The Healing (43 page)

There was a great uprushing in her throat and she cried aloud, “You were my people!”

Gran Gran began to quake. It was not just skin and muscle, but
something had set her bones to trembling, as if the earth had shuddered. Her cane went rattling down the steps and Gran Gran, unable to bear the weight any longer, crumpled to the porch floor.

She was not aware of how much time had passed before she lifted her head to the velvet star-filled sky. Behind her she heard the careful footsteps, and then felt a hand, small and chilled, take her own. The grasp was tentative but then gathered strength as it warmed like an oven brick, until the girl’s grip was as sure and strong as any the old woman could remember, the heat soothing her ancient sorrow like a salve.

The revelation was neither blinding nor thunderous.

Polly Shine had remembered.

A
winter’s twilight found them skirting the puddles and then stepping carefully down a disused path that cut into the overgrowth beyond the house. Picking their way through briars and creeper vines, they passed the falling-down chimney of the old hospital, destroyed at the turn of the century by fire during a lightning storm, and from there proceeded deep into a dark skirt of woods.

It was a path seldom used because it led only to the old slave cemetery, forgotten by most and unrecognized by anyone else who happened to stumble upon it. It was sheltered by hardwoods and carpeted by bramble, underneath which lay the old rotting wooden crosses, rough-hewn stones with scrawl long faded, toppled by the relentless spread of roots.

By the time they arrived, the old woman’s breathing was labored and her step halting. She stood silent for a moment among the graves to catch her breath. In one hand she gripped her cane, in the other she held a lantern, as yet unlit. Over her shoulder hung the leather hunting pouch given to her by a pretty, blue-eyed boy, never grown, and now long dead, buried with his mother over the rise. While Gran Gran waited for her strength to return, she listened to the graves, as if they might remember her. The girl, who toted the cross, listened, too.

But all the graves were silent. Gran Gran heard only the rush of her own breath. It was coming easier now, calmed by the soothing
night sounds of the forest. “You and me gone have to get out here one day and clean this mess up. First warm day in spring maybe.”

The girl nodded. “They’s a lot of them.”

“It’s a sight,” Gran Gran said, “but we got time.”

It would have to be later. Today Gran Gran and Violet had other business in the cemetery.

The old woman and the girl found their way to the far side of the ridge to a muddy gash of earth that had not had time to heal over. Gran Gran searched the bramble for signs of another grave, dug before Freedom. Somewhere under the creeping vines was a rusted cast-iron plowshare that Lizzie had cradled through the woods and placed where Rubina’s head rested, disobeying the master’s decree to leave her grave unmarked. It must have been the last thing she did before taking off through the woods to catch up with Polly and Silas.

Gran Gran set the lantern by the more recent grave and then nodded to Violet, who positioned the cross at the head of her mother’s grave. As the girl steadied the cross, Gran Gran pounded it into the ground with a hammer retrieved from her pouch.

The two stood silent over Lucy’s newly marked grave mound for quite a while, Gran Gran remembering the woman as best she could.

“Polly said a soul needed to be grieved out of the world proper to make sure they joined the Old Ones,” Gran Gran said. “If you don’t give them their respect, they might wander until the Second Coming. That means a string of generous words, a grave song, and some praying.”

She had told all this earlier to Violet as they planned the ceremony, but it bore repeating.

Gran Gran spoke serious and slow. “Lucy, me and your girl here, Violet, are standing for you today. We are here to give you a marker for your grave, so you can be remembered. And we come to do what we can to grieve you into heaven.”

She paused for a moment as the chirring sounds of dusk rose around her and then looked down at the girl, who stared pensively at the grave. “Any words you want to say to your momma?”

Violet breathed in deep and then said what she had rehearsed.
“Momma, I’m sorry I didn’t hold your hand when you was dying. I love you. I hope you are happy in heaven with Jesus.”

Gran Gran nodded. “Those are some fine words,” she said.

Speaking to the grave once more, the old woman said, “I ain’t much for singing these days, but I’ll sure give you what I got left.”

In a weak voice, quaking with age, she sang what she could remember of the words she had overheard Polly sing so long ago over Rubina’s grave:

She sang low and gentle, swaying to the rhythm.

The girl held the woman’s arm, steadying her as she knelt down to the grave. Gran Gran opened her pouch and placed some of Lucy’s personal possessions on the grave dirt. A tube of lipstick, a compact mirror, a sewing needle and thread, a necklace of glass beads, a butterfly broach of rhinestones, all things Violet had chosen.

Next she took the bottle from which the woman had drunk the potion, placed it on the grave, and shattered it with the hammer. She buried the pieces in the dirt.

She sang again, her voice stronger this time:

The last word rose toward the bare branches and seemed to hover for a moment in the chill air, before finally fading away into a darkening sky.

Gran Gran dropped her head and prayed. “Lord, we all done left this poor girl alone and I’m sorry for it. She was Your precious daughter and she must have been about as alone as a person can be to do what she done. I don’t know why she done it. But I reckon only You and her know the business of it. Please forgive her if she’s needing forgiveness and let her join You in Glory.”

With Violet’s help, Gran Gran raised herself to her feet and brushed the dirt off her hands. She looked down upon the grave.

“And Lucy,” she continued, “I want you to forgive me for any way I let you down. For not seeing what I should have seen. And this girl Violet sure loves you and she’s going do right by you in the world and ain’t never going to forget you. You going to be remembered, I promise you that. We both going to see to it.”

Violet was weeping now. She held the lantern while the old woman lifted the globe and lit it. The girl placed the lantern on the head of her mother’s grave, so that the shadow of the crossed boards loomed large over the mound.

“Now, by the light of our remembering,” Gran Gran pronounced, “find your way home, Lucy.”

The old woman began singing the grave song again, and now the words were infused with the wistful gladness of crossing over rather than the grief of dying.

Gran Gran reached down and opened her hand. The girl laid hers across the old leathery palm. Gran Gran could feel the warming pulse in the place where they touched, the single beat of a heart.

The woods were dark and the path disappeared beyond the light cast by the lantern. But Gran Gran knew the way home. With her memory and the girl’s sight, they would do fine.

They departed the grave, both of them singing. The lantern still burned, throwing its light in their path. With Gran Gran stabbing the ground before them with her cane, they led each other out of the woods.

T
oday the living will surely outpopulate the dead. It is sociable weather, the kind that naturally draws people together. The dawn broke with the threat of rain, but it cleared off nicely. Now a procession of low billowy clouds wafts through the mid-August sky, mercifully capturing and holding the sun long enough to provide a steady succession of shady reprieves.

Folks are still climbing the ridge to the old burying grounds, leaving behind their mules and wagons and the occasional automobile strewn about the old plantation yard below. Women in their Sunday-best dresses kneel at gravesides pulling weeds, while their men carefully situate newly chiseled slabs of concrete or brush on new coats of whitewash to wooden crosses, sweat darkening the shoulders of their freshly boiled white shirts.

On the back side of the ridge a chorus of cheers rises up as two men set the last section of the low border fence. After a century, the burying place is now completely ringed in iron. The biggest portion of the fence is made up of the elaborate grillwork that had once adorned the mansion’s galleries, but the supply ran out and the back side was left unfinished. Earlier in the day, the great-grandson of Big Dante showed up with a truckload of rusted bedsteads. The fence will be so heavily swathed with honeysuckle by next Cemetery Day no one will be able to detect the slightest inconsistency in style.

As the day progresses, the grounds begin to take on the look of an overplanted garden. Syrup buckets, rusted enamel dishpans, and coffee cans brimming with plants and flowers of every imaginable color and fragrance are still being placed on the grave mounds. Overpowering the senses is the smell of lemon lilies mingling with fried chicken.

The old pine table was hauled up from the mansion’s kitchen and positioned in a shady grove of oaks and sweet gum. It is already laden with tubs of greens and ham hocks and potato salad, platters of every kind of meat, plates of corn bread and biscuits, pies and cakes and cobblers and puddings, everything covered with dish towels. Makeshift tables built by laying planks across stumps await the overflow. Women stand guard, shooing off the gathering storm of flies and hungry children with sharp flicks of their starched aprons.

Beyond the tables and deeper in the shade, the old ones sit in straight-backed chairs and favorite rockers toted up from the quarter, or hauled halfway across the county in the back of a mule-drawn wagon or pickup truck. The ground before them is a field of patterned quilts on which lie a small army of babies either drowsing or hypnotized by the pretty bits of silk and satin hanging from the branches of the shade tree, their gauzy edges tinged by fire, fluttering in the breeze like candied cobwebs.

A flock of giggling children race by, chased by a boy with a handful of ice stolen from beneath the burlap sacks. As they pass, a flurry of shushes and stern warnings not to trample across the graves “lest the devil burn your feet!” rise from among the grown-ups. The oldest voice breaks above the rest.

“Violet!” she fusses from her rocker. “Gather up all these little chicks, you hear? Get them to mind you.”

The slight girl with color-shifting eyes commences to corral the host of children. When she gets them quiet, she herds them about the graveyard like a master shepherd.

Her voice is as solemn as any preacher’s. “Now this is where Aunt Sylvie is buried. She made biscuits and dressed up Gran Gran when she was only a little girl.”

The children’s heads turn in unison to the old woman. With open mouths and wide eyes, they study the crooked lady in the rocking chair, as if trying to imagine such an ancient creature ever being a girl.

“Father Silas was her husband,” Violet continued, “but she stayed behind because she didn’t want to leave her kitchen. He’s the one who led the people to Kansas and was their first preacher and mayor both. He lived to be a hundred and three!”

Violet draws their attention with the wave of her hand to the silk tatters in the tree. “Them is the
very
dresses Gran Gran wore!” she exclaims in a voice that says she is as astonished as anybody to find them there, as if she hadn’t hung the scraps with her own two hands, somehow knowing that the sight would not only quiet the babies but charm the children. “That’s all that was left after the mistress set that terrible fire.”