The Last Odd Day

by Lynne Hinton

  At first glance there wasn’t anything surprising or unexpected. His army discharge papers, an old farm deed that didn’t mean anything anymore, pictures from the war I had already seen, the soldiers gathered and friendly, and a few documents that his father had given him about his genealogy, the Witherspoon family tree.

  The jewelry box was locked, but a small key was taped to the bottom. I pulled it off and unlocked it. Lilly sat down on the ground in front of where I was seated, and I placed the box on the tractor beside me and opened it.

  His military awards were inside, his mother’s pearl ring he had brought to her from France, a faded old hair ribbon that I was sure wasn’t mine, a sketch of me he had penciled when he drove up to see me before we got married, and a folded piece of paper stuck way behind everything else in a small compartment, under a narrow and secure lid.

  I held each of his army medals, the ring, the ribbon, and the folded paper, then passed them on to Lilly, one at a time. I steadied the picture across my lap, keeping it for myself.

  Lilly handled the items I gave her, examined them, delicately placing them beside her as she went from one to the other. When I handed her the ribbon, she rolled it in her fingers, held it to her nose, and closed her eyes.

  Without either of us saying it out loud, we knew whose it was. We both knew it was Clara’s, the only thing O.T. had kept, the only thing to remember her, the only thing that linked him to Lilly and her to me. She stretched it out and then tied it in her hair. Quickly, I turned so as not to watch her.

  I can’t say if it was embarrassment, shame, or even disappointment to find proof of my husband’s love for someone else, to see a token, a tangible expression, a keepsake of something he fell into and then forsook. To find and hold a thing, a memory, that he had kept and hidden and treasured even when it was all over. I do not know the motivation behind the action, only that I turned and looked away. I fumbled with the picture in my hands.

  “It’s Mama’s,” she said after a few minutes.

  I kept my eyes down. “Yes, I imagine it is.”

  “Does it hurt you that he kept this?” Her voice was as innocent as a child’s.

  “A little,” I confessed. I finally glanced up. Her hair was pulled back, away from her face, and I saw again the resemblance to O.T.

  “I can understand that,” she said.

  A flock of geese flew above the shed heading toward the pond behind the field where we used to grow tobacco. They were loud and clamorous, sounding like a room full of angry old women. We smiled at each other. The cries faded and a silence fell.

  “He picked you, you know.”

  I turned away.

  “I mean, you can say it was because your baby died or because he was a dutiful man or because he was racked with guilt; but regardless of why, he still picked you.”

  I glanced down at the picture my husband had drawn of me more than fifty years ago, a picture he drew when we were younger than Lilly, when we were filled with hopes and grand ideas, when we were not old from life.

  I studied the lines, the curves, and remembered the day he had come to the mountains with his pad of paper and pencils, how he had coaxed me into going out behind the house to sit under a tree. I remembered how he worked so long and diligently, trying to capture in his drawing, he said, the likeness of my deep beauty. I remembered how I blushed when he said that, because no one had ever called me beautiful. No one had ever looked at me so completely.

  “Yes,” I answered his daughter and remembered the moment of tenderness there in a yellow meadow, framed in wildflowers and a wide blue sky. I remembered that in fact he had made it very clear, on that day and others that were to stretch before us, that he had chosen me—to draw, to love, to marry. And somehow the memory and the reminder of his choice eased the awkwardness that had pushed its way between Lilly and me.

  After a few minutes she reached up and touched me on the arm. “What about the paper?” she asked, changing the subject.

  I handed it to her without opening it for myself. I thought it might be something else that was more hers than mine.

  She unfolded it and began to read. “I don’t know what it is,” she replied and handed it to me.

  I took it from her and realized that it was a deed to a cemetery plot on the far side of town, a park that I had once told O.T. I thought was genuinely lovely in spite of the fact it was full of death.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It appears as if he bought a place at Memorial Gardens.” I tried to see the date of purchase. “I don’t understand that,” I added, “since we both have plots with his parents.” Then I had a flashing thought that maybe I had buried him in the wrong place.

  “Do you know where it is? Maybe we should go see,” Lilly said, and she waited a minute then got up from her seat and began walking toward the front of the shed.

  She was so confident and so easy about it that I agreed. I took a last glance around at the old place where my husband had spent most of his life, switched off the light, and followed her. I dropped off the jewelry box, the drawing, and safe papers in the house, found a jacket since it was cold outside, and got my purse and keys.

  The sun was high and bright as we drove almost to the county line. It took about fifteen minutes to get there, and neither of us said much. A comment about the coming of spring, the way she loved to ride in the country, a reminder to myself to take the car to the station. I drove as if I was only going to the store or to vote. It didn’t seem at all like what it really was, that I was riding out with his illegitimate daughter to see what else my husband had hidden from me for almost forty years.

  The green land sloped toward a pond where ducks were always lounging about. There were a few trees, the flowering kind, dogwood and Japanese maple, and a bridge that seemed to signal a passageway from one life to the next. It was restful there, I had told O.T., a good place to go and remember a life. I parked near the entrance and turned off the engine.

  Lilly got out of the car first. And suddenly as I sat watching I became afraid. I remembered the things I had said about the cemetery, the way he seemed to take note, and in just the amount of time that it takes to recognize the face of a friend, I knew what I would find.

  I sat there for what seemed a long time before she tapped on the window, right beside me, and motioned me to get out of the car.

  “What’s the matter, Jean?” she asked as I opened the door.

  “I think I know who’s here,” I said, still not moving from the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah?” She glanced out across the cemetery, the green and rolling hill marked with flowers and stones, telling the stories of those buried there. “Family?” she asked.

  I nodded. Then there was a long pause.

  “You want me to go find the plot and come back to tell you?” She waited for me to answer, and I remembered how quiet O.T. had gotten when I called and told him what I feared. The baby was dead.

  I shook my head. “No, I’ll need to go.”

  She turned away from me and waited until I felt a little more steady and stepped out of the car. I pulled the deed out of my purse and handed it to her. “I don’t know how you follow this,” I said as she unfolded the paper and began to read over it.

  “It says row 44, plot H.” She studied the cemetery. “But I don’t know how you figure out what is row 44. I don’t see any numbers.” She shielded her eyes as she inspected the graves ahead of us.

  As I focused out beyond the paved circle where we were parked, I knew without counting. It was simple once I saw the tree. There next to the mountain ash on the far side of the hill, where the grass was deep green and the angle of the sky seemed to lift the ground right into the rays of the sun, that’s where I knew she’d be.

  Mountain ash, like friendship and old grief, offers something unique and different with each passing season. There is a pattern to it, an order that becomes familiar and yet unpredictable, both warm and glaring, at exactly the same time.

  In the late
spring it yields great clusters of milky white flowers. In summer it is full and fernlike, providing restful shade. In the fall, when the other trees turn and fade, the leaves of the mountain ash stay red and yellow and the branches drip with red berries, supplying birds with food. In winter, while other trees are barren and unwelcoming, the berries remain, a resource that is dependable and abundant.

  European mountain ash is the most widespread of this variety in the United States. For more than a century it has been rooted and maintained across North America. It was one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite trees, evidenced by the large numbers of them planted in his garden at Monticello; and it was my grandmother’s favorite tree. Near the reservation, we were surrounded by them.

  The old folks called the tree witchwood because it was said that the burning of the bark and limbs could be used to exorcise witches or rid a place of spirits. When Mama and Daddy died, an uncle from my mother’s side left a small stack of twigs outside the front door for me to burn and send away my family’s ghosts. But I knew what the sticks were, and I didn’t light them.

  My grandmother used to pick the berries and make tea that we drank for an upset stomach and to prevent colds in the winter. I loved the mountain ash; and O.T. knew it. That was, after all, the tree in his picture. Of course he would have planted one near the grave of our daughter. Of course he would have kept it strong and healthy. Of course he would have taken care of my baby’s resting place.

  I pointed out to Lilly where she was, and slowly we walked together. I felt the weight of the sun on my neck, the pull of my heart to return to the car, and the silence of my new stepdaughter as together we marched up the hill to a place I had long pretended did not exist.

  I do not know what I thought they did with Emma’s body. I guess I figured they just destroyed it in some way, burned it or threw it out. I thought if they called it fetal demise, they just ridded themselves of it in some orderly fashion as if it were only a diseased organ or amputated limb.

  I never considered the idea that O.T. would have made arrangements with the hospital staff, with a funeral home, and with a cemetery to care for our dead baby. I never thought he would have done such a thing, tender and careful. I just did not expect he could have known.

  I stopped for a second before we got to the grave, to gather myself, I suppose. I felt a wave of fear, a rush or dread; and I reached out my hand to hold Lilly’s. She took it, and together we walked the last few yards.

  It was a small heavy stone, chipped, old but sturdy, with a statue of an angel sitting on top and an etching of a small flower in each corner. “Emma Lovella Witherspoon,” it read. “Born and Died November 11, 1959. Loved and adored by both Mother and Father.”

  I touched the marker, drawing my finger inside each groove and line that spelled out my daughter’s name. I felt the angel, the tiny petals of the flowers, the rough edge at the top, the smooth corners at the bottom. I dropped to my knees and felt the earth, cold and unyielding, that had buried and held my child.

  I stayed that way for a while, kneeling at the grave, just as I had at the ocean when I decided to let her go. Lilly remained there behind me. She didn’t shift from side to side, clear her throat, or even reach for me. She just stood there, quiet and undemanding, letting me have the silence and the sun for as long as I needed it. When I finally felt ready, I got up, walked over to the mountain ash, pinched off a small limb, and laid it at the foot of the grave.

  I stood back as if the prayer of benediction had been said, marking it as time to go, turned, and walked to the car. Lilly waited and then followed. And as she came striding toward me, the perfect reincarnation of my husband, I shook my head, realizing how my entire life had been weighted and balanced by death.

  15

  “What’s it like being pregnant?” a young girl at the mill asked me as she watched me stop in the middle of my sewing and rub my stomach.

  She was no more than sixteen, somebody’s daughter sent into town to make a little money for her family living on the farm. The mill was full of girls like her, who never left home but were sent away, learning now about life from conversations with older, wiser women, discovering the world from the inside of a too-hot-in-summer, too-cold-in-winter warehouse where we made and boxed fancy underwear for rich ladies who could afford the finest in lingerie.

  All the mill women dreamed of how it must be to wear fancy underwear, to have stacks of such lacy, silky things lining our drawers. We sewed while we fantasized about the good life, the life we had accepted would never be ours.

  We wore the rejects, the mistakes that were left in a large bin near the lunchroom for anyone to go through and find what they could. We took them home and fixed them, knowing that to use company time to work on the irregulars was grounds for being fired. We took them home, satisfied that we had all that we needed, grateful that even though we made luxurious things we’d never wear, at least we had a job, at least we were off the farm and managing things for ourselves.

  Wanda, the young girl who asked me about being pregnant, was not a good worker. She was slow to learn the machines, always late with her work, more interested in the women around her than in meeting her quota or filling the boxes. She was forever away from her machine, standing behind someone else, asking something about how the rest of us lived.

  “Doesn’t feel too good right now,” I answered her, trying to rub away the low ache of skin stretching farther and tighter than it was meant to go. “My back hurts; my feet are so swelled I can’t wear any shoes but slippers. There’s indigestion and this high-strung baby kicking me in the ribs.” I poured out a long breath. “And I’m so tired I feel like, if she’d just lay quiet with me, I could sleep all day and all night long.”

  I leaned over and stuffed the completed batch of underwear I had finished into the empty carton at my side.

  Wanda came closer to me, peeked around to make sure no one was listening to her; and then she whispered, like what she was saying was too dangerous to be spoken out loud. “My sister said it was like being God.”

  She stopped. Her eyes darted from left to right. “But you ain’t supposed to say that,” she added, shaking her head. “My mama hear somebody say something like that, and she’d fly after them with a broom.”

  “Why?” I asked, noticing the time on the clock. I was getting hungry and hoping it was time for dinner.

  “Sacrilege,” she answered. “Can’t nobody claim to feel like God.” Her voice was clipped, sullen, a child in confession.

  She waited. “You feel like God?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders and pulled out another stack of unfinished panties. “I don’t know,” I said.

  I thought about what she was asking. “I feel like I’m part of something like a miracle, something that pulls every part of me into it—my spirit, my blood, my dreams. That the pieces of who I am are being drawn into this life growing inside me. That I’m being multiplied and divided into somebody else.”

  Then I stopped what I was doing and considered God at the beginning of the world. I thought about how it might have been, the loneliness at first, the powerless echo of one single voice, the desire to share what was imagined and dreamed, the appetite and ache of a heavenly heart.

  I wondered if creation started with an inkling, a feeling, that eventually developed into a choice that God made. The choice of pulling God’s own self into winding rivers and flashing stars and small glossy leaves.

  I thought about the notion of color, a wish for magenta and sapphire blue, pale pink and deep, deep brown. And how God then breathed out marigolds and black-eyed Susans and plush green carpets of rye grass, the exploding laughter of God’s beaming yellow sun. Rich black plums, tiny red berries, and ripe golden peaches. Trees and flowers and long, curled, white blooming vines.

  I imagined that at first there was an idea and then there was a reality, a hope and then the unfolding, a “why not?” and then a “yes,” all streaming from the fingers and eyes and marrow of God.


  The spinning planets, the emerald seas, the wide, wide spread of purple fields and long lovely meadows. All of earth and sky and watery depths, all of light and darkness and life. Mountain and sand, valley and stream, marbled stone and ice-capped peaks, all from the dancing and delighted bones of God.

  Then, in the gathering of the colors, the whirling moons and stars and planets, God looked around at all this creation, all this space filled with possibility, bounty, and without limits; and God desired, for creatures, beings like Godself to roam and honor and celebrate the world carved from the Creator’s own imagination. So God gave birth.

  Like a woman pushing and groaning and delivering of herself, God gave birth. A flood of water breaking forth into creeping, crawling life. God gave birth to lions and beetles and pelicans and mice. To sleek graceful horses and soaring fearless eagles. To amoebae and insects and frogs and worms and snakes and fish. God brought forth them all, in joy, in zealous expectation. God brought forth them all, out from God’s own great and mysterious and fertile womb.

  And when the world was round and brimming with all the animals of the one host, alive and thankful, exploring and explored, God still thought that there was need of one creature more.

  God decided, God chose: “Just one more image of myself.” And there in the final hour of creating, expectant and full of faith, God knelt upon the newborn earth and breathed a deep and hopeful and lusty breath; and out from the great womb we came, male and female, separate and same, marching, calling and called; out of the hope and heart and soul and dream of God, we came. Children, infants of heaven, we came.

  I turned to the young teenage girl who asked what this inexplicable gift to me was like, and I took her hand and let her feel the baby rumbling inside my belly.

  Her eyes were big as plates as she felt the life stirring within me; and she smiled and pulled her hand away.