The Secret Sense of Wildflower (14 page)

Below us the house looks spooky. People are like shadows with pipes and cigarettes lighting up the dark hillside like fireflies.

“This is strange, your daddy dying like this,” Mary Jane says finally.

“Much more than strange,” I say. We let the silence gather around us. I can tell she is uncomfortable. But at the same time I am grateful she is making an effort. Even though we’ve been friends since we were in diapers, neither one of us have ever gone through anything like this before. If this had happened to Mary Jane’s father I wouldn’t know what to say to her, either.

“Everybody in Katy’s Ridge must be here,” she says.

“It looks like it,” I say.

Down the hill toward the house I see Jo washing dishes through the kitchen window. I feel guilty for not helping, but I am grateful to be here with my friend.

“Everybody liked him,” she says.

“Yeah, I think they did.”

Night noises surround us: crickets, toads, lizards and other small critters moving around in the fallen leaves. Do they mourn when one of their own dies?

“He was always helping people out,” she says, as if this is something I don’t know. “I liked him, too,” she says softly.

Mary Jane and I have never been this awkward together for a day in our lives.

“How’s your mother taking this?” she asks.

“Pretty good, I guess.”

We sit for a long time, not saying much of anything.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary Jane says. Then she buries her head in her dress and starts to bawl, complete with snot. I pat her back to comfort her. I have never seen Mary Jane cry like this, and I wish she’d just stop it. My father is laid out in the bedroom and the entire population of Katy’s Ridge is at our house, even the Monroes and the Sectors, and it is taking everything I have to hold myself together. The last thing I need is people falling apart right in front of me, especially my best friend.

To my relief, Mary Jane finally stops weeping and wipes a long, slimy trail of snot on the sleeve of her dress. But I guess her crying is better than ignoring me, like the other kids from our school. They act like I have a fatal disease they might catch if they get too close.

Later that night after everybody has eaten and paid their respects to our family, the house starts to empty out. I walk with Mary Jane and Victor to the bottom of the hill. Somebody has put lanterns every few feet along the path so that people can see how to get home. The new moon is no help tonight and the wind blows at the lanterns, trying to put them out. The wind makes the trees creak and moan, as if they miss Daddy, too.

We say our goodbyes, and I walk back up the hill, passing the last of the people going home. When I get to the front porch Mama is standing at the railing looking out into the dark night.

“It was a good crowd,” she says.

Since I don’t know what else to say, I agree, and feel more tired-out than I’ve ever been in my life. I leave her standing in the shadows and go inside. The screen door slams shut behind me. Any other day Mama would yell at me for letting the door slam, and I half-wish she’d yell at me now so everything would feel normal, but she doesn’t. The truth is I doubt that life will ever feel the same again.

This is about the time of evening Daddy would be picking up his banjo to pick out his version of a lullaby, while my sisters and I get ready for bed. For once it doesn’t bother me that my sisters and I all sleep in one room. After Meg and I came along, Daddy built a small bed in the corner for us next to the big bed in the center that Jo and Amy shared. Because of the small room, we bump elbows when the four of us get on our nightgowns. In spite of the ways they bother me sometimes, I love my sisters. Being the youngest, in one way or another, they all look out for me.

Any other night we’d be talking or laughing before we went to bed, but tonight we are quiet. Meg and I crawl over Jo and Amy to get to our corner of the room like we do every night. In a way it helps to know that I am not the only one left behind.

In the meantime, I haven’t given up on a miracle. If Jesus is all that Preacher makes him out to be, I don’t see why he can’t do for Daddy what he did for Lazarus. Preacher is always bringing Lazarus back to life and it appears to be one of his favorite sermons. He especially likes to point out that Lazarus started to rot before Jesus found him. I force myself not to think about Daddy rotting, even though he and I have always been fascinated with nature’s way of decomposing dead things. I get on my knees and pray for a Lazarus-sized miracle instead.

“Jo, where’s Mama going to sleep?” I say, suddenly alarmed by the thought of Daddy stretched out on their bed.

“Aunt Sadie made up a bed on the couch,” she says.

“Mama probably won’t sleep tonight anyway,” Meg says.

“I probably won’t either,” Amy agrees.

“Well, I will,” Jo says, turning off the lights. “I’m too sad and exhausted to stay awake.”

“Who would have thought people could eat that much?” Meg says from the darkness. “And they brought things, too. Daddy would make some joke that we’ll have leftovers for the next two years.”

I haven’t eaten all day except for breakfast, and I still don’t feel hungry at all. It’s as if the sadness from the day filled me up like a full-course meal.

“I think Aunt Chloe filled her plate at least three times,” Amy says, giggling. She stops herself and apologizes, but then Meg starts giggling, too. Before long we are all laughing into our pillows or bedcovers or whatever we can find. It feels bad and good at the same time. Laughter gives me hope. Until then, I felt dead like Daddy. We laugh at nothing and everything all at once and decide that if Daddy were here he’d be laughing, too.

We settle back into our beds and I can hear Mama and Aunt Sadie talking softly in the living room. For the first time in our lives, Mama doesn’t come in to say goodnight, and she hasn’t even scolded us for making noise.

I close my eyes and pretend that nothing has changed. I wait on Daddy to come in and read us part of whatever book he’s been reading. Sometimes it is
Robinson Crusoe
or
Moby Dick
or something from the Old Testament where so-and-so begets so-and-so. Those are the nights we fall asleep the fastest.

Everything grows quiet, then. The quietness feels as deep as the deepest part of Sutter’s Lake, the part of the lake where I can’t see or touch the bottom, no matter how much I hold my breath and dive. I can’t stop thinking of Daddy’s body in the next room. It wouldn’t be like him to haunt a place. He didn’t believe in ghosts, no matter how many spooky stories we girls made up to scare him.

After a while Meg starts to cry. I rub her shoulders and back for the longest time, like Daddy always did if we didn’t feel well. Afterwards, I close my eyes and think of the river, its waves lapping against the shoreline. In my imagination, a water bug skims on the top. They keep their balance no matter what the water is doing underneath them. I try to be that water bug and let the waves of emotion pass under me without getting capsized.

Meg’s crying keeps up until her breathing finally deepens into sleep. In a room filled with sisters, I feel totally alone. In my loneliness, I think of Jesus on the cross when he asked God why he abandoned him. For all I know, I’ve been praying for miracles from somebody that doesn’t even exist. Too tired to question things anymore, the worst day of my life ends when, at last, I fall asleep.

CHAPTER TEN

The morning of the funeral I smell breakfast before I open my eyes. I smile at the thought of Daddy and Mama in the kitchen with their first cup of coffee, then I remember that he won’t be there. When I walk by the door to their bedroom it is closed, like he is still sleeping. But the nightmare of the day before is true. The accident really happened. He is really gone.

When I come into the kitchen Aunt Sadie gives me one of her big, strong hugs. She has made a breakfast of eggs, bacon and biscuits.

“I want you to drink this,” she says. “It’ll keep your strength up.”

A glass of something dark green sits on the kitchen counter. All of Aunt Sadie’s concoctions taste like tree bark and grass mixed together, but I don’t argue with her, I just drink it and hold my nose while I swallow.

We all sit around the kitchen table as if we are in a daze. Jo looks like she’s been crying again and Amy is quiet, as usual, and Meg stares into her coffee cup. Even Mama has stopped her busyness and is nursing a cup of coffee. Despite all the sadness weighing down the room, the smell of the bacon reminds me of how hungry I am. Before I know it, I’ve eaten two eggs, three strips of bacon, and two biscuits with butter and some of Horatio Sector’s honey on it.

Just as I finish breakfast a knock comes at the front door and Mama answers it. Men’s voices fill the living room. Some of Daddy’s friends are here with a pine box in the yard behind them. I smell the wood all the way from the living room.

“I was up all night making it,” Silas Magee says. “I think it’s the best I’ve ever done.”

Silas is the best carpenter anywhere. He made practically everything we own. Between him and Daddy our family has enough wood and kindling stacked next to the porch to get us through two hard winters.

Mama thanks Silas and the other men but has that faraway look in her eyes again like she might climb in the box with Daddy if given half a chance.

“We need to get him down the hill,” Silas says. “Doc Lester has that contraption he bought waiting on the road.”

Mama steps aside as the men carry the coffin into the house. Her eyes are fixed on the pine box and when I try to follow the men she holds me back.

“Come on,” Jo says from behind me. “Let’s go pick flowers for the church.” As the oldest, Jo has taken over Mama’s job of telling us sisters what to do.

Meg and Amy follow Jo and me out the back door to the path into the woods behind our house. As we walk, I picture Daddy being carried down the hill by the same men who carried him up.

“Will they take him right to the church?” I ask Jo.

“I believe so,” she says, locking her arm in mine.

“Will Mama go, too?”

“Probably,” she says. “At least for a little while, to make sure everything’s set up the way she wants.”

We walk to the sunny side of the hill to search for flowers. Early that summer there were daffodils in bloom, and crocuses, white trillium and crested irises. But now, in early fall, there is only snakeroot, goldenrod, asters and witch hazel. A few crested irises risk a late bloom but they are scrawny compared to weeks before. We gather what we can find, along with fern fronds and take them back to the kitchen and put them in water. Amy will arrange them since she is good at things like that.

The men and Daddy are gone when we get back to the house. For the first time that I can remember, Daddy is on his way to church without us, and something about that makes a lump of grief lodge in my throat.

Every Sunday, rain or shine, freezing cold or summer heat, we walk as a family to the Katy’s Ridge Missionary Baptist church, the only church in Katy’s Ridge. The cornerstone outside the church kitchen has the date 1911 chiseled into it. Rocky Bluff, the biggest town close to us, has four churches: one Methodist, one Presbyterian, and two more Baptist churches—one being a Baptist church for colored people. Aunt Sadie says the colored people praise Jesus by singing, clapping their hands and dancing in the aisles. That comes closer to my idea of what a church should be. But the coloreds and the whites stay apart in these parts, except for Aunt Sadie who goes to worship with them every now and again, whenever she’s invited.

In the past, on days when the temperature fell below freezing, I didn’t see why we couldn’t skip the freezing walk and just talk to God from in front of our warm wood stove. God made winter in the first place, so why wouldn’t he understand? Daddy could have led us in some hymns and Mama could have read from the Bible, some of the good parts that Preacher never got around to, like what love meant to the Corinthians.

Most Sundays, Preacher talks about Satan and the evils of sin and how we have to repent. He says we are all sinners and no matter how hard we try to be good people we can’t keep from sinning. What I never figured out was if people were so horrible already, what was there to aim for? Daddy didn’t like it when I questioned Preacher, especially to his face. But I could tell he didn’t go along with everything Preacher said, either. Sometimes he would doze off right in the middle of the sermon. When this happened, I was supposed to nudge him awake before Mama noticed.

I am glad it is fall because the church in winter is always too hot or too cold, nothing in between. Preacher’s nephew, Gordon, gets a dollar a month to stoke the coal furnace in the basement of the church, and so we either roast like we are already in the fires of hell or freeze like explorers in the Antarctic. But it is warm enough today that maybe some of the windows can be opened and a good breeze let in.