Miss Julia Rocks the Cradle (24 page)

“You sure can,” Etta Mae said. “You can feed one of them while I do the other one. Hazel Marie just washed her hair and she’s dripping all over the place. We thought they’d sleep a little longer, but no such luck.”

I followed her into the bedroom where she indicated the upholstered rocking chair. “Sit there, Miss Julia, and I’ll give you one. Hazel Marie, go ahead and dry your hair, we’ll take care of them.” And before I knew it, I was given a very unhappy little girl.

“Here’s the bottle,” Etta Mae said. “Just put the nipple next to her mouth and she’ll take it.”

And did she ever! “This child acts like she’s starved,” I said, wondering at the intensity and strength of a pair of little working jaws.

Hazel Marie sat on the side of the bed, toweling her hair, and watched us. “I think the hair dryer woke them up, but they’ll have to get used to that—I use it so much.” She laughed, but I noticed that she kept her eye on me. And rightly so because I was feeding an infant for the first time in my life.

Hazel Marie let the towel drop as a dreamy expression crossed her face. “I can hardly wait for them to get a little older. I’m going to have so much fun fixing their hair and dressing them. I wish I knew how to smock, I’d make them little matching dresses and embroider some teddy bears or something across the smocking.”

“You’re already fixing their hair,” Etta Mae said, holding up two tiny pink ribbons. “Miss Julia, you should’ve seen these bows in their hair. We’ll put them back in, but they slide right back out when the babies start wiggling around.”

After a while, I became accustomed to holding and feeding the baby and was able to relax and let the child eat without staring at her. Etta Mae sat across from me with the other baby, who took to the bottle with loud gulps, working away at it as if it were the last meal on earth.

“Pastor Ledbetter called a little while ago,” I said, venturing a conversation while having the responsibility of such an important task as feeding a baby. “He’s having services for Richard Stroud this afternoon, and he’s afraid Helen will feel forsaken if no one comes. So he asked me to be there. And I’m just not sure I’m up to it.”

“Why would she feel forsaken?” Hazel Marie asked, stopping to look out at me through strands of drying hair. “I thought she divorced him.”

“I thought she had too,” I said, moving my baby-holding arm the least little bit to avoid a cramp. “But apparently he, I mean the pastor, not Richard, talked her out of it at the last minute.”

Etta Mae chimed in. “Preachers are always trying to talk somebody into or out of something.”

“Well, it’d be the nice thing to do, I guess,” Hazel Marie said. “To go, I mean, for Helen’s sake. But I can’t imagine the church will fill up, not for an ex-convict, anyway.”

“I think they know that, because it’s a graveside service,” I said.

“Oh my goodness,” Etta Mae said. “I bet that means they’re burying just his cremains.”

“Cremains?” Hazel Marie asked. “What’s that?”

“His ashes,” Etta Mae told her. “What’s left after being cremated.”

“Yuck, as Lloyd says,” Hazel Marie said. “I wouldn’t want to be cremated, would you?”

“I doubt you’d know it at the time,” I said.

“Well, but still,” Hazel Marie responded, scrunching up her shoulders, “the thought of it makes me shiver. I’m going to write that down somewhere: don’t cremate me. And, Miss Julia, don’t let J.D. do that to me. I want to rise up on the last day all put together, not scattered to the four winds.”

“I expect,” I said, somewhat dryly, “that the Lord is able to manage whatever is called for. But I admit I feel pretty much the same way. I’d prefer a burial rather than a cremation, and come to think of it, I’d better write that down too in case Sam has other ideas.” If he was even around at the time, I thought but didn’t say. A shiver ran across my own shoulders.

“Well,” Etta Mae pronounced, “I know a lot of people who’ve had their loved ones cremated, then gotten them back again.”

“How in the world?” Hazel Marie asked as she started combing through her still-damp hair.

“Well, see,” Etta Mae said, “there’s this company that’ll take the loved one’s cremains and make a diamond out of it and put it in a ring or a pendant or whatever you want. So you can have your loved one always with you.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” I said, as Hazel Marie’s mouth gaped open. “Etta Mae, is this baby all right? Her face is so red and she’s sweating all through her hair.”

Etta Mae laughed. “She’s fine. They get hot and sweaty when they’re nursing. Takes a lot of energy, I guess. But I’m telling the truth. About this company, I mean. It’s called something like Forever Together Gems. They take the ashes, which are mostly carbon, just like diamonds, and put them under a lot of pressure and out pops a diamond. The only thing I can’t figure out is how they can make the different colors. Or maybe,” she said, musingly, “the colors depend on what kind of ashes they are. I mean, maybe men have a different color than women do, or children are different from adults. I don’t know. I do know, though, that you can get blue, red, yellow, and colorless diamonds, so maybe they just add dye.”

“Etta Mae,” Hazel Marie said, “you’re making that up.”

“No, I’m not. I had a patient one time—Mr. Buck Hanson—and he had two diamond rings made from his first and second wives. Wore one on each hand. His first wife was the red diamond and his second was the yellow, but I never did ask him how he’d gotten those colors—whether that’s just the way they turned out or whether he’d had a choice. If he did, maybe he picked them because of their temperaments. His third wife wasn’t too happy about them because she said his two ring fingers were all taken up and she didn’t want to be a pinkie ring.”

“You
are
making that up!” Hazel Marie said, and I was inclined to agree with her, although it was awfully entertaining in spite of the subject matter.

Etta Mae giggled. “I’m not, I promise you. And as it turned out, Mr. Hanson died before his third wife did. I ran into her on the street one day and she was wearing what looked like a big sparkly diamond on a chain, you know, like a pendant? And I’ll just bet you that was Mr. Hanson himself, hanging around her neck.”

“Well,” Hazel Marie said, looking off in the distance as she cogitated about it, “I guess I wouldn’t mind being cremated if J.D. wanted to make a diamond out of me. But if he does, he better wear me and not leave me in a jewelry box somewhere.”

“Oh for goodness sakes, you two,” I said, “let’s get off this morbid subject. Etta Mae, I think this child’s had enough.” The baby was slack in my arms, sound asleep, the nipple loosened from that strong vacuum as milk drooled from her mouth.

Etta Mae showed me how to hold the baby on my shoulder and pat her back, which I did until air bubbles erupted with a loud clap and spit-up flowed down my back. Eau de baby, Etta Mae called it.

I went to the Stroud funeral, or rather, the graveside service, hating every minute of it because I felt hypocritical appearing to honor a man who’d stolen from me left and right. Of course, few knew how he’d about picked me clean because I’d hidden the fact that I’d invested with him, and I hadn’t had time to tell anybody about the stolen checks.

But having good manners means doing the right thing even when you don’t want to. I do my best to do what is correct in all circumstances, although the Lord knows, sometimes it almost kills me to do it. Take standing around in cold, blustery weather waiting to inter a man for whom I had not the slightest bit of respect. But services for the dead, as this Presbyterian understands them, are really for the comfort of the living—in this case, Helen, although I wondered at how much comfort she actually needed—and not for the glorification of the one who’s passed on.

And to be perfectly honest, I thought that Sam would be there. We could’ve at least stood together and maybe he would’ve reached for my hand. Instead, I was one of only eight or nine others gazing down at the casket resting on straps over an open grave, listening to Pastor Ledbetter read from the Scriptures. Most of the mourners were men who, most likely, had had business dealings with Richard. I recognized two bank vice presidents who probably were there to make sure they couldn’t sue him for unpaid loans. And of course there was old man Randall, who never passed up a funeral whether he knew the deceased or not. I’d once heard him say that he’d lived so long he knew everybody in town even if he couldn’t remember who they were. He never missed a postfuneral reception either, making full use of the buffet table.

Then there was Stuart Hardin, a local restaurant owner, who may or may not have known Richard but who made it a practice to attend any community gathering, usually holding forth vigorously on some issue he was interested in. I squinted as I tried to read what was on the big round pin on the lapel of his overcoat, but he was across the grave from me and it was hard to see. But when Stuart adjusted his position, stepping closer to the gaping hole, I silently gasped. The man was running for county commissioner, and even though it was months before the primary, there he was, sporting a campaign pin advertising himself. Of all the tasteless things I’d ever seen, using a funeral service as a campaign event was among the worst. If I were Helen, I’d snub him good.

Holding my coat together against a cold blast of wind, I glanced at Helen, not wanting to stare at her. She was dressed fittingly in black but was dry-eyed and without expression so that I couldn’t help but wonder what she was thinking and feeling. Maybe she’d loved Richard deeply—after all, they’d been a couple for years and seemingly had been content and well suited. It had only been Richard’s fairly recent foray into investments and developments that had started him on his downhill slide.

Actually, I figured that any grief Helen had experienced had come when Richard was in the process of sliding, not now when he’d finally hit bottom. The shame and humiliation he’d heaped on her head must have been worse for her than losing him entirely.

All unbidden, a line from something I’d read or heard suddenly flitted through my mind:
I’m glad you’re gone, you rascal, you,
and I had to stifle myself.

Funny, isn’t it? How in the most somber and inopportune of circumstances, the mind will play such a trick on you. I had to think of Sam and the pain in my heart to keep myself from laughing out loud.

The service was short, as it was designed to be, and no one, other than the pastor, was given the opportunity to say a few words. I declare, I’ve been to funerals that went on and on as one person after another praised and eulogized the deceased until he was unrecognizable. I’ve even on occasion wondered if I’d gotten the time wrong and ended up at the wrong funeral.

I well remember just such an amazing two-hour lovefest, during which the deceased had been praised to the skies for his humility, his commitment to the Lord, his kindness, honesty, compassion, and generosity to Christian causes, specifically those operated by the eulogizers. I’d walked out of the church behind the man’s sister and heard her whisper to her husband, “I wish I’d known the man they were talking about.”

That was the saddest commentary on a life I’d ever heard. When you treat others better than the ones closest to you, something is wrong with your priorities.

When the pastor finished the last prayer, he walked over to Helen and took her hand, murmuring a few comforting words. The rest of us swayed from foot to foot, eager to leave but waiting for a signal of some kind. It came when Helen turned away, head lowered, and walked toward the funeral home’s limousine. Ordinarily, family members would linger to receive condolences, hugs, and shoulder pats from those attending the service, but understandably Helen wanted to leave. As she passed, she caught my eye and nodded an acknowledgement of my presence. I think she appreciated it, because not another single, solitary person in our social circle had come.

As I trudged down the hill toward my car, avoiding tombstones and grave sites, it struck me that Richard had probably perpetrated his investment schemes on every one of our friends. That was why none of them had shown up. And in a way, it made me feel less foolish for having invested with him myself.