by Tabitha King
Mama had always emphasized the unregenerate wickedness of the Dakins—by which she meant that they did not have any money. So instead of paying attention to the minister or to the woman at the organ whose amazingly orange hair was marcelled like Mamadee’s, or thinking about Daddy lying dead and chopped up in the coffin, I stared across the aisle at my uncles and their families, and all the kin that I barely knew. My Uncles Dakin—Jimmy Cane, Lonny Cane, Dickie Cane, Billy Cane—uncomfortable in their cheap and rarely worn suits, sat solemn as a row of old men in rocking chairs on the verandahs downtown on a Saturday night. Like the surface of the moon, their complexions were deeply scarred and thickened. Their wives, the Aunts Dakin—Jude, Doris, Gerry, Adelina—were uniformly slack at the bosom, as though mother’s milk and comfort had been sucked right out of them. Though not all were bone-thin, the fat they carried looked dense and hard. The flowers in their hats were faded, their dresses to a woman, the plastic-belted, collared rayon shirt-waist in every size and any color, so long as it was dark, that hung on the racks at Sears. My cousins, the Sons Dakin, were numerous and fidgety. They did not take well to the hard oaken pews and the hand-me-down jackets that pinched in the shoulders or were too short in the sleeve. There were too many of them for me to remember all their names or to whom they belonged. They did a good deal of sniggering and staring at Ford and me. There were no Daughters Dakin.
At least on that side of the church. On our side of the church, there was me. I had new white gloves and a new hat, a white straw boater with a black ribbon band and streamers, which Mama had had to go out and buy when she realized that I didn’t have a thing to put on my head or hands for the funeral. As usual she bought the hat too big, so it would fit down over my twinned ponytails and ears. Wisps of straw tickled my ears unmercifully. When I tried to look around more, Mamadee dug her fingernails into the nape of my neck.
Mama had, of course, expected the worst of the Dakins but none of them wept audibly, though their bandanna hankies got used to mop up the occasional tear and they blew their noses loudly. At least there were no outbreaks of “Praise Jesus.” When they looked at Mama at all, it was sidelong.
Outside the church, before we got into the cars for the graveyard, my uncles held their hats in their hands and yanked at the hard, tight knots of their ties.
Aunt Jude hugged me and cried, “You poor baby! I know you are desolate.”
The other aunts murmured their agreement and patted my head.
Mama hastened to say, “This little girl is not a particle as desolate as I am. Not a particle.”
But the aunts did not touch Mama and they did not speak to her directly. Mama mistook this as a signal of respect for her person and her station. The Dakins did not bother with Ford either, or Mamadee, and Mamadee and Ford did not bother with the Dakins.
On the off chance that they were voters, the governor came over and shook the hands of the Uncles Dakin. He paid no attention to the Aunts Dakin. Likely as not, they voted the way their husbands did, or not at all.
We got into the Edsel that had been washed clean of road dust first thing in the morning by Leonard. Mama had driven us to St. John’s in Montgomery in it. Mama was not about to ride in Mamadee’s Cadillac. She and Mamadee were only speaking to say pass-the-salt-please and thank-you and whatever cuttingly courteous spitefulness they could invent.
The drive to the graveyard was so long that I dozed off. When the Edsel came to a stop and I woke up, we were out in the country. Mama crammed my hat back onto my head and I straightened my glasses on my face. I had been expecting one of the cool shady green cemeteries in Montgomery or Tallassee. Mamadee had said that Daddy’s burial would be a circus unless it was out in the backside-of-the-moon. Evidently she had won over Mama on that count.
But there was no grass, just prickly weeds in patches. The weeds were rooted in coarse sand, amid pebbles with edges so sharp I could feel them biting the soles of my Mary Janes. Crumbling concrete marked out the sunken rectangles of the graves and all the tombstones tilted forward as if they wanted a better look at the man or woman or child or stillborn infant they commemorated. On nearly every grave a cracked clay pot or old milk bottle held dried-up old flowers. The few trees thereabout were all bent and scraggly and seemingly half dead. They looked like the paper trees we cut out in kindergarten for Halloween decorations, so the bats and ghosts would have some background beside the moon. On one raggedy pine perched a crow. Its beak prospected busily underneath one wing.
“Where are we?” I whispered dry-mouthed to Ford.
“Hell,” Ford said. Adding, “This is where they bury Dakins.”
He snatched off my glasses and smeared them with his thumbs, before flipping them back to me. While I was trying to get them back on my face, he pushed me toward Mama.
Blinking through the blur on my lenses, I caught up with Mama and grabbed at her gloved hand. “Where is this, Mama?”
“The Promised Land. Where your daddy bought himself a plot. That’s what they call it. The Promised Land.”
I wasn’t old enough to wonder why Daddy had bought this plot, or when, or why just one plot instead of a family one. It was more significant to me that when I looked around, Mamadee’s Cadillac was nowhere to be seen, nor was she, nor any of the other grandees or notables or pooh-bahs.
The two FBI agents had come though; I saw them getting out of their black Buick sedan, and taking off their fedoras. One of them had a bald spot. I had known they were FBI agents as soon as I had seen them drive up to Ramparts on Monday. They looked like the other ones, the ones in New Orleans. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover must have figured if they all looked the same, nobody would notice them. Maybe men wouldn’t notice them. Any half-wit woman would notice right off, two men looking like they dressed out of the same closet.
The pair of agents had spent most of Monday afternoon with Mama. They had been very interested in the papers that Mr. Weems had turned over to her. She had to develop a sick headache to get them to leave.
Ford and Mama and I were on one side and the tribe of Dakins were on the other, just like at the church, except that now it wasn’t the church aisle between us, it was Daddy’s coffin, being lowered into Daddy’s grave.
That graveyard is still my image of the life—of the death—that comes after dying. Blurred. Recognizable but barren of any comfort whatever.
The woman with the marcelled orange hair who had played the organ during the funeral service came around with limp sheets of mimeographed paper that smelled of pears. The green plastic frames of her cat’s-eye-shaped glasses were studded with glittering rhinestones. She was wearing Tangee lipstick, I could tell.
“Calley and I will share,” Mama said.
“No,” the woman said pleasantly, “the little girl gets one of her own.”
She held out the limp pages and I took one. Not from the top and not from the bottom, but from somewhere in the middle of the limp stack. Typical of the mimeograph process, the words were smeary, and the greasy state of my lenses did not help me in making out the words. The gloves on my hands made holding the sheet difficult as well.
These were hymn sheets. As they were passed out to all the Dakins, a preacher—not the one from St. John’s but a rotund lay preacher with mail-order dentures and a shiny-seated suit—recited the verses about To Everything There Is a Season . It is very popular at funerals, presumably comforting to the mourners, but in this instance, I realized when I was some years older, it was grotesquely inappropriate.
When the preacher was through, the woman with the marcelled orange hair raised up her hand as if everyone had been talking and she wanted silence, though no one was doing anything at that point but clearing throats, blowing noses, and shuffling from one foot to another.
She shut her lips tight and hummed a note.
Then all the Dakins began to sing.
There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.
I sang the way Daddy did. Mama sang very loudly, to drown me out. Ford stepped on the side of my foot, which only made me sing louder. None of the Dakins seemed the least surprised that I could sing like Daddy. We all sang the word there to rhyme with afar, which made Mama cast her eyes heavenward very briefly. No archangel of proper pronunciation saw fit to punish us with a lightning strike, however.
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
We shall sing on that beautiful shore
The melodious songs of the blest,
And our spirits shall sorrow no more,
Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.
It was on the chorus after this second verse that I got into trouble. The words on my mimeographed sheet were different from everybody else’s.
Everybody else had the chorus just as it was before. But the words I sang were just for me:
By the dark of the moon
Thou wilt rise on that beautiful shore
In the ashes and ruin
And Thy bones will be washed of all gore.
Uuuuhk shrieked the crow in the raggedy pine.
As soon as we had finished the chorus and all the Dakins were starting on the fourth verse, Mama grabbed the mimeographed page out of my hand and hissed at me, “Calley, what in the hell are you doing?”
To our bountiful Father above,
We will offer the tribute of praise
For the glorious gift of His love,
And the blessings that hallow our days.
I tried to get the page back from her—the mimeographed page that I had chosen from out of the limp stack that the woman with the orange marcelled hair had offered to me. The page I had chosen the way a volunteer from the audience chooses a card from the magician’s proffered deck. The page that had a message on it meant just for me.
But Mama threw it into the hole under Daddy’s coffin in the ground. It fluttered down like Betsy McCall’s head when I sliced it off. Then the Uncles Dakin lowered Daddy’s coffin into the crumbling pebbly earth on top of it. It seemed to me less that they were interring Daddy than that they were making certain I could not retrieve the ripe-pear-smelling mimeograph.
I threw myself onto the coffin, only to be snatched out by the long arms of an uncle. I struggled wildly in the tightening enclosure of those strong arms.
“ ‘You are my sunshine,’ ” I sang out, “ ‘you make me happy when skies are grey.’ ”
Hushing and shushing me, Uncle Billy Cane Dakin carried me away.
Seventeen
THE funeral reception for Daddy was at Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin’s house—a big old place in the backside-of-the-moon country outside of Montgomery. When I saw the place, I realized that Mamadee must have won this battle too.
Uncle Jimmy Cane’s house was sided in wide weather-beaten unpainted boards. It had narrow doors, narrow short windows with only a couple of panes each, and three or four dormers indicating a warren of half-story rooms that were surely as frigid in the brief Alabama winter as they were sweltering the other ten months of the year. A wide, dusty porch undulated three-quarters of the way around the house. The whole thing stood raised up on stacks of brick five feet high, with cool dark sand beneath where snakes made swirled patterns and raised miniature dunes. A dusty field that in another season would be scabby with a failing crop of some unpalatable vegetable planted by Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin, his wife, Gerry, and their pack of boy Dakins surrounded the house.
Mama had no intentions of going inside. She parked the Edsel a few yards from the house. Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin brung an old twig chair down from the porch and arranged it next to the car for Mama. There she smiled a sad smile and spoke a few soft words from behind her veil to various Dakins when they approached her with their halting condolences.
Ford took off his tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He refused even to look around but slumped into the backseat with his hat yanked down to cover most of his face.
Mama said, “Calley, go inside and see if you can find me something to drink with ice in it. And wash the dead bugs out of the glass before you pour anything into it, you hear me?”
Mama said this last just loudly enough to be overheard by a Dakin or two, and just softly enough that they might think she had not so intended.
The Uncles and Aunts and Cousins Dakin parted before me, creating a winding path that led up to the creaking wooden steps. They murmured and cooed at me soothingly.
The screened door opened before I touched the handle. The woman with the marcelled orange hair, the very one who had played the organ at St. John’s and passed out the hymn sheets at the Promised Land graveyard, beckoned me inside.
I had visited Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin’s house half a dozen times with Daddy but this visit—final, though I did not know it—is what I remember of it. In the Edsel, I had made a surreptitious effort to clear the lenses of my glasses with the hem of my dress without significantly improving their clarity, so I continued to see everything in a haze. The rooms were square and high-ceilinged. The sun had bleached the chintz curtains in the windows almost colorless. Long dried-out wallpaper with patterns faded past comprehension blistered and peeled on the plastered wall. The linoleum on the floor buckled like the coverlet on a slatternly made bed. The kitchen sink wore a homemade skirt made of a worn-out checkered tablecloth, while there were no proper kitchen cupboards, only open shelves on iron brackets. Aunt Gerry cooked on a wood-fired black-iron range, ironed with the flat-iron on the shelf above the burners, and stored perishables in an icebox. The kitchen smelled strongly of the beagles that slept behind the stove.
I kept looking through the open doorways for a glimpse of Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin or Aunt Gerry, or Aunt Jude or Uncle Billy Cane—anyone at all would do, so long as it was not this woman I did not know, who had given me that mimeographed sheet of pear-smelling paper in the graveyard. My stomach roiled with uneasiness.
“I am not really a Dakin,” the woman confided in me, as she drew me deeper into the house. “My half-sister’s niece by marriage married one of Jimmy Cane Dakin’s grown-up boys, but he was killed when his pickup ran into a five-point deer on the Montgomery highway, and later she died giving birth to triplet sons. Only one of the boys survived but he was never right in the haid. So I am not a Dakin, like you are, but I am connected to the family, so I guess I am connected to you.”
I nodded in mute agreement.
“How is Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin taking it? The death of your daddy, I mean?”
It seemed odd how she called Mama Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin instead of your mama. The oddity made me cautious how I answered.
“Everybody says it is hard on her.”
“That’s right,” said the woman with the orange marcelled hair—as if her question had been What is the capital of North Dakota? and my answer had been Bismarck.
“And by the way,” she said, as if this were my reward for having given the right answer, “my name is Fennie.”
“Fennie what?”
“Fennie Verlow. I have already prepared a glass of sweet tea for Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, who must be exhausted with holding up in the face of her desolation and grief. Just let me add some ice and you can take it out to her.”
Fennie came up with a handful of ice cubes from a cooler on the kitchen table, and dropped them one by one into the tall glass of sugared tea.
“Take it to Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, honey.” As I took the glass from her hand, she added, “And you can tell her that I washed all the bugs out the glass before I poured the tea.”
When I repeated Miz Verlow’s message, Mama’s eyes widened behind her veil as if she had seen a ghost. Her fingers failed to grip the glass and the iced tea spilled out onto the crumbling track the front tire had made in the bright sandy earth. Mama swooned, seeming to melt right there in
the twig chair. Aunt Jude and Aunt Doris and Aunt Gerry hurried over. One of them lifted her veil back over her hat so they could pat Mama’s cheeks, daub her temples with dampened hankies, and coo comfort at her.
Mama came around long enough to whisper weakly, “Today had more hours in it than I expected.”
Then Mama’s eyes rolled up in her head. She would have slipped right out the chair if Miz Verlow had not suddenly been there to help the aunts. The four of them gently lifted her into the front passenger seat of the Edsel.
Miz Verlow whispered in Mama’s ear. Nobody was close enough to hear but me and Ford, who had dropped his hat and leaned forward in the backseat.
“You caint drive this car, Miz Dakin. You are a desolate widow with two orphan children and no man to guide you or provide for you or side with you against the world. So ride soft and ride safe and let me take you home. You sleep cool and cushioned and dream of Joe Cane Dakin like he was still alive. I will drive you safe home.”
At first, I took it that Mama was unconscious again and did not hear any of Miz Verlow’s soothing instructions. But I was wrong.
Mama heard enough to murmur, “You drive. I just want to close my eyes. Don’t let Calley talk.”
The Aunts Dakin finished loading up the trunk of the Edsel with the funeral baked meats, jars of soup, covered casseroles, foil-covered tins containing things that were baked in layers, wrapped-up cakes, pies with crusts that floated like scum over chunks of unknown fruit in dark syrup, and Nehi drink bottles filled with dense, sugary liquids and stoppered with saturated corks. And all these foods smelled of burned dyes, warping linoleum, unwashed bodies, and the spattered residue of rendered fat.
Ford and I sat silently in the backseat, both of us tensely aware of Mama’s condition. Mama breathed slowly, unmoving as Miz Verlow adjusted the visor against the sun.