AND THOUGH I do not dare to tell anyone, I know how I really wanted this moment to end. Not down here along County Route 57, at the end of this gravel driveway, not with the Bronco pulling in beside this lonesome farmhouse, but up on the Goshen Road, on that wooded hilltop in that little cemetery, at the graveside where they laid my father to rest. In my mind’s eye, I am still back there, standing in that chilly drizzle, looking around at all those unruly graves, some with markers and some without, clumps of uneven ground and broken slabs of stone. I cannot undo the sight of how there was a great haphazard here, long thorny brambles in unkempt clusters hiding overgrown paths and unknown graves, headstones off-kilter or the little sayings unreadable, worn-down grave markers partly covered in mud, family names blurred, or no name at all, just a couple of initials or a date. We are all so empty and hopeless here, I wanted to say, and I cannot erase this thought.
My mother had not yet reached for me, as she looked only at that box, that dark hole in the ground, this dark day’s somber ritual. But something in me got frantic. I wanted to break through that moment, I wanted to push against the darkness of my mother’s grief, and I wanted to pick up that white shawl and take it off the coffin, keep it out of the grave. I wanted that shawl at that moment more than I ever wanted anything in my life. What I also wanted to say, but what I didn’t say, is that the satiny, milled boards of the poplar box would be just right for him, the damp clay of the cool earth was fitting enough for him, but that I needed that white shawl for me.
FOURTEEN
SAVING JASMINE (1992)
MY SISTER DESSIE STOOD IN MY KITCHEN ONE SUNDAY in mid-September, not quite six months after Lux’s passing, complaining about her newest charge, a one-year-old baby named William Lee. She’d stopped in after church as I was about to set out dinner, wearing a dark gray dress that used to be snug but now hung on her shoulders. The high collar lined in black made her complexion look pale and her face seem smaller. Her graying hair was gathered back into a bun, and unruly strands framed her face with curls.
“This little guy’s without a doubt the saddest, most pitiful baby I’ve ever seen,” she said, picking up a knife from the counter. Noticing where I’d left off, she started slicing a knobby batch of my fresh-picked carrots into tidy, quartered sticks. “He holds his little hands out toward the door and cries, ‘Mama, Mama,’ all day long.” She brushed beads of sweat from her neck and under her chin with the back of her hand, the knife waving around her face like a small dagger.
“Can’t you get him down for a nap?” I asked, taking a tray of rolls out of the oven and giving the stew a stir. Her eyes met mine for a moment and darted away, like she did not talk to people enough or get enough fresh air. I cranked open the kitchen window over the sink, but the heat of the outside air mixed with the heat of the stove to make the kitchen even warmer.
“That’s the worst of it. When I think he’s worn himself out, I tiptoe him into the living room and set him into the crib. Soon as he settles down and starts to breathe steady, up pops his bald little head, and he starts in again, like he’s afraid to give in to sleep. You wouldn’t believe how worked up he gets. He’s got a set of lungs on him. It’s a wonder you haven’t heard him over here. He’d try to flop himself backward over the crib rails if I didn’t watch him.” She found a plate in the cupboard for the carrots. “That little man is not happy unless I hold him. Then he falls asleep on my shoulder, and when I go to set him down, it starts all over again. I pray my back won’t go out.”
She nibbled on a carrot. Right before she took William, she’d mentioned that babysitting children under the age of two would be too much work. Dessie had gotten the ball rolling by watching Jeanie when she came off the school bus from half-day kindergarten. That was last spring, while Lissy was living with Dessie and working at the nursing home in town.
Jeanie was a perfect way for Dessie to start babysitting, easygoing, curious, helpful, and good company during the afternoons, and for whole days during the summer. Then school started back and suddenly Dessie had Jeanie after school and two little ones during the school day. Marcia Lee, the new second-grade teacher, arrived by Greyhound from Pittsburgh just in time for the school year with two towheaded kids and one suitcase: Theodore, four and still wearing a diaper; and one-year-old William, fussing from the time Marcia Lee dropped him off until she walked back in the door again.
“I can tell William’s been through a rough go of it,” Dessie said, rolling her wedding band around her finger as she spoke. “The way he clings, he was most likely taken off the breast too soon. And Mr. Theodore Lee is going to need to lose those diapers before he hits kindergarten. He pitched a fit when I tried to set him on the commode. He’s ornery, but he’s a smart little guy. He can’t wait to see Jeanie when she comes in after school. Last week Jeanie had him writing his ABCs at the kitchen table.” As she spoke, I realized that even her fingers were thinner. Her ring used to be too tight.
Dessie picked up the plates I’d set out, put them aside, and wiped the table down with a dishrag, scrubbing until every spot was removed. Then she set the plates back out and looked up at me. “I just hope I can be a comfort to William Lee, God bless his sweet little soul. I pray the good Lord can guide me.”
“Des,” I said, “lately you think the whole world is racing toward ruination on a fast train.” I held off saying what I really thought, though, that the way she was talking got me worried about her mental state. Certain words were sneaking their way back into her vocabulary and maybe her thinking, too. I worried she’d start back in scanning the very heavens and earth looking for heavenly signs. If there was a sign to be had, I hoped it wasn’t a sign that she’d been watching those TV preachers again.
She stared at me, reading my thoughts, no doubt. “I know what I know,” she said.
“Des,” I asked, “are you staying for dinner? The guys won’t eat much. They’ve been snacking all day.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said. “Not today, but I promise, sometime I will, sometime soon.”
“At least take some rolls, then,” I said. “I figured out a new recipe using that quick-rise yeast.”
She smiled, eyeing the warm rolls, “OK, I’ll take a couple. Look how nice the crust came out.” She peeked out the window toward her driveway. “Thanks, Billie. I better run. I’ve a new mother coming over. I’ll eat later when Tommy gets in from work.”
“A new mother? I thought you didn’t want to watch more than three?” I said.
“Oh, this one’s for Saturdays,” she said, her voice lowered. “I could use the money.”
Who couldn’t use the money? I thought, nodding back. Dessie was carrying a heavy load these days. Tommy helped with groceries, but she didn’t feel right asking him to part with more of his salary. He was saving for an old Jeep with a blown head gasket that he wanted Alan Ray to help him rebuild. Dessie washed her hands at the kitchen sink, wrapped the roll in a napkin, and picked up one more sliced carrot. “You’uns have a good supper,” she said. “God bless.”
The screen door slammed and blew back a final whiff of her talc. “Don’t forget to check your sugar after you eat,” I said, not really sure if she could hear me, and not really sure if she would eat. I called to Alan Ray and the boys to wash up and come to dinner, then stood in the warmth of the kitchen window and watched the rear bumper of her tan Buick creep down the driveway, past our two gardens, and pull up into the turnaround spot in front of her house.
Alan Ray came out of the back bedroom as soon as she left. “How’s Our Lady of Perpetual Prayer doing today?” he asked, only half-kidding.
“I don’t know. She’s lost more weight, and she was talking about taking another child,” I said. “She wears herself out. William Lee is crying nonstop.”
“He’ll get over it. They always do,” Alan Ray said. He winced as his back caught when he eased into his chair. My sister imagined the worst, but she had a way with children. She always took on too much, but I took it for granted that sh
e would do that.
Bertie and AJ bounded in from the yard, and as they cleaned up I told them I wanted their help, and that we could all look in on Dessie later, to see if she and Tommy needed anything done around the house. “I just want to check on things. You know, take a look around and see what she has got herself into,” I said.
Alan Ray looked up at me, one eyebrow raised, checking to see if I wanted him to come along. His eyelids seemed heavy, about halfway closed. It was the back medication. “You can’t hardly sit up,” I said to him. “Don’t you worry, we’re just dropping by for a minute.” Dessie wouldn’t ask Alan Ray to do anything most times, even if I offered to get him to help. No, she insisted, she would do it herself.
COME SUNDOWN, I rounded up the boys. We grabbed flashlights and headed across the hayfield on the footpath to the farmhouse. I rapped on the edge of the screen door and popped my head in. Under the yellow glow of the ceiling light, Dessie sat at the kitchen table in paint-splattered blue jeans and one of Lux’s old plaid flannel shirts, pencil eraser in her mouth, scowling at her checkbook. Bills were stacked in piles, spread out like homework.
On the radio, the Family Hour of Prayer blasted in from New Martinsville, parishioners singing their hearts out, full of feeling, but off-key as ever. Lux would’ve had the ballgame on. For a moment, when I walked into that kitchen, I knew it was Dessie, but my mind flashed back to Mom, how she wore her hair back in a huge clip, how that same old show on that same old radio was her evening soundtrack as she fixed our supper. The boys raced upstairs to see Tommy. “How’d it go with the new mother?” I asked.
“Well, it’s just strange,” Dessie replied. “I only met the girl, her name’s Jasmine, and the grandmother, Mrs. Wills. Jasmine’s the cutest thing, long curly black hair, freckles and bangs, with eyes as big as saucers. She’s in fifth grade, but she’s already eleven. She might’ve been held back. She didn’t say a word. I also never heard one bit about her mother and father. I don’t even know who they are.” She looked down, set the pencil on one of the envelopes in front of her, looked up at me. “Just watch. I feel like this one’s going to be a real case.”
“What’s the grandmother do?” I asked, turning down the radio to catch Dessie’s full attention.
“She’s a weekend nurse at the VA,” Dessie said. “Jasmine just started staying with her. Do you know she remembered taking care of Dad after his gallstones?” Dessie began to blink, her eyes watery.
I thought back. “Nurse Wills. She’s got that short-cropped white hair. She barked orders at Dad like a drill sergeant. I was scared of her, but Dad gave her, uh, heck right back,” I said. “Are you going to babysit Jasmine?” I asked.
“I guess. I mean, I said yes,” Dessie said. “I promised. I’ll start next Saturday. It will give me a chance to get caught up. I figure I can charge five dollars an hour, and that way I can keep four and give the fifth to the Lord.”
Ahh, yes, I thought, wondering again why the collection plate did not seem to be enough for the Almighty, and what He needs with this extra from family and neighbors, all sweet and caring people whose ends ain’t never gonna meet. The All-Powerful does not need to exist on food stamps and commodities like us mere mortals. I held my tongue, but only because I had already said my piece about that, and it did not go over all that well. “That sounds good, Des,” I said, thinking that at least these days she was tithing to our family church. “It will give you a chance to return her kindness to Dad.”
Dessie nodded. She looked worn out. She didn’t offer me any tea or coffee, didn’t seem to want the company. I started to ask if she needed a hand with anything, but she stopped me. “Thanks for stopping in, Billie. We’re fine. Really. We made it through another week now, didn’t we?”
AFTER LUX’S funeral, at first Dessie seemed to be trying to keep things as normal as possible for the sake of Tommy and Lissy, maybe even for the sake of keeping snoopy neighbors away, and that’s one reason I did not notice right away that she kept to herself too much. Soon I saw that she kept to the house, she did not even go to church, she didn’t want to put in a garden, she kept conversation short when I called or stopped by. I’d stop by, see Lissy tending the flowers. Give her time, I thought, give her time.
But after a few weeks, it was obvious something was not right. Dessie’s body was there, but it was hard to talk to her, as if her mind was snatched up or her brain changed a channel. We used to watch the daytime soaps before the kids came home, keep company with Kelly and Mason, Sophia and CC on Santa Barbara. Suddenly, afternoons, there was a different kind of soap opera on Dessie’s set, a cast of TV ministers every weekday and Sunday, too. Comb-over men with their big-hair wives, their clothes too shiny, their smiles and hands too big, crying themselves red in the face about damnation or salvation.
Soon Dessie started sounding too churchy. Something on the news would set her off, and she’d start in with a lecture about the “decline of family values,” as if it was her new calling to make sure everyone around her, including my boys and Alan Ray, got right with the Savior. Everyone said that only Lux had kept her from being who she really was all along, but I did not agree. I was pretty sure I figured out where this was coming from. It was because of the way Lux went, so sudden. I think she was terrified that if a bolt of lightning came down from the heavens and struck us down, not a one of us would find eternal salvation.
It did get trying. She wouldn’t let Glenn or Alan Ray drink a beer in her house, Tommy had a curfew, and she wouldn’t tolerate cussing or taking the Lord’s name in vain. It spooked us all to go over there and have some preacher droning on in the background, and Dessie saying “Amen” or “Praise the Lord” back to the television set, and “God bless” to us, no matter what we’d been talking about. Lissy stayed with her mom a month or so, to keep her mom’s spirits up after Lux’s funeral, but then off she went, moving back with Glenn.
MIDSPRING, DESSIE got the first insurance payment from the accidental death and dismemberment policy through A-1 Lumber, and she’d already had some money from Lux’s boss for the burial. That week she ordered a polished, jet-black granite stone for Lux’s grave, with his name, Luther “Lux” Cranfield, and his dates, 1949–1992. When the stone was ready, we all trucked up to the little graveyard at the head of the Goshen Road. The boys and Glenn cleared the weeds off the grave site. Then Tommy and Ron dug a trench, chopped away any tree roots, and set his headstone firmly into the ground, tamping the ground to set the stone. It stood out, solid, solemn, dark, and tall, among the other weathered, moss-covered stone markers from ages ago. We knew we would all find him that way, there in the woods.
Dessie, Lissy, and I transplanted some prickly pear plants of Mom’s from her yard, to protect Lux’s stone, and Dessie prayed over the grave, telling the Almighty that Lux was His now, to do with as He saw best, and asked for Lux’s eternal peace by the Lord’s side. We stood together, heads bowed, saying Amen at the right time. I wondered what Lux would make of it all. Finally, after Dessie walked back to the Bronco and she couldn’t see him, Alan Ray poured an Iron City beer and sprinkled some Copenhagen tobacco over the grave, for good measure, and also to water all the new plants and make them grow handsome and strong, he said.
After that, we held our breath to see how she would spend the remainder of the first installment of Lux’s life insurance. When I saw her set up a checking account and begin sending daily checks to those wrath o’ God salesmen, I missed Lux more than ever. She blew through ten thousand dollars by tithing it out, mostly to her two favorites, Robert Tilton and Oral Roberts. No one, not me, not Alan Ray, not Lissy, not even Little Lux, could tell her that those fat cats did not need a raise from Dessie Cranfield.
Of course they were going to take as much of her money as she was willing to send. Why wouldn’t they? All that nonsense about miracle prayer requests, and the money disappeared in less than forty days and forty nights, with never a sign about whether or not Lux’s poor soul was taken into heaven, and no mira
culous improvement in her diabetes, just “Thank you, and, by the way, can we have some more now?” cards. Glossy magazines showed up in the mailbox from the Word of Faith Family Church and the Abundant Life Prayer Group, and that was about all she had to show for it. I wanted to shake some sense into her, but all that would have accomplished is that she would have added me to her list of people she wanted those ministries to pray for.
Alan Ray said that my sister was the living proof that televangelists preyed on the troubled and the weak-minded. One day, after a few beers, he said that when he’s finally too beat up to run a chainsaw, he’s going to buy himself a bright pink suit, march himself down to WBOY-TV in Clarksburg, and start the Blessed Coal TV Cathedral, since the miners in the eastern and southern part of the state might as well tithe their pensions in his direction. I told him in that case, I’d have to do my eyes up like Tammy Faye Bakker, and he and I had a good laugh about where a person could go to buy the longest and cheapest false eyelashes and the flashiest neon-pink suit.
ABOUT A month later, the second half of Lux’s AD&D policy was due to arrive. After a couple of strong hints, Reverend Clayton Shorter of the First Apostolic asked Dessie to a sit-down with him after church service on Memorial Day weekend. He asked me and Lissy, too. We knew Dessie would not refuse Reverend Shorter, as he had deep roots in the community. Though he was only in his thirties, his father had been Reverend before him, and Clay took up as an assistant to his dad until, as they say, the cup passeth.
Reverend’s small office behind the pulpit was lined with tall overstuffed bookcases, some books had shiny leather bindings and others had tattered cardboard and cloth bindings. There were at least twenty versions of the Holy Bible, and holy books from other religions, including the Jehovah’s Witness, the Book of Mormon, and the Hebrew Old Testament. On the desk was an Unabridged Webster’s New International Dictionary at least five inches wide, a dog-eared copy of Unger’s Bible Handbook, and a soft amber stained-glass reading light with a pattern of the dove descending. Above his left and right shoulders hung a pair of matching leaded-glass transom windows with a ruby cross in the center, donated by the Paul Wissmach Glass Company in Paden City.
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