Vows

by LaVyrle Spencer

  Staring at the corner, Frankie replied colorlessly, "I guess so."

  When they were dressed, they walked to Earl's house holding hands. They had not held hands since Frankie had turned seven and given up that sissy stuff, and not since Emily's world had begun revolving around more important matters like her studies and her engagement and growing up. But they walked to Earl's house holding hands.

  * * *

  At the livery stable, Edwin fed the horses and hung a sign on the door: Closed due to death in the family. Next, he trudged to Charles's house. When Charles opened the door Edwin told him point-blank: "It's bad news, son. Mrs. Walcott is gone."

  Though the unfortunate timing was not mentioned, it was uppermost in both of their minds. Charles masked his disappointment and gripped Edwin's hand hard, drawing him inside. "Oh, Edwin, I'm so sorry." They stood for seconds in silence, still linked by the unbroken handclasp. Finally Charles said, "I'd like to make her coffin if you'd let me, Edwin. I'd like to do that last thing for her."

  Their eyes met in mutual affection and regret, and Edwin broke down fully for the first time, clasping the younger man, weeping sorely against his taller shoulder.

  "She was a g–good woman but she was never v–very happy. I couldn't make her happy, Charles. I n–never c–could make her happy."

  "Aw, Edwin, she was happy, I know she was. She had a good marriage and two fine children. It was just her suffering in the last years, and you did what you could about that. You brought her out here and cared for her. You did all you could."

  In spite of Charles's consolation, Edwin's tears continued for minutes. At last he regained composure and stepped back, drying his eyes on a sleeve, hanging his head. To the floor he said, "No sir, when a man lives his whole life with a woman he knows whether or not she's happy, and Josie wasn't. Not very often." Edwin fished a handkerchief from his pocket, cleared his nose, and admitted against the linen, "I didn't do that in front of the women, Charles. Forgive me."

  "Aw, Edwin, don't be foolish."

  "You're like a son to me, you know that, boy, don't you?"

  Charles gulped back emotions of his own. "Yes, sir, I do, and you're like a father to me. I'm sorry … awfully sorry."

  Edwin sighed, feeling better since his cry. "And I'm damned sorry about your wedding being put off—and not a word of complaint out of you, though you certainly have the right." Edwin squeezed Charles's shoulder affectionately. "You go ahead, you make her coffin and thank you."

  "I've got some fine cedar. She'll have the best, Edwin."

  Edwin nodded and prepared to leave. When he reached the door Charles inquired, "How is Emily taking it?"

  "She's bearing up as well as can be expected, but you know how good Josie felt yesterday—it was a shock to all of us after that."

  Charles nodded and reached for his jacket, too. "Well, I'd best get over to see Reverend Vasseler, tell him we won't be needing him today."

  But as Edwin left, Charles made up an excuse to stay behind. Alone, he dropped onto a hard kitchen chair and sat lifelessly, his shoulders bowed by disappointment. One thought ran through his mind time and again. Bless her departed soul, Lord, but when am I ever going to get to marry the woman I love?

  * * *

  When Emily returned from walking Frankie to Earl's house, Fannie had the kitchen table extended full length, covered with a freshly scrubbed oilcloth. Emily stared at it in horrified fascination while slowly removing her coat. She lifted her gaze to find Fannie with her hair painfully neat, her apron fresh from the bureau drawer, all starchy peaks and pressed planes, her expression grave and respectful.

  "I can do it alone, truly I can, but you'd have to help me carry her down."

  "No, Fannie. It'll be easier together. All of it."

  They carried Josephine downstairs, sharing an unspoken horror at the indignity suffered by the woman who had lived her life with unfailing decorum—being toted downstairs like some ungainly piece of furniture. If only a band of angels might appear and deposit her with stately grace upon the kitchen table.

  But the only angels on duty were Fannie and Emily.

  They laid Josephine—ignominiously bent—on the table, and Fannie ordered, "Go around. We must straighten her. Press here and here." But Josephine had died as she'd lived the last few months—sitting up, angled at the hip. Hours had passed, cooling the rigidifying her corpse, rendering the women's attempts at flattening her futile.

  "Leave!" ordered Fannie abruptly.

  "Leave? But what are you going to do?"

  "Leave, I said! Outside, where you can't hear!"

  "Hear? But I—"

  "Dammit, girl, why do you think this is called the laying out?" Fannie's voice slashed. "Now go! And don't come back until I call!"

  It struck Emily what Fannie must do and she blanched, gulped, and ran from the room, out into the sweet clean snow, beneath the great bowl of sun-washed sky, into air pure as dew. Nausea threatened and she doubled forward, braced at the knees, gulping drafts of air. Her stomach keeled and reflex tears spurt into her eyes. She is breaking my mother's bones!

  She covered her ears as if the brittle sound could reach her through the walls, dropped to her knees in the snow and wept, fledging a part of her youth in a single moment of realization as harsh as any life could mete out. My mother, who gave me life, who nursed and nurtured me and combed my hair and bathed me and walked me to school and made me eat the foods I disliked. My mother is having her bones broken!

  Soon Fannie approached and gently touched Emily's shoulder. "Come, Emily. The rest won't be so hard." Bolstering the younger woman, the older one walked her inside to the table where the form of Josephine now lay supine, a measure of its dignity restored.

  What—if anything—Fannie had used to break the bones remained a mystery, for Emily hadn't the fortitude to ask, nor did Fannie volunteer the information.

  They worked together, washing the pale body with its withered skin, then clothing it in Josephine's best black silk dress with a white collar of punched organdy. The dress lay slack upon the shrunken form, so Fannie added padding, inside Josephine's undergarments. At her throat she pinned Josephine's favorite cameo brooch.

  Meanwhile, Emily washed the blood from her mother's hair and combed it up in an effort to cover the near-bald spot at the back of her head.

  "Her hair was always her pride and joy," Emily recollected sadly.

  "How I envied Joey her hair," added Fannie. "On her wedding day she wore it in a pompadour held up by combs trimmed with pearls. My, it was dramatic."

  "You were there, then, the day she married Papa?"

  "Oh, yes. Oh my, of course, yes, I was there. They made a handsome couple."

  "I've seen their daguerreotype."

  "Yes, of course. So you know she had an enviable mane of hair. When we were children we would make clover rings to wear as garlands. The flowers always looked so striking on her black hair and so sickly against mine. So one day your mother had the idea to dye mine dark like hers." Fannie chuckled nostalgically. "Heavenly days, the trouble we got into. I said, 'We can't dye my hair, Joey, what will we use?' And she said, 'Why can't we use the same thing Mother uses to dye cotton?' So we sneaked into her mother's pantry and found the recipe for black dye and got what we needed—some of it I believe we stole."

  "My mother—stealing?" Emily's eyes widened in amazement.

  Again Fannie chuckled. "Yes, your mother, stealing. Potash and lime, as I remember, from one of our father's backyard sheds."

  "But she was always so … so…"

  "So obedient?"

  "Yes."

  "She got into her share of mischief, just like all the rest of us."

  Emily found herself transfixed by Fannie's tale, which was revealing a new and unexpected side of the rigidly strict mother she had known all her life. "Tell me about the dye," Emily encouraged as she lit a lantern and began heating curling tongs to tend to her mother's hair.

  "Well, we stripped sumac bark and bo
iled it up with potash and something else—what was it again? Copperas, I think. Yes, copperas. Where we got that I don't remember, but what a vile black liquor it made. And when it was brewed it stank so bad I'm not sure how I ever got up the courage to stick my head into it. As I recall, your mother egged me on when I suggested that perhaps red hair wasn't so bad after all. She said. Did I want to spend my whole life looking like a pink rat, and of course I didn't. So we dyed me black as crape, and fixed the color quite indelibly with lime water. Oh, it was a tremendous success!

  "And then our mothers saw it," Fannie ended on an ominous note.

  "What happened?"

  "As I recall, neither one of us sat down for days, and I spent weeks wearing a bandana tied around my head, pulled clear down to my eyebrows, because we'd not only dyed my hair, but my forehead and ears as well, and I looked as if I was coming down with leprosy!" Fannie shook her head fondly. "Heavens, I'd forgotten all about that."

  The reminiscence had served its intended purpose: it had made the two women forget their aversion to the task at hand. While Emily curled Josephine's hair and Fannie buffed her fingernails, they did so as lovingly as handmaidens working over a bride.

  "She's very pale," Fannie observed almost as if Josephine were alive. "Do you think she would like it if we put a touch of color on her cheeks?"

  Emily studied her mother's still face. "Yes, I think she would."

  Fannie opened a quart jar of raspberry sauce and painted Josie's cheeks with the juice. When the stain had set she washed them clean again and said to the dead woman, "There, dear, you look much, much better. I know what store you always set by your appearance." To Emily she added, "Not too curly now. She always detested the frizzed look."

  "Only enough to sweep it away from her face like she always wore it."

  "Yes, exactly."

  When they had combed Josie's hair, when her hands lay manicured at her sides, and her shoes were on and tied and her clothing plump, they stood on either side of the kitchen table, looking down at her with a measure of ease restored to their hearts.

  "There, Mother," Emily said quietly. "You look fine."

  "Edwin will be pleased, I think."

  At the winsome tone of Fannie's voice Emily looked up. She had never taken time to consider how difficult the last half year must have been for Fannie, loving both Mother and Papa as she did. And she had loved Mama; this morning had made that indelibly clear. Studying Fannie, she saw not a woman who had loved another's husband, but one who had selflessly eased a family's burdens during the last six months. Fannie was all the things she'd always been: understanding, strong, cheerful, good. She had come into a home weighted with cares and lightened those cares daily, not only by her good deeds, but by her indefatigable spirit. And who had there been to lighten Fannie's spirit when she needed it? Only Papa. And now, Emily herself.

  "Mother told me about you and Papa," Emily admitted gently. "She wanted me to know before she died."

  Fannie studied Josephine's berry-stained cheeks for a long moment before speaking. "If I could have loved him less, I would have. It was a great cross for her to bear all her life."

  "Fannie…" Emily swallowed. "Forgive me?"

  Fannie looked up. In her eyes was a sadness that ran as deep as her lifelong love for Edwin.

  "There is nothing to forgive, dearling. You are their daughter. What were you to think?"

  Emily's eyes stung. "I want you to know, Mother's last wish was that you marry Papa and that I give you both my blessing. I intend to."

  Fannie made no reply. She studied Emily a long time, and finally reached down to collect the buffer, washcloth, and towel from the tabletop. "We must make a satin pillow for the casket, and prepare the front parlor and make black wreaths and armbands and press our black dresses and…"

  "Fannie…" Emily came around the table and touched Fannie's arm. The two women stared at each other through a blur of tears, then pitched together and clung.

  "I don't know what I'd have done without you this morning," Emily whispered. "What any of us would have done without you."

  Fannie lifted her eyes to the ceiling as her tears spilled. "Yes, you do. You would have persevered, because you're very much like me."

  * * *

  Edwin came home with Reverend Vasseler to find Fannie and Emily sitting side by side in the kitchen beside Josie, forming roses of black crape: cutting circlets, stretching them over their thumbs, then stitching the tiny petals together to shape the flowers.

  Reverend Vasseler stood beside the table, said a prayer for the departed and another for the living, resting his hands on Emily's and Fannie's heads, offering special condolences to the younger woman, whose wedding was to have been today. Edwin stood transfixed by the sight of his wife all laid out, grateful he had been spared the agony of having to perform undertaking duties. Fannie, bless you, dear Fannie. His eyes remained dry and unblinking and he forgot about Reverend Vasseler's presence until the minister spoke softly and touched his arm consolingly. "She's in the Lord's hands now, Edwin, and He is all good."

  The day evolved into a series of vignettes: good Christian women coming to help sew black crape roses, to carry away the soiled bedding, to bring custard pies and chocolate cakes and hamburg casseroles; Edwin carrying the copper hip-tub upstairs and emerging after his bath wearing his black Sunday suit on a Thursday; Frankie returning from Earl's to take his turn in the bath; then the women doing the same; Tarsy, arriving owl-eyed and uncharacteristically silent, volunteering to press Emily's black dress, then remaining at her side throughout the afternoon; the family standing motionless while Fannie stitched mourning bands onto their sleeves; the sound of the church bell announcing the death hourly; and late in the day, Charles arriving with a buckboard, bringing a pungent-smelling cedar coffin, as lovingly and meticulously joined as the cupboard he'd made for Tom Jeffcoat.

  He entered the kitchen, hat in hand, encountering the ladies still sitting in a circle, within a dozen roses of completing the second impressive black crape wreath, which lay on their laps. Emily glanced up at Charles's long face and laid aside her needle. The ladies murmured, lifting the wreath from Emily's knees so that she might rise and go to him. One of them reached back to squeeze Charles's wrist, offering a low word of consolation. But Charles's eyes remained fixed upon Emily as she rose and left the group with a slow-moving dignity.

  "Hello, Charles," she said, a subdued stranger in a black tight-necked dress and skinned-back hair parted down the center.

  "Emily, I'm so sorry," he offered sincerely.

  "Come," she whispered and, without touching him, led the way into the dining room, around the corner from the black-garbed women whose needles continued flashing. In the empty room she faced him.

  Sadness lined her face but she stood before him with all other emotions hidden. Reaching down, he scooped her gently against him. A sound came from her throat as her cheek met his jacket—a sob, swallowed; gratitude, unspoken. He felt solid and comforting, and smelled of wood and winter.

  "I've brought the coffin," he said against her hair.

  She drew back and reached into his eyes with her own. "Thank you for making it, Charles. Papa appreciates it so. So do I."

  "It's cedar. It'll last a hundred years."

  She wiped her eyes, smiled dolefully, and rested her hands on his arms. "I'm sorry about the wedding, Charles," she told him.

  "The wedding—awk, what does that matter?" For her benefit he assumed a note of false bravado. "We can do that any old time."

  She experienced a sharp sting of guilt for feeling reprieved when it took such an obvious effort for Charles to mask his deep disappointment. Unable to hide it from her, he dropped his gaze and fiddled with the crease in his black Stetson. He was dressed in proper mourning garb—a black suit and stringtie over a starched white shirt. She stared at his chest while her mind absorbed the fact that the customary period of mourning measured one full year—surely he was aware of that, too.

  "
Charles," she whispered, covering his wrist, stilling his hands. "I am sorry."

  He swallowed thickly, still staring at his hat, then made a visible effort to put secondary concerns aside until a more appropriate time.

  "You doing all right, Em?" he asked throatily, as always more concerned for her than for himself.

  "Yes. Are you?"

  "I was glad to have the coffin to work on, to keep my hands busy today."

  With both of her hands she squeezed one of his, then drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "And I was glad to have the wreaths."

  "Well." Charles lifted his bereaved eyes, fingering the hat crease unnecessarily. "I'd better go find Edwin to help me carry it in. You go sit down, Emily. It's going to be a long night."

  And so it was Charles who helped Edwin lay Josephine in the aromatic cedar box, who moved her broken bones for the last time and arranged them on white muslin, and centered her head on the white satin pillow, and handed Edwin her prayer book and waited nearby as Edwin placed it in Josephine's crossed hands. Then, together they carried the coffin to the parlor, placed it in the bay window upon two wooden chairs, and propped the lid on the floor before it.

  In the kitchen the ladies formed the last black rose and affixed it to the wreath. Emily respectfully placed it against the coffin lid, then stood in a circle of loved ones, gripping Tarsy's hand on her left and Charles's on her right.

  "It's a beautiful coffin, Charles."

  It was. And by his making it, and helping Papa lay Mother in it, and standing beside all of them through this difficult ordeal, Charles had endeared himself to the family more than ever.

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  «^»

  The hard kitchen chairs were arranged in an arc facing the coffin. Sitting on one, Emily experienced some wholly profane thoughts about wakes. What possible good could they do either the loved ones or those who kept their all-night vigils over the corpse? Comfort for the living and prayers for the dead, she supposed, though she found herself praying little and comforted less. The townsfolk were kind to come and pay their last respects, but it put a tremendous strain on the family. How many times could one repeat the same trite phrase? Yes, Mother was better off now; yes, she'd lived a good Christian life; yes, she'd been a good woman. But Emily found Fannie's story about the hair dye a more proper elegy than the doleful study of those who came to gaze down into the casket and shed tears.