Before I Saw You

by Amy Sorrells

  “We’ll see about that,” Gabe says.

  “The raccoons are on straight cat food now,” I say. “Don’t forget about them.”

  “How many raccoons?”

  Shawnie’s visible trepidation makes us all laugh this time.

  “A half a dozen. They’re babies. Don’t worry. They’re cute.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she says, crossing her arms. “Nothing else, is there? No snakes? I don’t do snakes.”

  “No. That’s it, besides the bat.”

  “Let’s get you home,” Gabe says, taking my hand again.

  “Wait. There’s something I have to get.”

  I find it beside the sink, the green bottle. The dandelions are still fresh in the top of it. She must’ve picked them just yesterday.

  We say good-bye to Shawnie and Tim, then walk slow back to my place. The rain has stopped, the clouds thinning except for a few wispy low gray ones that float fast over our heads. Over the meadow, there’s a break where streams of sunlight angle to the ground.

  “I always think that’s heaven coming down when I see the sun breaking through the clouds like that. . . . What’s that hymn?” I start humming, and Gabe recognizes it, starts singing the words.

  “Swing low, sweet chariot . . .”

  “Coming for to carry me home . . .” I smile and the tears come flooding out again. “That was one of her favorites. She loved the old songs. The old hymns.”

  Gabe sets his arm around my waist to steady me, our steps in sync as we walk up my drive. “She loved you, Jaycee.”

  “I know.” I wipe my face. Gabe follows me inside the trailer.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I think I’ve been crying all day.”

  “No pains though, right?”

  “No. No pains. I just hurt here.” I put my hand over my chest.

  Inside the trailer, he makes sure I force down a sandwich, along with an apple he slices up for me. When I finish that he scoops me up in his arms, big belly and all, and sets me gently on the couch. “There. You stay put. I’ll stay as long as you need.”

  “What about the flooding? Don’t they need you at the station?”

  “I told Chief what happened, how you’re on bed rest. He told me to go on and take as long as I need.”

  “Thank you.”

  He smiles, fluffs the pillows behind me, and picks up my feet, arranging them on the couch.

  “I’m so tired, Gabe.”

  “I know. I’m not going anywhere. Try and get some sleep.”

  “You don’t have to stay,” I say, not wanting to be a burden, but at the same time knowing if he leaves I might fall apart.

  “I’m staying, Jaycee. That’s all there is to it. You just lost your best friend. Besides that, somebody needs to make sure you stay put on this couch.”

  His eyes are filled with so much kindness, tired or not, I can’t argue with him. All I can do is nod.

  Gabe grabs the TV remote with his free hand and flips through the channels until he settles on a show about fixing up homes, and despite Sudie’s passing, I fall into a deep and dreamless sleep. When morning comes, he is still here, watching as I wake up.

  31

  * * *

  The next few days are a blur.

  Sudie doesn’t have any living relatives. At least she picked out her own casket and paid for a burial plot back when her husband, Ernest, passed, so the only decision I have to make is what clothes to give the undertakers. That isn’t too hard. Sudie was not a fussy woman, except for her unwavering insistence on wearing a dress to church. I choose a navy-blue one with a starched white collar, the one I remember her wearing to the wedding of one of Shawnie and Tim’s children a few years back.

  It is when I’m in her room choosing that dress that I dare to look in her curio cabinet.

  The veil between life and death feels thin when rummaging through a dead person’s private things. I shiver when I pull open the bottom drawer. The smell of must and age is strong as I search out a pair of clean pantyhose. I can’t imagine putting pantyhose on a dead person, since putting them on when you’re alive is hard enough, but I am certain Sudie would insist on wearing them. I hold them up and stretch them out to make sure they don’t have any runs in them. Sudie put up with a lot, but never a run in her hose.

  Next drawer up are all her skivvies. I can’t say for certain whether she’d care about wearing these, but a clean pair’s got to be better than the ones she’s got on now.

  The drawer above that holds a few old scarves and socks, and above that, costume jewelry, thick Bakelite necklaces and bangles, the kind people wore in the seventies.

  I smile. Sudie had style.

  The very top of the cabinet lifts up, and inside is an indigo velvet-lined and sectioned space with rings and earrings and more delicate necklaces, including three lockets, each containing a lock of hair.

  Mary, John, and Samuel. The only evidence I’ve ever seen of their sweet lives.

  I take them out and set them on top of the pile for the funeral home. She would want these to go with her.

  I’m about to close the top when I see her strand of pearls.

  I remember the first time Sudie had me help her fasten them before church.

  “You know the story about the pearl in the Bible, don’t you, Jaycee?” she asked as I fitted the clasp together at the back of her neck, her thick hair pulled up and pinned into her trademark braided bun.

  “No.”

  The pearls shimmered in the morning sunlight streaming through her window, each one perfect and round and with a hint of pink. I watched her adjust the strand around her neck. Her dress was the color of lilacs with tiny little pleats all around the skirt that made it swish when she walked, and thick black shoes with a strap that buckled across the top. My own shoes were the sneakers I wore every day, the same ones with the plastic edges cracked and peeling back in places.

  Even then Sudie had animals, and she had feedings to do before we left. She lifted one of three abandoned fledgling sparrows from its makeshift nest of shredded rags and tenderly began to feed it. “Well, then, let me tell you.” The sparrow opened its mouth and nearly inhaled the mixture, which she had to feed them every couple of hours. “There was a man. He was a merchant, and he sailed his ship all over the world looking for pearls to buy and sell. He’d seen plenty of pearls, thousands and thousands, and so none of them really impressed him anymore. But one day, while he was at the pearl market, he found one that stood out from the rest of them. He couldn’t believe no one else had claimed it, it was so much more beautiful than the rest. So, you know what he did?”

  I shook my head.

  “He went and sold all he had just so he could buy that precious pearl.” She ran her finger across the sparrow’s fuzzy head and placed it back in the nest.

  “That’s how much God loves us, child.”

  I imagine Sudie and Ernest, young and in love, out to dinner on Main Street, maybe. Strolling hand in hand by a jewelry store, Sudie eyeing the pearls, him saving up for the pearls, giving them to her for Christmas, or maybe their anniversary.

  I put them in the bag of things for the funeral home.

  At the cemetery, the begonias and coleus and petunias have grown thick and strong from all the rain, and the leaves of the locust trees have all come out. Slowly folks gather around the grave site and the casket, set precariously on top of the lowering device over the four-by-five black hole in the earth. Inches of soil are the only thing separating her and Ernest and those babies now, and as heartbroken as I am, I can feel the rightness of that. Even Jack, sitting on his rain-soaked haunches alongside the gravestone, seems to sense the victory in this.

  The fields around the cemetery are overflowing with bright-yellow ragwort stretched out to the horizon, and I imagine them as streets of gold. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the Lord, about what happens between the last breath and when he raises us up out of the grave. But I know t
hat times like these, when the ragwort is in all its splendor as if it wants to celebrate Sudie’s homecoming too, are when the veil thins and he gives us a glimpse into the great mystery so we can know, as much as it’s possible to know, that the grave is not a cold, black ending but a welcoming place to finally find rest from the hard things of this life.

  Several rows over, a woman kneels on one of the fresh graves of the young people who died from the bad heroin. She doesn’t seem to care that her knees are sunk deep into the thick, soft mud. I wonder if the veil ever thins for her.

  My rubber boots sink into the waterlogged green grass. Setting chairs out here was not an option because of all the rain, so I was careful to keep my feet up as long as I could at home to ward off any contractions that might be tempted to come with having to stand here this afternoon.

  Gabe is on one side of me, Carla and her husband on the other, and it seems like the whole church is here to see Sudie off, except, thank goodness, for the Blairs. Jim Thompson and Ike Walsh stand stoic at the head of the casket. Reverend Payne is dressed in full robes and holds his weathered Bible in both hands. Veda and Trina ordered the finest spray of flowers for the top of the casket—lavender roses and larkspur, lilacs, lilies, and freesia—and they have tea and finger foods waiting for everyone back at the church. Shawnie and Tim are here, along with several other neighbors, including a surprisingly sober Dewey Johnson dressed in an ill-fitting suit with Virginia standing next to him, her hand curled around his elbow.

  Reverend Payne clears his throat, and the hushed voices still. A lone tractor hums low in a distant field. Red-winged blackbirds trill from their perches along the fencerow, and two mourning doves trade calls. Over my shoulder I hear the footsteps of a latecomer, and when I turn I see it’s Walter Crawford and he’s looking straight at me.

  Those court papers.

  Lord, help me.

  “‘God places the lonely in families,’” Reverend Payne reads, the Bible splayed out in his hands. “‘He sets the prisoners free and gives them joy.’ Psalm 68:6. The word of our Lord.”

  He scans the small crowd of us, taking the time to look at each face. “I picked that verse because some might say Sudie was alone, and the four graves around her would confirm that observation—were it not for each of you, and were it not for the fact that the Lord demonstrated this promise of placing the lonely into families in Sudie’s life. I remember well the days we buried her children, her husband. They were dark and difficult days. I’m really not sure I’ve had any as difficult as that.” He pauses, his chin trembling. “But seeing how the Lord surrounded her, placed her in a new family, the family of this church . . . Well, I can tell you that is indeed what set her free and gave her the joy we all knew her to have.”

  A mumbling of amens rolls across the group, and the reverend goes on to talk all about how much Sudie loved her church family, how much she loved the family of critters she cared for and restored, how much she loved the land and the seasons.

  “God places the lonely in families.”

  The baby kicks inside me.

  “He sets the prisoners free.”

  My mind wanders away from this spot, away from the feeling of Walter Crawford’s eyes staring at the back of my head, and to the far corner of the cemetery. I can just see the edge of Jayden’s headstone.

  The day we buried him, Sudie and Shorty dug the grave themselves. The sky had been clear, a brief morning rain washing away the hot and sticky summer air. We’d marveled at a swirl of wind that passed over us, whipping up a mess of leaves that seemed to hover around the site. Jack had jumped and growled, barked and mouthed at the tiny twister as if it were playing with him, and he was playing with it. The veil lifted for me in that moment, and while some might argue it’s not biblical to think such things, I know it was God’s way of letting me know Jayden was free and running with joy on streets of gold, even right here in this cemetery playing with old Jack, and that I was not alone, either.

  You’re not alone now, he says to me. I place everyone right where they need to be.

  But where does this baby need to be, Lord?

  I’m jolted from my thoughts and prayer by Reverend Payne saying my name.

  “If there’s anyone Sudie cared about, it’s Jaycee here, who was like a daughter to her. And her good friend Walter.”

  Walter Crawford? I think back at the times I’ve seen them talking at church. That day I saw him driving out of the cemetery. I figured the pink in her cheeks was on account of her being hot, but maybe not.

  Sudie, you sly girl. I grin until I remember those custody papers sitting in my living room. But wait . . . if they were such good friends, what had she known about those? What if he was using Sudie to build a case . . . ? But that’s ridiculous. Isn’t it?

  “Thank you both for your friendship with Sudie.”

  I nod and feel my face heating red. I am sure Walter is staring at my head even harder. Thank goodness Gabe takes my hand.

  “In the last few weeks, Sudie didn’t feel well, and I think perhaps she knew this day was coming. She and I talked more and more frequently about how she couldn’t wait to see her husband and her children. But all that was secondary to her anticipation of meeting our Lord.”

  More mmm-hmms and amens, and across the way, I see Hersch. The corner of his mouth turns up so slightly someone else might have missed it, and he nods at me. Carla slides her arm around my waist and gives me a squeeze.

  “There’s just one hymn Sudie asked that we sing. Ida, would you be kind enough to start us off?”

  Ida looks slightly lost without the security of her big organ, but she gives the pitches and begins:

  “Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?”

  The rest of us join in, tentative and unsure of ourselves and the raggedy-ness of our meager voices in the big open space around us.

  “Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heav’n and home,

  When Jesus is my portion? My constant friend is he:

  His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me;

  His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.”

  As the machine lowers Sudie’s casket into the ground, Reverend Payne reads from Revelation, the chapter at the end where it says God wipes away all our tears, that death is no more, that we won’t have to mourn or cry or hurt anymore when we get to heaven.

  Maybe Sudie kept that green bottle—the one I set by my sink and put a stem off a lilac bush in before I left this morning—to remember this promise, too. Not just to collect her tears, but to know someday she wouldn’t have any more.

  A hawk circles overhead, soaring on the breeze without even bending its wings as we file past the edge of Sudie’s grave, tossing in rose petals distributed to us by Trina Bishop. Little Clifty Creek shimmers gold on the far horizon, and I realize living life with arms and a heart wide open is a choice, that accepting the Lord’s grace and trusting him is a risk worth taking because he is always watching over us, and that where we’ve come from isn’t near as important as knowing who we belong to.

  I am thinking on all this when Mr. Crawford approaches.

  “I know this isn’t the time or place,” he says, turning his felt hat in his hands, “but do you have a moment?”

  My heart feels like it’s beating in my throat.

  “What’s this about?” Carla says.

  “Custody papers,” I say, my voice barely a whisper. “The Blairs. Bryan. He sent me papers saying he’s going to file for custody.”

  “Is this true, Crawford?” Carla eyes him.

  “It’s true,” I say to her, then turn back to Mr. Crawford. “If you were Sudie’s friend, if you really cared about her, then you have to help me. Please. Don’t let the Blairs take my baby. Please, Mr. Crawford.” The heat of shame rushes through me as I realize how desperate I must sound.

  “Jaycee,” Gabe says softly.

  “Can they really do that?” Carla asks.

  “Unfortun
ately, they can.” Mr. Crawford turns to me and averts his eyes, turning his hat in his hands again before looking back up at me. “What I wanted to say is that Bryan’s mother was there.”

  “What?”

  He clears his throat. “When Mr. Blair came to see me, he came with his mother. It was obvious she was running the show, that he was reluctant.”

  “He couldn’t have been that reluctant. He went through with it.” I try to keep my voice down, but a couple of folks turn their heads as they walk by us toward their cars.

  “Sure he did,” Carla sneers. “He’s spineless. Especially around his parents.”

  Mr. Crawford edges closer to us. “There is a way,” he says quietly.

  “What? How? I can’t afford a lawyer of my own.” My stomach churns with feelings of helplessness.

  “If Bryan decided to give up his rights, that would make the other documents null and void.”

  “He’s not going to do that,” I say, my voice cracking. “There’s no way. Not now. Not with the way his mom is, keeping him on such a tight leash.”

  “Mr. Crawford, with all due respect, I’m not sure what you’re saying is very helpful,” Gabe says.

  “Gabe’s right,” Carla says. “It’s not right to get Jaycee’s hopes up about something that isn’t likely to happen.”

  “That’s not my intention.” Mr. Crawford reaches out and sets his hand kindly on my forearm. His pale-blue eyes, outlined by deep and upturned wrinkles, look deep into mine. “I’m not saying he will give up his rights. I don’t know the young man, other than what I saw when they came to my office. If Mrs. Blair hadn’t been there . . . I’m just saying, if he states he’s willing to give up his rights, that’s a way, God willing.”

  I nod and run my hand across my belly. “God willing,” I say, tears puddling in my eyes.

  Mr. Crawford says good-bye and heads toward his car, leaving me there with Gabe and Carla, and her husband by her side.