Two Shades of Morning (17 page)

P.W. sat forward with his elbows on his knees, dangling his hands. On the other side, Robert Dale sat straight, useless long arms folded. Miss Lettie was gripping the handle of her brown plastic bag on her lap and gazing around curiously. Somebody behind poked her shoulder, and she turned, hissing behind her hand. “This ole thing!” she said, plucking the sleeve of her brown polyester knit dress. “I made it my ownself.”

“Several men, rumored to be bootleggers, nodded solemnly in Robert Dale’s direction as they passed, heavy legs rasping toward the coffin. Dressed in black wool suits with their black hair matted, they looked hot and slick. Elec Simms and his daddy and uncles, came the announcement from the hissers along the wall.

“They say he got drafted,” one said. “Did you hear P.W.’s been called too?”

“No!” somebody answered, quickly distracted and making another announcement. “Look a-there, poor ole Miss Ima Jean made it. Ain’t missed a funeral in fifty years.”

Miss Ima Jean, the oldest living school teacher in Little Town, floated up the aisle between two other teachers, short stocky women, who practically lifted her feeble, rangy body clear of the floor. She wore her same old beige linen suit with the dipped hem. Her yellow-gray hair was balled in a skimpy knot on the back of her angular head. Like seed peas, brownish green and moldering, her eyes were embedded in her old-cloth face. She nodded to Sibyl, as in greeting; she nodded to Robert Dale. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” she muttered in a voice phelmey and worn. Even slumped she was taller than the other two teachers, erect and dignified. She’d taught everybody in Monroe County, or at least one from each family, and anybody pledging allegiance to the American flag would recite it in her glorious cadence, whether or not they got the meaning.

As punishment for throwing spitballs in the fourth grade, she’d made P.W. and Robert Dale pull two hundred tee-weeds each from the patch between the school house and the quarters. Later, I even pulled some, those deep, stringy tap roots a dreadful strain on even a young back. It didn’t hurt us; I don’t know that it helped, but the field was cleared for summer soft ball.

A group of elementary school children tagged behind their teacher to the front. The little girls were dressed in print poplin and the boys in stiff khaki. They looked as if they’d been rehearsed on how to dress and act for a field trip to view a commemorative plaque about the American-Indian War in Monroe County—unable to relate, not much believing.

When Principal Edmondson came to pay his respects, I was reminded that school usually turned out for special occasions: anything educational, civic or religious, which called for community attendance—for a showing, as much as anything. For reasons known only to those in seats of authority, funerals came under all those headings. Also, Sibyl’s funeral was of special significance because Sibyl was president of the PTA. They were paying their respects and not because she’d been a boon to education; she’d been a nuisance, had manipulated Dorothy Hanks out of office. Sibyl had worn the title like a badge.

She hadn’t got elected because the association had been in awe of her, but for immediate relief from her wheedling and flamboyant campaign. As with any trend, she would pass. Sandra Nell Carter had married Duke Dees to keep him from pestering her for dates on Saturday nights. Most of them weren’t that weak-minded though; they’d simply tried the new because they knew that new would wear off. Actually, any connection in Little Town would suffice for a funeral gathering. Robert Dale was a veteran basketball player for good old Monroe High. And the truth was, a funeral was a big event. Maybe because we had too little to do. Then there was always the matter of custom. Sure, they all came, to a degree out of curiosity, but mostly out of respect for Robert Dale, his family, maybe even for P.W. Or to see me!—depending on whether the rumor had spread. And they would remember Sibyl because she was different and because she was in some ways beautiful and because there were so few in our neck of the woods to remember.

“To my notion, she looks better than Sibyl.”

When I got wind of that from the wall, I tried not to think about it, I really did. I couldn’t help it. They’d graduated from whispering, spoke boldly in the racket of scudding feet.

You could tell when the service was coming to an end by the last to pass by the coffin: Punk and Mae, the only blacks. So black in that sea of whiteness, Mae with her overpowering perfume, like pear blossoms in a heated room. She still wore her white maid uniform and dingy white gloves. And Punk, a step behind, skulking whipped-dog style up the aisle with his head down, his hands rammed deep in his pockets. More show, Punk and Mae. Proof of Sibyl’s status. I’d seen it done before, beloved and dutiful servants paraded at a funeral like white limousines, but not much and not without it making me crazy. After Mae and Punk, the row behind us filed past the coffin, and I watched Aunt Birdie fanning and nodding howdy-do. She smelled of talcum and snuff, over-warm and moist. Passing before Sibyl, she simply inclined her head, her freckled face garnering the glow of candles, eighty-strong. Turning to go out, she glowered at those lingering along the wall to watch the family grieve or not grieve, and several of them herded out before her like children driven with a switch.

Daddy and Mama stepped to the coffin and paused, his scratched hand resting on the back of her blue gabardine suit coat. As they started to walk away, Mama eyed me. One of those shrinking looks. God, Mama, I don’t know why I’m sitting on the front pew and me not kin, I felt like saying. And I don’t know why I’m still saying “God!” when you’ve got on to me a million times, and taught me too about the impropriety of sitting on front pews at strangers’ funerals and wearing things inappropriate—this wild dress. I still remember that word “impropriety,” but it just doesn’t seem to work here, doesn’t matter. All I know is I’m hurting and doing the best I can, and I’m bad, real bad, you can count on it: I didn’t go all the way before I got married but I came close, and I hate this woman, dead here before me. I haven’t turned out the way y’all expected—I haven’t even turned out yet. So there! Maybe I popped up here on the front pew because Robert Dale and P.W. did, or maybe I simply got a front row seat because I have the most at stake.

Lifting both soft antiseptic hands, the funeral director motioned for us to rise, and I crept behind Robert Dale to the coffin, looking down with him at Sibyl for the last time—the Sibyl at the funeral home. Turning, he started to take my hand, but clasped his own and walked away up the aisle. I followed, hearing P.W. and Miss Lettie scuffing behind, and then the lid of the coffin closing with a flutter like bird wings. The funeral director had turned Robert Dale around at the door and was whispering as he whisked him back toward the coffin. Drawing level with me, the director reached out and caught my elbow, turning me too, then motioned for P.W. and Miss Lettie to follow.

“What in the world now!” Miss Lettie said, swinging her bag to her other arm and gazing hungrily at the bunch in the sunlit doorway.

While the pallbearer-basketball players positioned themselves each side of the coffin, the funeral director handed out lit tapers from the candelabrums, grading us like Vacation Bible School kids, Robert Dale, P.W. and then me, and sent us marching behind the coffin from the church. All except Miss Lettie.

“I come with them,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “They’ll wait on you.”

“Well, I be!”

Aunt Birdie in funeral navy was standing in the midst of matronly ladies by the concrete stoop when I toddled through the door with my pink taper. She reached out and snatched it, puffed at the tiny flame like it was her stove on fire, and hissed, “You don’t owe her nothing!” I walked on with my head high and my ears roaring, smiling as I had in the beauty contest. She was right. And suddenly I didn’t want to play anymore; I didn’t want to help Sibyl build a memory of herself at my own expense.

The director followed, ushering Miss Lettie to the car, as though he had another funeral scheduled and had used up the time Sibyl had bought.

P.W.’s candle still burned as we crammed into the T-bird. Miss Lettie bumped her head and swore, placing a hand over her mouth. P.W. snuffed the flame, and smoke feathered out the window to the high blue sky.

Again, we tailed the hearse, which tailed the sheriff’s car, brattling gravel south along the side road to the rear of the courthouse square and turning west with a string of cars and trucks with headlights on toward the crossing, where Deputy Leif was waving back north and southbound traffic on the main highway with his cap. Like bumper cars at the fair, several cars were jammed in front of the courthouse, blocking the others trying to file into the procession. Between the crossing and the river bridge, west with the sun, cars were parked each side and diagonally in banked yards, with people thronging toward the bleached-sand cemetery on the hill. Puny headlights melting in the sun.

From the cemetery, where we sat in the parked T-bird till everybody got there, I could hear lone shouts and festive voices rising from the procession-on-foot, could see them trickling up the dirt ramp and trooping through the ranks of sun-fired tombstones, headed for the green canopy near an isolated clump of cedars in the middle of the cemetery. The canopy and trees, oddly lush against the leached sand and granite, where people had congregated like saints at heaven’s gates. And across the expanse of shimmering sand, on the river’s banks, the darkening green and beckoning shade of pines and hardwoods where frogs throbbed. In all, there were probably three hundred tombstones, plain old granite with simple Christian epitaphs shaded in with mossy green mold: ASLEEP IN JESUS, CHILD OF GOD, LOVING FATHER or LOVING MOTHER. Several said REST IN PEACE. A place to play in summer when I was growing up, me and Robert Dale and some others stopping by on our way to swim in the river, licking purple Popsickles and stepping over graves as we did sidewalk cracks to keep from breaking our mamas’ backs.

We’d been sitting in the car with the air conditioner humming for almost an hour, with the funeral director, standing by the hearse, alternately checking his watch and the sun, now dipping toward the treeline along the river. Babies bawling, everybody talking, and the throb of frogs thickening with the light. Standing tall in his sleek suit, the director strolled to the T-bird and talked to Robert Dale through the window. “We might as well get started,” he said, looking off and shining his porcelain teeth. “There’s some still coming on foot, but we better go ahead.”

Before dark, I thought, getting out. Looking toward Little Town proper, I could see people weaving up the highway as Deputy Leif’s car cut along the center line, dragging traffic like a needle through twead cloth.

We followed the pallbearers with Sibyl’s coffin across the hot sand embedded with prickly pears toward the canopy and through the parting crowd, and there I stopped. Before the canopy, just this side of the cedars, stood a small mausoleum of marbled stone with a pitched slate roof. More country cottage than tomb with English ivy and pink roses trained along the swirly pinkish walls to the overhang of eaves. Double doors were swung wide with rose-embossed S’s on each. Double-S, Sibyl Sharpe. Catchy name, I thought, and as good a reason as any I’d dreamed up trying to figure why Sibyl had married Robert Dale Sharpe.

The pallbearers placed Sibyl’s coffin on tracks concealed by runners of wine carpet extending from the mausoleum, then stood like guards, three facing three. Wilted from the heat, their sorrowful expressions had gone bored. “I swannee!” said Miss Lettie, tripping over the Easter-moss mat beneath the canopy.

Behind Miss Lettie in the treasured shade, going for the front row again, I spied Timmy Ellis making a beeline for me through the grove of cedars. Tottering, belly first, he pointed and jabbered, “I know you, I know you”—the bright feckless jabber of an idiot. His dark eyes were glittery and stretched, an old child in high belted pants with his white shirt packed in up to the pockets. “Prettiest girl in school,” he said, “you the prettiest girl in school!” He had to cross paths with P.W. to get to me, started to reach out and touch me but pocketed his hands instead. His curly brown bangs, parted and water-pasted, had sprung free on his apish forehead.

“Hey, Timmy,” I said, trying to walk past him, trying to get P.W.’s attention so he would make Timmy leave me alone. Harmless as he was, Timmy was a pest—everytime he saw me he’d start that “prettiest girl” crap—and now that he was just this side of thirty and no longer in that cute-puppy stage, he was doubly bothersome. Usually, I tolerated him, even joked with him, but not now. Everybody was seated and Miss Lettie was turned, motioning for me to come on.

Feeling more familiar, Timmy backed me to a canopy pole, talking in my face with one long finger punching air. “I know you, I know you. The prettiest girl in school, everybody says so.” Bristly hair was growing from his nostrils.

The strange minister from church stepped with the soloist from the canopy to the foot of the coffin and began reading a poem, his voice intermittently racing and lagging in the paltry breeze, dark locks luminous in the falling sun.

Still as a bird on a nest, to keep from drawing attention to myself, I leaned against the canopy pole, gazing off to keep from egging on Timmy. “I know you,” he said, “I know you...”

When the minister wrapped up the poem, the soloist rang out again with song, the terminal report of “Now the Day is Over” seeming to bounce from the sun-etched shadows, riverside, back to Little Town and eastward to the Georgia line. Hollow and thin, a capella, the song vibrated while the soloist’s quenched eyes roved to the pearly sky, one note barely uttered before another caught beneath the white robe and sucked from the fanciful O of her mouth, like quicksand inversion.

“I know you,” said Timmy, “I know you...”

Still, I didn’t look at him. Just stood listening to the frogs calling and the babies bawling and the melody so ludicrous in the face of it all.

“One time I went all the way to Tallahassee to see you in the Christmas parade,” he said, oblivious to everybody squeezing around the canopy. “You won the beauty contest, the prettiest girl in school, everybody says so.”