Letter From Home (20 page)

She sat very still. . . . On the wire . . . her story would go out on the wire. . . .

 
 
GRETCHEN SLIPPED ON her dull blue wool crepe dress. It was her best winter dress and the pleated skirt felt heavy as a blanket. She'd be hot as blazes, but none of her summer church clothes were dark. She had one pair of pumps for summer, white, and one for winter, dark blue. Should she wear the winter shoes? She shrugged, stepped into the dark shoes. She popped on a navy straw hat. She'd carefully taken off a cluster of yellow feathers. Why did people wear dark clothes to a funeral? To show they were unhappy? Gretchen wasn't sure. But that's what everybody did. Funny. Just like ants swarming around an anthill. Was she like an ant? Doing what everybody else did because that was all she knew? She tucked the question in her mind to think about.

Grandmother was waiting in the living room, wearing her best navy silk dress and a blue straw hat. Her white-blond hair was freshly braided in a coronet. Usually, when they were on their way to church, her blue eyes would be shining with eagerness, her plump cheeks pink in anticipation. Today she looked old, her face drawn and pale, her shoulders bent. She held a blue pottery bowl covered with wax paper. “I have made a fruit salad. Barb and her aunt are at the house so I thought we'd take it there.” Her round face creased. “I don't know if people will come to the house after the funeral. . . .” Her purse and gloves lay on the table by the front door.

Gretchen reached out for the bowl. Murder changed everything. Murder had turned Faye Tatum from a woman eyed with suspicion because she was an artist into a bad person. At least that seemed to be how Reverend Byars saw Faye. How many people in town felt the same way? Grandmother had made the salad because that was what she always did when someone died. She fixed food and took it to a bereaved family and after the funeral everyone gathered at the house and ate and talked and laughed and cried. But today, nothing was familiar, not even sun-baked Archer Street with two unfamiliar cars parked in the rutted drive of the Tatum house. A mud-streaked green coupe was nosed in close to a pile of logs. Behind it, a shiny black sedan gleamed with fresh wax.

Blazing heat pressed against them. Every patch of shadow from the thick-leafed oaks was a welcome respite, a fractional lessening of the heat's burden. Gretchen held the bowl in one hand, braced Grandmother's elbow with the other. Grandmother moved slowly, as if each step took effort. When they left the Tatum house, it would be three blocks more to the funeral home. Could Grandmother walk all that way? The thought wiggled in Gretchen's mind, dark and ugly as a cottonmouth slithering through red-tinted lake water. Fear for Grandmother made Gretchen feel cold, despite the waves of baked air that rolled against her like hot drafts pulsing from a grass fire. Grandmother had always stepped with dignity, but she had been able to walk anywhere she wanted, even the two miles to Cousin Hilda's farm. Today, her gait was leaden, like an old, old woman's.

The Tatums' rusted gate still hung from its hinge. The unkempt yard seemed weedier than ever, the house shabbier. The front door was open. Gretchen moved ahead of Grandmother, lifted one hand. Before she could knock, the screen door swung out.

Barb, her face white as a clown's greasepaint, held the screen. She, too, wore a dark dress and hat, held gloves tightly in one hand. She didn't say a word. Red-rimmed eyes, glazed with misery, stared emptily. Her features looked like they'd been chopped from pond ice, hard, gray, rigid.

Gretchen stepped inside even though she wanted to turn and run, leave behind Barb's pain, flee from this square room with its awful freight of memory.

Grandmother climbed the steps, breathing heavily. She came inside, folded Barb in her arms, held her tight.

Footsteps clipped on the hardwood floor. “Come in. I'm Darla Murray, Faye's sister. Barb, mind your manners, introduce our guests.” Darla Murray's voice was sharp. Her face was a heavier version of Faye's, the artist's elegant bone structure blurred by age. She, too, might have been beautiful, but her green eyes were hard and cold. Tiny, deep, dissatisfied lines fissured her face, bracketed tight lips.

Grandmother patted Barb once more. “Mrs. Murray, we are neighbors to Faye and Clyde.” She spoke his name with a trace of defiance. “This is my granddaughter, Gretchen. She has brought the salad.”

Mrs. Murray waved a thick hand, the nails a bright red. “Oh, you can put it in the kitchen. It's very nice of you.” There was no thanks in her tone. “I don't know whether we'll need anything. Some people brought dishes, but I've got to get on the road as soon as the burial's done.” She glared at Barb. “And you have to get your things ready to go to the preacher's house. I can't stay more than a few minutes after everything's done so if you don't want to be here”—she waved her hand at the living room—“by yourself, you're going to have to move fast. One of us has to lock this place up.” Her cold eyes scanned the living room. It was neat, no magazines or Coke bottle or crackers scattered about. Someone had cleaned and straightened, the rug smooth without a ripple. There was nothing left to remind of the careless easy lives spent here or the painful death.

Barb's stricken face turned toward Gretchen. “I'll take the salad.” She reached out, grabbed the bowl, limped toward the kitchen.

Mrs. Steele, her sweet face solemn, bent past Lucille Winters's big dark pompadour, to flutter her fingers in greeting. “Lotte, Gretchen.” There was an old man Gretchen didn't know in one corner talking to Mrs. Crane, who held a handkerchief tight in her hands and dabbed at her eyes, but the living room didn't hold the usual big gathering of family and friends after a death.

Grandmother moved past Mrs. Murray. Gretchen sped toward the kitchen. She didn't want to think that Grandmother was standing right now where Faye Tatum's body had lain.

Barb stood in the doorway to the back porch, slumped against the door frame, facing the welter of canvases and the easel with the unfinished painting.

“Barb,” Gretchen called softly.

Barb turned as if her body ached. She looked at Gretchen dully, her face heavy with sadness and despair. “Daddy didn't come home. They're going to bury Mama and he isn't here. Aunt Darla said”—she took a deep breath and now her shoulders shook—“what could Mama expect, no man would put up—” She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God, I wish I was dead. That's what Daddy thought. That's what he thought and . . .”

Gretchen fought tears as she hurried toward Barb.

A crisp hand clap sounded from the doorway.

Barb's head jerked up. Her eyes blazed.

“Time to go.” Barb's aunt adjusted her hat, dropped down a short veil. “Have you got your gloves? Come on, girl.”

Barb started across the kitchen, then whirled and limped back to the porch.

Mrs. Murray clapped her hands on her broad hips. “What do you think—”

Barb came through the door, clutching a paintbrush. She held it tight to her body.

“You can't take that—”

“I'm going to take it. I am.” She moved across the floor, her face set and hard, stopped by Gretchen. “You and your grandmother will sit with us, won't you? And come in the car? There's room. There's so much room.” Her voice was uneven. “There's only me and Aunt Darla. Please, Gretchen, say you'll come.”

MRS. PECK TAUGHT music at her house. When a student played, she turned on the metronome. Gretchen remembered trying hard to keep up and always falling behind, the heavy tick sounding louder and louder. When Mrs. Peck played hymns for funerals, she wore a black hat and black dress and her thick arms moved like pistons, mechanical and lifeless. Now she pounded out “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

They sat—the four of them, Barb's aunt and Barb and Grandmother and Gretchen—in the family room that overlooked the pews. The heat was suffocating, thick and heavy as the dusty purple velvet curtains at each end of the opening into the chapel. In the chapel, only a handful of mourners sat in wooden pews, their faces waxy in the dim gloom beneath yellowish lights. Of those, only two were young, Jim Dan Pulliam and a soldier. Gretchen was puzzled. Where were Barb's friends? Barb was popular though a lot of the girls were jealous of the way the boys flocked around her. She'd always had plenty of friends. But murder changed everything.

Gretchen's gaze moved from face to face, in part to avoid looking at the white casket. The casket was closed. Gretchen was glad. She'd not attended many funerals, but she remembered the slow, shuffling lines that inched past and the awful empty grayness of a dead face. She didn't understand looking at a dead person. Why remember anyone that way? She sat in the hot, fetid room and was glad she didn't remember her father's funeral, not really. She remembered the smell of flowers and her Mother's icy stillness, but not the casket or a dead man. She remembered her father striding toward her, picking her up, swinging her in the air, his face alight with love. And with life. Maybe someday she would blot out the ugliness of Faye sprawled broken on her living room floor and remember Faye's laughter on a summer evening as she played jacks with Barb and Gretchen, her narrow face alive and eager, her artist's eyes seeing more than anyone ever realized.

Reverend Byars, his face flushed, was waving a manicured hand and shouting, “. . . our sister, if her heart is repentant, will find forgiveness and peace. And someday, brothers and sisters, we too . . .” Gretchen blocked out his words, refused to listen. She was intensely aware of Grandmother's soft sobs, a handkerchief pressed to her face, and the rigidity of Mrs. Murray, her bulky body still as stone, though tears slipped down her hard face, and, most of all, Barb, who trembled like a brown leaf swept by a November wind.

Gretchen refused to hear even though Reverend Byars's voice rose higher and higher. She stared through into the chapel, her gaze moving from person to person among those whom she knew. . . .

Martha Crane plucked at the strand of pearls at her throat. She stared at the casket, her expression forlorn.

Lucille Winters opened and shut the clasp of her purse. She looked older in her Sunday dress than she had at Jessop's Five and Dime. She kept shaking her head and frowning.

Betty Steele's head was bent, perhaps in thought, perhaps in prayer. She held a rosary in one hand.

Mr. Dennis's suit coat was bunched up around his thick neck. His arms were folded across his front. His wrinkled skin was more pronounced when he frowned. He looked irritable and impatient, his grizzled eyebrows a thick straight line, his lips pursed. As clearly as if he'd shouted, Gretchen knew his thoughts. If he'd had a copy pencil, he would have marked through Reverend Byars.

A strand of chestnut hair fell across Jim Dan Pulliam's face. His worn white shirt was mended but he wore a tie. Occasionally, he lifted a graceful hand to smooth back his hair and then his expression for an instant was clearly visible. His eyes were lifted to the sunlight streaming in a cascade of color through a stained-glass window. The brilliant shaft poured over one end of the wooden casket, making the white paint glisten bright as dime-store pearls.

A chunky young soldier, his khaki uniform crisp, sat next to Jim Dan. The soldier's brown hair was cut short, his freckled face sunburned. Every so often, his eyes slipped toward the family room. He held his uniform cap in big-knuckled hands, nervously turned the cap over and over.

Behind them, Ralph Cooley sprawled in a pew, arms widespread, legs outthrust. He wore his hat on the back of his head. His flaccid face, worn by years of too little sleep, wrinkled in a sardonic sneer as Reverend Byars concluded, smacking his Bible on the podium, “. . . know that hell awaits us if we pursue the path of damnation.”

The last rumble of his voice still hung in the air when Mrs. Peck began to hammer out the first stanza of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

In the last pew, Chief Fraser lifted a big hand to rub his rough-skinned cheeks. His imposing bulk made the bench look small, the space confined. He looked like an old crow waiting to scavenge, bright cold eyes darting about the room.

At the other end of the last row, as far from the chief as possible, sat Sheriff Moore and County Attorney Donny Durwood. Moore's watchful face, the bones jutting at odd angles, turned toward Durwood as he bent his head to whisper. The county attorney looked tired, his cheeks sagging with fatigue. But he blinked his eyes and listened intently, finally nodding.

The door to the family room opened and the funeral home director, pink face solemn, natty blue suit tight across his chest, stepped inside. “Mrs. Murray, Barb, if you wish to go by the casket now . . .”

Barb reached out, grabbed Gretchen's arm, clung so tight it hurt. “I can't. . . .” It was a thick deep whisper.

Mrs. Murray stood, started forward.

Barb still sat in the cushiony chair, her fingers digging into Gretchen's skin.

Grandmother held out her hands. “Come, girls.” She made a soft sighing sound. “I will be with you both. And please to remember that our lovely Faye is not here. She is in heaven with Jesus. ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain.'” She took Barb's hand.

Mrs. Murray waited in the hallway. “Come on. Let's get this over.”

Barb clutched Grandmother's arm and ignored her aunt as they walked slowly through the door into the chapel and toward her mother's casket. It wasn't until they stopped beside the casket with its single spray of white flowers that Gretchen saw the paintbrush in Barb's hand. She reached out, pressed the brush against the wood, held it there for an instant. “Mama . . .”