The Last Crossing (11 page)

A sparse congregation gathered in the Stubhorn. Mr. Clumb’s wife planted herself down beside Lucy Stoveall with that hopeful look some women wear when they’re readying themselves to shine in a crisis. There were no other ladies present; the sporting women from Rotten Row stayed away because they knew their presence was likely to set Mr. Clumb off. He was a great one for preaching against whores on street corners. The rest of the mourners were a few men whose laundry Madge and Lucy had done, and a contingent of the curious who were eager to see how Straw would conduct himself at the girl’s funeral. They had heard rumours he had been taken in for her murder.

Straw and Dooley sat side by side, the latter with his chin tucked in his chest and his long legs splayed out in front of him like travois
poles. He kept clearing his throat, sniffing the air with his red nose, and casting anxious glances at the mirror over the bar. It had taken him all morning to hunt up a sheet of canvas big enough to drape over the forty feet of tobacco-yellowed glass and Straw knew he was worried that it might come undone and float off. For Aloysius Dooley, to leave a mirror uncovered in the presence of the dead was to court the worst possible luck.

Straw noted that pudgy Mr. Clumb was sending signals that he was ready to begin the service. He was shifting from foot to foot, his fat little hands cuddled up to his waistcoat like hairless kittens. By the look on his face, the Methodist was confident he was about to dazzle the congregation.

And he did, after a fashion. “Someone has gone to Jesus!” Clumb suddenly shouted, causing Dooley’s outstretched legs to give an involuntary jerk. Clumb’s voice managed to do two surprising things at one and the same time, simper and penetrate. “Let us sing her home,” he urged and launched into “Diamonds in the Rough.” Clumb was not dismayed by those who didn’t know the words and could only softly moan along through their noses. He carried the burden himself, with a will loud enough to drown out a boat whistle. This sacred composition by C. W. Byron, a former carnival man who had made his way to the Glorious Light, struck Clumb as a very apt choice, since the unfortunate girl had spent her last hours at a frolic.

Clumb paraded back and forth, scooping up bushels of air to toss heavenward, as if lending a boost to Madge Dray’s soul, help send it flying upward to Paradise. Straw noticed that Lucy Stoveall had not risen to join in the singing. She stayed put, head bowed under the
sludge of words washing over her. The pallor of the woman was enough to break his heart.

After he waded through the hymn, Clumb began to hop about, nimble as a flea, taking a bite from Holy Scripture wherever he landed. Straw could make no sense of any of it, although one old waddie nodded away as if Clumb was clearing up each and every religious doubt or problem that had ever plagued him. On and on the preacher went in full spate.

Lucy Stoveall was doing her best to shut out the preacher’s holy babble. She had sworn to herself not to let any picture of Madge creep into her thoughts that might cause her to collapse and make a spectacle of herself. But this fool was working up a portrait of her sister that was so wrong she could not help but correct it in her mind. Now Clumb was singing “Jesus Loves Me.” As if that had anything to do with Madge. Wasn’t her big sister the only one who had ever loved Madge after their mother and father had been carried off at one stroke? And as far as Lucy Stoveall could see, the typhoid had to be laid on Jesus’ doorstep. Besides, it wasn’t Jesus who had raised Madge from her seventh year on, that had fallen to her.

Madge was an angel with a gift for happiness. Just having someone brush her hair could make her grateful, make her sing to the strokes of the brush. Her breath had smelled of milk, like a baby’s. The milk of human kindness, the simple scent of goodness.

The sudden scrape of a chair on the puncheon floor arrested Clumb’s peroration. Lucy Stoveall, up on her feet, was facing him. “Mrs. Stoveall?” he said, bewildered.

She took three deep breaths to ease the ache in her throat. “Finish with it,” she said. “Make an end, Preacher.”

Lucy stood amidst a great hush, a shocked and humming stillness. Then, all at once, a tumult broke on the roof like the beating of a multitude of wings. Every face lifted upward, then turned to the windows. Rain was thundering on the glass; a door of beaten silver swung shut on the view of the road.

Lucy was headed for the saloon door. “Bring her,” she said. The assembly rippled with indecision. Then Straw and Dooley rose, went to the casket, gripped the rope handles. Several others followed their example. Madge’s coffin lifted from the sawhorses on which it rested.

They found Lucy outside, holding the bridle of one of the undertaker’s team. The cloudburst suddenly slackened, as if its peremptory signal, being answered, had lost the need to insist. The assembly filed out of the saloon doors into a fine shower, gentle and feathery, cloudy as muslin in the distance. The pallbearers slid the coffin into the wagon and before the driver could climb up on his seat, Lucy gave a tug to the team and started the funeral cortege towards the cemetery. Everyone fell in behind the wagon, slogging along wordlessly through the gumbo. The wagon wheels crusted thickly with mud, and then unwound in long bandages of greasy clay to the accompaniment of the low groans of the wagon box, the soft chatter of a loose tailgate. Pedestrians on the boardwalk came to attention and bared their heads to the rain. A squat man with a hand of cards fanned in his fist came to the door of the Wild Turkey and peered out; a head bobbed above his shoulder. A teamster pulled his mules to the side of Front Street to give the funeral procession free passage. “God walk with you, ma’am,” he said, doffing his hat as Lucy Stoveall went by, eyes on her feet.

Numbed by a great tiredness, she did not see or hear him. When she lifted her feet from the mud, she felt hands clutching at her ankles, trying to hold her back. It was as if she was dragging it all along behind her: horses, wagon, casket, mourners. But the weight of this was nothing compared to the burden of sorrow inside her, heavy, ponderous as lead. She glanced up and saw the Missouri to her right, the river current pulling in the opposite direction to the one in which she trudged. It was slate grey under the overcast sky, and it seemed to
Lucy that it was threatening to take hold of her and Madge, sweep them back down-current, deny her sister a resting place.

Custis Straw kept his eyes fixed on Lucy, full of wonder at her determination, the way she plodded on in a haze of rain, earnest as a prayer, head bowed to the mud.

Now they were beyond the outskirts of town, ahead a crop of wooden crosses sprouted above the sage and tumbleweed, the needle-grass and wild rye. The two men Straw had hired as gravediggers were leaning on their shovels by a mound of freshly turned earth, jute sacks thrown over their shoulders to stave off the rain.

The casket was unloaded, lowered into the grave. Silence reigned for a moment before a single bird in a nearby bush began to call the sun back out from behind the clouds. Mr. Clumb led them in the singing of yet another hymn.

Straw saw Lucy stoop to the pile of wet dirt heaped beside the grave. She took up a fistful of mud. He watched her hand tighten, dirty rivulets of water streaming from between her fingers, dripping on to her skirt.

She drew back her arm, face working, and hurled the ball of clay down into the pit. It hit the casket lid with dreadful force.

“Mrs. Stoveall,” Clumb admonished sternly, “collect yourself.”

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, mud to mud, Preacher,” Lucy scraped out hoarsely. “That’s all there is to say. Cover her.”

When she swung away, blundering blindly through the tilting crosses and rank wet grass, Straw hurried after her. Gaining the muddy track, Lucy broke into a slithering run, lost her footing, slid to her knees.

“Mrs. Stoveall, Mrs. Stoveall, have a care. You go easy now,” Custis murmured as he helped her to her feet. Lucy was sobbing, her
face crumpled and red. “Listen,” he said, “listen to me, girl. Where are you bound in this fashion?”

The answer was nowhere. She could not form a reply. A sudden gust cast a spatter of cold rain in their faces. Straw put his arm around her shoulders, drew her into the shelter of his chest. “You come along with me, Mrs. Stoveall,” he whispered. “Let me take you to the Stubhorn.”

The wind and rain returned with a vengeance, driving everyone off Front Street just as Straw and Mrs. Stoveall reached Dooley’s saloon. Straw installed Lucy at a table beside the pot-belly stove, got a fire of cottonwood chunks going, set a kettle to boil, rustled up cups, a bottle of Monongahela whisky and rock sugar for hot toddies. Lucy hadn’t spoken a word since they had left the graveyard; she was sitting hunch-shouldered, hands clamped between her knees, gnawing at her lips, shuddering. For Straw, her condition brought to mind scenes he had witnessed during the war, men who had passed through the worst of trials and then broke apart on a safer shore.

When he handed Lucy the toddy, her shaking hand splashed hot whisky on the table. Straw took the mug from her, held it to her lips, let her gulp a bit. “Easy,” he cautioned. “Take a breath.”

Lucy whispered, “I’m all aquiver. I can’t stop.” Strands of wet hair hung in her face.

“You’re just cold,” Straw lied to her.

Lucy pried the cup from him. “I’m steadier now.”

The door flew open and Dooley lurched in, shaking the rain from himself, stamping his boots, blowing like a grampus. Straw was happy to see him. It was a chore to hold a conversation with Lucy Stoveall aloft by himself.

“Hasn’t let up yet, has it, Aloysius?” he called out.

Dooley didn’t answer. At the best of times females tongue-tied him. He needed a plausible reason to avoid chat, so assuming an air of great purpose, he marched across the floor and set to tearing down the canvas tarp cloaking the mirror over the bar.

“Leave that alone, Aloysius,” said Straw. “Come and take a drink with us.”

The canvas came off the mirror with a ripping sound, bellied out and wafted down to the floor. “Let it be,” said Straw sharply. “I’ll help you fold it later.”

“Hold your horses.” Dooley’s eyes scurried to the oil painting that he’d taken down and hidden behind the bar to keep it away from the disapproving eyes of the Methodist. Snatching it up, he rushed to the vacant nail and slammed the picture on the wall. Stepping back to judge whether it was hanging straight, he realized what he had gone and done.

The painting was of a naked woman lying on a shocking scarlet divan in a pose of languorous abandonment. There she was, all lust and invitation, flaunting her rose and alabaster flesh, her round belly and pert-nippled bosoms.

Dooley, beginning his mortified excuses, couldn’t bring himself to turn and face Lucy. “It come with the saloon when I bought it from old Jew Jake. I don’t hold with nudities, but the boys wouldn’t hear of me taking her down. The fellow who painted this picture called her Clara, and they said he was from Philadelphia. That’s all I know about this picture.”

Behind him, Straw cleared his throat.

Dooley thought of another mitigating circumstance. “There was a prospector named Giles offered to buy her off me for a hundred dollars. He wanted to put her up in his cabin. I’d have sold her to him too, but the rest of the fellows drinking here that night took up a subscription and outbid Giles by forty dollars. They wanted Clara left up on the wall. So I’m under obligation. I taken the money.”

Lucy said, “Mr. Dooley, I want to thank you for letting me have the use of your saloon for the funeral. You are a good man. Come and join us.” Straw heard the whisky in her voice for the first time. Most probably, she was not accustomed to drink. Her words were a tiny bit slurred, a throaty purr.

Dooley’s relief at being forgiven was boundless. It made him forget for a moment his wariness of women. He went to the bar, collected a
bottle, and bashfully joined them. “I don’t want to trouble your conversation,” he said, sinking into a chair six feet off. When he realized Lucy was looking at him, he smiled to the ceiling, lifted the bottle to his lips, and took a long drink.

Straw asked him, “Everything settled at the cemetery?”

Dooley nodded. “Clumb was still singing some, but the gravediggers didn’t wait on him to finish. They wanted to get out the rain so they started to fill the hole.”

“What that Methodist lacked in sense he tried to make up for with singing,” Lucy said coldly.

Dooley crouched forward like a cat offering its head to be petted. “I won’t have a piano in here,” Dooley declared, “for fear it might encourage singing. The worst for singing is them Frenchies off the St. Louis boats. Only thing worst than singing is singing you can’t understand because it ain’t English.” Dooley pelted on. “In my experience, Southerners are near as bad for tunes as the Frenchies. There was a fellow from Louisiana used to come in here, get drunk, and sing darky songs. Generally, darky songs ain’t cheerful tunes. I had to put him out. He was bad for business. As a rule, singing is bad for business. It oppresses the spirits. Drinking ought to be a cheerful occupation.”

“Madge had a sweet voice,” Lucy said, slopping another generous measure of Monongahela into her cup. “She purely loved to sing. If she heard a tune once and it pleased her, she never forgot it.” Her eyes filled as she lowered her mouth to the mug. Bad sign, thought Straw, a drunkard’s caution, to lower and not lift. “We ought to have sung one of Madge’s favourite tunes at the funeral instead of that Jesus malarkey.”