by Cheryl Reid
“If you say so,” Nelly conceded.
My watch read noon. The river breeze died and the air grew thick. I was anxious to have his body out of the house.
Lila, who had been observing Marina, came close by me. “You look terrible.”
I gazed into her steady, sunburned face. The night before had been hellish—Elias scratching about and banging on my door. He would have killed me if he had not died.
“Annie?” Lila’s voice was deep like a cold current in the river.
“I found him this morning after I woke up.” I searched her cool blue eyes to see if she sensed my untruth. I had waited thirty minutes, until two a.m., listening for any movement or sounds of life before I dared open my door and peek out. If Eli and Marina found out, they would never forgive me.
“Gus doesn’t know he died,” she said. “He was already out on the rolling store when your father called.” Monday through Saturday, Gus drove a school bus stocked with groceries from our father’s store into the country to sell to people who couldn’t come to town. “He won’t be back until late.”
“There’s nothing he can do,” I said. My eyes returned to the dark girl in pink.
Lila took my arm and led me down the porch steps toward Sophie. “You’re burning up,” Lila said.
I was hot from the dress, the heat, the worry.
An old mockingbird I’d been feeding for years flew down and landed on the porch rail. He called to me in notes, short, short, long. “Go on, now.” I waved my hand. Back up into a low branch he went. He held his tail feathers high. He expected the raisins and breadcrumbs I threw out every morning. People said, “You can’t feed a mockingbird,” but my mother had kept one caged in her Nashville hat shop when she was new to America. Its chirping reminded her of the songbirds back home, and she hung fruit in its cage to keep it singing. She’d find crickets or dig worms from her garden.
“Mama,” Sophie bellowed. She was a tiny, dark-headed sprite. “We have to go or we’ll be late.”
Lila looked at her watch. “In a minute.”
Sophie skipped across the green grass, and with her slippered feet on the running board, she hung from the truck’s door handle. She looked at us, her eyes squinting in the sun. A fly buzzed near my ear.
“Mama,” Sophie demanded from the truck. “It’s hot.”
“Hold your horses, little girl.” Lila took my hand. “That damn watch of hers.” She laughed. “She’s going to get us there, one way or another.”
I smiled. “She’s growing up.”
She knew better than anyone how I felt to have him gone. She had seen the marks he’d left before. More than once, she had said, “I’d kill the bastard if he did that to me.” But what she didn’t know was how Elias had come home early yesterday, how he had seen Mr. Washington at the dining-room table with a glass of water in his hand, how Elias had cursed him, how Mr. Washington ran to save himself, but then Elias caught me, flung me down and pinned my arms to the floor, his knee pressing into my chest. How he had accused me, “Did you bed him in this house?” Or how I spit in his face. She didn’t know he pushed the air from my lungs, how he said, so eerily calm, “I could kill you and no one would fault me.” She didn’t know how his eyes bulged and how he wanted to press the life out of me, how my last hiss of air sounded, or how he said, “You would humiliate me to have your way.” She didn’t know I had almost died, that I could not breathe against his weight, or how he argued with himself, his face bright red, “I have every right.” He got off of me, not for my life, but because he knew the trouble he’d have if he killed me so blatantly. He knew that his daughter, who loved him without hesitation, even she would shame him for the black stain on his heart. Before he walked out the front door, he had said their names. “What about Eli and Marina?”
I had been surprised because for almost a year he had not laid a hand on me, not since Marina told us she was to have a baby. I had thought he was sorry for beating me in the past, or that he hoped for better with our grandchild, or that he’d lost the urge to fight and had resigned himself to his station with me. I should have known he would hurt me over Mr. Washington.
Lila squeezed my hand. “I have to get Sophie to her lesson. You okay for now?”
I nodded.
“I’ll come back this evening.” Lila walked to the truck. She moved awkwardly in the dress, and with each step, her heels sank in the pea gravel. I felt honored she had dressed up for me. She opened the door for Sophie. I forced a smile and waved.
They drove off and the hearse pulled up. Two men in dark suits stepped out of the car. One was tall, with a long neck and large Adam’s apple, the other short and squat. They shut their doors with little noise and walked solemnly toward the house. They removed their summer straw-brimmed hats from their heads.
“Ma’am,” the tall, pale man said.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” his partner, the shorter, fat man said. His eyes were a cloudy hazel color.
“He’s inside.” I motioned toward the front door and followed them. I wondered if they would be able to tell what had happened to him. My legs felt heavy, as if I were treading through thick mud and not the green grass of my lawn.
Inside, my vision blurred in the dim light. The yellowed soles of his feet stared at me. Coffee, milky breath, and the musty odors of bodies and death mingled in the air. Nelly propped her elbows on the table and bowed her head near his head. Eli stood beside Nelly. His shoulders slumped and his lips moved in prayer. I could see the sadness in his body. Ivie flanked the other side of Nelly. Both men stood close in case she collapsed. She refused to leave him, afraid, maybe, that if she did, his body would disappear altogether.
I retreated to the far corner of the living room by the stone fireplace, away from his body and the long, dark faces of his kin.
The undertakers glanced my way. I gripped the collar of my dress and wished I could loosen it. I wanted to change out of it, put on something loose and flowing, but the bruises would show and everyone would know what he had done.
Soon they would take him out. Nelly would go. Father McMurray would leave, and then, some peace. I could take off this dress and the stockings and lie in my bed with the fan spinning above.
Eli’s eyes appeared as hollow as mine felt. With a clenched jaw, he said to Nelly and Ivie, “I’ll take care of this.” He looked antsy, the same as when he was a teenage boy, helping me with the baking when he could have been out doing fun things—paddling the canoe we bought him, or reading, or lying in a hammock. Partly he stayed near because he enjoyed the ritual of baking, the same as me, but also to protect me from his father. The worst Elias would do around the children was grumble and scowl, but Eli sensed the violence in his father, so he stayed near to watch over me.
The funeral men spoke in low voices. “We will take him, and the coroner will examine to determine the cause of death. Then, we will embalm.”
Nelly’s voice boomed. “You bring him back.”
Marina opened the swinging door from the kitchen and stood behind Nelly. She did not want her grandmother to do or say anything to cause alarm.
The funeral men eased out the front door as silent as monks.
Father McMurray spoke to Nelly. “Come with me to the church and we will pray.”
“No. I will wait for my son to come back.” With her cane, she walked into the kitchen.
Marina said, “I’ll go, Father. We need some things from the Fellowship Hall.” She had begun to plan the particulars, unlike me, who had not thought past the moment he died. Marina, though she never worked in the store, could run it from a stool behind the counter. She never lifted a finger, but told her father and me what needed to happen, how to arrange the fruit or how to stack the bread in the glass counter. When she was little, Elias would smile at me and say, “What did we do, Anna, before our little dictator arrived?”
The funeral men returned, quietly opening the screen door. With soft steps they pushed a gurney inside. The wheels hummed aga
inst the hardwood floor. With reverent movements, they pulled the chairs away from the table and set to their work.
Marina, Eli, and Father McMurray joined Nelly and her sister, Louise, in the kitchen so as not to see the undertakers move him. Ivie crossed the dining room to me. He stood too close and the heat swelled around us.
The men worked like priests preparing the Eucharist, folding and unfolding, lifting and placing. Soon he was on the gurney and the gurney was outside.
I inched away from Ivie, but he was broad and tall and leaned in, filling the space around me. Shadows hid his expression. He had been looking over his brother’s body all morning. He put his lips near my ear. “Elias told me he was in the house.” It was a whisper, a threat.
“What?” I asked. It was the one mistake I had made—inviting Mr. Washington in—the one thing I would change, that impulse, that moment of familiarity that I should have warded off. Afraid Marina might hear, I pushed past Ivie and out the front door, out of the thick, stale air of the house. There would be trouble for me, and worse for Mr. Washington, if people knew that I had asked him in, that he stepped through the front door of our house, that I had given him a glass of water, that I sat with him at the table. If Marina heard, she would be furious, and if Nelly knew, she could make my life more miserable than I could imagine. She would see to it that the rumors never stopped.
Ivie followed me outside. “Does Marina know you had him inside?” He sucked his teeth.
I stepped away toward the porch rail, but he pressed close to my side.
“Elias came by, picked me up last night,” he said. “We drove to Mounds to talk to that Washington fellow.” The smell of tobacco seeped from his clothes.
“Did you hurt him?” My legs felt hollow. Ivie had been hanging around Elias more the last week, since I had told Elias about Orlando Washington. In the past few days, Elias had allowed Ivie to sit behind the counter at the store. I wondered if the news of Mr. Washington had brought them together, if somehow they had found a common thread of hatred against him, against me. If Ivie knew he’d been inside, Orlando Washington was in worse danger now that Elias was no longer here to restrain his brother.
“You worried about that old spade?” Ivie took a flask from his shirt pocket with shaky hands. He’d been a drunk so long, he had to sip it like medicine to keep from dying. He unscrewed the cap and the sweet smell of whiskey sifted out. He took a swig. Licked his lips. “Strange my brother’s dead the morning after he catches Washington with you.” He screwed the lid back on his flask. He leaned near and his warm breath landed in my ear, like a snake slithering out of the river onto the muddy bank. “I think Mama’s right. I think you killed him, and I’ll be damned if you get away with it.” He smiled, showing his stained teeth. He raised his eyebrows up and down like he was in the catbird seat.
The undertakers reached the back of the hearse and pushed the stretcher in like bread into an oven. They removed their hats, wiped their foreheads with handkerchiefs. They took in the beauty of the front yard, an excuse to stand still and catch their breath. Then, with the same care with which they’d arrived, they were gone.
“You two worked like field hands in this yard.” Ivie took another sip and put his flask away. “I guess it was the one thing you could agree on.” He had nothing like my house or my yard, only a servants’ quarters behind his mother’s. “Shame it will go to shit.” Ivie glared down at me. His gloating made me sick, how he reveled in his newfound position, having his mother’s full attention now that his overbearing brother was dead. Recently, Ivie had come home broke and drunk from a yearlong bender. He had cried to Elias that he’d been in love with a woman in New Orleans, but that she’d come to her senses and kicked him out. Always the prodigal son, the ne’er-do-well, and Nelly always took him in, patched him up, and sent him begging to Elias for work.
Ivie’s boots clapped on the limestone steps and crunched the gravel drive as he lumbered away. The silhouette of his shoulders, the nape of his neck, the same as Elias except thicker. He drove off in his truck, maybe to the funeral home, maybe to Elias’s store, maybe to rouse more trouble against me or Mr. Washington.
I left the porch and stood in the shade of the pecan tree. A stranger passing by might think happy people lived here, for it was a lovely house, a big, brick, Craftsman-style home with a green tile roof and wide porch with limestone steps broad enough to lie across and gaze at the sky. My father had bought the lot and a Sears and Roebuck house plan for my mother’s Christmas, two years before she died, but after her death, he put the deed and the plans in a drawer until my engagement to Elias, when he built it for my wedding gift.
Ferns hung from the porch ceiling, and petunias cascaded down from pots. On the second floor were two large windows—one to my room, the other to Elias’s. On the backside of the house were two more that had been Eli’s and Marina’s rooms. Our lot was wide and long, larger than any other on the street because Papa had bought the land before people built so near the river.
Elias had planted rows of cedars along the east and west property lines. Folks assumed he planted them because of where our people were from—they’d heard of the cedars of Lebanon in the Bible—but Elias wanted them for privacy. He lived in public view at the store, where he had to smile, be friendly, and shake people’s sweaty hands when what he wanted was to be left alone.
Only Verna, across the street, had a good view of our house. Early on, she’d watch and wait until we were working in the yard. She’d make some excuse to walk over, make polite small talk, until eventually she’d ask, “Now, exactly where are your people from?” Elias knew she disliked having us across the street, and he would answer her differently each time. Once he said, “The Levant,” and she’d asked, “Where is that?” He’d said, “You don’t know?” Other times, he’d answer, “the Holy Land,” or “Mount Lebanon,” or “the former Ottoman Empire,” or “Syria,” or “just east of the Mediterranean.” Each time he would wink at me, and I ducked my head to hide my laughter. She looked confused and his eyes danced with glee. A few years in and Verna had had enough of him. She avoided us altogether, which was what he wanted.
I looked up into the pecan tree. The branches kissed the roof. The pale-yellow drapes hung straight without the breeze. The night before, I’d studied the branches for a way to escape. Goose bumps rose on my skin. To which the old woman inside would say, Someone is walking on your grave.
The mockingbird swooped down again. His dark sliver of beak parted with sound. He cocked his head in my direction.
“I have nothing for you, old man.” I put my hands in my pockets.
He flew up and swooped down twice more. His chest rose with the sound coming from his beak. Short, short, long.
“Go on,” I said.
The screen door slapped shut. I turned to see Eli helping Marina down the steps. Father McMurray came behind her. He had his arms outstretched to break her fall if she slipped.
“We’re going to the church, Mama.” Her voice sounded thin and tired. Her face was flushed from the heat and the blood pulsing through her swollen body.
“Let me go instead,” I said.
Marina dismissed me with a wave of her hand as she walked to the car.
“Marina, you go home and rest,” I called after her.
“No, Mama.” Her voice deepened, gaining strength to offer the litany of reasons why she must be the one to go. She ignored my pleas as I had brushed off the bird’s pestering for his morning’s handout.
“There’s no arguing with her,” Eli said.
I wanted to grab Eli, tell him that Ivie and Elias went to Mounds to talk to Mr. Washington. My son could find out what Ivie meant by talking. Eli had been my one ally when I found out Mr. Washington was to be given the job to deliver mail to white houses, that he was to deliver on our street. I had told my family that I planned to allow it, but Eli had been the only one to say it was the right thing to do. He could find out now if Mr. Washington was okay. But I had to quiet
the worry. I could not ask about him near Marina. I would have to find another way.
“Let me,” I argued and trailed after her. “You go home, put your feet up.”
“No, no, Mama,” she said. “I’m fine. I’d rather be busy. Father McMurray and I are talking about the Mass, and there’s no need to go over that again. Besides, I know where the ladies keep the big coffee maker and the plates.” She ran her fingers across an eyebrow and then to her temple. She would supervise her father’s funeral as she saw fit, with or without me, asserting her independence as she always had.
“I’ll keep up with her.” Eli rolled his eyes and opened her door. “Don’t worry.”
Marina skimmed my dress with her graceful hands. She raised her arched eyebrows and her green eyes scoured over me. “Find your pretty navy dress, Mama. That one is too heavy in this heat.”
“What does it matter?” The bruises would peek out the sleeves of the navy dress.
“People might come by to pay their respects.” She sat in the passenger side of Eli’s car. “You’re sweating like a pig.”
I ignored her. “You’re not driving. That’s good.” I shut the door.
She rolled down the window. She knew nothing of Orlando Washington coming inside the house. She would have chastised me. She would be angry that I had done damage to our family, to her. She was like Elias, worried I might smear us, discredit us, when she worked so hard to climb to the highest ranks, a female college graduate, the president of her sorority, married to an up-and-coming lawyer in his daddy’s firm, and now the secretary of the Junior League, the one of us that no Junior League lady would dare look down on.
Eli started the engine.
She turned her eyes on him. “First, take me by home,” she said. He backed out and I could hear her rattling off all they must accomplish.
Father McMurray drove off in his black Chevrolet.
At the front door, I opened the screen, and the rooms met me hard. The house smelled of him, his death, his mother. I had lived in the house for twenty-seven years, and still I felt out of place. I pulled the tablecloth from the mirror over the fireplace. I folded it, crossed to the dining room, and picked up the old linen sheets that Nelly used to shroud him. I tossed them down into the basement to be laundered.