The Funeral Dress
Authors: Susan Gregg Gilmore
Tags: #Fiction, #Coming of Age, #Family Life, #Historical
A
LSO BY
S
USAN
G
REGG
G
ILMORE
The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove
Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Susan Gregg Gilmore
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B\D\W\Y, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilmore, Susan Gregg.
The funeral dress : a novel / Susan Gregg Gilmore.—First edition.
1. Women—Southern States—Fiction. 2. Single mothers—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.I4527F86 2003
813′.6—dc23 2012050084
eISBN: 978-0-307-88622-4
COVER DESIGN BY CHRISTOPHER BRAND
COVER PHOTOGRAPHY © LEE AVISON/TREVILLION IMAGES
v3.1
for my mother, MARY,
and
for VALLERIE
who welcomed me home and
led me over a mountain
Contents
Emmalee: The Tennewa Shirt Factory: 1974
Emmalee: Red Chert: Three Years Later
Leona: Old Lick: Late Afternoon
Emmalee: Red Chert
Leona: Old Lick: 1956
Emmalee: Red Chert
Emmalee: Fulton-Pittman Funeral Home
Leona: Old Lick: 1957
Emmalee: Old Lick
Emmalee: Red Chert
Leona: Christmas: 1962
Emmalee: Red Chert
Emmalee: Old Lick
Leona: Old Lick: 1965
Emmalee: Old Lick
Leona: Old Lick: 1969
Emmalee: Red Chert
Emmalee: Fulton-Pittman Funeral Home
Leona: Old Lick: 1973
Emmalee: Cullen
Leona: Tennewa Shirt Factory: Two Months Ago
Emmalee: The Fulton-Pittman Funeral Home
Leona: Old Lick: Two Weeks Ago
Emmalee: Fulton-Pittman Funeral Home
Emmalee: Cullen Church of Christ
Leona: Old Lick: Three Days Ago
Emmalee: Old Lick
A Reader’s Guide for The Funeral Dress
A Conversation with Susan Gregg Gilmore
Recommended Reading: Books on My Desk While Writing The Funeral Dress
My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?
—JOHN 14:2
New International Version
E
MMALEE
T
HE
T
ENNEWA
S
HIRT
F
ACTORY
1974
Emmalee Bullard became a Tennewa girl on the last Thursday in May. She woke early that morning, like always, in the back of a two-room house squeezed in tight at the foot of Pine Mountain. But today she’d slipped away beneath the oaks and cedars without waking her father.
A steady line of cars pulled into the Tennewa parking lot, and women, mixed in conversations, spilled out of each automobile and herded past her. They giggled and pushed against one another as they funneled inside the one-story building, not noticing the willowy teenager lingering behind them. Standing on the rough asphalt drive outside the shirt factory, Emmalee listened to the hum rolling from the building’s open doors as it swelled and deepened. The sound coursed through her body and lured Emmalee closer.
The shift bell rang. Emmalee climbed the concrete steps leading to the sewing room and slid onto the factory’s floor, hugging the wall like a shadow skimming along smooth and silent. A dozen fans spinning from the whitewashed ceiling provided the only relief from the thick morning air. Fluorescent bulbs cast an artificial glow about the room, and the hardwood flooring, its patina burnished with age, sparkled beneath the light. High-set windows spanned both sides of the building, but most of the panes had been painted gray.
Heavyset women with thick, flabby arms and weathered skin sat in perfect rows next to younger girls with slender frames and long hair clipped behind their heads. Concentrating on the fabric streaming through their hands, they looked almost dwarfed in the large space. Their bodies nearly touched as they hunched in front of their machines, trying to make ends meet with every single stitch. Even those who had rushed past her in the parking lot had already taken their places and begun the day’s work.
“You hunting your mama? Go on in, girl,” said a man in oil-stained coveralls with a tool belt hanging low on his hips.
“No, sir.”
“What you need?”
“A job.”
The man took another look at Emmalee.
“How old are you?”
“Old enough.”
He grinned and pointed to a closed door. “Office is over there.”
“Thank you,” she said, her eyes turned to the floor.
The office walls were painted the color of butter beans not quite ready to pick. A few metal folding chairs and a rack for hanging coats were the only furnishings in the small space other than a tall wooden counter anchoring the right side of the room. A woman perched on a stool behind the counter peered over the rim of her cat-eyed glasses and smiled.
“Can I help you?” she asked and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of her nose. A wad of blond hair teased and piled on top of her head held a ballpoint pen and a yellow pencil. Emmalee thought this woman beautiful and caught herself admiring her pearly skin and perfect red lips.
“Sweetie, you need something?” the woman repeated.
“I was wanting to know … I mean I was wondering if …”
“What is it, hon?”
“I’m wanting to work. Here. At Tennewa.”
The woman studied Emmalee.
“How old are you?”
“Old enough.”
“Well, you need to be eighteen. Anything younger than that and you’ll have to get a permit. It’s not a big deal, but we’ll need it on file here. So how old are you?”
“Seventeen,” Emmalee said. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Come September. I’ll be seventeen in September. I’m sixteen.”
“Okay.” The woman shuffled a stack of papers but kept her eyes on Emmalee. “That’s fine. You graduate from high school early?”
“Don’t go no more.” Emmalee did not confess she had quit only yesterday. She had run late for the bus again, and Nolan refused to drive her the four miles in the pickup. He said it was time for her to get a job, not waste her days listening to a bunch of bullshit. He wasn’t carrying her nowhere near that school, he told her.
“That’s okay, hon. We always ask. I don’t recognize you though. You from Cullen or you drive over from Pikeville or Jasper?”
“Cullen.”
“Who your people?”
“Bullard.”
“Hmm.” The woman tapped her pencil on the counter’s smoothed top. “You by chance Nolan Bullard’s girl, the one that makes them crosses when somebody dies?”
Emmalee looked away. She knew people in Cullen had heard of her cross-making. She had seen plenty walk back into Red Chert to inspect her handiwork. Some thought it interesting, pretty even, while others poked fun. Emmalee didn’t want to talk about it no matter how this woman judged her habit of commemorating the dead.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“How about that. I’m Gwen Whitlow.” She extended her hand over the counter. Emmalee hesitated but shook the woman’s hand. “I heard you made a cross for my daddy when he passed two years ago. Landis. Landis Williams. You remember him?”
“Yes, ma’am. I remember them all. Their names, that is.”
Emmalee knew the full names of all those who had died in Cullen in recent years: George Chester Lamb, Floyd Wade Kenner, Berta Grant Price, Landis Bell Williams. She
had made a cross for each one of them, even those she didn’t know or didn’t much like. But she had lost count of the number of crosses made since starting eleven years ago come June fifteenth, only five days after her mama died.
“Heard they’re all nailed to an old tree. Nearly covered up by now.”
“Yes, ma’am. A white oak. It’s dead too.”
“Huh. How about that.” Mrs. Whitlow pursed her lips and rolled her stool a few inches back. “Kind of a peculiar thing for a young girl to be doing,” she said. “But you look normal to me, and we are hiring. Can you sew?”
“Yes, ma’am. Some.” Emmalee could place a button on a shirt and stitch a simple seam on a machine, all things she had learned at school. She made a two-pocket apron last spring, even placed the hem by hand.
“You don’t really need to know how. We’ll train you. This is real specific work. It just helps a bit, especially in the beginning. Any chance you had Easter Nichols for Home Economics?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Emmalee stifled a small laugh. She had never heard anyone call her teacher by her first name.
“Easter’s been working here since she retired from the high school end of last May. She’s a wonderful seamstress. Does beautiful work. Always meets her quota unless she gets to talking.” Mrs. Whitlow tugged on the ballpoint pen buried within the beehive heaped on top of her head. Emmalee expected the woman’s hair to fall, but it held in place. “Go ahead and fill out this application. Get comfortable, as best you can in one of those old chairs, and take your time. Only got a couple of positions open, but you might be the very girl we’re looking for.”
Emmalee chewed on her left thumbnail while she wrote her name, address, and birth date with her other hand. She didn’t know her Social Security number or what that was. She didn’t even know if she had one, although Mrs. Whitlow reassured her they were easy to get and handed Emmalee another form. Emmalee bit some loose skin between her teeth.