We were all sitting around sharing the sorrow—men in the parlor, women in the kitchen, and young’uns playing outdoors. The cake wouldn’t stretch far enough to feed a houseful of people, so some of the nearer neighbor women had stopped at home to fetch a couple of winter apple pies to serve to the visitors today. But for the suddenness of the burial, there ought to have been food aplenty after the funeral when the people who came back to the house afterward would have brought fried chicken, casseroles, bowls of mashed potatoes—all tokens of their sympathy for us, for words come hard to most of the folks around here; they’d rather do you a kindness than have to talk about delicate matters. There hadn’t been time for any of them to cook today, since they’d only just heard the news. As the pies warmed on the stove, we sat in the kitchen, shedding a few tears and talking softly, trying to pretend that we weren’t just passing the time, dreading the waiting.
“They’re here!” One of the neighbor boys came to the back door and poked his head in just long enough to let us know the group from the Richlands was coming, and then he was gone again, running back to join the rest of the children in the yard, watching the doleful procession.
Three men on horseback rode alongside the wagon, and one of them was Edward Shue himself. When I caught sight of him he was laughing and talking with the nearest rider. When he saw the door open and people spilling out on the porch, he broke it off, trying to look all solemn and bereaved in case anybody had noticed him. After a minute or two he seemed to forget to be mournful, and went back to talking with his companions again. Some of the men from the house went out to help take the coffin out of the back of the wagon, and Edward Shue was right there with them, telling them not to jostle it too much and trying to take hold of the front end of the box himself. He kept right close to the coffin, like a herding dog, as they brought it up the porch steps and into the house. He shook hands with one or two of the men on the porch, and suffered himself to be hugged by some of the neighbor women, but neither Jacob nor I wanted to say anything to him until we could govern our tempers, for it wouldn’t do to quarrel in front of a houseful of people.
We had put the two kitchen chairs in an open space in front of the parlor window, and Jacob directed the bearers to set the coffin there. I wished that we could have put flowers out beside the coffin, but in late January, there were none to be found, so I draped an old baby quilt over a stool and set a candle and the Bible on top of it, to remind us all that Zona was in God’s hands now.
The coffin lid had only been lightly nailed down, for safety’s sake during the journey, but now one of the men took a crowbar and prised it open. When two of them lifted off the lid, Edward Shue, who was hovering close by, turned his face away so that he wouldn’t have to look at the body. Then he composed himself, and commenced to talk in a low voice to one of the men who had come with him from the Richlands, but he never left the side of that coffin, not for an instant, and when anybody else tried to get close, he would become agitated, as if he was determined to protect his wife even in death.
I had gone through the ritual of sewing the mourning bands and preparing food for the visitors, but the fact of Zona’s death would not really hit me until I saw her for myself. That time had come, and I steeled myself not to show grief—not that I would have anyhow in front of so many people, but also because I was mindful that Zona’s killer was only a few paces away, pretending grief like a possum feigns death. But I’d not succumb to such cheap theatrics. Living through a war teaches you everything there is to know about sorrow. Real grief is silent as the grave.
When I felt able to do so without giving way, I went up to the coffin for a last look at my only daughter, but she was so wrapped up that I could scarcely recognize her. Zona was dressed in that same dark, high-necked dress she had worn when she married Edward Shue back in November—well, I couldn’t fault him for that; it was the best she had—but he had also wrapped a scarf around her neck, one that didn’t match the dress at all. A pillow and a bundle of cloth were placed on either side of her head; I had never seen anyone dressed for burial so outlandishly. Zona seemed lost in all the padding in the coffin. Her whole head was covered in a black veil tied under her chin in a big bowknot. I leaned down to untie the bow so that I could take a last look at my daughter’s face, but as I reached out, her husband grabbed my hand.
“Please don’t touch her! I can’t bear it.”
I stared at him, shaking away his grasp. “Don’t touch her? But I’m her mother. I only wanted to see her one last time.”
“Let her rest in peace, ma’am. Please.” His eyes were pleading. “She has suffered enough, and we must not disturb her.”
Had it been anybody else, I’d have thought he must be out of his head with grief, talking like that, though he certainly showed no other signs of bereavement, but as it was I decided it was just part of the show. “Surely she has been disturbed already. Someone had to prepare her body and dress her.”
He shook his head. “I did that myself. She would have wanted me to do that for her. And now no one else must touch her.”
“Did you put that scarf around her neck, too?”
“It was her favorite, ma’am. She would want it laid to rest with her.”
“What about the pillow and the roll of cloth?”
There were beads of sweat on his forehead, but he managed to smile. “You’ll think me foolish, Miz Heaster, but I wanted my Zona to rest easy in the coffin. I didn’t want her to be jostled around on the wagon coming out here. She had such trouble sleeping these last few weeks, and I just thought the pillow might . . .” He shrugged. My expression must have told him how crazy he sounded.
I drew back my hand, but I fixed him with a cold stare that held not an ounce of sympathy. Every word he said made me trust him less. I wondered if he had also prepared the body of that other wife, the one who died year before last, and whom he seemed to have forgotten so easily, as he would no doubt forget Zona. “Tell me what happened.”
The room got quiet just then, as if everybody present had been waiting for just that question. No one turned around to stare, but everything was suddenly still, and all the conversations seemed to have stopped midword. I kept my eyes fixed on Edward’s face, daring him not to answer me.
The grieving husband didn’t seem to notice the tense silence that had befallen the room. He was watching me carefully, as if trying to make up his mind what to say as the stillness stretched on. Finally he sighed and shook his head. “I wasn’t there when it happened, Miz Heaster. So I don’t know. I left for work that morning, same as always, and she was just fine then. On my way to the smithy, I stopped by Aunt Martha Jones’s house and asked her boy to look in on my wife, to see did she want any help with anything around the house. He’s a good fellow, not good for much in the ordinary way of things, but willing enough to lend a hand if you make it plain what you want him to do. Well, he says he finally got around to going over to the house about eleven o’clock, and when he went in, he found Zona sprawled out at the foot of the stairs. He called out to her, he said, asking did she need any help, but she was already gone.”
Jacob was hovering near my elbow, listening in on Shue’s explanation. “She fell then?”
He nodded. “It must have been an accident. I won’t think otherwise, though Dr. Knapp did ask me if I thought she had made away with herself.”
“Why would he ask that?”
“She had been low in spirits these past few weeks, and he had been treating her for that. But I won’t believe she would do such a thing on purpose.”
“Neither will I,” I said.
By late afternoon the day of the burying had turned cold and misty, with a leaden sky that muffled the tops of the mountains, as if the clouds were intent on burying the world. The wagon crunched over dead leaves and through puddles crusted with ice as we made our way in cold silence to Soule Chapel to lay Zona to rest. Our nearest neighbors followed behind us in their buckboards and buggies. Our boys were riding with nei
ghbors one wagon behind us, for the coffin took up too much room in the back of our wagon for them to fit, too.
I sat up front of our wagon, on the seat beside Jacob, staring straight ahead at the muddy road, edged by bare, wet trees. I had stayed awake all night, so I was as numb from weariness as much as from cold, but I wanted to be. That would make it easier not to give way during the funeral, not to faint when they put my daughter in the ground, and not to cross words with the devil who killed her.
Soule Chapel looked like a cloud itself, hovering there in the mist on a little rise about the dirt road. There were a goodly number of folks already there for the funeral, for the space beside the church was already filled with all manner of horse-drawn conveyances. Some familiar rigs—like Dr. Lualzo Rupert’s one-horse shay with his fine black gelding in harness—told me who had arrived. Most of the church congregation seemed to be present, though most of them had been driven indoors by the sharp winter wind. I wondered which of them had come in sympathy to our family, out of friendship to Zona, and which were there out of morbid curiosity because of the tragic circumstances surrounding her death. I was sure that by now word would have spread through the settlement that Zona’s sudden death was mysterious.
Jacob jumped down and secured the wagon, and then led me inside the church. He’d had a word with our neighbors, and five of them—and H. C.—had agreed to serve as pallbearers. They brought Zona inside and out of the cold, one last time.
I sat on the front bench close to the pulpit, trying to keep my mind on a silent prayer for my daughter’s soul, but I kept trying to remember who I had seen on the benches as I made my way up the aisle. The opposite front bench was empty—just as it had been at Zona’s wedding.
There was a clattering at the back of the sanctuary, and then a gust of icy wind. I turned to see what the disturbance was, and lo and behold, it was the widower himself, muffled to the eyes in a scarf and overcoat, making a belated appearance at the funeral of his wife.
The congregation, after a brief glance back out of curiosity, turned around again, pretending that nothing was amiss. Tongues would wag later, of course, but here in church they would preserve the decorum required by the solemn occasion. Edward Shue stamped the mud off his boots on the woven mat just inside the door, and made his way to the bench at the front of the church, while the minister waited in silence for everyone to settle down so that he could begin.
Edward nodded to us and then smiled at the pastor, but when he caught sight of Zona’s coffin set up at the front of the sanctuary, his smile faded, and he folded his arms, looking more grim than solemn, preparing to endure a trying afternoon.
The music began to play then, and at the pulpit the pastor opened up his Bible, so I paid no more mind to Edward Shue, but as the service went on, I stared out the window at the clabbered sky, remembering my words of last night and finally repeating them as a silent prayer: Lord, give me a way to know what really happened to Zona. Give her justice, so that she may rest in peace.
The service wasn’t long. The most momentous events in life—baptisms, weddings, and funerals—don’t seem to take much time, but the effects of them bind up the whole of your existence. It seems like life doesn’t take much time, either, although some days can seem to last forever.
A few sentimental old souls in the congregation shed tears, because Zona had been so young and pretty that it seemed a waste for her to have had such a brief life, but her widower shed no tears for her, and none of our family wept, either. I suppose Jacob didn’t think it fitten for a man to grieve in public, but I was willing myself to be strong, because I had no time for the weakness of self-pity and sorrow.
When the last hymn had ended, we all stood up as the six pallbearers hoisted the oak coffin and marched slowly down the aisle to deliver Zona to her final resting place. We followed them outside into the feeble sunshine that leaked through the gray clouds, and walked the few paces to the burying ground at the back of the church.
The grave had been dug earlier that morning, before we got there. It was perhaps a hundred feet from the back of the church, past the older graves and midway between the woods that lay at the foot of the gentle slope and the dirt lane that ran along the side of the church. The mourners hung back a little, and Edward Shue started over to stand with us, but I gave him a look, and he thought better of it and contented himself with staying at the front of the crowd, but he stayed well away from the casket.
Our family gathered around the open grave, shivering in the wind, and I thought: We’ll all be here beside her by and by, but when I see her in heaven, I want to be able to tell her that I got justice for her here on earth.
The graveside service was brief—a prayer and a few words of consolation to us. There was no more to be said, and the numbing cold was a warning that lingering here might cause some of us to follow her to the grave. The crowd encircling the open pit stood with heads bowed, solemn and still. We were mindful that a short, imperfect life had ended in disturbing circumstances that none of us understood, and there seemed to be nothing that we could do about it except to consign her body to the earth and her soul to the Lord. We stood there in silence as they shifted the ropes to lower the wooden coffin into the ground. Two or three of the congregation members picked up handfuls of damp earth and tossed them down onto the top of the coffin, but I didn’t follow their example. The casting of dirt clods into the grave was a sign that the mourners were releasing their hold on the departed one, but I was not yet ready to do that. I could let her body go into the cold ground, but I hoped that her spirit would stay earthbound for a while longer.
I had to know.
When it was over, and in groups of two and three people began to walk back toward the church, I hurried to catch up with Edward. He had showed no inclination to linger beside the grave, and I thought that there was more than the weather to blame for that.
I put my hand on his arm to stop him, and he stiffened as if I’d put a knife in him. He spun around, saw it was me, and began to stammer, something about how sorry he was, but I had no patience for his excuses. I just wanted to be done with him.
“I have something to return to you, Edward.”
When they had opened the coffin back at the house, I saw that Edward had stuffed a sheet into the casket, and I’d thought that such a contrivance was silly and undignified. When the men went out to fetch the wagon to take the coffin to the church, I had eased that sheet out from around her shoulders without disturbing her restful pose. I thought I’d give it back to Edward Shue, because as a newly married man with little money to spare, he couldn’t have owned many bed linens, and burying a perfectly good one struck me as a waste. He might as well have this one back and get some use out of it. When we went out to go to the funeral, I tucked it under my blanket in the wagon, so that I could give it back to him at the funeral, for I doubted that any of us would ever set eyes on him again after that.
When I said I had something to give him, he stopped babbling and stared at me. Then he glanced over my shoulder at the casket, still resting there in the open grave. “I’ve just now recalled that I have something to give to you as well, ma’am.” He dug in the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a little gold ring with three discolored pearls set in it. “I reckon she’d want you to have this.”
I stared at it, for I had never seen it before in my life. “A ring? But that didn’t belong to Zona. Where is her own ring? The one she was wedded with. I want that one, not this old thing.”
He sighed and shoved the ring back in his pocket. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Will you give me my daughter’s ring?”
He just shook his head. “I think you said you had something for me?”
I had no mind to do him any favors, but now I wanted nothing more than to be rid of every trace of him. “When you put Zona in her coffin, you rolled up one of your bedsheets in there alongside the pillows, and I thought maybe you’d be needing that sheet. You can’t have too many to spare, and
it was practically new. Anyhow, I took it out just before we left the house to come here. I’ve brought it to give to you. It’s under my lap blanket in the wagon yonder.”
A gust of wind hit us just then, and that might have been why Edward suddenly commenced to shiver. He pulled his coat tighter around him and backed away from me. “I don’t want it back, ma’am. Thank you for the offer, though, but I couldn’t take it. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go off home now so the fellows can return the wagon to Mr. Crookshanks. It’ll be gathering dark afore we get there.”
I nodded. “You go ahead.” We hadn’t so far to go ourselves, but night would surely overtake Edward Shue before he reached Livesay’s Mill.
He nodded, and raised his hand in a tentative farewell. “Don’t reckon I’ll be seeing you all again.”
I gave him a long stare, colder than the wind. “You might, one of these days. You just might.”
That night I went to bed when the rest of the family did, and I should have been exhausted, as much from dealing with a houseful of people as with grief and toil, but I found that I couldn’t sleep anyway. I got up again, telling Jacob that I had remembered more things that needed doing before I could go to bed, and that was true enough. The ash and soot from a fireplace constantly puts dust out into the room, so that no matter how many times you sweep the room and run the feather duster over the furniture, it still has to be done again all too soon. Visitors track in mud on the floors and drop bits of food on the carpet. I was determined that the house should be in good order, so that we could put the memories of the funeral behind us and get on with the business of living.
After I tidied up the mess that everyone had left, and made sure that the rest of the family was fast asleep in their beds, I sat up beside the fire in the parlor, keeping vigil, except that there was no coffin to keep it for. Over by the front window, the coffin had sat, balanced on two kitchen chairs, the lid on the floor behind it, until they nailed it in place when we set off to church for the burial.Perhaps it was just as well that she was gone, so that I couldn’t look at her again, for I’d had my fill of seeing her that afternoon when they brought her in.
The Unquiet Grave: A Novel Page 12