Two Shades of Morning Read online

  My own mother pulled in behind Miss Eunice and rocked me, saying, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” sniffling. And I knew they made each other cry too.

  Finally, after they’d all hugged me, Robert Dale turned around and hugged me too, and I felt truly ashamed but still couldn’t stop crying. Miss Thelma brought me her ironed handkerchief with the embroidered violets, her funeral handkerchief, and I thought of all the times I’d seen it, and I cried harder, lumping all the wakes I’d been to with Mama and Aunt Birdie into one prodigious mourning.

  Miss Louise and Miss Lavenia walked me between them to the sofa where they had set Robert Dale and brushed back my sweaty bangs with their cool smooth hands.

  “Get her some tea,” said one of them.

  “It’s all right, sugar,” another said.

  Miss Posey squatted before me with her brown eyes flickering through my tears. “Sibyl wouldn’t of wanted you carrying on over her.”

  Oh yes, she would, I thought, and cried afresh, wrenching, painful sobs. I was tired—really tired. Tired of crying, tired of sleeping by myself, tired of the whole ceremony, and we were only into the first phase of the wake.

  Miss Sallie Walker toddled to the sofa with a glass of tea floating picked ice. I sipped the syrupy drink and tried to swallow while they watched, their sweet droll faces saying, Once it goes down, she’ll be all right. The house ticked like a clock and the out-of-place smell of turnip greens wafted.

  “Better now?” said Miss Lavenia, towering behind petite Miss Posey.

  “She’ll be all right,” said Miss Thelma, slicking back my bangs till I could see them scutting like a rooster’s cone. “Won’t you honey?”

  “Yes ‘um,” I said, and they all smiled, unleashing a round a heavy sighs.

  Through the bay window, I watched Miss Lettie’s drab brown car tool through the oaks and park in front of the house. She got out, craning her tube-like neck, and tugged her yellow shirt down on her brown pants. She reached into the rear seat for two stuffed grocery bags, then tripped on toward the house, gazing about as though looking for some link to the old place. But when she got to the door, she literally burst through, eyes stretched in her wizened face. Her cropped brown hair made her look girlish. Seeing everybody, her old friends, she gave off a long hurt-dog squeal, dropping the bags, and the room full of women swooped toward her, emptying the space around the sofa. They hugged and clucked, then ushered her over to Little Robert Dale.

  Any fool could tell that those women, Miss Lettie’s old friends, had considered Sibyl a home-wrecker—probably a house-wrecker, too—and wanted Miss Lettie back with her baby brother even if it was over his wife’s dead body.

  Robert Dale stood to hug Miss Lettie, a dutiful half-hug, and she clung to him, steadily shushing. “I went by and told Mama, honey,” she said, “course, she didn’t hardly know what I was asaying.” Then she sat between us with one hand on his knee, planting sharp pats.

  “Hey, sugar,” she said to me, “how you been doing?” “I’m fine, Miss Lettie.” I could smell her breath, something old.

  While she batted her lashless brown eyes, taking the room in, she kept stringing sentences—”Say what you will about Sibyl, but she sure knew how to fix stuff up.” Her eyes roved from portrait to portrait of the make-believe ancestors, then landed on Sibyl’s.

  “Y’all come on and eat a bite,” Miss Louise called from the kitchen.

  The dining table and kitchen counters were covered with bowls and platters of food, foil peeled back on each dish. While we served our plates, more food came in, and folks kept stopping Robert Dale in line to hug him. I took my plate and went to sit in one of the folding chairs lining the dining room walls, eating alone to keep from being set off crying again.

  During dinner, Mr. Lyde brought another table from the school lunchroom and set it up under the double windows in the dining room, with only walking space left between it and the dining table. Wedged onto the tables were fried chicken, baked ham, roast beef, chicken and rice, chicken and dumplings, vegetables, put up and fresh, and every casserole the ladies could conjure from canned soups. How in the world they cooked it all so quick, I never knew.

  Somebody set up a card table in the living room and it too soon filled up with chocolate cakes, pound cakes, cobblers and pies. The ladies were all eating, talking, taking turns washing dishes—not in Sibyl’s dishwasher. They rotated from the sinks to the refrigerator, packing away salads with Sibyl’s leftovers. Mae must have been sent home, and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Punk. Mr. Lyde set out to get an ice chest.

  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-full 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 s
hove 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 h
er 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.