The Rosewood Casket

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “I suppose,” he said. He wondered if the angelic Rudy was mixed up in this; in fact, he caught himself glancing around the room as if his wife’s angel might be lounging in a corner watching the excitement with a bemused, seraphic smile. Lilah claimed that she never saw Rudy, but he was always afraid that he might. “What set them off, Lilah? I thought you’d had a stroke or something, the way they carried on.”

  Lilah shook her head. “An old friend of your father’s dropped by,” she said. “Nora Bonesteel, her name was.”

  Robert Lee swallowed hard. Everyone in these parts knew about Nora Bonesteel. Were scared of her, too, the way she knew things. She went out of her way not to bring bad tidings, but it made folks uneasy, anyhow, wondering what it was she knew about them. “Did she say anything about Dad?” he whispered.

  “No. She knew that he had been taken ill. Well—let me take that back. She seemed to fear the worst. She brought us this box, and said that Daddy Stargill would want to be buried with it. Isn’t that extraordinary, Robert?”

  “I guess it is,” he said. “But Miz Bonesteel is an unusual sort of woman.” He was ashamed at the relief he felt. Far better for Daddy to die quickly now, without suffering, than to fight his way to a tenuous, helpless recovery, only to require constant nursing or to succumb weeks or months from now, forcing Robert to take off from work all over again.

  “I recognized her, of course,” said Lilah, with a complacent smile. “She was that dark-haired beauty that your father used to run around with before the War. There are pictures in the family album, though why Clarsie let them stay there is more than I can guess.”

  “That was a long time ago, honey,” said Robert, patting her shoulder.

  “Well, that’s what Rudy said. I was working my way up to telling her that Daddy Stargill’s illness was a family matter, and that she wasn’t family, when Rudy said, just as plain in my head, he said: ‘Lilah Rose, you got no call to go sticking your damned nose into what went on before you were born and doesn’t concern you now.’”

  Robert shifted uneasily. “Damned? He said that?”

  “He did,” said Lilah, nodding emphatically. “He’s a dirty-talking angel, sometimes, when he’s worked up.”

  “And Nora Bonesteel left this box to be buried with Daddy. That’s strange, all right. I don’t ever remember them so much as passing the time of day together at church even.”

  “No. Your father did his courting when he was young, and when that was over, he had nothing left to say to women in general,” said Lilah. Her conversations with her father-in-law had been perfunctory and few.

  Robert sat down beside his wife, and took the polished box out of her lap. “It’s heavy enough. Good workmanship. What’s in it? Love letters?”

  “That’s what we all thought,” said Lilah. “Open it.”

  Robert started to lift the lid, but he was distracted by the rest of the family, who came trailing into the room. Debba was still making snuffling noises, and hanging on to Garrett’s arm, and Kelley, still whey-faced, murmured that she had to check on Kayla, and fled.

  “Get on with it!” said Garrett. He and Charles came behind the sofa so that they could look over their brother’s shoulder as he opened the box. Robert Lee took a deep breath—Nora Bonesteel!—and flung back the lid.

  His first irrational thought as he glimpsed the contents was that someone had packed away a collection of ivory carvings, but an instant later he realized that he was seeing bones. Small, delicate bones. They were yellowed with age, with a root growing through a crack in one long bone, and the tips of some of them were pocked with tooth marks, but the bones were as clean as if they had been newly washed before being set in the box. The eggshell skull rested beside them on a knitted blanket. Robert Lee heard Charles Martin gasp, and even Clayt had been shocked into silence.

  “It’s human,” said Robert Lee, poking at the skull with his forefinger, and hoping that when he lifted it, he would find the elongated facial structure of a fawn, but no. It was a human skull, tiny and perfect, with fine seams crisscrossing the cranium, and it bore the small opening at the crown of the head that gradually closes as a child grows into adulthood. This one would never close.

  Across the room, Debba swallowed a sob, and buried her face in the upholstery of the red chair. “Take it easy!” said Garrett, but he looked more exasperated than concerned. He leaned forward for a closer look.

  “Isn’t it sad?” said Lilah, as calmly as ever. “I suppose she wants the baby to be buried with its father.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Robert. “My father and Miz Bonesteel never—never married.”

  “No, Robert. But that wouldn’t have prevented their having a child together. Perhaps the baby died at birth, and she has kept it all these years. She never married, did she?”

  Garrett picked up the skull, and, holding it inches from his nose, he peered at it. “This is no baby,” he said at last. “I mean, I’m no expert, but—without going into any details here—I’ve seen some skulls in my time, and this one is too big to be an infant. I’d say this is a young child—five or six, maybe.”

  Robert looked puzzled. “Nora Bonesteel never had a child. Certainly never one that lived to be five or six. That’s a secret that you couldn’t keep in a small community.”

  “Well, who is it then?” asked Lilah. “If it’s not their child, why else would she want it buried with your daddy, Robert?”

  “How do you reckon it died?” asked Clayt.

  Robert looked down at the little pile of bones in the box on his lap. “I don’t know. I think we ought to take them to the sheriff, and see what he can make of them. Miz Bonesteel didn’t tell you what was in the box, or explain why she brought it?”

  Lilah shook her head. “She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  In the kitchen the telephone rang. Clayt hurried out of the room, motioning for everyone else to stay put.

  “If the woman offered no explanation, we should consult the sheriff, for sure,” said Garrett. “This isn’t something we need to be worrying about, what with everything else going on right now.”

  “Should we phone the sheriff?” asked Charles Martin. He had been staring at the bones in an abstracted way, and his fingers were making chords on the sofa.

  “Clayt’s still on the phone,” Lilah pointed out.

  Garrett shrugged. “Might as well take them to him. Save him a trip up here. It isn’t as if this were a crime scene. And we don’t know anything. I guess he’ll have to talk to Nora Bonesteel.”

  “Who’s going to take them in?” asked Robert Lee.

  Clayt came back in time to hear his brother’s question. “I’m dropping the wood off at the cabinet shop,” said Clayt. “And then I’d better go to the Stallard’s place. That was Dovey calling, upset, wouldn’t say why. I was going to offer to take the young-un with me, if you think Kelley wouldn’t mind.”

  Charles Martin shrugged. “Sure. Whatever. But you can’t be hauling her around with a skeleton in the car. Kelley wouldn’t care for that one bit.”

  Garrett looked over at his wife, and scowled. She was going to need an entire afternoon of tea and hand holding, and he didn’t want to do it. Let Lilah cope with her. She looked like the motherly type. He straightened up. “I’ll take the box into Hamelin. Sheriff’s department still in the same place, Clayt?”

  His brother nodded.

  “Like everything else in Hamelin,” said Garrett, grinning. “Nothing ever changes around here.”

  Charles Martin looked uneasy. “Listen, Garrett, could you tell the sheriff to keep quiet about this situation here? Ask him not to talk to reporters. I wouldn’t want this to get splashed all over the supermarket tabloids. You know: Country Singer Finds Skeleton in Family Closet. That kind of publicity would just make it tough on all of us.”

  Garrett’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll be sure and do that,” he said:

  Clayt looked at his watch. “Eleven o’clock. Guess I ought to
get going. Come help me load the wood into the truck.”

  Garrett picked up the box. “I’ll head out, too, then. Let’s go.”

  When they had left the room, Debba raised her tear-stained face, and looked at Lilah. “He’s mad at me again.”

  “Who? Garrett? Well, patience is not a virtue the army sets much store by, Debba.” She paused, and then decided to say it straight out. “Courage is.”

  Debba’s mouth tightened. “Garrett Stargill may not understand, but he knows.”

  Lilah shrugged. She knew by now not to meddle in other people’s troubles. She bent over a box of baby clothes, and began sorting tiny embroidered garments as thin and yellow as parchment. “That poor child in the box,” she murmured. “I wonder did she ever have nice things to wear.” She listened for Rudy’s rejoinder, but the only sound in the room was Debba Stargill’s sniffling.

  * * *

  Garrett stopped for a moment to look at his brothers’ vehicles, parked in a row beside his own ’95 Chevy Blazer. “What are you driving?” he said aloud. It was a standard greeting among the old men of east Tennessee. They said it when you turned up after a long absence. Not “How are you?” but “What are you driving?” Maybe it was the same question, he thought, looking from Charles Martin’s Lexus to Clayt’s battered seventies four-wheel drive. He supposed that his Blazer answered the question about himself truthfully enough: he had a good job, and he didn’t care for the pretense of fancy cars.

  He backed out of the driveway, and headed down the hill toward town. The carved box rattled on the floor of the passenger side, and Garrett glanced down at it, hoping it wouldn’t tip over. He had seen enough dead bodies, one way and another, not to be panicked by them, but the sight of a child’s bones saddened him. He wondered if it was an Indian baby, plundered from an ancient burial ground. He knew his father had been a digger of arrowheads in his youth. Perhaps he had stumbled upon this find somewhere in his rambling. No other explanation made sense. They were the Stargills, not the outlaw Sorleys or the white trash Harkryders. There was no violence in the family as far back as anybody could remember. Only Dwayne’s drunken escapades had ever cost the family a legal fee.

  Garrett tried to concentrate on the road, remembering other trips down the mountain, riding like a hound in the back of Daddy’s old pickup with Charles Martin and Dwayne, or racing his first car down the mountain, taking care not to ride the brakes, because he couldn’t afford new ones. He was a cautious driver now. He was older; he and death were better acquainted; and Debba had cried until all the joy of bravado had left him, even when she wasn’t in the passenger seat to reproach him for his recklessness.

  He thought he would go to the hospital after he finished his business at the sheriff’s office. He’d like some time alone with the old man. The thought of a deathbed crowd scene made him squirm. He wished he had put aside some time for his father while they still could have talked. They had never compared war stories, for one thing.

  Randall Stargill had two funny stories about World War II, one involving a pet bulldog he’d had on base in England, and one about the time the people in the pub thought that his buddy Schlintz was a German agent, because he talked so funny. Schlintz was from Alabama. If heroic things, or tragic things, had happened to Lieutenant Stargill during the war, he had kept it to himself for the next half century. Garrett was the same way. He preferred not to talk about his missions, but if somebody outside the unit pressed him for details, he would trot out a carefully edited story, just dull enough to discourage further questions about his work.

  Garrett wished he had talked to his father about his own battles, frankly and without censoring out the fear and the intensity of combat. Did you have a hard-on when you when into battle, too, Dad? He could not imagine saying such a thing to the laconic old man. But no matter how drunk he’d have had to get, he would have told it all, and insisted on a response in kind. They could have met on common ground then, and accepted each other as men, as fellow soldiers. As it was, Garrett knew that to his father he was still a wet-eared adolescent, and to him, Randall Stargill was a man he barely knew. The opportunity to change that was lost. He wished that it could be otherwise.

  * * *

  Randall Stargill lay alone in his hospital room, undisturbed by staff or visitors, oblivious to his surroundings, drifting. Still and silent in sweat-soaked sheets, he was trying to reach the coast of England, straining for a glimpse of green fields beyond the ragged gray of the cliffs in mist. It was the spring of 1944, on his eighth and last bombing mission in the B-17 nicknamed “The Pistol-Packing Mama” by the mountain boys who flew her. The Judy Canova hit tune about a gun-toting hellion had been a great favorite with the pilot, a West Virginian who fancied himself a tenor. They had decorated the side of the cockpit with a Varga-style portrait of a bosomy cowgirl with a six-gun in each hand, an American Valkyrie leading honky-tonk warriors into battle. Randall could remember each line of that painted lady’s face, better than most of those he had seen since.

  The raid had been uneventful until they were flying back through Holland. As they passed too near a German E-boat base at Ymuiden, the German ground troops opened fire with a battery of 20mm guns. The Mama took a hit in its number two engine, but they flew on over a green and gray patchwork of sea and clouds, counting themselves lucky that no real damage had been done to the plane. They sang “On Top of Old Smokey” on the flight back to England, and Randall called everyone over to look down at the wreath of clouds below them, saying how it put him in mind of looking down at the valley from the cemetery ridge on the Stargill farm back in Tennessee. “I was up there with my girl oncet,” he was saying, “and telling her how I was saving up for a plane ride—”

  They were laughing so hard at this that it took a moment for Thompson’s shouts to be heard. The second engine was on fire. The oil pressure had dropped to zero. They had been hit. The pilot feathered the propeller. They activated the fire extinguisher, but the blaze stayed strong, making clouds of its own in the mist.

  Randall felt the plane lose altitude. The engines stopped, and his throat closed on bile as he waited for the crash, but just then the props began to turn again, and the landing gear dropped. He’s trying to blow out the flames, Randall thought.

  It didn’t work. Now the other crew members were running past him, scrambling for their parachutes, heading for the open bomb bay. “Bail out! She’s going to explode!” It was the last thing he’d heard the captain say.

  They were six hundred feet above the waves when Randall and—was it Schlintz?—dropped through the forward escape hatch. Six hundred feet—just enough distance for the static line chutes to open. The ones who left by the bomb bay only seconds later weren’t so lucky. Randall had just pawed his way out from under the floating parachute when he saw the wing explode as the pilot tried for a water landing. The B-17 spun to the right, cartwheeled, and plunged into the sea. Randall never saw the captain again.

  A PBY Catalina seaplane fished three of them out of the water alive. Randall had some broken bones, but he would make it. The other guy was unconscious, but they managed to hold him up until help came. Thompson died in the rescue plane, and the bodies of the others were recovered later from the Channel, or from an English beach.

  Randall never told his sons about that day. He never told anyone how, when he was floating in that water, he kept seeing Nora Bonesteel’s face that morning up on the ridge above the farm, remembering the sad look she got when he told her how much he wanted to fly. He wrote her a letter from the hospital, breaking off their engagement, and not long after that he got some leave, went home, and married plain, serious, little Clarsie Hollister. He made sure his cane wouldn’t show in the wedding pictures. He didn’t see Nora Bonesteel then or later, but sometimes he dreamed about her. He’d see her standing beside that open bomb bay, tears streaming down her face, and he’d scream at her, “Why didn’t you warn them?” Then he would wake up, cold and shaking, and lie there dry-eyed until morning.


  * * *

  Clayt Stargill had taken the rosewood planks to Hamelin’s cabinetmaker to be planed. They would be ready late tomorrow, Dalton Wheeler promised him. “H’its hard wood to work,” the old man said. “Right nice when you finish, but you’uns will want to be careful how you nail it, because it would as soon split as look at you. So don’t go trying to rush the job now.”

  Clayt promised to pass along the warning to his brothers. Kayla had come with him on the drive to Hamelin, saying little along the way, and standing well back from the machinery in Wheeler’s workshop, a blond shadow who watched everything, without attracting any attention to herself. She was a child who knew how to make grown-ups forget she was there, he thought, and he wondered if behaving that way was her idea or a lesson she had learned in the course of her short, hard life.

  “You want some ice cream?” he asked her, as they headed back toward the highway.

  Kayla shrugged. “Sure. If it’s no trouble. I like chocolate.”

  Clayt smiled at her. “Women mostly do,” he said. He swung into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, and took her in for a large dip-cone and a fistful of napkins to protect the seat covers.

  “I don’t usually spill stuff,” she told him. “Not that I eat in cars all that much.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t,” said Clayt, thinking of his brother’s silver Lexus. “So what do you like to do, besides watch television?”

  Kayla shrugged. “Coloring books. Swim. I can’t read much yet.”

  “Do you like animals?”

  “Mama says I can’t have a dog. They’re too messy.”

  “You don’t have to own something to like it,” said Clayt. “Look at that bird on the telephone pole over there. See him? The gray one?” Kayla leaned in the direction he pointed, and nodded. “That’s a mockingbird. State bird of Tennessee. They put his picture on road signs.”

  “What are the little fat ones that just flew over the car?”

  “Snowbirds,” said Clayt without looking. He had noted them as they went past, as methodically as he catalogued every facet of nature in his mind, but he hadn’t thought them interesting enough to mention.