Gordon, gets a dollar a month to stoke the coal furnace in the basement of the church, and so we either roast like we are already in the fires of hell or freeze like explorers in the Antarctic. But it is warm enough today that maybe some of the windows can be opened and a good breeze let in.
After Mama comes back home, we sit around the kitchen table finishing off an apple pie sharing two forks between us. We are waiting for three o’clock when we are to head to the church. Nobody talks about the empty seat where Daddy usually sits, or how we are supposed to go on with this big empty chair in our lives.
Meg chatters away about nothing and Amy never says a word. Jo and Aunt Sadie stay close to Mama, like she is a daisy whose petals might all fall off at once. Time drags on like a wagon stuck in the mud, a wagon that we’re all too sad to get out and push. The red rooster clock over the icebox ticks so loud we can hear it whenever the talking stops. It doesn’t seem we’ll ever get to where we are going, not that any of us want to go there anyway.
I excuse myself and go out to the front porch to read in the sun. Two stray cats that have been hanging out at the house since Daddy fed them supper scraps, keep me company. I try to concentrate on a passage in Oliver Twist that Daddy and I were reading together two days before, but I read the same paragraph three times without understanding it once.
Aunt Sadie comes to the back door. “It’s time to get ready,” she says.
I have a thousand questions for Aunt Sadie but my mouth has stopped working just like my mind. I nod and come in the house.
I am the last to take a bath. We take our baths on the back porch in Mama’s biggest washtub, except in winter. Right now it is just warm enough for us not to freeze to death, as long as Aunt Sadie keeps the hot water coming that is boiling on the stove. Two kettles of boiling water and a bucket of cold usually get the temperature just right.
We can’t afford indoor plumbing yet because we have to hire the men with the things they need to lay the pipes all the way up our hill. But
the electric lines were easier, so we’ve had power for a few years. Mary Jane has indoor plumbing and so does just about everybody else, except for maybe the Monroes, the Sectors and us. The money in the Mason jar just hasn’t been enough.
The only fight I ever saw Mama and Daddy have was about Daddy always putting a portion of our jar money into the offering at church. Mama thinks an indoor toilet is more important than Preacher having a new robe to wear at baptisms and she told Daddy so. She said he’d give away our last dime if somebody asked for it, which is probably true.
Aunt Sadie hangs sheets around the bathtub for privacy since my body has started to change. I am going from being a girl to becoming a young woman, and though my sisters and I share a bedroom and have seen each other naked, I still feel shy.
Undressing quickly, I rub the soap over the goose bumps on my arms and legs and then wash my hair and rinse it with a pitcher of water nearby. Aunt Sadie brings out a towel, stiff from hanging on the line, and it softens as I wrap it around my shoulders. I shudder and shake until I put on my underwear, slip and then the dress I will wear to the funeral.
At the kitchen table, Aunt Sadie helps comb the tangles out of my hair, instead of Mama, and I thank God for small blessings until I remember how angry I am that he hasn’t produced any miracles yet.
While everybody else gets ready, I wait in the living room. Daddy’s banjo looks lonely just sitting there. Does it miss him? Do the strings hanker to be touched by him again, the frets wait to be turned and tuned? The house seems quiet in a way I can’t put my finger on. I study the difference until it hits me that a voice is missing. A baritone voice to balance out all the sopranos. Daddy’s voice.
We leave the house going down the path that Daddy’s body traveled earlier that morning. Mama, Jo, and Aunt Sadie lead the way, followed by Amy, Meg, and me carrying bunches of wildflowers and ferns. I wear new shoes that scrape against my heels and I can already tell I am going to have a whopper of a blister. Aunt Chloe brought new shoes for all of us that morning and dropped them off when we were picking flowers. In the past, Mama would have refused such charity, even from her sister. But she doesn’t seem to have the energy to argue right now.
Aunt Sadie has not left Mama’s side. As Daddy’s sister, she must have a deep sadness all her own, though other than those first moments when she found out, she hasn’t let it show. She just watches out for Mama, because that’s what her brother probably would want her to do.
“Daddy will like being the center of attention,” Meg says, the first to break the silence.
“Who’d want attention that way?” I say, irked by her dreaminess.
“Remember, we’re going to celebrate his life, not his death,” Aunt Sadie says.
“It sure doesn’t feel like a celebration,” I say.
“I know it doesn’t,” Aunt Sadie says. “It’s just what we say so it won’t hurt so bad. But I guess nothing could help with that.”
She drops back a few steps and puts her arm around me, squeezing my shoulder. I think of Daddy hugging me the day before, when I came into the kitchen for breakfast. If I’d known it would be the last time we hugged, I would have hung on longer, instead of wanting to get to Mama’s biscuits.
Sadie moves back to Mama’s side and we walk the rest of the way without saying much. Instead of almost twelve, I feel like a little girl again. I kick a rock down the side of the road, something I might have done years ago.
The first thing we see when we near the church is Doc Lester’s hearse.
“That is the tackiest contraption I have ever laid eyes on,” I say, using the word I heard Silas Magee use earlier.
“He bought it used in Rocky Bluff from the colored people’s funeral home,” Meg says. She always knows the details of what’s going on.
“He must have shined it up special,” I say, “because it looks like a brand new copper penny.” It sits in front of the church, too fancy for the dinky little building. “Daddy always made fun of that hearse,” I continue. “He said if Doc couldn’t cure you, he could always drive you away in his hearse. Either way he got paid.”
“Louisa May,” Mama says, “must you always say exactly what’s on your mind.” She sighs like I have crawled all over her grief wearing dirty shoes.
What Mama doesn’t know, is that the thought of Daddy in Doc Lester’s funeral wagon makes me want to cry and hit somebody at the same time, so she’s lucky I’m just talking.
The same people from the night before stand around outside the church. Some turn to watch us come down the road. I imagine Onward Christian Soldiers playing in the background because we walk like soldiers going to war.
Mama reaches over and takes my hand as we come to the church, like all is forgiven regarding the earlier hearse comments, and I nearly cry from the unexpected tenderness.
“Don’t worry, Louisa May, we’re going to be fine,” Mama says.
She squeezes my hand.
“I promise to be strong, Mama,” I say and squeeze hers back.
At that moment I feel close to her, something I don’t feel too often. But as quickly as it comes, it goes, and she drops my hand.
“Right this way, Mrs. McAllister,” Preacher says to Mama. He usually calls her Nell, but today he uses her married name.
He leads us to the entrance of the church like we’ve never been there before. We follow him inside and Jo puts the flowers on the coffin while we take our places on the front row. Miss Mildred starts playing the organ and we are sitting so close we can hear her feet pumping the slats at the bottom that makes the low notes. She hums along, pushing her glasses up on her nose again and again, studying the music intently, as if trying to do an extra special job. She hits sour notes that a week ago would have made me swallow my hysterics, but today I don’t feel like laughing.
The pine box with Daddy in it sits at the front of the church. Pots of lilies are placed on either end of Preacher’s podium which is moved over to the side. The casket lid is off but we can’t see anything. I imagine Daddy sitting up and giving us a wave, a modern-day Lazarus, giving the whole church the shock of a lifetime. I wait, sending God the message that this would be the perfect time to prove his greatness. In exchange, I promise not to be mad at him anymore and then cross my fingers, arms, and legs for good luck.
Miss Mildred’s solo goes on forever and I pass the time by remembering the only other time I sat on the front row in church. It was the day I got baptized at eight years of age. If you had the unfortunate luck to be nine and still unsaved, people in Katy’s Ridge stared at you during altar calls, those times when Preacher invited the unsaved to play on God’s team. Once tapped on the shoulder by Jesus, you were to ask him to come into your heart and be your personal Savior. It seemed a regular Savior would be good enough for me, but as far as I can tell, the Baptist’s insist on a personal one.
That Sunday I walked down the aisle, trying to make up some tears like Audrey Fisher had the week before, proof that Jesus touched my heart. I liked Jesus just fine, but I hated being stared at, so I tapped Jesus on the shoulder instead of him tapping me just to get the busy-bodies of Katy’s Ridge off my back. To make matters worse, when I stood at the altar, Preacher put his hands on my head and prayed for my salvation so long a big drop of sweat fell from his head onto mine. As a result, I bolted upright in complete disgust only to be pushed down again while he kept praying.
The next Sunday Preacher dunked me and Jake Turner—who was two years ahead of me in school and who people had already worried had gone to the Devil—at the place in the river where it is shallow enough to stand in and get dunked from the waist backwards. As soon as we were up out of the water, Preacher announced Jake and me were full of the Holy Spirit. I kept waiting to feel different, maybe a little lightheaded or something, but mainly I just felt wet.
At the very least I thought an angel should appear and give me a message of some sort. But nothing happened, except I found out why people don’t walk around in wet clothes. It is not
the least bit comfortable. My dress kept sticking to me and my underwear twisted up so bad I started to get the underwear version of a rope burn. After we dried off, Jake and I sat on the front row of the church and told our testimonies to the whole congregation. This was when I was supposed to say how rotten and lost I was before God shined a light on me and changed my heart forever. These testimonies always made Preacher smile from ear to ear and nod his head and rock back and for on his dusty black shoes saying “Amen” with every sentence.
Even Jake Turner came up with something good to say about how he would never look at Katy’s Ridge the same way again. But I felt like a colossal fake because as far as I could see, nothing had happened to me. I felt the same as I always had, which wasn’t good or bad, but just the same. Despite my total lack of revelation, I made up something about how I had suddenly seen the light about how sinful it was to talk back to my mother and pick my nose in public. The last part made Jake Turner laugh. I don’t know what made me walk up to the altar in the first place, except to keep from getting stared at.
The ferns and flowers we picked look nice and give me something to look at while we wait for Miss Mildred to finish playing the organ. When she finally stops, she smiles over at Mama as Preacher walks up to the podium with his Bible in his hand. Preacher is never without his Bible. He holds onto it like it is glued to his fingers. I wonder sometimes if his wife has to yank it out of his hands at night after he falls asleep.
“Dearly beloved,” Preacher starts out, like we are at a wedding instead of a funeral. “We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Joseph McAllister. . . .”
It never once occurred to me that someday I might be sitting at Daddy’s funeral. I never even thought about it happening when he was really old. I just never thought about it. Now I kind of wish I had, so that maybe I could be more ready for what is happening. But nothing could have prepared me for the death of the most important person in my life.
The Secret Sense of Wildflower Page 11
