Two Shades of Morning Read online

  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.”

  Feeling my face burn, I placed one hand on his clammy wrist, and his long bony fingers laced into mine.

  The funeral director stepped up to Robert Dale and P.W., lit their candles, and holding them ahead, they stepped together to the mausoleum, placing the pink guttering tapers in concealed mounts on opposite ends of the coffin.

  “Santy Claus come at the end of the parade and you was on the float,” Timmy said. He laughed, his brown eyes twinkled. Then his buck teeth clamped on his bottom lip and he got quiet, suddenly melancholy, studying me.

  An engine hummed low from the mausoleum and the coffin glided inward, the tattered flame of the first candle calming to a still small glow inside, and then the second, light blooming in the raw pinkish maw as the end of the coffin vanished within.

  “I like your dress,” Timmy said.

  Like halves of a shell closing underwater, the doors eased to, and the hum and the frogs and the bawling quit.

  * * * * *

  PART FOUR

  * * * * *

  Chapter 13

  The next day, it rained, dark, heavy and unrelenting, as if the sun had been forever withdrawn—anti-climactic after such a momentous event—and I went over to help Miss Lettie clean up and acknowledge the food and flowers. Also, I went because there was not enough room for me and P.W. and Sibyl’s ghost, all rained-in in a trailer. Our first day alone since she had died, with nothing to concentrate on but each other, and we couldn’t come up with a single thing to say, let alone do. We seemed to be idling around, waiting for next week when P.W. would leave.

  He sat sprawled in his recliner with his feet turned out on the foot rest and stared at the blank TV, and I could tell he was mulling over her and the war mixed up together. But he’d stared so diligently and long that I couldn’t accuse him of staring at her portrait after I’d gone over and got it and brought it home.

  On my first trip to Sibyl’s house that morning, Miss Lettie had met me at the door and thrust the portrait, face forward, into the rain: “Here, sugar,” she said, “how bout taking this on over to your place; Little Robert Dale says she wanted you to have it.”

  Yes, I could have dumped it, I could’ve marched straight out in the woods and left it for the rain to dissolve those stark living eyes. But I didn’t. I would keep it as a reminder and symbol of all those other Sibyls out there who would walk all over me should I lapse back into a doormat. Of course, part of why I kept it then was that I couldn’t tolerate waste and I knew the portrait was expensive. Since then, I’ve learned that some things are more valuable wasted, but somebody has to keep pictures—what’s left of people after they die—just as somebody had kept Sibyl’s fake ancestors and somebody had sold them. I don’t know what causes us to do the things we do—I keep pictures—and some day, somebody might need Sib
yl’s for proof of kin. So, I took it home and lifted down my cuckoo clock and hung the gold-leaf frame on the same nail above the television set, leaving it askance before P.W.’s froze-over face. His auguring, pupil-less eyes reminded me of his daddy’s, and though I didn’t find the old man repugnant, I found his traits repugnant on P.W., that overlapping likeness like a wart between the eyes. For about fifteen seconds of weakness, I felt guilty for going back to help Miss Lettie and leaving him alone, and if I hadn’t gone then, I might have sentenced myself to a lifetime of sharing his pitiful life. ###

  On my second dash through the rain to Sibyl’s house, I found Miss Lettie bent over a stack of white cards at the dining table, methodically scribbling thank-you notes.

  “I’ll do half of them.” I pulled up a chair beside her.

  “Ain’t got but twenty, sugar,” she said, licking the pencil point with her lizard tongue.

  “Twenty!” I said. “Miss Lettie, you probably didn’t get all the cards off the flowers; I’ve never seen so many.”

  “Sent ‘em her ownself.” She wrote with hasty confidence, as if through her discovery of that lone fact she’d located the missing link in the Sibyl mystery.

  “Did Robert Dale go back to the cemetery with you to get the cards?” I tried to act unconcerned, but knowing Miss Lettie’s bent for rashness, I figured she might have missed some.

  “Yep,” she said.

  “I can’t believe Sibyl sent her ownself flowers!”

  “I don’t know why not, baby,” she said, gazing up with those quick brown eyes. “She bought everything else in the world, even that fancy-pants preacher and singer and them little fellas that lit the candles. I reckon that’s what comes of it when you ain’t got no family of your own to put you away proper.” She made a clucking noise with her tongue. “Go get us a cup of coffee, will you, sugar?”

  I got up and went to the stove, pouring her a mug full of braiding black coffee from her old speckled pot. An open pressure cooker of dried limas was boiling on the next eye. Earlier, I’d seen her out scouting along the branch in Robert Dale’s yellow slicker, searching for just such relics, I supposed.

  When I handed her the giant mug, she took a long swig and folded her fleshless legs. “Honey, Robert Dale said you and him would take care of her belongings and all; I gotta get back to Mama.”

  “Yes ‘um, we will.”

  “Mae’ll do the biggest part,” she said, lipping the cup and slurping. “But you know how scary she gets. Bout how come her not to help out at the wake. Reckon P.W.’ll mind if you give Little Robert Dale a hand?”

  “No, ma ‘am.” I was surprised she hadn’t heard that P.W. and I were breaking up.

  “I’m sorry to hear he got called.” She took my hand between both of hers and rubbed it.

  “Me too,” I said. “Where’s Robert Dale?”

  “Out tending to business, and in this rain.” She began writing again, in the tiniest scrip she could manage, with her cropped brown hair scooting over her eyes.

  I got up and went into the living room, staring at the blank space where Sibyl’s portrait had hung. The room, dulled by the gray rainy light, was still full of her: her tastes, her many scents, coming in surprising drifts like her moods. Hearing the rain thrashing in the oaks out front, I crossed to the stairs and started up, smelling burned wax. Miss Lettie had opened the windows and turned off the air conditioner, letting the outside in for the first time, and though the damp air had diluted Sibyl’s ambiance, it had enhanced the stench of smoky wax, reminding me of the candles at her funeral.

  Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming urge to know where I would have been instructed to place my candle at the mausoleum if Aunt Birdie hadn’t snatched it from my hand. The ceremony with the candles replayed in my head, that whole pinky-precious scene of Robert Dale and P.W. placing candles at each end of the coffin, it sliding inside with their offerings of light, and couldn’t imagine where I would have put mine. What had Sibyl had in mind for me? What would it tell? The funeral director would know. I went on up the stairs and into her bedroom, taking the telephone directory from the top drawer of her bedside table. My hands shook as I dialed the white princess phone. After several transfers, I finally got him, and by then I was hell bent on knowing and pride bedamned! “What did Sibyl Sharpe want me to do with my candle yesterday?”

  “Carry it out of the church behind her coffin.”

  “I mean after that?”

  “You mean if you’d gone to the graveside service?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t say I had gone but had been waylaid by Timmy; I didn’t want to get in too deep with this man: the walking dead. “Mrs. Sharpe’s instructions were for the two men to put their candles on each end of the coffin...”

  “I know that.”

  “Did you see our commercial on television?”

  “No.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “Just tell me where I would have put my candle if I’d gone to the graveside.”

  “In the candle mount outside the tomb.”

  Outside. Right where I was when the screen door had latched while I was hunting goose eggs. I hung up the phone on him telling about how young people should make their arrangements in advance because you never know... I didn’t say goodbye or thank you like Mama always said to do, I just lay across Sibyl’s bed and listened to the geese clucking along the branch banks, the rain singing in the oaks.

  Finally, hearing Aunt Birdie’s sandy voice downstairs, I sat up. Like fingernails scratched across a chalkboard, her realistic grasp of things always brought me around. I stood and smoothed the champagne comforter, thinking about Sibyl’s buttery white wine. A long time ago, before I grew up. But when I saw my little-girl face and drooped pollen-tinted ponytail in Sibyl’s mirror, I felt like an an intruder in her house—Goldilocks in the fairytale. Going down the stairs, I heard Aunt Birdie talking to Miss Lettie in the dining room. “Lettie, you recollect that old Ford cloth-top car Emmet Moore bought used?”

  Miss Lettie mumbled something I couldn’t hear, and Aunt Birdie rattled on, reminding her how Emmet and Pap used to go out “gallivanting” with Candy Block. But when I came in, Aunt Birdie switched subjects and tones—”Sugar, I didn’t know you was on the place!”—got up and hobbled to the kitchen door, ducked into the rain and spat. Wiping her mouth with her handkerchief, on the way back, she stopped at the bar divider where the dishes of neighbors who’d brought food for the wake had been stacked. She lifted one plain glass casserole and squinted at the taped label, as if interested in who might own such a fine dish, and I knew I’d walked in on a private discussion, like one of their rare sex talks.

  Except for those odd times I’d overhead them talking about their periods or going through the change, they talked mostly about cooking—how many jars of jam or pickles they’d put up—taking the ripening time of fruits, berries and vegetables and savoring the seasons. Never bored, shuffling about their clove-cloying kitchens, the hot air so sugary it stuck their chins to their chests. Never weary, wandering along fence rows to pluck nubby blackberries in the bloom of summer. The dry rattle of a diamondback would periodically sound off in a patch of briers in response to testing pokes of their cane poles.

  I’d tag along behind, barely aware of the world making tracks at my back. What my sweet neighbor-ladies did seemed necessary and tranquil. But blackberry picking and putting-up seemed lazy to me now, a waste of time and energy when you could buy a pint of KoolAde-flavored jelly for fifty cents. Before Sibyl, I’d never felt that way; after Sibyl, it seemed I was standing light years away, looking back at Aunt Birdie and Miss Lettie sullying Sibyl’s house with their saving ways.

  Aunt Birdie peeped out the dining window at the rain, carelessly parting the sheer draperies so that they were left gaping when she let go. Sibyl’s house smelled strange with Miss Lettie’s steaming dried limas and her boiling cheap coffee. And as riveting as their earthiness was, there was an out-of-place feel to Sibyl’s carousel world. In Little Town, neighbors always ca
me the day after the funeral to help wash and sort the dishes and take them back, to clean and air the house, usually washing every sheet and curtain to give the family a fresh start, to rid the house of death. But before they started cleaning, they would sit and mull over the departed’s life, his grief, his death, in detail. And then, throughout the day, they’d stop cleaning to fuss over an old hat or an apron, shedding a few tears in the sharing. Then they’d pack up all his belongings to take to a special niece or nephew, or to the needy. And the spell of the wake and funeral would lift when the sun set on the rough muslin sheets, bleached free of the dearly departed’s death-sweat and tears by a dash of chlorine and the sun. The after-company cleaning that took place after death ended only when the last sunned towel had been flapped in the dusk, folded and put away.

  We did none of that for Sibyl. Her house was a shrine with our invading dried limas and boiled coffee and snuff spat through her back door. We didn’t even mention her name.

  Miss Lettie finished the notes and snapped a rubber band around the stack, then went to the kitchen to make a pan of biscuits—if she could find some baking powder, she said, to add to that sorry flour she wouldn’t pick up if she found it on the road.

  Aunt Birdie stood above the pot of limas, letting the steam rise to her face and fog her pinned-together glasses. She took them off, lifting one wire-thin hook from her left ear and then from her right, and stooped while pinching the bridge of the delicate frames to polish the lens with the hem of her soft gray dress.