Anyway, it was the hottest summer I could remember. I was in the kitchen with Millie, sewing name tags on socks and underwear to take to school. It was July twenty-first, a week before Trip’s birthday. He came in the back door in a state of excitement.
“Guess what?” he said.
“What, fish breath?” I said.
“Shut up, dog face. Mr. Jenkins has been cleaning out the old stall! Don’t you think that’s a good sign, Millie?”
Millie stopped sewing and looked up. “It’s not a bad sign,” she said. “How’s the sky look?”
I looked out of the window across the river. “Dark and crazy,” I said, “gonna rain. Jeesch! Five minutes ago the sun was shining!” Shadows fell across the room as the sky became more and more ominous.
“What else is new?” Trip said, peeling a banana and eating half in one bite. “Bet I’m getting my horse!”
“Seems likely,” Millie said, and came to the window to see for herself. “Where’s your daddy?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Down at the barn?”
I didn’t like the look on Millie’s face. I’d never seen her quite so serious.
“I was just there,” Trip said. “I think Mr. Jenkins said he was going up for a ride.”
“Come on, boy,” Millie said, “he’s got better sense than to fly when there’s a storm coming!” Her breath became raspy and short.
She went out to the hall and called for Mother to come downstairs. Mother heard her and, annoyed, called back to her.
“Stop screaming like I don’t know what, Millie! If you need me you can walk . . . what?” She stopped on the landing of the stairs and a huge clap of thunder boomed all around us. The chandelier in the foyer flickered. We stood behind Millie, glued in place by fear. I knew it before it happened. In my mind, I saw a plane in flames. Daddy was inside, unconscious, and his khaki trousers were on fire. I started to scream. Over and over I screamed until I felt the sting of Mother’s hand on my cheek.
“Stop it! Stop it right now!” she said, screaming at me, just as loudly.
I shook all over and began to cry. “He’s dying,” I said. “I can see him . . . Fire! Mother! Millie! Oh, God, please! Do something!” I ran out the front door into the storm. Sure enough I saw the smoke in the distance. We ran, all of us, slipping on the wet grass, stumbling through the bushes, to the place he had crashed. By the time we got there, we were all hysterical and soaked to the skin. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Mr. Jenkins was on his knees, on the wet ground, with his arms folded around his head, hiding his face.
“I tried, oh, God, I tried to get to him! To get him out! He was gone, but I didn’t want him to burn up! Oh, where is God this day?” Mr. Jenkins’s anguish was quickly spread among us.
I tried to cover Trip’s eyes so he wouldn’t see Daddy. We held each other, staring at the wreckage and sobbing. Trip screamed over and over. No! No! No! The engine on the front of the plane was burning and smoking and I could see over Trip’s head that there was nothing left of Daddy but a blackened cadaver, nearly burned beyond recognition. Little fires burned all around, like patches of death.
I couldn’t stop staring. Millie held Mother back as she screamed over and over. Then the worst happened—what was left of the plane exploded, hurling pieces of jagged metal high in the air. We fell to the ground in fear, screaming louder yet until I knew we had all gone insane. Where was Daddy’s body? Who would find it and put it back together? We were as horrified and hysterical as I imagined anyone could be.
There was no one to blame and no way to make it end. I was facedown on the ground; water puddled all around me. Oh! The grief and anguish of us all! Everyone weeping, sobbing. Where was God this day, Mr. Jenkins had said. Senseless. Horrible. My tears rolled to the ground along with raindrops, a tiny river of loss, flowing away with all I had cherished. How could this be real? How could God let this happen? Ashes fell in my line of vision, ashes of my father, falling on me, in my hair, in my tears. I watched this shower, on my stomach, face to the side, tears rolling. Ashes falling in spirals. Me sighing then gulping again, wounded, permanently damaged in a ghoulish sense of disbelief. My salt, Daddy’s ashes, the rain. Trip crawled to my side, trying to talk through his crying.
“Come on,” he said, “get up. We gotta get up.”
I couldn’t move. I heard him, but I couldn’t answer. I knew he wanted me to be his big sister. I didn’t want to be anybody’s anything. Maybe I’d never feel again.
“Come on,” he said, over and over, “come on!”
Finally, I felt Millie’s hand on my shoulder. The rain had started again and then it had all but stopped but I felt like I was sinking into the earth, part of it then, impossible to pry loose. I didn’t care. I grew roots. My daddy, my wonderful daddy, he was dead.
“Come on, Caroline, Millie’s gone help you to your feet,” she said in the most impassioned voice I had ever heard her use. “We gots to take care of many things now. Many things.” She put her hand under my arm and Trip did the same on my other side and they pulled me up to my knees.
“Oh, God,” I said, “oh, God.” I started crying again. The whole accident, the smoldering wreckage, I was so unable to steady myself, to calm down—it was too much. Now I was afraid to look, that Daddy’s arm or leg might be hanging in a tree. I didn’t want to raise my head. Millie just put her arms around me and Trip did too. We stood and cried together, making sounds like inconsolable babies, small animals in pain, soaked, muddy, wailing against this unthinkable catastrophe. We cried until we couldn’t cry anymore, each of us stroking the other’s hair, back, arm, cooing and then breaking down again until we had worn ourselves out.
Mother had disappeared; Millie said Jenkins had taken her back to the house. They were calling the fire department and the police and only God knew who else. I was dumbstruck that she had left us with Millie. Seriously! How could she have done that? It made me so angry I wanted to hit her! She had never reached out for us, not once in the time we had been witnesses to the fire, the explosion, the elements. What had she been thinking? We were just children! How could she?
What I remember of that day, that horrible day we lost Daddy, is a mosaic of moments—the largest tile, the explosion—the others, small details. I was cold and covered in mud; my hands were freezing. I was tired, I had never felt that kind of weariness. I ached all over, my throat, my stomach, my shoulders and back. Too tired to lift my feet, my head, or my arms. My throat hurt from crying. I could only sigh and sigh.
At about the same time we arrived back to the house, men began arriving in official vehicles—the coroner’s station wagon, the fire chief’s truck, a team of men from the fire department and police department with dogs to search for pieces of my father’s body. Mr. Jenkins directed them. We went upstairs, filthy and bedraggled.
Mother’s door was closed. Millie took Trip and me to our rooms and started hot showers for us to wash away the nightmare.
“Use shampoo and wash your head good, yanh?”
“I will.”
In the shower, I sat on the floor of the tub and let the water run and run. I watched it go down the drain and saw my happiness slide away with it. I would never be happy again. I had loved Daddy too much and God had punished me for it. I knew then that it was a sin to love like that—so completely. If you did, you got robbed.
I went to Trip’s room in my bathrobe, hair in a towel, and he was just sitting on his bed, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, staring out the window. His face was wet, his eyes almost swollen shut from crying.
“You okay?” I went over and looked at his face. I sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulder. His bloodshot eyes searched my face and he tried to talk without sobbing.
“What’s gonna happen to us now?” he said, and then his voice cracked from the weight of our uncertain future. He was so young to me then. Boys needed their fathers more than girls, I thought then.
“I don’t know. I’m gonna take care of you. We
are all gonna take care of each other. Come on, baby, don’t cry. I love you, Trip.”
“I know,” he said, “but Daddy’s dead and I can’t stand it.”
“Me either,” I said, “me either.”
We sat for a while and then I got up and walked to the window. The Edisto River was there, still flowing, no doubt with Daddy’s ashes, a witness to what had happened, rising and falling, moving toward St. Helena’s Sound, carrying our pain, the same way it had carried the pain of others for all time. I felt like I was a thousand years old; I had seen everything.
“Trip? Let’s get dressed and go help Millie.”
“Okay.”
I felt a little guilty that I didn’t go to Mother’s room and see how she was. But I was going to be angry for the rest of my life. Angry that she hadn’t come to us. How could her grief have been greater than ours? Or more important? Seething with hatred for her, I walked silently by her door, into my room, and dressed to go help Millie.
Millie sang in the kitchen, low and serious, as though her songs would cleanse us of how we felt.They were a solemn plea for mercy.
Gone down to the river,
The river flows with life!
Gone beg my god to help us all,
Help us through our strife.
Take this pain away, God!
Oh, take our pain away!
Heal our hearts so we can live,
To praise You one more day!
I took a tray of sandwiches from Millie and put them on the dining room table.
“People gone be yanh all day and into the night,” she said. “Tell Jenkins to come see me. I got work for him.”
“Okay,” I said. Normally, I would have stolen a sandwich intended for company. That day I would’ve been swallowing rocks. I couldn’t seem to think or stay focused on anything.
The doorbell started ringing.
Miss Sweetie was the first to arrive, with Mr. Moultrie, her husband. Soon the living room was filled with people, coming and going. Miss Nancy, her family, Miss Ellen and Mr. Jimmy. Miss Marian, Mr. Charlie. Everyone from the area came, strangers I had never seen who must’ve been friends of Daddy. Everyone was consumed by the shock of Daddy’s death. Their faces were frozen in masks of denial, sorrow, and grief. The truth was terrible to comprehend.
Mother appeared and sat in her favorite chair and the guests would kneel and speak to her, holding one of her hands in theirs, trying to console her. I saw Trip staring out the window and went to his side.
“Come on,” I said, “come with me. I gotta find Jenkins for Millie.”
“I don’t feel like doing anything,” he said.
“Come on, bubba, I know this stinks, the whole thing stinks, but we gotta get ourselves together. We can’t not help Millie.”
His vacant eyes met my face and we left the house together.
We walked, my brother and I, toward Mr. Jenkins’s cottage. The door was open. We knew what we would find. And there he was, at the table, head in his hands. From the back we watched his shoulders rise and fall as he wept silently and alone.
It struck me that I was alone now too. Daddy had been my link to Mother. And Trip’s. Who would hold us together now? Mr. Jenkins loved Daddy and had worked for our family for almost as long as Mother had been alive. Although he had always worked at Tall Pines for Mother, he was a man’s man. He loved to tell the stories of how he taught Daddy to ride a horse, to burn undergrowth, to shoot wild turkeys, and to clean fish. He had loved my daddy, all right. Loved him like a son.
“Mr. Jenkins?” I said, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but Millie sent us to get you. She needs you.”
His eyes, red from crying, tortured by grief and shock, scared me for a moment.
“Tell her I’ll be there directly,” he said, pulling his white and wrinkled handkerchief from his back pocket and wiping his whole face, as though it would make everything the same again, the same as it had been that morning, before the storm.
“Okay,” we said, and closed his door quietly behind us.
Without even the suggestion from each other that we do so, we ambled our way down to the river dock. Watching the water move was something we had done together all our lives. We stood side by side, leaning on the railings, watching the moon rise and the water rush below us in tiny silver caps, in its southern flow, moving in arms that joined into others, always moving. The voice of the water was great, singing a song to soothe us, telling us that though we paused now, and it was right that we should, life went on. Our challenge was not to make sense of Daddy’s death, but to make sense of his life and to be strong enough, smart enough, old enough to hear what the Edisto was trying to tell us.
“Caroline?”
“Yeah?”
“Where do you think he is?”
“Daddy?” Trip bobbed his head, and I tried to think of what Daddy would be thinking now. “I don’t know, but I know this. If he could talk to you, he wouldn’t say that you have to be the man of the family. He’d say to just be a good boy and that he’s sorry he left us like this.”
“Yeah.”
For another few minutes, or maybe for a while, we stood together watching the movement of the water and trying to find Daddy’s voice in our hearts, our minds. I thought that I could feel Daddy’s regret that we had been witnesses to the explosion, regret that he couldn’t repair things for us. I could have sworn I could smell his breath. Then I realized it was the smell of the river. Always the Edisto.
Twenty-seven
The Merry Widow Speaks
IT was the shock of Nevil’s death. Looking back now, I can tell you plainly that I was in a state of shock that lasted far too long. If I had realized it at the time, things would have been very different, I assure you. For the first and only time in my entire life, I was at a loss for words. I don’t mean to say that I couldn’t speak at all, it was that I couldn’t think of what to say to the children. So I said nothing. I know now that it wasn’t right, that they were absolutely split in two by what happened to their daddy. But, so was I.
The day before and the day of the funeral are still a blur. There was no wake because there was no body to mourn. That was the first thing Nevil’s death deprived us of—a body. It wasn’t fair. The coroner’s men had gathered what they could find and put it in a bag, but I knew in my heart that there were still pieces of Nevil out there in the rice fields. How on God’s earth was I to explain to my children that they shouldn’t play there? I was filled with a kind of fear you cannot imagine that they would come across something the dogs had missed. No, they could not play outside. There would be so many sweeps of the fields until we were satisfied—Jenkins, Millie, and I. So life stopped when Nevil died. At least until we could reconcile ourselves that we had done all we could.
So, forgive me. I was a little preoccupied with the search to locate my husband’s limbs to give the proper attention to Caroline and Trip. Call me a terrible mother, but I do not have in my possession a manual that tells one how to conduct oneself when something like this happens. But I did have Millie and Jenkins, and my friends saw to the children—Sweetie and Nancy, always there. Nancy took Trip to Charleston for a day of visiting churches and talked to him over lunch about how he thought the funeral should be arranged. She was such a dear to do this. Nancy was so modern and up on things like child psychology.
And Sweetie took Caroline to Columbia to the Happy Book-seller to buy her summer reading. Caroline and Sweetie liked nothing better than a good book, except to have a stack of them, unread and waiting. Sweetie told me she bought Caroline her first iced coffee, which Caroline drank to the last drop. She made Caroline feel grown-up. Then she took her shopping for lingerie and night-gowns at Belk’s. I suppose it was time for Caroline to wear underwear that matched. Leave it to Sweetie to make that decision! It was the furthest thing from my mind, I swear.
Having them out of my hair gave me the chance to, pardon the expression, put all the pieces together for my husband’s funeral. Jenkins and I
chose a casket from wood samples brought over from Bagnal Funeral Home in Walterboro. I simply could not bring myself to make the trip. It would be solid mahogany with brass handles. The coroner delivered Nevil’s remains to them and a time was set aside two days later to bury Nevil in the family graveyard at Tall Pines.
First, there would be a small reception in our family’s tiny chapel. Nevil’s casket would be there on a platform draped in the whitest linens, covered with a blanket of flowers interwoven with flowers from my garden. Two huge sprays had been ordered for either end of it and the family’s silver candelabra would be lit. Then, at three o’clock, a graveside prayer service led by the Episcopalian minister from Walterboro, where Helena Blanchard from Charleston would sing “Ave Maria” and some other spirituals that were Nevil’s favorites. A grand reception would follow at the house, with the chamber ensemble from the Charleston Symphony. I was determined to send my Nevil to Glory in style. The children and everyone else would see how much I loved Nevil by the funeral I had planned. I truly hoped they would.
Millie was my well of strength. She helped with all the details, making hundreds of phone calls and taking at least that many messages. The morning after Nevil died, I found her in the kitchen, her command central, on the phone when I went downstairs for some toast.
“I managed to find five cases of Dom Perignon in the storage room at the Hibernian Society in Charleston through Mr. Moultrie,” she said.
“What year?” I said, because if it wasn’t a vintage year, we simply wouldn’t pour it.
“Miss L?”
She looked at me with those eyes of hers, the black light through slits that said We are damn lucky to find it at all!
Plantation Page 26