The Funeral Dress (11 page)

“You are absolutely sure you can handle this, hon?” Mr. Fulton asked.

Emmalee nodded.

“Okay then. When you get to the top of the mountain, go three miles to the fork. Then veer to the left.” Mr. Fulton set his coffee on the counter and picked up a pencil and worn envelope. He flipped it over and started drawing a map on the back as he spoke. “Go about another hundred yards. It’s the first drive on the left after that.” He drew a big star at the end of a thin line and handed Emmalee the paper. “Hey, while you’re up there, why don’t you see if there’s a suit for Mr. Lane. If not, we
got some of those here too. Got them in black and dark navy. You mind checking for me? Unless you got plans to sew him a suit while you’re at it.”

“No, sir.” Emmalee hugged Mr. Fulton, squeezing the baby between them. “I’ll get on out of here and let you be.” Kelly squirmed and began to whimper.

“Let me get a good look at this little girl. She’s been so quiet, almost forgot she was there.”

Mr. Fulton lowered the blanket from Kelly’s head.

“You’re a sweet thing. Yes, you are. Such a pretty girl.” Emmalee had never heard Nolan gush over the baby like this. “Look at that head of hair. Our babies were born bald as cucumbers. This one here’ll be asking for pigtails before long.” Mr. Fulton’s tone grew soft. “I really mean it, hon, you two doing all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Runt said he and Mettie offered to help with the baby. Said they came to the hospital to tell you that but Nolan ran them off.”

Emmalee covered Kelly Faye’s head with the blanket. “Nolan said they wanted to take her home. Keep her as their own.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Mr. Fulton said. “Runt didn’t get real specific, but I know how your daddy feels about charity of any kind. That’s why I’m telling you this in private. If you need anything, let me know. Nolan doesn’t need to know about it either.”

The baby’s fussing grew louder. Emmalee jostled Kelly Faye in her arms and rushed out the back door. The baby grew quiet in the cold morning air, and Emmalee pulled the blanket farther over Kelly Faye’s head.

“You keep that little thing covered up, Emmalee,” Mr. Fulton called after them. “You hear me? I don’t want her catching sick.”

Emmalee hurried down the paved drive. She settled the baby in the box in front of the pickup and pulled away from the funeral home. She headed straight for Old Lick, the strange smell of the mortuary lingering in her nose.

L
EONA

O
LD
L
ICK

1957

Leona never knew Curtis to worry about much of anything. His good nature had attracted her in the beginning. She called him solid and sweet back then. So when he stepped into the trailer with coal dust smeared on his face and a vacant look in his eyes, Leona understood it was bad news.

“The mine’s shut down,” Curtis told her straight out. Leona watched as her husband stood slumped against the kitchen counter, cradling a small savings book between his large, calloused hands. She closed her eyes but could feel Curtis staring at the dwindling numbers scribbled inside the tiny green book.

“Don’t go worrying, Ona,” he said and rubbed her pregnant belly. “I’ll find another job soon,” he added, pulling his wife into his arms.

Leona dropped her head against his chest. She heard
his heart beating, strong and steady. She had always hoped Curtis would find a better job someday, a safer job, one not thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. When they first married, she even dreamed of him joining the Teamsters Union and driving a big truck across the country. She watched him talking to the drivers who stopped to fill their tanks at the gas station near Kimball. She spied him admiring their shiny rigs, lolling around the pumps as the truckers chatted about destinations she could only imagine. Maybe, she thought then, she’d ride with him across the country, even dip her toes in the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean. But a baby was coming, and there was no time or money for dreams like that.

Curtis found work the following week in a poultry processing plant thirty miles south in Chattanooga. It was only temporary, he promised her, till he could find something better and closer to home even though businesses in town were shutting their doors, not looking to hire more men. But Curtis told Leona something was sure to come his way. The Lord would take care of them. At least for now, he came home every Friday evening with a paycheck in his pocket and a roasting hen wrapped in brown paper tucked underneath his arm.

Leona knew very little about her husband’s day. She really didn’t want to know more than his hourly rate. She saw him leave for work wearing clean pants and a clean shirt, and return home some twelve hours later wearing clothes stinking with the urine and feces dropped from nervous birds. He eased out of the pickup most days to find Leona waiting for him with a rag and a bottle of bleach.

“Wipe that seat down, Curtis, before you step another foot near this house,” she said, waving the rag in her hand. Curtis did as he was told, dousing the rag with the liquid that sometimes burned his hands. He’d walk toward Leona with his arms open wide, begging for a kiss. “Uh-huh, Curtis Lane, I mean it. Don’t you take one more step till you get out of those nasty clothes,” Leona warned him.

Curtis stripped down to his underwear right there in the yard. He teased Leona about her wanting to see his body bare and strummed his hand in front of his chest as if he was playing a guitar. Some nights he danced in the moonlight in nothing but his white underpants, singing a love song to his pregnant bride. He’d take her by the hand and spin her across their grassy ballroom floor. “There’s no need to worry,” he whispered in her ear, “this is only temporary.”

Then one cool June morning, Curtis left for work as he always did, a few minutes before six. He carried a cup of sugared coffee in one hand and an egg biscuit Leona had wrapped in a paper napkin in the other. He stopped to kiss Leona’s cheek before rushing down the porch steps. The early-summer sun already lightened the sky as he steered the pickup toward the main road cut across the top of the mountain, waving another good-bye out the truck’s open window.

It was nearly nine o’clock before Leona scrambled a couple eggs for herself and poured a full glass of milk. She wasn’t going to the factory these days. The doctor told her it was time to stop for a while. Rest up for the birth of the baby. This morning she sat on the sofa with
a breakfast plate balanced on the top of her tummy while she listened to the newscaster on Channel Nine yabber on about construction and roadblocks in downtown Chattanooga. She wasn’t feeling hungry but forced herself to eat another bite of egg. Curtis promised to bring her a bottle of ginger ale tonight, but she wished she had it now.

Leona slipped the breakfast dishes into the sink filled with soapy water and left them to soak. She noticed the kitchen floor needing mopping but walked back to the sofa instead. She woke tired today, and her back had been aching since yesterday evening. It was hurting worse this morning, but she hadn’t mentioned that to Curtis. There was nothing to be done about it anyway, and there was no money for another doctor’s visit. Besides, a cotton gown for the baby needed hemming, rows of strawberries needed picking, and jars of jam needed to be made. Once the baby arrived, there’d be no time for such chores.

Leona studied the empty crib shoved tight under the living room window and pictured herself patting the baby’s back as she sang a lullaby to soothe him. She leaned over the railing to smooth a flannel blanket already in place when a fierce, stabbing pain seized her back and radiated fast around her tummy. She gasped, struggling for her next breath.

“Oh God,” she cried out and gripped the crib’s railing. A stronger, fiercer pain moved swift around her tummy, and Leona fell to the floor. She took short breaths and pulled herself onto her hands and knees. She crawled to the trailer door and banged her head against it. “Help me. Curtis, come back.” She raised her body far enough
to open the door and then fell back on the floor. “Curtis,” she cried. “The baby.”

Leona crawled down the hall toward her bedroom, believing if she could lie down for a moment, this pain would surely pass. She wanted to scream, to release the hurt mounting in her belly, but Leona did not want to admit what was happening. Instead she called out for Curtis, but he never came.

She hugged a blue-ticked pillow, dug her fingers into its feathered mass. And when she could no longer bear the pain, she finally screamed for God to save her. As her body heaved with another contraction, Leona felt something wet seep between her legs. She looked down at her panties and the white sheets beneath her, both stained brown. The smell was foul, and her fear was ripe. She had no more strength for crying or calling out for help.

Her body grew hot and beads of sweat dripped from her nose. Then she grew cold, and her body shivered as if she had been left too long in the snow. She tugged on a blanket and slipped into a shallow sleep, only to be startled awake by another sharp pain brewing deep inside her belly. “Curtis,” she moaned. She repeated her husband’s name over and over, hoping he would sense her need. But sometime later that morning, Leona birthed her baby alone.

The boy came fast, too fast. His body was small and weak, and his cries sounded more like those of a new kitten than those of a newborn child. Leona pulled him on top of her belly and kept him warm against her body. She stroked his cheek and encouraged him to take her breast.
“Please baby, please. Look at your mama.” She hummed her plea in his ear. But the baby grew still.

She rubbed her finger, wet with her breast’s first milk, across her son’s lips, but he held his tiny mouth closed. She patted his bottom with a firm hand. She pulled on his chin and tickled his tongue, but he would not suckle. His breaths grew fainter and farther apart until she heard only quiet, sporadic gasps.

“Wake up, baby. Please wake up,” Leona cried till her voice sounded raspy and weak, but her little boy never opened his eyes. And by the time the sun fell behind Old Lick Mountain, the baby boy born on the first day of summer was dead.

Leona named her son Curtis Brown Lane, Jr., and held him in her arms, even as his skin grew cold and a deep shade of blue. She kissed his cheeks, washing his tiny face with her salty tears, and lightly stroking the tip of her finger along his back. Curtis came home that evening and found his wife unconscious in their bed, a bloody towel stuffed between her legs, and the baby lying limp across her chest.

“Where’s my boy,” Leona mumbled as Curtis carried her to the truck. “Where’s my baby boy?”

“Right here, Ona, right here,” Curtis said. He had wrapped their son in a flannel blanket and placed him on the seat of the truck. “He’s right here, Ona. He’s right here.”

Leona came home from the hospital two days later to find the crib sitting empty. She blamed herself for the baby’s death at first. Next she blamed God. Then she
blamed Curtis. If her husband had been on the mountain, he might have heard her cries. He might have felt her pain. He might have found her and the baby before it was too late.

Leona and Curtis stood side by side at the cemetery next to the Cullen Church of Christ and watched as their baby’s casket was lowered deep into the ground. Leona had refused to let Mr. or Mrs. Fulton dress her baby. Instead she slipped the pale blue cotton gown she had stitched by hand, the one with little white feathers along the hem, over his tiny head. She eased his arms into the sleeves and held him against her chest as she buttoned the three pearl-like buttons down the back of the gown.

Leona had insisted on embroidering Curtis’s name on the collar, afraid God might not recognize the little baby boy from Cullen, Tennessee. She tied a matching cap on his head and wrapped him in a knitted white blanket with a lacy edge. Easter had hurried to make the blanket so Leona would have something pretty for swaddling her baby for his eternal sleep.

Leona had insisted a family portrait be made before her infant son was placed in the casket for good. Mr. Fulton offered to take a picture with his camera, but Leona refused. So Curtis called the Olan Mills studio in Chattanooga and asked them to send a photographer to Cullen by the end of the day. He paid ten dollars extra for the photographer’s trip to Sequatchie County.

Leona knelt by her baby’s tombstone. She had insisted on this, too, that the marker be in place right away, with
her son’s name already engraved on it. She couldn’t stomach the thought of her little boy lost among the other dead buried there. Mr. Fulton had said it usually took several weeks for the final tombstone to arrive, and they would use a temporary marker instead. Curtis only pulled his wallet from his back pocket, insisting Mr. Fulton do whatever he could to rush the order along. “He’s just so little,” Leona said as she sunk closer to the ground. “He’s just so little.”

She stayed on her knees while the preacher promised the Lord never delivered more than one could bear. He spoke of Curtis, Jr., sitting happy on Jesus’s lap and loved by the family gone on. A short black veil covered Leona’s face, and the preacher could not see her sad, angry eyes.

“There’ll be more babies, Ona,” Curtis promised his wife, kneeling by her side, holding her hand tight in his.

Leona hated Curtis for saying that. She hated him for not crying. She hated him for not talking about this baby like he was their son, instead only speaking of the others to come.

There’ll be more
became a hollow refrain Leona heard too many times in the months after their baby’s death.
There’ll be more
. Somewhere in its singing, Leona no longer trusted the young man who had promised her a life better than the one she had known.

The preacher lifted his Bible toward the heavens. He held it above Leona as she rested on bended knee in the short grass carpeting the hillside. A thick ribbon of clouds streamed across the sky.

“Be with Leona and Curtis, dear Lord, as they carry on. Reassure them that their baby boy is safe, happy,
spared the difficulties and pain of this world,” the preacher said. “He is with our Lord and Savior.”