by Rhonda Riley
Rail-thin now, Momma chilled easily and preferred hot tea instead of iced tea. I heard her restless moans as I waited in the kitchen for her tea to steep. I set a glass and fresh pitcher of water on the tray with her cup of tea and carried it to her room. The doctors had recently upped the dosage on her pain medication and she asked for it every four hours on the dot.
Swallowing pills had become difficult for her; she was on liquid morphine. She opened her mouth like a child as I held the full tablespoon out and she took it hungrily. She scowled patiently, waiting for the morphine’s effects. The unhealthy prominence of her cheekbones seemed like a rebuke to my list of questions about my father.
I waited for the drug’s effects. Lately, it seemed to make her less drowsy, as if the pain now sopped up the morphine’s peripheral effects. After a few moments, her body relaxed, but her eyes retained a vigilant brightness, as if she anticipated the pain’s immediate return.
For weeks, I had questions ready for her, polished and clear, but suddenly they seemed a jumble caught between two simple sentiments: How could she have kept my father’s name from me for so long? What else had she not told me?
I settled the blanket up around her chest and startled at the sound of footsteps on the back porch.
Momma turned her head slowly and smiled weakly at Adam as he paused in the bedroom doorway. I stifled a disappointed moan. My opportunity was gone. I had not told Adam Momma’s news.
“I’m early, but I thought I’d . . .” he apologized.
Momma patted the bedspread beside her and Adam sat on Daddy’s side of the bed.
My thwarted questions filled my throat. Everything I did not understand about both Momma and Adam seemed to congeal into one spot in my chest.
I fought my tears and swallowed. Then my frustration gave way, surrendering to his presence. “Adam, go back out and check to make sure no one else is in the house. Check the driveway. The front door, too. Make sure there’s no one on the way.”
He glanced quickly at Momma. Her shoulder moved slightly, suggesting a shrug.
“Go on,” I said. “Then come back in here with us.”
Momma held my gaze while we listened to Adam’s footsteps echo the length of the silent house.
When he came back into the bedroom, I offered him my chair next to Momma’s side of the bed. Still puzzled, he sat and looked up at me.
I leaned over Adam’s shoulder, picked up Momma’s hand, and put it in his. “Go ahead.” I tapped him on the chest. “Show her.”
His eyes searched my face, not understanding.
“All she’s known is the pain of your voice. And she’s in pain now.”
“Evelyn I can’t change that.”
“I know. But she should know you. Let her hear who you are. And it will soothe her.”
His face softened.
Momma frowned at me, confused, then looked to Adam as he placed her hand on his breastbone and covered it with both of his. His lips parted in a gentle “ahh.”
As I closed the bedroom door behind me, the first wave resonated sweetly across the room.
In the kitchen, I poured myself a cup of coffee. My hands shook slightly.
The distinct, sweet tonal waves of Adam’s voice rose and fell in the rhythms of a long, slow heartbeat. More complex than what he had done with the girls in the mountains, this song swelled with an optimistic sadness and receded in tender resignation.
Outside, early afternoon brilliance filled the empty streets and yards of the mill-village. All the children were in school, the same schools I had gone to. The mill hummed. All the night-shift mill workers were home sleeping. Beyond the mill lay downtown Clarion and the farm, more land, hills, then the mountains. So many different voices.
I paced the house with deliberate quietness, looking out the front door and then the back door, stopping once outside of Momma’s bedroom to place my hand on the door and feel the vibration of his voice through the wood.
Slowly, Adam’s song receded, as if gradually absorbed by the air. Stillness filled the house.
When I returned to the bedroom, Momma sat upright and they embraced chest to chest. Her arms circled Adam loosely. He supported Momma’s back and cupped her head as he lay her back down on the pillows. She seemed to fall asleep immediately, a small, relaxed smile on her lips. Tears streaked down Adam’s face. We tiptoed out.
Back in the kitchen, Adam wiped his eyes and took a deep breath. “She is leaving soon.” A hard sorrow deepened his voice.
“Did she say anything?”
“Not a word. Neither of us.”
Rita’s car appeared in the driveway, sunlight flashing off the windshield.
“I’ll wait for you in the truck,” he said.
Rita shot a wary glance at Adam as they passed each other on the porch. Neither spoke.
“She’s had a good day,” I told Rita as I gathered up my purse.
Momma died quietly in her sleep five days later. She and I never had another moment alone when she was awake and coherent. We never discussed Ben Mullins again or the time she spent alone with Adam. Once, as she drifted off into a morphine drowse, she rolled her head on the pillow and looked over at me. “You’ve had your secrets, too.” That was the last clear statement she made to me.
What do we ever know of our mothers? I thought I knew her. But I’d seen her as a child sees a good mother—pure, transparent, incapable of deception.
She was the only person I ever really wanted to tell about Adam, the only one I felt ashamed of lying to. I never got to tell her I forgave her. I never got to ask for a map to help me through the terrain of my own secrets, my own marital bargains.
I tried to set aside what Momma had told me while we prepared for her funeral. But I felt the current of it run through me when I was near my father, brother, and sisters. My eyes kept wandering over their features, not just for the similarities and differences between us, but for what they knew. I gained nothing by my scrutiny. All I saw in their faces was a mirror of my own grief.
The speed of her death surprised us all. She’d never been sick before. We thought we’d have her for months longer. Rita, who had held on to the certainty that Momma would get better, collapsed in on herself, her face vague. Daddy fell into a constant stupor. Joe, Bertie, and I made arrangements for the viewing and the funeral. We kept it simple, the way Momma would have wanted it.
Then Bertie called. As I drove to Momma’s house, my anxiety centered on Adam. I also wondered if Momma had said anything to them. Maybe Daddy had told them I was their half-sister. Maybe they wanted to discuss that. At best, I hoped to hear about some disagreement between them, something that didn’t involve me at all. But Joe stood on her porch and held the door open for me when I got out of the car. The apology on his face ended my suspense. We were there to discuss Adam.
Bertie sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Joe poured two more cups and set them in the pool of yellow morning light on the checkered tablecloth. He turned a chair around and straddled its back. Neither of them met my eye.
When Joe took a deep breath to begin, I held up my hand to stop him and both of them looked at me, waiting. I gripped my coffee cup. “I think my family needs a private viewing before the funeral,” I said.
Joe nodded. Bertie lit a cigarette and leaned back, her jaw flexing.
I continued, “No surprises this time.” I shook my head and bit my lip. I thought of that force in Adam, that horrible cry. I knew no way to hold that at bay.
Joe patted my hand. “That would be good, sis.”
I began to cry.
“Damn good.” Bertie sucked on her cigarette and went to the stove to fill her cup again.
I wiped my face. “But I do want us to be able to say good-bye to Momma. All of us.”
Bertie turned at the stove and gave me her hard, quizzical look.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll talk to the funeral home and the preacher. Arrange for us to go to the church early in t
he morning and view the body. It’ll just be me and the girls at the funeral,” I said.
Joe rubbed my hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be okay, Evelyn.”
Bertie shook her head. “I don’t want Momma’s funeral ruined. I don’t want Adam—”
“Bertie! She’s agreeing!” Joe shushed her.
Silence followed. Bertie stood up and cleared the table, clattering our coffee cups into the sink.
I blew my nose. “One other thing. Something I want.” I waited for Bertie to finish with the dishes. I wanted to make sure I had her attention. “I don’t want to see Frank at the funeral. Just thinking about him . . .” And for a second I saw Frank, his blank animal stare as he looked down at Jennie on the ground.
Joe nodded several times. “Sure, sure.”
Bertie shrugged. “Keeping Frank out of a church will not be a problem.”
“Mary’s never liked him. Says he gives her the willies,” Joe added.
I dreaded telling Adam about my family’s plans to keep him away from the funeral of the only mother he’d ever known. I did so cowardly, in bed, in the darkness.
“That’s a good solution. I can’t guarantee that it won’t happen again,” he responded.
“You don’t have to go at all, if you don’t want to, Adam.”
He lay beside me, taut.
Since Jennie’s death, he’d held himself back in everything, even with me. Days went by without intimacy. Then he would turn silently to me in the dark, not out of love but out of need, and there was a fierceness to his touch that overwhelmed me. We went at each other as if the hounds of hell were after us. Or we were the hounds themselves. The act was not lovemaking, but grief-making, a new beast manifest, without tenderness, raw and exhausting, throwing us into black, dreamless sleep. His sweet tones seemed to have died with Jennie. His climax came with a simple shuddering moan.
But that night, after I told him about the arrangements for Momma’s funeral, I turned him on his back and began to touch him with our former delicacy. He took my hand and moved it off of his chest.
“No,” I said, pinned his wrist to the bed, and began tracing his breastbone with my other hand. I touched every part of him, my hands open against his smoothness. He did not move again to stop me, but lay rigid before me.
I knew him well. And I took him. Eventually, he pressed up to meet me, and his voice rose as sharp and dark as it had been at Jennie’s funeral, though, thankfully, far less intense and much briefer. My breastbone and temples rang painfully. Afterward, we did not sleep but lay next to each other in the sudden cool of our sweat.
We decided that Adam and I would skip the wake and he would have his own private viewing of Momma’s body early on the morning of the funeral.
I woke in the middle of the night before the funeral, Adam alert beside me.
“We could go now. We don’t have to wait for daylight,” I said.
We began to dress. I went to the closet, but Adam reached for his dungarees. “She wouldn’t mind,” he said. “And no one else will be there.”
I hung my skirt back on the hanger and put on a pair of pants and an old sweater.
We drove to the church in silence. A train whistled in the distance. Mist slid over the fields near the church. The ground sparkled white under the streetlights with the first frost of the season.
All churches were left unlocked back then, refuges for sudden repenters. We walked in quietly, as if trying not to disturb anyone. Faint moonlight diffused through the yellow glass windows. Being in the church at such an odd hour felt both sinful and holy.
Momma’s coffin sat in front of the pulpit, the lid shut. I went to turn on the lights while Adam opened the coffin. The electric light brought the room back to its ordinary self.
I’d seen her the day before at the funeral home, but this was Adam’s first time seeing her. She didn’t look like herself. She had lost so much weight in the last weeks. Her face had a strained, unnatural look. Only her hands were unchanged. All my life, I had seen those hands moving, giving me the world. Now they lay stilled.
“Momma,” Adam said, touching her hands. “Good-bye, Momma.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. I was acutely aware of him beside me, his ragged breath, his sweat. I braced myself for his howl.
But he remained silent. After a while, he turned and faced the pews. He leaned over and gripped the back of the first pew. His shoulders tightened. He looked so alone, the dark rows of empty seats in front of him. I thought of the faces that would fill the church later in the day, the people we were avoiding. I pressed my hand between his shoulder blades and readied myself. He took a sharp, deep breath.
There was no horrid cry. Instead, he fell to his knees and wept like an ordinary man, his head on the hard wood of the pew. We held each other for a long time. Then we went home.
He did not go to bed, though it was still hours until dawn; instead he began to pack. “I’m going up into the mountains,” he announced.
I wanted to stop him, to insist he not go, but I saw the faraway look on his face. He was already gone.
While I packed some food for him, he went to say good-bye to the girls. Rosie’s voice rose in protest then fell again as he soothed her.
“Adam.” I took his arm as he passed.
“It’ll just be a couple of days. Call Wallace for me. Let him know he may need Cleatus’s help for the next few days.”
Then he left.
My anger at death splintered into a brittle rage toward those people in the congregation who had turned against Adam. I could not allow myself such brittleness. I could not afford to break: my daughters slept down the hall. I lay in bed, comforting myself with images of Adam in the forest, howling his strange songs to an audience of receptive wildlife. I remembered the radiance of his face when he’d told me about his mountain trips and how the mountain returned his calls. I hoped it did this time. I wished that solace for him.
I must have slept, for I woke to the gentle percolation of the coffeepot. Adam sat at the kitchen table, a cup in front of him.
“You haven’t left yet?”
“No, I’ll go after the funeral. The truck is packed. I got a few miles down the road then turned around . . . the girls . . . She was their grandmother. I should be there with them.”
“You want to come to the funeral?” I held the coffeepot over my empty cup.
“Yes, I should sit with them. I am their father.” He did not look at me.
“But . . .”
He shook his head. “You told me they’ll be singing at the funeral and I told them I’d always be there when they sang.”
I remembered his face in the barn after Jennie’s funeral, when I had silenced him with the girls. I did not press him further.
Cars packed the church parking lot. Momma had lived all of her life in Clarion. The bereaved family is always the focus of a funeral, but I felt the extra stir of attention as we entered the church, Adam first with Sarah holding his hand. I braced myself against the stares and kept my eyes steady on Adam’s shoulders above Gracie and Rosie’s. Lil clutched my hand.
The funeral home usher stopped Adam halfway down the aisle. My heart pounded so hard, I coughed. But the usher nodded and led us to the second pew. Daddy sat in the front pew between Rita and Joe. I pushed ahead to make sure I would be sitting beside Adam. Next to Joe, Bertie turned and glared, her face reddening as we filed in behind them. She grabbed Joe, who looked up, a question on his face. I touched his shoulder in a gentle plea as I passed behind him. Rita gave us a panicked, quick smile.
Behind us, footsteps sounded on the wood floor. Then the vestibule door creaked as it swung open and shut. Someone had left the church. Reverend Paul rose. The footsteps and muttering voices halted abruptly.
I cannot remember any of what the reverend said about Momma. Once again, Sarah sat on Adam’s lap and I lay my hand on his thigh, under her warm, thin leg. I concentrated on fighting the waves of nausea that kept rising to my throat.
Gracie nodded to the pianist, who struck the introductory bars. Then Gracie’s pure, strong alto rang out, followed by the three younger sopranos. I wanted to shut my eyes and ride that sweetness, to rest mindlessly on the resonance of their voices. But I had told them to look at me if they got shy. They did not need that crutch. They sang full and steady without hesitation.
“Open my eyes, illumine me, Spirit Divine.” Each time they hit the chorus, I thought I heard a fifth singer as their voices converged on those final notes. For a few moments, my heart ceased its hammering and the nausea left me. I squeezed Adam’s hand as the girls finished and returned to us.
Reverend Paul led another Scripture reading. Then it was time to view her body. Adam closed his eyes briefly as Lil scrambled past his knees. “Go on,” he whispered to Sarah, who held his hand and tried to pull him to his feet.
Seeing the dead helps the body understand what the mind does not want to grasp and the heart longs to deny. But I hated the ritual of the funeral at that moment. I wanted to send my girls running down the aisle out into the sun, out beyond this sorrow, past Clarion.
But we filed up to the coffin, Gracie and Rosie stately in their new poise. Lil looked once at her grandmother and then quickly away as she hugged my hip. Sarah just stared, her eyes glued to Momma’s face, as Gracie, who had been holding her up to see over the side of the coffin, lowered her back to the floor. I resisted the urge to keep looking back at Adam still seated behind us. I braced myself, but there were only the normal sounds of people moving in a quiet church.
Adam met us at the end of the pew and we walked out behind Daddy, who leaned on Rita’s arm. As we passed, everyone backed up or turned suddenly to speak to a neighbor. A little girl pivoted away from us to bury her head in her mother’s skirt.