Two Shades of Morning (16 page)

Several of the men came in to eat, then sat and talked to Robert Dale. Had I not known Sibyl and her way of doing things, I’d have thought it was a regular Sunday get-together in Little Town. But I had never before seen a crowd of adults at her house.

Aunt Birdie hobbled in around three, Sunday-scrubbed in a plaid shirtwaist, hugging a blue-speckled roaster covered with a white dishcloth. “Chicken and dressing,” she said in a voice that told how long it took to make, how precious was each bogged and baked chicken breast. She slid the pan between the pink sliced ham and the browned pot roast with a moat of gravy. Speaking crustily to everybody as she sashayed from group to group, she arranged the belt of her brown and gold plaid dress—not where her waist should be, but where it was, just below her bosom. “Howdy-do.”

“How you, Aunt Birdie?” they would say.

And she’d say “Awright, and you?” Her eyes, stern and earnest, her lip-line dissolved in freckles, she’d pass on, her very presence a social culling. If they couldn’t meet her approval, her neighbors hoped to at least be spared her notice.

Taking a deep breath, I sat up straight as she came my way, hoping she couldn’t tell I’d been crying. “How you, Aunt Birdie?”

“Sugar.” Question or remark, I couldn’t tell, but her eyes felt like Geiger counters, detecting my gilt heart.

Then she saw Robert Dale, four chairs down, and went to him. She said something—I couldn’t hear what, everybody was talking so loud—but she didn’t say much before she crushed his head to her stomach and held it there like he had the toothache. She turned him loose when she saw Miss Lettie tipping gaily through the crowd in the kitchen door. “Lettie!” Aunt Birdie shouted and headed for her; Miss Lettie cried out, shrill as a whistle, meeting her halfway, latching onto one another and tittering like girls.

Aunt Bird stepped back, switching to solemn. “How’s Miss Avie Nell getting on?” “Doing bout the same,” said Miss Lettie, “no better, no worse. They’s times she don’t know nothing, then again her mind’s clear as a bell.” Miss Lettie’s own voice rang out like a bell.

The first floor of the house was chock-f of visitors, some quietly prowling the upstairs, not plundering but filling dead spaces to keep Robert Dale from stepping into one.

Mary Beth came by with some of the girls from school and I watched her, wondering to what degree she had been affected by Sibyl. I suspected that like me she didn’t know where she fit, only that she fit somewhere, a piece in Sibyl’s puzzle.

Later, when P.W. finally got there, I thought it strange that he hadn’t come earlier: Robert Dale’s best friend, Sibyl’s lover. That his fair hair was glazed with hairspray seemed a betrayal, and I felt jealous of him for me and for Sibyl, galled that he’d be trying to look good for the other girls while his lover was dead, his own wife sitting in her dining room, eating her wake food and strangely coveting that strange boy, P.W. I resented his fixing up for her wake, for finding life worth going on for—his lover passed, his wife present—and him off to war.

He shook hands with the men, hugged the women, disgusted with a custom he’d have to put up with till he left for the army. I spoke as he passed my chair, and he said, “Earlene,” same as he spoke to everybody else. Going into the living room, his eyes roamed from the person he was speaking to, up to the portrait of Sibyl. And I wanted to die and wanted him to die: one flesh.

In the living room, where I had to shove through to get to the bathroom, they were talking about the war, that foreign rift that didn’t pertain to Little Town. Like death, we couldn’t really believe in or understand it. Like faith, we only felt it, felt its power over us. Like Sibyl’s death, everybody talked around P.W. getting drafted.

#

I was a woman now and had to wash dishes—no one told me to do it, but I’d felt lazy watching other girls my age working in the kitchen, picking ice and mopping the floor. We were young women now, not girls, and I had no idea when we’d made that transition, but I no longer felt comfortable with sliding my food-smeared plate on the kitchen counter and walking out. I almost fainted when Miss Louise came up and told me she was leaving it up to me to put the sheets Sibyl had died on in the washer.

From Sibyl’s kitchen window, at sunset, I saw P.W. wander to the gazebo, go inside and sit down. In the stirring dappled shade, his copper hair blended with the gold-tinged woodsline. The geese had come back and now marched along the banks of the branch with their long necks cranked. They were silent now, as if they’d at last been fed, at last were satisfied. Like me.

I felt a rush of pity for P.W. that made me want to cry again. I wished I could go home and get back to normal, but the dishes kept coming, and I kept washing—dishes I’d never seen. A pint jar of tea-stained ice came at me and I thought of the fit Sibyl would have pitched over somebody drinking tea from a jar.

Robert Dale crept around a group of chattering women in the middle of the kitchen and went to the back door, stopping with his hand on the knob. He nodded for me to follow and stepped through the door and closed it. I rinsed my hands, and headed out the door, leaving the burble and clatter of the house for the ringing calm of the yard. We sat in the gazebo with P.W., looking out at the latticed world—Sibyl’s vantage—and the octagonal nook was oddly crammed with passion and sadness, a cocoon that should have metamorphosed us. We said so much, not to have spoken. We said it with our eyes, saying how far we had come, how much we had regressed, how little and how much we had learned. And it was nothing. And we couldn’t go back—didn’t want to. I sat between them on the gazebo bench, aware of a gap, like a missing picket in a fence, left by Sibyl, who had connected us while living as surely as she’d separated us by dying.

Suddenly I stood up, turned and directed my two-word speech to whomever it applied. “Grow up,” I said, surprising myself as much as I did them.

Not even looking back, I started walking toward home, watching the sun glint on P.W.’s old car in the back yard. In the knee-high grass and weeds it looked serrated in half, and it reminded me of our marriage, P.W.’s lost interest in us. One coat of paint to make it shine, then he’d dropped the whole project. No more plans to make the engine go, to profit from his investment. Rust would claim the body, the upholstery would rot to the naked springs. A fender would be picked off, then a bumper, a wheel, till there would be nothing left but a frame. Much as I couldn’t wait to get home, when I got there I found the trailer was too empty, too hot—sun slants laid floor to wall the entire length of it—too messy. I needed to clean up, but I was tired, the mess didn’t matter enough. After showering, I had to dry on a dirty towel left in the heap beside the commode.

#

Again, I drove Robert Dale to the funeral home, but this time with him in the back and P.W. on the other side of me, and a familiar line of Chevys and Fords tagging along the stretch of tree-lined highway, low shadows laced with golden sun.

When we got there, we were ushered down a dim green hall on thick carpet that hushed our steps, the rasping of our neighbors’ legs behind us, off to view Sibyl. About halfway up the hall, I spied a white placard posted on an easel with her name printed in black. SIBYL SHARPE FUNERAL SERVICE 2 PM TUESDAY LITTLE TOWN BAPTIST CHURCH. I walked on, feeling the words tamp into my head. It was official now, Sibyl was dead.

“I can’t believe it!” Robert Dale whispered. Now that he’d spoken, I felt afraid—afraid the way a child is afraid when an adult shows fear. I hadn’t heard him speak since that morning. P.W. turned to the left when we got to the north viewing room, but I kept step with Robert Dale, bearing right toward the dark grained coffin on the end wall. It stood on a wine velvet-skirted catafalque, with a mound of pink roses cascading from the center to the foot. The lid was sprung wide and I could see Sibyl’s nose before we got there, only the tip, finically perked, and then her smug chin, as if she’d just lay down for us to look. Her eyes were sealed shut, as with a line of melted wax, and I half expected them to fly open, couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t. Her skin was tight and matted with makeup, a base too pink for her skin tone. She would have hated that, I thought, suddenly realizing how helpless she was for the first time.

Her coral lipstick, cameo earrings and dress looked old because I’d seen them already. Her hair, fanned on the ivory satin pillow, was nylony, golden strands spiking in the soft pink light. I wondered if she wore shoes. I wondered if the blood speck on the back of her dress was still there and felt guilty for not having mentioned it. Her hands, lapped like a mannequin’s on her waist, had been made up with the same peachy concoction as her face. Again, as on the day she’d shown me the dress, they were shockingly naked and old. I was disappointed that she didn’t look more convincing and dramatic. I’d always thought of death as fantasy, and in a fantasy, beauty is a given. But she was almost ugly, lying there so swollen. Her shaped-clay face was smooth and stuffed, indentions rubbed out. There were double creases above her ears where the skin folded. She looked old, and yet she was the youngest person I’d ever known who died.

Still, she outclassed us all, even in death.

* * * * *

Chapter 12

The day of the funeral we started eating again, eating from the day-old food as well as fresh. Several casserole creations had been brought in and more deserts. A banana pudding, to name one, with a sugary browned meringue, in a clear glass bowl bedded in vanilla wafers.

I felt bloated and ill, the inside of my mouth coated and sweet, not just from overeating but from staying up. My eyes felt sandy and blurred, never fully open. Even dressing for the funeral in my special dress, I felt dull, no thrill. The cincher waist was too tight, and I was afraid I might pop the nylon zipper. Paying that much for a dress, you’d expect a decent metal one. I started to get P.W. to pin it at the waist for good measure, but decided not to. He was already dressed for the funeral, moping about the trailer in his shirt with the iron brand on back. Fuming because he would have to wear his hot wool coat to cover the scorched place. Red-faced and sullen, he set out up the sun-bleached road to wait till time for the funeral with everybody else, cleaning his nails with his pocketknife.

#

That afternoon, P.W. drove Robert Dale, Miss Lettie and me to the funeral in the T-bird. But first, in keeping with Sibyl’s plans, we had to go back to the funeral home in Tallahassee and follow the hearse to the church in Little Town in a slow procession of neighbors. Fifty miles round trip, twenty-five spent watching the pink roses tremble on Sibyl’s rosewood coffin through the rear window of the black hearse.

From the river bridge, city limits of Little Town, I could see Sheriff Walker and Deputy Leif standing next to their official cars at the blocked crossing with their caps over their hearts. As we turned south, toward the church, Miss Lettie waved at the officers. Beaming, in a brown pillbox hat, she looked like an organ grinder’s monkey. A train of cars and trucks were parked along the highway from the courtyard to the church, and already the small square churchyard was jammed with people leaning on their vehicles, waiting for the funeral to start. Babies crying and diapers strung across the open doors; children skirling among the stout flanks of adults trying to wedge their way into the white concrete-block church. Getting out of the car at the front, we set off an echo of other doors closing from the parked cars of the procession still curving from the highway to the parched grass lot south of the church drive. Six of the young men most frequently seen at Sibyl’s struggled with her coffin from the hearse to the double doors, keeping stiff, strutted faces, while the hot sun beat out its rhythm on the marked grains of the reddish wood.

Only the two front pews on the right were vacant; the others were packed with folks, scrunched and sweating, fanning with cardboard hand fans. More stood in serried ranks along the walls, the brunched silhouettes of those outside, a blight on the tall windows.

Eight branched white candelabrums, the kind rented for weddings, formed a crescent on the pine platform above the coffin. The entire front wall of the church was tiered with flowers: roses, gladioli, mums in pots, wreaths and sprays, flowers tacked on Styrofoam crosses and hearts. One wreath of red roses and blackish-green stock was the size of a tractor tire with a diagonal red satin banner that read CASSIDY CARS in silver glitter. I’d seen their sticker on the bumper of Sibyl’s new car.

Sibyl’s family filled up half the front pew: Robert Dale, P.W., Miss Lettie and me. We sat down and waited as the funeral director inconspicuously funneled a line of funeral drifters onto the other half pew and the pew behind us.

“She don’t have much kin, does she?” somebody along the wall hissed.

“Shh!” said another—it sounded like our welfare lady, Adith Law.

“Was she saved, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Shh!”

I was yet to go to a funeral without their hissing, and always that same concern about kin and salvation. Dinging piano music muffled the rest of their whispers—one of Sibyl’s new hymns that sounded like a sacred waltz. Florid-faced, with a skull cap of dark roots in peroxide hair, Miss Effie played and tilted, whole body, when she got to a fast place, much like taking a sharp turn in a car. There was a gash between her eyebrows from frowning over the keys—she’d played as long as I could remember and always with that same keen exactness and flow. I knew this music was not what she considered suitable funeral music. I wondered if she’d tried to color her hair like Sibyl’s.

Shiny black shoes tapping on the wood floor, two husky young boys marched forward and began lighting the candles, all eighty pink tapers.

“Whose younguns is that?” whispered some woman behind us.

“I ain’t never laid eyes on ‘em before.”

I couldn’t resist turning to see who was hissing, and sure enough there stood Adith Law, and of all people, our preacher’s wife was the hissee.

When the crude concrete church glowed with candlelight, and the coughs and hisses had scattered like mice, a wholesome-looking young girl—who no one knew either—floated through one of the two doors behind the pulpit. She wore a white flowing robe with egg-yellow epaulets, fringe oozing on the sleeves. Presenting her square unformed face, she let loose with slow arcing melody, sculpting her mouth into a delicate oval. Some new song about a new day in a high soprano that filled my ears and made me feel that the world had ended, that everything began and stopped with Sibyl, whose face radiated from the bed of ivory satin.

“Looks just like herself, don’t she?” somebody said—sounded like Aunt Birdie.

Just when you felt there was no end to the song, almost dreading its end, it stopped, and the soloist floated back through the door, closing it soundlessly.

A strange man, whom no one had seen before either—judging by the volume and scatter of the hissing—breezed through the same door with the same aloof air. He too wore a white robe, and unlike our fervent preachers, sweating out the gospel through their pores, he was as pretty and poised as a girl. Dark locks tumbling on his pale polished brow, he held to the podium and lifted his messianic eyes, laying a hush over the shifting crowd. That slow dark gaze traveling left to right with an imperial air, yet humble and charitable, dispensing his forgiveness for our joint ignorance. His pearly voice rolled the Twenty-third Psalm over us like water sheeting off glass, and we knew Sibyl was on a safe, prepared journey even if we didn’t know to where.

“Who is he?” whispered somebody.

“I ain’t got the slightest.”

“Somebody from down around Orlando, I guess.” Everybody was yawning, itching for the climax.

In an erudite manner, he enumerated each of Sibyl’s deeds, referring to Little Town only, adding some, taking small tasks and glossing them over into achievements, his qualitative tone ringing it out to a triumphant end. Cancer Drive, Heart Fund, March of Dimes—beyond the projected goals. All presided over by Sibyl. All in one summer. “Who you reckon’s gone get P.T.A. president now?”

“I imagine Dorthy’ll go back in.” And so the talk passed along the wall on my right and came to rest in the fern shadow stenciled on Sibyl’s face.

Now and then, the girl who sang before came again with one of her redundant songs that prickled the hair on my arms. The church trembled under her highest notes and swelled with her as she literally rose to her toes. I felt embarrassed for her when she sang Ava Maria in opera, half-hoping that cultured voice would crack, because I could sense, and so could everybody else, that she was uppity (call it little-town paranoia).

Sibyl smiled through the whole thing, the faint smile arranged by the deft hand of the mortician. I expected it to spread. From where I sat, facing her coffin, my eyes skimmed her face, to the face of the half-Italian minister. (The half-Italian business had just been passed along the wall by the hissers.)

When he finished, I felt ashamed that we hadn’t appreciated Sibyl more—wry little-town kidding. But couldn’t we all write our own eulogies and pick out somebody clever to deliver them? Sibyl had—I could see it everywhere. I glanced over at Miss Lettie on my right and her mouth was open.

Somebody at the rear clapped when the minster wrapped it up on the third round between songs. And I could feel the scrunched and sweating bunch getting bolder, and absolutely itched for a wrap-up. Nobody’s funeral should drag out so. Cutting my eyes back, I saw Aunt Birdie, mute and absurd in her navy straw hat with the faded matching feathers layered around the brim. She was wearing her navy polka-dot funeral dress. A lump rose in my throat and I figured if tears came, so would laughter. I swallowed the gout in my throat and set my eyes on Sibyl to battle back the sadness. “Poor lil ole thing,” somebody whispered. Was the remark for me or for Sibyl? For the hundredth time, I wished I hadn’t worn the dress and tugged up my slip strap, which had now worn a tickling groove in my shoulder.

When I could no longer stand it, I turned again and our Avon lady smiled at me. I’d quit using Avon and wasn’t up on the gossip she peddled door to door with her makeup. I doubted she’d have gossiped to me, about me, if I had answered the door last time she came. I wondered if she knew, if they all knew. Blushing, I faced Sibyl, feeling more comfortable with her because she’d been in on my shame.

Her face was now dusted with gold-flecked powder and it glinted in the sun diffusing around the silhouettes in the window. Still, I thought she looked surprisingly unattractive, almost vulgar, lying there with her face presented. And death on her smelled mysterious and preserved. Was it the flowers or the embalming fluid or death itself?

Somebody whispered: “Is that the dress she...?” “I can’t believe she put up with...”

If they were going to talk, I wished they’d speak up. My neck felt red, my ears distended from trying to catch their endings. My jaw was tight and I wondered if I might have an abscessed tooth.

When the soloist and the minister failed to return through the ceremonial door again after five minutes, the funeral director strolled forward and coughed into his fist. Standing in front of Sibyl, he caught his hands before his gray pin-striped trousers. “Anyone wishing to view the body can pass by at this time, starting with those standing on the outside and the rear of the church.” His bombed tone leveled the uplifted mood of the service. “Please pass along to the outside afterwards.” Miss Effie began playing the piano again, still the new stuff, but this time with more feeling, as if she was glad the funeral was almost over. All of the churches from the other communities in Monroe County had apparently come together for the funeral, same as they did for revivals each spring and fall. Many of those shuffling in from the outside, mumbling benignly, I recognized from the farming area across the river, where P.W. folks lived. They were stoic and reserved, respectful of the dead, mindful of hiding their curiosity.

Even the Primitive Baptists—Hardshells and Progessives—passed by the coffin to view the legendary remains. Miss Avie Nell had been Primitive Baptist, and I’d gone with her to Big Meetings, all-day dinners on the ground and preaching once a year. She’d always intrigued me, especially at her church, because she smelled fancier and looked smarter than those simple, hardworking folks. She didn’t fit in and didn’t care. She went because her folks had been members and Robert Dale went because of his mama and I went because of Robert Dale.

The members of the Church of God came by, the women with long hair and clean faces, the men pious and swilled on the gospel, oddities on the denominational tripod with the weak-lawed legs of Baptists and Methodists. I’d been to their church with Miss Eular once and loved their uninhibited singing, but found I was too self-conscious for the babble of concert prayer and speaking in tongues. Also, to them, vanity was a sin, and let’s face it, I was vain.

Three lardy, haggard women came up to look at Sibyl, each tugging a line of children with tow hair and faded eyes, children wanting to look also but wrapping themselves in their mama’s wide skirts.

Poor Sibyl was a spectacle like the middle-aged acrobat in the circus, I thought. But in truth, most of us went to most funerals, especially for a member of an old family like the Sharpes, county born and bred.

Miss Cleona, who lived just down the dirt road from Miss Eular and Mr. Buck, skirted the coffin in her long buttoned-to-the-throat dress and came straightaway to Robert Dale, whispering in his ear as she gripped his neck. I tried not to listen, but it was only the regular stuff they’d all been saying: “I’m so sorry, bless your heart.” Then she edged into the line trailing across the front and stayed with them along the wall to the exit.

The line approaching the coffin grew disorderly, shuffling up and out in an array of denominations and communities, some lingering along the wall to wait for the family of the deceased to view the body. Miss Effie got tired of playing Sibyl’s new pieces and took it on herself to play common hymns such as, “Love Lifted Me,” “Bringing in the the Sheaves,” and “Blessed Assurance.” Between slubbing the keys, as if she was weaving, she would pause to flip leisurely through our green Broadman for the hymns we’d all teethed on.

There was a regular frenzy of cardboard fans oscillating the sticky air, fanning body odors, perfume and foul breath, while the candles at Sibyl’s head flickered, throwing a waxy scent over the frenzy of her funeral. By the time those seated got their turns to view, everybody was wiping sweat and mumbling, and all the slick drooling babies were crying. Oddly, it was that hot primal bawling I remember best, beyond the ludicrous pomp, beyond the inexpressible discord of the requiem. There must have been a dozen bawling babies passed from person to person. But they waited anyway, many of them masking disappointment as they finally got to the coffin and stared down at Sibyl. Several people branched off from the line to speak to us.

Mary Beth hobbled up and vaulted away, while her friends, the cheerleaders, sobbed in a huddle. I’d seen them react just that way when we’d lost a basketball game—when we won one also. But the crying got to me. Again, I felt the gout in my throat and checked it, leaning side to side on the hard varnished pew to un-stick my dress from the backs of my thighs.