A Month of Sundays
Page 11
“Why are you crying?” I ask her.
She does not answer. I become aware of Emory and Avery at my elbow.
“Garnet, my sweet girl,” Poppy says very softly, and something about his tone alarms me.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Will you and the boys go back in there and watch television for just a few more minutes?” Uncle Otis says gently. “Then we will …”
“Then you’ll tell me what’s wrong?” I ask.
They all nod yes.
“All right.”
I nudge Emory and Avery back into the TV room where we sit down, but I can’t concentrate on the show. I can’t imagine what this is all about. In about ten minutes, Aunt June appears in the doorway.
“Garnet, honey, come with me,” she says. “Emory, Avery, y’all stay here for now.”
Aunt June places an arm around me and guides me through the October room, through the hallway and into the log room, where Poppy, Uncle Otis, Mom, and Dad are standing around silently. All eyes are on me.
“Sit here, sweetheart,” Mom says, and motions me to the rocking chair.
I sit down. Mom stands on one side of me and places an arm across my shoulders. Dad stands on the other side. This is strange.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Garnet, do you remember the minister at the Rugged Cross Chapel?” Aunt June asks me.
“Yeah, sorta. Why?”
“Well, his name is Mr. Greenleaf, and that was him on the phone. It seems he had some very bad news today.” Aunt June pauses, takes a deep breath, then goes on. “And the youth minister—I forgot his name.”
“Douglas,” I say. “The youth minister is Douglas.”
“Right,” Aunt June says. “Douglas told Mr. Greenleaf that you should be notified about … this bad news.”
“Me? How come?”
Aunt June looks at Mom, and Mom takes up the narrative. “Because it’s about Silver and his dad, Garnet. There was an accident, and—”
“An accident? Is Silver hurt?”
At this point Mom takes one of my hands into hers.
“Will he be okay, Mom?”
“No, Garnet, he will not be okay. He …”
I see that Mom’s eyes are brimming, and I begin to comprehend.
“Well, tell me!” I cry frantically. “What’s happened?”
“As you know, Silver and his dad were driving very late last night,” Mom says. “And it seems Mr. Shepherd fell asleep and went off the road.”
“No!”
“Oh, Garnet, I’m so sorry! They didn’t survive the crash.”
27
I am in my bed. I have been in a strange kind of fitful sleep, stumbling through all the woods and roads and tunnels of my brain. There are places in here I have never seen before. Some of them are dark and creepy.
I see things from years ago. I had a good friend named Mary Ellen who just went away one day. Now here she is tucked away in one of these wrinkles in my brain.
Here is Mom crying in the moonlight.
And here is S.S. + A.R. circled by a heart.
I wake up. I am sweating. Mom is asleep beside me with one arm draped over me. It’s too hot with her in my bed. I move her arm from me and throw off the sheet. I sit up. I see that an armchair has been pulled into my room, and Dad is sleeping in it.
“It’s hot in here,” I say.
Mom sits up on the side of the bed. There is a pan of water on my nightstand. She dips a cloth into it and bathes my face. She used to do this for me when I had a fever. Dad gets up and adjusts a fan on my dresser, so that the breeze falls more directly on me. Then he sits again in the armchair.
I lie back down. Why, oh why, oh why?
“Mom, why did this happen?”
“I don’t know, Garnet. Sometimes life is a mystery.”
She cools my face with the cloth.
“Silver calls me April,” I say. “I want everybody to call me April. Okay, Mom?”
“Yes, of course,” Mom says.
“You know something, Mom? His face lights up when he sees me,” I go on. “When you were dating Dad, did his face light up for you?”
Mom pauses for a long time, and then she whispers, “Yes.”
“Do you remember the first time Dad kissed you?”
Again she whispers, “Yes.”
Dad shifts his weight in the chair.
I go back into the tunnels of my mind. There are question marks everywhere. Carved on all the trees. Scratched on the bridges. Painted on the road signs. Why? Why? Why? Some are healed. Some are taken. Why? Young people are not supposed to die. It makes no sense.
Later I wake to find Mom gone, but Dad is still in the chair. I can’t tell if he’s awake.
In the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.
Is it true? Is there such a place where we will meet our loved ones again?
Now light is moving ever so slowly across the mountaintops. Mom and Dad are gone, and Poppy is in the chair.
“Hey, Poppy, you know what?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“I don’t think we get any easy answers in this life. All we get is questions.”
“I think you’re right,” he agrees, “but the important thing is that you keep on asking the questions.”
Yes, I have to do my own search now—I must—and that’s how I’ll start, by questioning everything.
Later when I wake up, Poppy is sound asleep, and I have to go to the bathroom. I get up without waking him. I can hear a mourning dove somewhere outside. I touch the walls as I go down the hallway barefooted. The house seems to be alive and breathing. It’s the pulse of my family, my people, all those who mean most to me in the world—here right now under this roof, just at the time I need them the most.
Is it true what Aunt June says, that everything happens for a reason?
I leave the bathroom, tiptoe down the stairs, and go into the October room. There I find Mom and Dad curled up like spoons together on the forest green couch. Both are sound asleep. Last night I thought nothing would ever mean much to me again, but here is hope.
As I close the door quietly, the thought comes to me that I don’t know the reason for Silver’s death. I will probably never know. But I do know, without a doubt, there was a reason for his life.
Then I sit on the steps and cry, as a thin yellow beam of sunlight falls through the front window onto my face.
ALSO BY RUTH WHITE
Little Audrey
Way Down Deep
The Search for Belle Prater
Buttermilk Hill
Tadpole
Memories of Summer
Belle Prater’s Boy
Weeping Willow
Sweet Creek Holler
Lyrics on page 106 from “It Is No Secret” by Stuart Hamblen © 1950, renewed © 1977 by Hamblen Music Company. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Member of CCLI and ASCAP—www.HamblenMusic.com
Copyright © 2011 by Ruth White
All rights reserved
RR Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia
mackids.com
eISBN 9781429933704
First eBook Edition : August 2011
First edition, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Ruth, date.
A month of Sundays / Ruth White.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-374-39912-2
[1. Families—Fiction. 2. Sick—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction.
4. Christianity—Fiction. 5. Country life—Virginia—Fiction. 6. Virginia—
History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W58446Mo 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010036311
>