I remembered. But I didn’t know what to think. Ronnie needled him more than the others, that was some of it. Dad got mad, yes, blew up, tried in stupid ways to make up for it. I stared up the hill beyond their old house site. Rows of wide red rhubarb had pushed their thick, tightly curled leaves out of the ground. It marked where the garden used to be. A well-made post-and-rail fence, the horse corral, and a lean-to shed stood as if waiting for another unlucky couple of homesteaders to take their chances. Glenn and I used to drive up here the summer we started going together. In those days we lay together in the bed of his old Ford with the doors wide open and the truck radio turned way up, nothing but the wide, star-filled sky and shooting stars above us. I didn’t even worry a bit once I got pregnant, and I was proud as ever when we got married. Who was that girl? It seemed like a hundred years ago.
“I was too young then,” I said to my mom, shaking my head. I wanted to clear these memories out of my head. I wanted to pay attention to my mother. She was the widow now. She was the one who needed looking after. I didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, and I did not want to think about Glenn.
Jeanie was squirming around in the back on Aunt Billie’s lap. I didn’t know how Aunt Billie could look Alan Ray in the eyes after all these years of his drinking and catting around. Once I realized how things were, I used to wonder why she kept letting him roll back in as if he was never gone. But these days he didn’t seem to pound the beer as much as he used to. Alan Ray looked more like sixty-seven years than forty-seven. His face was blotchy, and his eyes were ringed with pouchy circles. He complained about everything. He had the chest pains, had the sugar diabetes, but he wouldn’t see a doctor. We knew he was afraid that a doctor would tell him to quit smoking and drinking, and that would never fly with a man like Alan Ray.
I slowed down and eased the Bronco over the some of the largest ruts in the road. Up ahead, Alan Ray’s truck was pulled off to the side. I drove up alongside of him and let the Bronco idle. I hoped that Billie’s boys didn’t come sliding up behind me. They might get that Chevy hung up in the mud if they had to stop too quickly.
“The road’s too wet. We’re going to carry Lux from here,” Alan Ray said out loud. He motioned to my brothers, and they hefted the box out of the truck. Alan Ray shook the water off the tarp and draped it back over Dad’s coffin. I could tell from his voice that he was sober.
Aunt Billie got out of the backseat of the Bronco and walked over to Alan Ray, said something to him, and lit up a cigarette. She shouted for me to keep on driving while she walked, showing me where to put the tires for the best grip. I rolled the window back up to keep from getting soaked before I even got out of the car. I didn’t want Jeanie getting out yet. She was still wearing her patent leather shoes. She could get a bad chill if the rain kept up. Somewhere in the back I had packed a bag for her, galoshes and a little rain slicker. I would see how close I could get the Bronco. I drove through the grove of poplars and pulled over onto the berm, just enough room to turn the Bronco around. Through the edge of the woods ahead was the cemetery, marked by some scraggly tall evergreens and cedars.
“About like I remember it. Not much of a graveyard,” Mom said, looking out the window. A split-rail fence that had marked the edge of the plots was dragged down as if a herd of deer had run through it. There was one extremely tall cedar tree in the center, bushy and thick, and about ten or so big stones, with some small slab markers for all the buried children, lying flat. I’d been out here once or twice before and read the markers. There’s a Casper J. Smith, who fought in the Civil War and died in the 1880s. There has not been a Smith buried up here since we owned the land, and likely this small plot has been long forgotten. Today in church, Dad’s boss Bobby Burns said he’d help Mom out with buying a stone. I figure we’ll have to go to town and pick one after we see how much he’ll give. Mom says don’t expect much; Bobby Burns never gave Dad more than a quarter an hour raise twice in twenty-five years of work, and they carried the cheapest life insurance policy they could get.
“I see Aunt Billie’s boys,” I called out to Mom and Jeanie. Mom nodded. In the rearview mirror I could see headlights bouncing all over the field. Bertie and Junior had all five of the shovels rattling around in the bed of their truck. Bertie was just sixteen, but he drove fast like Alan Ray. They slid over next to us.
The rain began to let up, though the air was heavy and gray. I forgot how dark that north-facing hollow could be some times of the year. My brothers set Dad’s box down on the truck bed and Alan Ray showed them all where to dig. He staggered a bit and he kept his head down. I knew he had cried like a baby when he heard the news. He always had worn his heart on his sleeve.
I wondered if Mom would get out now, but she showed no sign of moving. So I kept the Bronco running for the heat. Mom had wrapped the shawl tighter over her like she was chilled down to the bone. She kept her face veiled. I hoped she wasn’t going to be sick to her stomach. Jeanie slid out to be with Billie, who picked her up and held her to keep her out of the mud. They stood on a knoll beside the cedar tree and watched. Then, as the sky began to clear, all the boys cleared back the scruffy brush and got to work with the mattocks, picks, and shovels.
“What a day,” I said to Mom.
“What a day? What a life, you mean.” She stared into my eyes as if I was supposed to know what to say next. I shook my head. My tongue would not move, my throat felt blocked.
I looked over at her and lowered down the blower on the car. That heater made a racket. I thought about Dad, and how he got Glenn a job, and Ronnie, too. And I thought about Uncle Alan Ray, working in the woods, cutting timber all those years. A woman never could know whether the man she said good-bye to in the morning would come home in a box in the evening.
Mom’s blue-gray eyes stared straight into mine. “Once me and your Dad had a row in Grandma’s root cellar. I was pregnant with you, and he said he didn’t want a male doctor looking at me.” She nodded down, below her waist. “He slapped me so hard I cracked my head against the block wall. I never told you this, but as I blacked out I heard the voice of the Lord.”
“You what?” I asked. I gave up trying to figure her out.
“I just heard this holy voice,” she said. “It said, ‘Go back, it’s not your time.’ Even though my body was not attached to my spirit, I heard those words, and then I saw a shining white finger pointing down at me. Then whoosh, I was back in that root cellar with your daddy standing over me, and Lord, my head ringing so bad that I couldn’t even talk. He lifted me in his arms and carried me to bed. That was when we was living in the trailer down from your Grandma and Grandpa. I told everyone I fell. I don’t know what your Grandpa would’ve done if he would have found out. I didn’t want anyone to know.” Mom looked like she was waiting for me to say something. “Where was I going to find me a female doctor?” She shrugged, pulled the shawl tighter.
Did she really say that? I thought. Should I make some excuses? Play my Dad’s part? But he hurt her. Oh, my sad, poor mother. Oh, my sad, poor dad, who cannot be here to see this hurt. I wanted to plug my ears. I wanted to cry for the both of them then, to tell her that this crazy jealousy was because he was scared, because he lost his mother, because he cared about her. Mom had lived with him, loved him, had given it her best shot, even though she was angry that he lashed out and hurt her. Somehow, I knew, she was just as angry that he went and died, that he left her. After all these years, I thought, keeping the anger and the love twisted around each other like two tangled vines, honeysuckle and greenbrier, clinging to each other. They probably spent their time figuring out how to make things better for every one of us and not better for themselves.
I wanted some breathing room. I wanted to get out of the car. I wondered what Grandad Bertram would have done to Dad if he knew. I thought about what I’d wished Dad could do to Glenn if Dad was still alive. Now I’d let that chance slip through my fingers, it was too late. I sat in the driver’s seat, window rolled up, staring at
this scene as if it was some kind of movie. There was Dad’s box, covered in a tarp in the back of Alan Ray’s pickup. There were my brothers, almost men, all of them carrying some of Dad, their faces, their hair, their arms and shoulders. Half the hole was dug now; the boys stood in it shin deep. Wet reddish-brown clay was piled up all around the hole. It didn’t look like all that much dirt had been moved yet. The earth was dark on top, but underneath it was the kind of clay that stuck to their picks, mattocks, and shovels. While Mom was talking, Lux Jr. found a glass aggie marble in the clay. I saw him clean off the shovel, pick out the marble, give it to Jeanie, and then return to digging. Though the rain had stopped, the fog hung low on the ridge at the tree line.
I turned toward my mother. “Did Dad hit you again?”
“Oh, a few more times.” I almost broke in to ask something, but there is a time to speak and a time to listen, and today, it seemed right to listen. “The last time was Christmas, about five years ago. I packed him Christmas cookies in his lunch pail. He was late getting home, and he came roaring in the door, drunk and swearing, because some new guy at work had prettier cookies. My cookies were sugar cookies, but that other wife done hers up with colored icing. Your dad slapped me hard across the face. But by then I bet I outweighed him by a good thirty pounds. I told him that if he ever again lifted his hand against me, I would hit him back harder, and I meant it, too.” She gazed at me, her jaw set, her pale eyes blinking hard, and she shook her head. “The days when he was late getting home, when I never knew if he was going to come home pissed off or just plain pissed.” Then she stopped. She got this look on her face. It was like she said it, that was it. She gave it all she could. Like she deflated in front of my eyes. “But he came on home to me every night of my life, now didn’t he?” she whispered.
I knew what she meant, and I bowed my head low, in sympathy and confusion, and then brushed her cheek with my hand, wondering at how I could have been so blind to all of this. Did she hide this from me, for all these years? I wanted to reach out, to apologize for my own blindness, but I held my tongue, hoping now that somehow, God in His heaven could heal my mother’s rage and comfort her in her sorrow.
“He never raised his hand after that,” she said. “He didn’t have to. It was other things. Every time we had two nickels to rub together your dad spent ’em on some new gun, or some pedigreed coonhound. Look where that got me. I can’t shoot the damn gun, and now I got to feed those yapping hounds.”
I began to remember things now. My mom’s pinched mouth brought them back. The boys’ bedrooms with their unfinished floors and walls, the mice that gnawed their way into the house each winter and nested in drawers, chewing holes into our scarves and gloves. My mom heating water on the stove for baths and dishes, or my mom flushing the commode once or twice a day with a five-gallon bucket full of water that she drew from the kitchen sink. How I couldn’t wait to have my own house, to get away from those chores. But I used to think that’s what everyone’s mother did.
There was a knock on the side window of the Bronco. I looked over to see Glenn standing with the Reverend Shorter. I lowered the window. “Where’d you come from?” I asked him. “The Reverend’s Ranger got stuck in the mud by Barker’s old place,” he said loudly. “They sent me home from work on account it was so wet in the woods,” Glenn said. I looked around, trying to read that scowl on his face. Glenn’s new black boots were already getting muddy. He hated mud on his boots. It would put him into a mood. Right then I decided something. I wanted to go back home with Mom and take Jeanie with me. I would spend a few days, at least, maybe a week or two.
It was barely drizzling now. The Reverend Shorter took some time to walk around the small square graveyard and look at the slabs and stones while Glenn stood by and watched. Alan Ray took Tommy’s shovel and helped the boys finish digging. I wondered if my mother was ready to get out into the cold.
Mom opened her door, and Jeanie ran over and stood with us. Aunt Billie helped her through the mud, up, under the cedar tree, facing Dad’s coffin. When the boys put down their picks and shovels, Reverend Shorter came over to the graveside to lead us in prayer. The boys had placed the coffin on two thick oak planks above the hole, and I stared at the box, thinking about how Dad would have liked that coffin as a final resting place. It was a satin-finished, quarter-sawn poplar casket from the Mannington Casket Company. Maybe Dad milled those thick poplar boards, maybe Ronnie or Alan Ray or Glenn felled the trees. Did Dad ever wonder, in all that time at A-1, if his boards would get shipped to the Mannington Casket Company to be joined with wide dovetails and lined with black velvet, to carry his own body back to God up in heaven?
Reverend cleared his throat and began. He asked for God’s forgiveness and grace, so that my dad would be returned unto Him in eternity, and said that he would be able to find a new body in Christ. Reverend cast his gaze around us all, at the boys and me, at Billie and Alan Ray and their family, at Glenn, as if to say that it was not too late for all of us to live right in the sight of the Lord. Somehow, wherever his eternal spirit resided, I hoped Dad would be healed, that his body would be new, and that he would be watching down on all of us, Mom included, with two good eyes, and a newfound sense of peace that surpasses all understanding, and repent the pain he caused my poor, sad mother. Burning with devoutness, Reverend’s voice became slower and more purposeful as began the last part of the service, ending with “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” As he concluded, Alan Ray looked straight at the Dad’s casket and said, “Lux, ain’t it true what I told you? Them woods will always find a way to win.” Then as if trying to catch his breath, he turned away and put his A-1 cap back on his head. Ronnie began to blow his nose, ducking his head down so no one could see his face, and Lux Jr. saluted and stood at stoic attention. Jeanie was in Billie’s arms, clutching tissues in her small fist, her face pressed hard into Billie’s neck, as Billie and Mom called out together, “Amen.”
I stood quietly, too flooded with my own grief. For a brief moment, all was still on this silent hilltop, with only the rushing sound of the headwaters of the Goshen Creek in the background; then Mom began to cry, the sound of her like gasps for breath. She was drowning in sorrow and grief. I reached over awkwardly to hold Mom’s hand, but she wouldn’t let me. Instead, she took off her white shawl, gradually unwrapping it off her arms and from around her shoulders. She walked over toward the coffin, and Billie set Jeanie down and rushed over to help steady Mom. Together they walked out on one of the planks and spread the shawl over the box, so that a little point of the delicate hand-knotted fringe hung down from both sides. Mom stared down at the casket, then, and in a low voice, said, “Lux, I will be with you again soon, as God is my witness.” Then she began to sing. “Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river . . .” Bit by bit, we all joined in. Then, still holding on to Billie, Mom turned and walked back toward Jeanie and me.
I THOUGHT Mom would want to leave right away, but she said she wanted to stay until the boys were done, lowering the box into the ground, filling in the grave. Glenn left right away, saying he’d remembered things he needed to do. I told him that me and Jeanie would be staying with Mom for a few days, maybe even a week or so, and he shrugged. Actually, I took that as a good sign.
When the boys were done, they were the next ones to drive back down the hollow. They probably wanted to change out of their church clothes so they could head up into the woods again. Then Uncle Alan Ray and the Reverend Shorter came over to us and both told Mom how sad they were for her, offering their help in any way possible. Mom said thanks, that they’d both been so kind, that she was fine, and that she had a wonderful family that would help her through this.
It seemed to me that the whole family meant to do just that; Uncle Alan Ray and all the boys had been really kind about things so far, and Glenn hadn’t touched a drop all day. And the Reverend had come all the way up the hollow to bury Daddy, instead of burying him in the church cemetery. As Aunt Billie said, it
was just as well that Lux Cranfield wasn’t buried in no churchyard; his own boys would never come to visit him that way.
Finally, the four of us, Mom, Aunt Billie, Jeanie, and I, walked back to the Bronco, trying not to step in too many puddles. Jeanie reached into her purse, took out a crumpled-up tissue, and unwrapped the marble. It was very old; the glass was pitted and etched with mud, but it was a sort of milky blue and white with gold streaks through it. “Little Lux said Papaw would want me to have this,” she said to me.
“That’s right, honey, he would,” I told her. “Like a little bit of buried treasure to keep with you, maybe a good luck charm.” I settled her into the backseat, and she climbed onto Billie’s lap for the ride down the steep and rutted road, toward the main road where Mom and Tommy now lived, one less light in the window, one less voice to fill the rooms. I drove slowly out of the hollow. With no rain, we could keep the windows down. I thought about how, in a month or two, maybe me and Jeanie could plant a small tree beside Dad’s grave site, maybe a holly or another cedar, something to stay green year-round. Maybe the boys would come up there too. No one spoke while the Bronco crawled out of the hollow. Trees rose up on both sides of the road. The hill got steeper, leveled off again. The wet mud splashed against our tires, and the fresh air smelled like clay combined with wild onions.
As we rounded the last steep bend, before we approached the main road, Mom began to sing. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .” Her voice echoed off the cliff beside the road. Though I wanted to join in, I held my tongue and let her and Billie sing. They held each word long and slow and clear; then, as Mom completed the fourth verse of the hymn, she reached over and took my hand firmly in hers. I turned onto the blacktop, took it slow, then pulled off again at her driveway. I marveled at the way it seemed like I felt something there in her hand, a strength that I did not sense before, and her touch felt suddenly warmer. I could feel it in her palm, out to her fingers, a small flame.
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