The Rosewood Casket

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Will Bruce was not even sure what prayer the old man would want uttered in his behalf. Did he want to live? He had not seemed grief-stricken at the death of Clarsie a while back, but some widowers swallow their sorrow, and then die like abandoned dogs a few months after their bereavement. He had not thought Randall Stargill would be one of those. He seemed sufficient unto himself, and perfunctory in accepting the condolences of his neighbors. Was Randall Stargill a tired old man who had seen enough, and was ready to go?

  He wondered if Randall Stargill’s sons knew any more about his frame of mind than his pastor did. They had never seemed a close family. The boys always behaved—in church, in school, in the community; Randall saw to that. But they behaved without excelling, and their father never seemed to take any pride in their accomplishments. It was enough for him that they did not embarrass him by getting into trouble.

  Some of the Stargill sons were close to Will Bruce in age, but Dwayne, who had been in the same grade with him, had died years back, and the others had left the community. Will Bruce and Dwayne Stargill had been, by common consent, acquaintances, but never friends. Dwayne, of course, had been the exception to the family rule. He had got into whatever trouble there was going, from smoking in the bathroom in the sixth grade to drag-racing on country roads in his high school years. He never finished school. Dropped out and was gone one day. Randall Stargill’s countenance at church was unchanged. One by one the boys left, and he seemed unmoved by their absence. Then Clarsie died, and he sat through her funeral as impassively as ever, and went home to an empty house. He had been alone on the mountain for more than a year.

  Will Bruce slipped into the hospital room, returning the smile of a passing nurse. He was a regular here. Most of the members of his church were elderly. The still form in the bed lay unmoving, eyes closed, and looking younger than he had in recent years, as if the long sleep had smoothed out the wrinkles from his life.

  Will Bruce did not notice the still figure sitting in the straight chair in the corner until his name was called.

  He turned from the dying man and struggled to sort names and faces in his memory. The stout, red-faced man in gray polyester pants and a shiny blue jacket stood up and extended his hand with a sad smile of welcome. “Good of you to come by, Pastor.”

  He had it now. The oldest son: a salesman somewhere in the Midwest. “Robert Lee! I’m glad to see you after all this time. I wish it could be under happier circumstances.”

  “Well, Daddy’s close to eighty. He’s worn out. We knew it had to come. Didn’t think he’d outlive Mama, and worried about how he’d look after himself if he did.”

  “He may pull through yet,” said Will, looking back at Randall Stargill’s expressionless face. “He looks at peace, though, doesn’t he?”

  “I expect he is,” said Robert Lee, sighing. “He hasn’t solved his problems, though—he’s just passed them along to us.”

  Will Bruce waited. He knew that most of grief counseling consists of listening. He pulled up the other chair, sat down next to Robert, and prepared to hear him out.

  “We decided to come one at a time instead of all together to sort of space out the visits,” Robert explained. “Clayt was here earlier. I don’t know if Daddy hears us or not. Feels kind of funny talking to someone who just lays there with their eyes closed.”

  The minister nodded. “I know. I do a lot of visiting with the sick, you know, so I see this—well, quite a bit. I always assume that folks can hear me, though, even if they can’t give any indication that they do.”

  “I can’t get over seeing him like that,” said Robert with a tinge of wonder in his voice. “Helpless. Look—I even put on a coat and tie to come see him.” He laughed. “Guess I can’t stop trying to impress him, even when he doesn’t know I’m alive. At least he has a good excuse for it now.”

  After a moment of silence, Robert Lee leaned over and addressed his father. “It was hard to impress you, Daddy, since I never did know what it was you wanted me to do. ‘Work hard,’ you said. ‘Get a good steady job with some security to it. Settle down.’ That’s what you told me. I remember it word for word. Guess you forgot it, though. Seems like all I ever heard from you was about how Charles Martin met some big-time person in show business or how many tanks Garrett blew up in Desert Storm. Why didn’t I just become a bank robber and be done with it?”

  Will Bruce knew that his presence had been forgotten. He wondered if the old man in the bed could hear his son. Knowing Randall Stargill, Will thought it was just as well that he could make no reply to his son’s lament.

  * * *

  Randall’s mother had forsythia beauty: a blond brilliance that blooms in earliest spring, lasts only a moment, and then fades, without a trace of its former glory. But when she looked at him, her eyes lost the opaqueness of fear, and she seemed to him as lovely as the moon. The small boy did not notice her dresses of flour-sack calico, and her work-roughened hands. He would sneak past his grandmother with a fistful of handpicked ditch lilies or white and yellow yarrow flowers, and hold them out to her, hoping for the rare tentative smile or the brush of her lips against his cheek.

  She had not smiled for a long time now. Her eyes were as red as her hands, and she stared off at nothing while she worked. There had been a lot of people around at first, and they had brought cakes and homemade jams and had asked him a lot of questions in gruff voices, but finally they all went away, and the house was silent again. They did not speak of the matter. Grandmother had said that God’s will had been done, and that it was a judgment on the sin of the mother for having had the child out of wedlock. She said God had taken away the evidence of sin, and that lamenting over what happened would be a blasphemy and an insult to the Lord.

  Grandmother went about now with her lips pressed together so that not even a crack showed, and her eyes were narrowed, as if she dared anyone to cry. He did not cry. He was waiting for Fayre to come back, so that he could play outside again without making tears run down Mother’s cheeks.

  Mother had crept into his room that first night, touching his shoulder beneath the ragged quilt to waken him. He sat up, opening his mouth to cry out in the dark, but she whispered for him to be quiet. Her eyes were big in the dark, and she kept glancing toward the door, while her fingers plucked at the tatters in the quilt.

  “Is it time to get up?” whispered Randall. The square of glass behind the curtain was still black, but perhaps the rain had darkened the day well past dawn.

  “No, hon, it’s still night,” she said, stroking his hair. “I just couldn’t sleep is all. I thought I’d come talk to you.”

  He nodded, trying to will his eyelids to stay open, straining to hear her voice over the sound of the rain.

  “Stay awake, Randall!” she whispered. “It’s raining outside. And it’s cold for May. So cold on the mountain.”

  “Uh-huhh.”

  “Please, Randall, tell me what happened to Fayre.”

  “We went into the woods,” murmured Randall. “I told already. Told and told.”

  “You didn’t tell it all!” she hissed at him. “You left out part.”

  “We went looking for the Boone tree, I said. Looking for that tree with Dan’l Boone’s name carved on it.”

  “Randall, did you see anybody else in those woods? Did somebody go with you?” She was holding him up by the shoulders now, not shaking him, but trying to keep him from burrowing back down into sleep.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled, nuzzling the pillow.

  “Can you retrace your steps, Randy? Can you take me to where you left her?”

  He shook his head. “Grandmother says I’m not to go in the woods anymore. The woods are bad.”

  “Randy, Fayre is your sister. You love her, don’t you?”

  “Grandmother says she’ll buy me a whole sack of penny candy at the store if I’ll be good.”

  He felt his mother’s hand loosen her grip on his shoulder then. She sat there for a long moment, while he pre
tended to be asleep, and then she stood up and left the room as silently as she had come. He could not ever remember her touching him again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The women could read the character of a man with invariable certainty. If he lacked courage, they seemed to be able to discover it, at a glance, and if a man was a coward, he stood a poor chance to get his washing, or mending, or anything done.

  —a pioneer, recalling Boonsborough

  The breakfast dishes had been left to dry on the drain board, and Lilah, who had changed out of her turquoise caftan and into a matching green sweatshirt and pants outfit, was leading the way to the attic. “There’s no telling what we’ll find up here,” she said. “I haven’t been up here more than half a dozen times in twenty years, and that was mostly to get Christmas decorations for Mama Stargill, or some extra blankets or some such. I never really investigated, if you know what I mean.”

  “Attics are so interesting,” said Kelley. “It’s like having a time machine, isn’t it? You can see what people wore, and what furniture they had. Even old letters, sometimes.”

  Debba Stargill shuddered. “They give me the creeps. I heard a story once about a girl who was playing hide-and-seek, and she went up in the attic and got locked into a trunk, and when they found her she was a skeleton.”

  “I don’t think this house has that kind of skeletons,” said Lilah.

  Debba said, “What kind do they have?”

  “Oh, skeletons in the closet, as the saying goes. The usual family things, I reckon. Fights between married folks, and one child favored over the other, and squabbles about money. I don’t think they ever had any convicts in the family or heavy drinkers—barring Dwayne—or even a divorce until, well…”

  “Until this generation,” said Kelley, glancing back toward the room where Kayla was still sleeping. She wondered what Randall Stargill would have thought of her, and if his opinion would have mattered to Charles Martin.

  “I don’t remember much about the family history,” said Lilah. “Robert never cared much about ancestor research, and tales about the Stargill family, ancient or recent, are not something Mama Stargill seemed to know much about. Daddy Stargill may have known more, but he wasn’t one to tell family stories. You could hardly get him to pass the time of day at the dinner table, much less air any dirty linen from years past. I heard somebody mention a tale once, I think, but I’ve forgotten all the details. Maybe Clayt knows. He’s always poking into the history of one thing and another.”

  A small storage room at the end of the hall had been turned into an upstairs bath with old-fashioned porcelain fixtures and a black and white linoleum floor. In one corner next to the claw-footed tub, three steps led up to a small pine door. Lilah picked up a wet washcloth from the side of the tub and handed it to Kelley. “We’ll need this.”

  She opened the door, revealing a steep flight of a dozen steps to the attic. “It shouldn’t be dark up here,” she told the others. “You may have noticed the little dormer windows from the front of the house. And there’s a bare bulb on a cord up here at the top of the stairs, if it isn’t burned out.” She plunged ahead into the gloom, before Debba could demand a flashlight.

  “Are you sure we’ll be able to see well enough to pick out samples of material?” asked Kelley. “How will you recognize things in semidarkness?”

  “I thought we could take things over to the windows,” said Lilah. “Daylight is best for judging color anyhow. We can clean the grime off them with that washcloth I got from the bathroom.”

  When she reached the top of the narrow steps, Debba Stargill ran straight for the dormer window, and leaned against it, taking deep breaths as if she could reach the fresh air outside. Kelley and Lilah looked at each other, and shrugged. “Least said the better,” murmured Lilah. She clicked on the light that dangled on a black wire above their heads, but its feeble wattage did little to illuminate the area.

  Kelley looked around. In the dim light from the far windows, she could make out a dusty wooden floor, littered with cardboard boxes, old chairs, and stacks of empty picture frames. She saw bits of old furniture, hatboxes, and a scattering of children’s toys strewn haphazardly about the room, and in one corner, a blond doll with a china head and painted waves of hair sat in a child’s rocking chair, fixing them with her painted smile. Kelley shivered and turned away.

  Glancing again at Debba Stargill, Lilah said, “I think this big trunk will be the best place to start looking. You want us to scoot it over there to the window, Debba?”

  “Yes … please,” came the faint reply. “I don’t much like little, dark places.”

  “A brass-bound trunk,” said Kelley, fingering the ornate metalwork on top of the trunk. “I’ll bet that would cost a lot in an antique shop.” She grasped the leather handle at one end of the trunk, and Lilah took the other one. Together they dragged it into the square of light beneath the window. The trunk was too heavy for them to lift, but its contents made no sound as they slid it across the floor.

  Debba Stargill did not turn around. She kept her nose pressed against the dusty window, still taking deep breaths. “You two go ahead and open it,” she said.

  Kelley thrust the wet washcloth into Debba’s hand. “Fine. You scrub the window, then.” She knelt and examined the brass fittings on the front of the trunk. “It’s not locked.”

  Lilah lifted the lid. “Old clothes,” she announced. “Just what you’d expect to find in an attic trunk.” She took out the top garment, shook it out, and held it up against the light. “Mama Stargill’s old winter coat. Last one she ever had. I don’t know why they didn’t get rid of it. It’s just about worn out.” She folded the brown coat, and set it down out of the way. “We might as well start a pile of things to get rid of, while we’re about it. I’m sure these things would do more good keeping poor folks warm next winter than they would moldering in a trunk up here.”

  “Do you think the boys would mind if you gave their mother’s things away?” asked Debba, who had consented to look into the trunk, since no rats or skeletons had been forthcoming.

  Lilah favored her with a pitying smile. “Child, an old cloth coat from J.C. Penney is nobody’s idea of a family heirloom. I’m sure we’ll be able to tell what’s worth keeping and what isn’t.”

  “I wonder why Mr. Stargill didn’t give these things away when his wife died,” said Kelley.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Lilah. “The Stargills don’t care much for hobnobbing with people at the best of times, and, aside from his grief, Daddy Stargill had just had to put up with a stream of neighbors and relatives, all coming in to keep him company and express their sympathy. I expect it was a lot easier for him to stuff Mama Stargill’s things in this trunk than it would be for him to take the clothes to a bunch of strangers at a charity office. I don’t know but what my Robert would do the same thing with my belongings if I were to pass first.” She sighed and shook her head. “Robert would be worried that the charity people would look down on him because the clothes weren’t up to their standards.”

  Kelley had continued to rummage in the oak trunk. “Look at this hat!” she said, putting the soft, homemade sun bonnet over her red curls, and tying the strings beneath her chin. “Don’t I look like somebody on Hee-Haw?”

  “Mama Stargill called that a poke bonnet,” said Lilah. “She wore it when she worked in the garden. She sewed them herself. I think it’s a very old design, though.”

  “We ought to keep that then,” said Debba.

  Kelley set the bonnet aside, and held up a fringed shawl of rusted black satin, embroidered with curling vines and flowers in red and blue. “Isn’t this beautiful? Do you suppose she made that?”

  Lilah shook her head. “Daddy Stargill sent her that from overseas.” Seeing the blank look on the younger women’s faces she added, “World War Two. He was stationed in England—navigator on a bomber, I think. He never talked much about that, either. He must have got to visit the Continent after the fighti
ng was over. Looks Italian, doesn’t it?”

  “It seems a shame to cut it up,” said Debba, fingering the delicate embroidery. “I wonder if his wife ever wore it.”

  “She never did,” said Lilah. “My mother was the same way. My daddy sent her some embroidered linen pillowcases from France, and she put them away in the cedar chest in her bedroom. And there they stayed for forty years. I found them after she passed away, yellowed with age but otherwise brand-new. That generation believed in saving things for a rainy day. I guess they never got over the Depression.”

  “And now, fifty years after he gave it to her, the shawl becomes part of the lining of Mr. Stargill’s coffin.” Kelley sighed.

  “At least it will be put to some use,” said Lilah. “And maybe it carries sweet memories, which must be what he wanted when he asked for a homemade burying.” She set the shawl aside. “That’s the first bit for the lining, then.”

  “I wonder if we can find her wedding dress,” said Debba. “That would have sentimental value, wouldn’t it?”

  “I expect so,” said Lilah. “But it won’t be the pretty scrap of lace and satin you’re expecting to find. It was wartime. Clarsie Stargill was married in a wool suit with a gardenia corsage pinned to her breast pocket. The wedding snapshots are in the family album, her and Daddy Stargill posing on the front steps of this house, looking shy and ridiculously young. He was in his army uniform, and his ears are poking out underneath his hat.”

  “She wore a suit?” said Kelley. “Somehow I figured them for a traditional wedding—being country people and all.”

  “Well,” said Lilah, “I think the war had a lot to do with it. They had clothes rationing back then, and he was probably home on leave, so there wouldn’t have been time for a big to-do. And maybe Clarsie thought she ought to catch him while she could. There are pictures in the family album of young Randall with a pretty dark-haired girl, who just puts little Clarsie in the shade for looks. It’s no use asking me what became of her, though, because nobody ever talks about it.”