Each Little Bird That Sings

by Deborah Wiles

  I wrote the obituary.

  * * *

  * * *

  Special to

  THE AURORA COUNTY NEWS

  (Mr. Johnson, this is for the March 28 twilight edition.)

  Unexpected Death

  Comes Calling at Snowberger’s!

  Life Notices by Comfort Snowberger:

  Explorer, Recipe Tester, and Funeral Reporter

  Imagine the shock and sadness all over Snapfinger, Mississippi, yesterday, when Edisto River Snowberger, patriarch of the Snowberger’s Funeral Home Empire, died just before taking a nap after a failed picnic attempt due to a surprise thunderstorm. The entire Snowberger family sprang into action (that is, after we took a little time to sink into despair).

  Edisto Snowberger was born in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, a stone’s throw from the spot where Crazy Horse surrendered to General George Crook (Discovering Our World Magazine, issue 72). He (Edisto) moved to Snapfinger with his favorite uncle, Allagash, to start a sawmill (Snapfinger being a town filled with piney woods). When the sawmill went kaput due to hard times and poor management, Edisto and Allagash looked around them and saw a town full of old folks sitting on sidewalk benches, swinging on front porches, and sleeping in church pews, and they said to each other, “What this town really needs is a funeral home.”

  So they started one in the old sawmill boardinghouse, which turned out to be a perfect funeral home house with its six bathrooms and two kitchens—one upstairs (for family meals) and one downstairs (for funeral flowers and funeral food storage). Thousands of dead people have come through Snowberger’s and have ended up in either the “Rock of Ages” or the “Everlasting Arms” section of the Snapfinger Cemetery. Edisto Snowberger touched all their lives—and the lives of their families—with the greatest respect. To this very day, people look forward to dying and coming to Snowberger’s for their laying out.

  Edisto created the Snowberger family motto, “We Live to Serve,” and Allagash engraved it on the Snowberger’s Funeral Home sign. Edisto’s sayings will be chronicled in the forthcoming book A Short History of a Small Place: Snapfinger, Mississippi, written by Comfort Snowberger. But that’s another story.

  Allagash died eons ago, and Edisto is survived by his uncle’s wife, Florentine Snowberger, and the rest of the Snowberger clan, including especially his favorite niece, Comfort Snowberger, who was also his picnic companion.

  Viewing will be at Snowberger’s at 7pm on Wed. evening, and visitation will be at 2pm before the funeral at 3pm on Thurs. Bring your favorite picnic foods (and recipes), as we will spread blankets and cucumber sandwiches around the newly opened “Bread of Heaven” section of the Snapfinger Cemetery, where Edisto Snowberger will enter into his well-deserved eternal rest.

  Chapter 2

  Great-great-aunt Florentine died in that same vegetable garden where Uncle Edisto had his tomato mix-up. (It’s a big garden.) It had been raining for days, but on that day, the sun was shining like a bright new penny. It was a Wednesday afternoon in September, just before Labor Day weekend. Everything (including school) in Snapfinger closes at noon on Wednesdays so everybody can go home, eat dinner early, and rest in the middle of the week. Of course, if your house is also the funeral home, you never really rest. You’re always on call, just like the fire department is always on call. You never know when calamity will strike.

  Great-great-aunt Florentine had been out hoeing in the garden all morning, and she had ignored the noon whistle again, so Mama sent me out to tell her to come on in, the biscuits were getting cold. Dismay went with me, his black tail swishing and his tongue hanging out of his slobbery mouth: I’m just so glad to be here!

  When we got to the edge of the garden where the zinnias are planted, there was Great-great-aunt Florentine, flat out on the ground next to a basket of crowder peas, with her garden dress poofed around her like a big, soft cloud and her head resting on a mound of marigolds. She was getting colder by the minute.

  She had a serene look on her face. “Angelic,” Mama later said. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling as if to say, It’s everything I’d hoped it would be, here in heaven! The streets are paved with lavender!

  Dismay sniffed at Great-great-aunt Florentine, then came back to stand with me. He licked my bare leg. I knew this was death—I’d seen it so many times before—and I knew what to do. I hugged Dismay first—he was so alive and full of good feelings—and I skedaddled for the house.

  Everyone galloped out to the garden to gaze on Great-great-aunt Florentine. Bees buzzed around the bachelor’s buttons that brushed up against Aunt Florentine’s hip, but they did not touch her. I felt they were showing their respect. Dismay kept his distance, too. He looked up at me with that panting, dog-smiling mouth and those shiny black dog eyes: What’s happening? Is everything all right? Is it? I gave him a reassuring pat, “It’s okay, boy,” and he settled down.

  Daddy kneeled beside Great-great-aunt Florentine, crushing the bachelor’s buttons (not to mention Aunt Florentine’s hat). He held her wrist and put his ear to her chest. “Nothing,” he said, looking at all of us as we crowded between the butter beans and the okra. “She’s been here awhile . . .”

  Mama nodded and looked grim—even grim looked beautiful on Mama. “Well . . . ,” she said, “she was ninety-four years old, and she died doing what she wanted to be doing.”

  Tidings ran his fingers through his hair and gave his scalp a little scratch. “I’ll bring the hearse around.”

  Now, Tidings is fourteen and too young to drive anything except the tractor, but Mama just said, “You do that, honey.” Tidings and I exchanged a look—Mama knew. She knew that Tidings had been sneaking around and driving Daddy’s old pickup through the cow pasture for the past year and a half. I shrugged. It’s hard to pull one over on Mama.

  Tidings saluted Mama and took off toward the funeral home garage. When he passed me, he tapped the brim of my hat twice.

  Daddy stood, put his arm around Mama, and folded her to him. His voice wobbled. “She was ready to go, Joy.” He rested his chin on the top of Mama’s head, and they stood that way until Daddy said, “We’ve got the Hindman viewing at seven . . .”

  Mama slipped her head out from under Daddy’s chin, pulled his face down to hers, and kissed him firmly on his bearded cheek. “You’ll be busy this afternoon, Bunch. We’ll help.” Then she reached for me and pulled me into the embrace, so the three of us stood together like one giant statue-headstone in a vegetable-garden cemetery, guarding the temporary graveside of Great-great-aunt Florentine and brushing up against the tomatoes. It felt good.

  My parents smell like a mixture of gardenias and embalming fluid, even in the evenings after their showers. I think the smells of their jobs have permanently soaked into their skins. I don’t mind. I’m used to how they smell. I rested in that familiar odor while the sun baked my back. Dismay rubbed his shaggy side against us and sniffed at us.

  “Comfort,” Mama said, “I’m going to need your help in the flower shop.”

  My heart made a little poof in my chest. I’d made plans to go cloud watching with Declaration. Declaration had spent the entire summer in Mobile with her mama’s kin (a first), and we hadn’t had an overnight or a good visit for ice ages. I’d been asking her to meet me at Listening Rock for three weekends straight, ever since school had started again, and finally, she’d said she could. And finally, there was no rain.

  And now I wasn’t going to show up.

  But death doesn’t respect plans or the weather—that much I knew. And Declaration would know where to find me. So I didn’t even protest out loud; I just squared my shoulders, looked Mama in the eye, and said in my most sincere voice, “I live to serve.” She smiled at me.

  Merry had lagged behind the rest of us. She had been distracted by the squash plants. (They were blooming again from a late summer planting.) She had been picking the tender squash blossoms and sticking them to her cheeks until she was festooned with them. When she discovered Great-great-aun
t Florentine, she sat on her with a thump. She slanted her short self in the direction of Aunt Florentine’s face and stared intently into her closed eyes.

  “Dead!” Merry said.

  “Yes,” said Mama. She gathered Merry into her arms.

  Once again, I wrote the obituary.

  * * *

  * * *

  Special to

  THE AURORA COUNTY NEWS

  (Mr. Johnson, this is for the September 4 early afternoon edition.)

  Yet Another Untimely Death at Snowberger’s!!!

  Life Notices by Comfort Snowberger:

  Explorer, Recipe Tester, and Funeral Reporter

  Grab your handkerchiefs! Eggs Florentine Snowberger, matriarch of the Snowberger’s Funeral Home Empire, has died at the ripe old age of 94 after a long and (extremely) colorful life.

  She was born into a chicken-farming family, the Petersons, of Halleluia, Mississippi. Her older brother, Benedict, moved to nearby Snapfinger to work at Snowberger’s Sawmill when it opened, and that’s how Florentine, while visiting Benedict, met Allagash. They fell in love, married, and moved into the old sawmill boardinghouse that became Snowberger’s Funeral Home. It’s a long story and too much to go into here.

  Today the entire Snowberger family lives above Snowberger’s Funeral Home in more rooms than this reporter can count. Florentine decorated every room with lavender (her signature herb) and made it her business to sample all funeral food on funeral days. With her favorite niece, Comfort Snowberger, she was compiling a cookbook called Fantastic (and Fun) Funeral Food for Family and Friends.

  Some people (we won’t name names) said Florentine Snowberger was a gossip, but she called herself a geographer. She studied the earth (Snapfinger, especially) and life on the earth (Snapfinger, particularly) and figured out how life on the earth affected the earth (Snapfinger, notably). She passed on her love of geography to her niece Comfort and willed to her (long before she died) all her old copies of Discovering Our World Magazine. This generous gift has directly influenced Comfort’s decision to become an explorer when she grows up.

  The viewing will be at 7pm on Fri., Sept. 4. The funeral will be at 4pm on Sat., Sept. 5, with visitation for an hour before the service. It’s Labor Day weekend, but don’t let that stop you. Y’all loved Florentine Snowberger as much as we did, and (as Florentine always said) a funeral offers the perfect time to study geography. So get in the car and come on to the funeral . . . unless your name is Peach Shuggars. We do not want a repeat of what happened at Edisto Snowberger’s funeral—so if your name is Peach Shuggars, stay home, stay home, stay home! I cannot stress this enough. Stay home. Stay. Home. You hear me?

  Snowberger’s Funeral Home

  RURAL ROUTE 2, SNAPFINGER, MISSISSIPPI

  * * *

  Typed on Daddy’s Royal typewriter

  at 3:27 pm on Wed., Sept. 2

  Declaration Johnson

  8309 Magnolia Street

  Snapfinger, Mississippi

  Dear Best Friend Declaration,

  By now you have figured out that I didn’t show up at Listening Rock to meet you, and you are back home wondering if I got run over, flat as a pancake, by a corn harvester out of control on County Road 2435. Well, no.

  I have a sad surprise for you: Great-great-aunt Florentine is dead. Can you believe it? She dropped down in the garden, like a leaf tumbling off the oak tree of life, just before I was supposed to meet you at Listening Rock.

  I won’t go to school for the next two days, but Mama says I can meet you at 3pm on Fri. at Listening Rock. I will bring a picnic.

  Aunt Florentine’s funeral is at 4pm on Sat. I know you said, after attending Great-uncle Edisto’s funeral, that you would forevermore stop going to funerals, but I hope you’ll make an exception for this one.

  Please send word back through your daddy and let me know if you can come on Fri. Sincerely, as ever, herewith and forever Your Best Friend,

  Comfort Snowberger

  Explorer, Recipe Tester,

  and Funeral Reporter

  Rural Route 2

  Snapfinger, Mississippi

  Dear Comfort,

  Fine.

  Declaration

  Chapter 3

  For two whole days, we Snowbergers were busy. Daddy worked on Great-great-aunt Florentine and made her beautiful in her alabaster-white casket. Tidings sat, tall and straight, on the tractor—as determined as General Sherman marching through Georgia—and cut the grass between rain showers. Merry sang songs—all to the tune of “Jingle Bells”—and took little catnaps on a pink blanket under the pecan tree by the downstairs kitchen door. She would fall asleep snoring against Dismay, who would thump his long black tail with happiness.

  Mama and Tidings and I cut flowers so Mama could fill orders in her shop from all the neighbors who had called to send bouquets. Lurleen, Mama’s helper, came to help arrange them. Then Mama and I cooked six tuna casseroles six different ways, and we baked four chocolate cakes and dusted them with confectioners’ sugar. “Aunt Florentine’s favorites . . . ,” said Mama. We cleaned Aunt Florentine’s room so it would be in order, forever.

  In Aunt Florentine’s nightstand we found a picture of Declaration and me when we were four years old. We were wearing matching red pajamas and laughing at the camera.

  “That was the Christmas after Declaration’s mama died,” said Mama. “Aunt Florentine sewed those pajamas herself.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  Mama and I stared at the picture until the grandfather clock in the hallway bonged and we both sniffed. “Go on and make your picnic,” she said. “You have served enough for today. Tell Declaration we miss her.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” I headed for the kitchen.

  Now, I hadn’t spoken to Declaration since Aunt Florentine’s death. For some reason she hadn’t come by the house at all on the day Aunt Florentine died, but her daddy, Mr. Plas Johnson, who is a friend and fishing partner of my daddy’s, came by that afternoon to pay his respects and talk to Daddy about the obituary for Great-great-aunt Florentine.

  Mr. Johnson owns the Aurora County News, and he always writes the obituaries himself. He needs help, in my opinion. He puts the obituaries under a column he calls “Death Notices,” so of course they are written in a deadly dull and unexciting way, although I would never tell him that. Great-great-aunt Florentine would hoot over Mr. Johnson’s obituaries. She’d say things like, “I could tell you all about Lyle Latham, but nobody asks me!” She’s the one who said, “Death doesn’t notice anything! Life notices everything! Write Life Notices, Comfort!” So I do.

  I feel that my Life Notices are much more colorful and interesting than Mr. Johnson’s Death Notices, but that’s just a matter of opinion—and it’s his newspaper. Still, he says he will print my obituaries if I can make them “newspaper worthy,” whatever that means. “Just the facts, Comfort,” he always tells me.

  When Mr. Johnson and Daddy were done, I gave Mr. Johnson my Life Notice for Aunt Florentine, and I also gave him a letter for Declaration. Declaration’s note back to me was prickly, bordering on peevish. So, because it was Friday and picnic time, I made Declaration her favorite kind of tuna-fish sandwich. I added hard-boiled eggs and apples and dill pickle slices. Declaration loved Great-great-aunt Florentine’s pickles. We’d first eaten them together at Snowberger’s on the day we met, which was on the day of Declaration’s mama’s funeral (death by illness). I had gone downstairs to the funeral like I always did. That didn’t seem unusual to Declaration then, when we were four, but a while back she had started remarking (for instance): “You’re not even related to the Dapplevines!”

  But I was, according to Great-uncle Edisto. After the funeral he had taken me and Declaration on our first picnic together. We’d eaten tuner-fish sandwiches. And right then and there, Declaration and I had decided to be best friends. She didn’t have brothers and sisters, and she liked my house, where there was lots of family. When she slept over, Declaration and I always
lay with Great-great-aunt Florentine in her big bed. Declaration would talk about her mama and cry into a Snowberger’s handkerchief. Aunt Florentine and I were good listeners because we were used to death. We lived with it.

  I packed our picnic in my backpack, then ran down the stairs and out the back door, whistling for Dismay. I grabbed my bike and ran alongside it until I could jump on. I pedaled hard down Rural Route 2, past the cornfield, then turned left onto County Road 2435. The cemetery was up a slope to my left, and Purgatory Hill plunged down to the oak grove on my right. It was my favorite part of the ride. I turned off the road onto Purgatory Hill. I steadied the pedals with my feet and steered myself down the hill, bumping and weaving to the bottom.

  I didn’t see Declaration anywhere. Usually we timed ourselves so well that we met each other as we got to the bottom of Purgatory Hill. I waited for a minute, but Dismay was barking from somewhere inside the grove, calling me to Come climb this rock! So I did. Declaration could find me at the top. I’d watch for her. I parked my bike against the first oak tree I came to and ran into the woody grove to find my dog.

  Chapter 4

  The oak grove was gnat-filled and steamy in late summer, but it was a paradise of grasses, acorns, pinecones, sandy spots, and rocks to climb, not to mention squirrels, rabbits, foxes, and mice for Dismay to chase. Creatures great and small lived together in the grove, hidden under a leafy oak canopy. Snapfinger Creek trickled its way through the trees. The oak grove was Snapfinger’s most unsung treasure. I felt alive there.