Fittingly, the clouds began to overtake the sun, dimming the landscape to fit the somber occasion. If you sit in faint light and stare at one particular spot for long enough, everything surrounding you seems to fade away, like you're entering a dark tunnel. As I sat there staring into the dirt, it seemed as though there was no end to that chasm in front of me, almost as if once they began to lower Noah's body, it would keep going deep into the earth, never finding the bottom.
I don't know how long I sat there. No thoughts went through my mind, no wild imaginings or vengeful schemes. In fact, there was nothing inside me, like everything that had once filled me up had spilled into that yawning tomb in front of me. If anyone had seen me there, my shoulders slumped, eyes staring vacantly into the dry earth, they would have packed me up for the asylum. But no one saw and nothing diverted my attention until murmuring voices announced the arrival of the first few mourners.
They were still out of sight, and I managed to shake a small piece of myself free from the solitary place I had retreated into and stand, brushing the grass and dust from my skirt.
The first person I recognized was Miss Taffy, who had worked with Gemma at the Hadley home some years back. And then there was Poinsettia Watts, wearing one of her bright floral dresses that couldn't do a thing to brighten the sadness on her face. Her daughter, Posy, walked alongside her. There was a smattering of other folks with them, people I mostly knew by sight but not by name.
Miss Taffy caught sight of me crossing the grass and reached both hands toward me even though we were still twenty yards apart. I stared at her vacantly, loath to have any sort of funereal conversation:
How sad to see such a young life cut short
or
His poor momma, she's bound to die of a broken heart.
But Miss Taffy, she didn't say two words to me outside of my name. Then she grabbed me so hard it hurt, and I wondered where on earth this woman had gathered up this newfound sensitivity. Once upon a time, she'd sooner knock me upside the head with her purse than give me anything even close to a hug.
But I suppose death does that to people. It sort of makes us all equal since we have one thing in commonâa broken heart. I didn't have the strength or inclination to return the hug, but I slipped into it all the same, grateful to be held up since I couldn't much see fit to hold myself up tall anymore.
Before she let me go, she whispered in my ear, “He was a fine boy, and I hear you was a fine friend to him too.”
If I'd had any tears left, I would have shed them right there on her lavender suit, but I was fresh out. She reached up and patted my cheek before making her way to greet the others who were now filing into the meadow.
“There you are.”
I glanced back to see Gemma and Tal walking up behind me. She took my arm in her hand and turned me about, but once she caught sight of me, her whole face drained so much of color, you might have thought we actually could be related. “Jessie, you look like . . .”
She caught herself, but I finished for her. “Death?”
“What's wrong with you?”
I looked away from her prying eyes. “I ain't slept much, is all.”
She meant to say more, I know, but she didn't get the chance to before we were joined by Momma and Daddy, followed behind by Luke, who was escorting Miss Cleta with expert care. Nobody said much to me. I suppose there really wasn't much for anybody to say to anybody else.
Momma kissed my hair and murmured, “Mornin', baby,” but that was all she said. That was all she could say.
What I remember about that funeral comes in bits and pieces, like chapter titles without all the story filled in. I remember how the wind picked up so that the ladies' scarves flapped into their faces and they had to keep a hand on their hats. I remember standing next to Luke with his arm around my shoulders. I remember Gemma on my other side, keeping a clawlike grip on my hand. I remember the preacher talking about how Noah Jarvis would be sitting at the feet of God, worshiping, looking down at us every now and again thinking we were crazy to mourn over him being in paradise.
But most of all I remember the way Noah's momma watched that casket like maybe the top would lift off and her youngest would sit up and come running to her, like the Lazarus of Calloway County. She didn't cry much. I figured she'd run out of tears just like I had. But she sure watched that box like a hawk, so much so that I wondered if she could see something we couldn't.
A roll of thunder rumbled across the sky, and all I could think was
Not now
. I'd loved thunderstorms from the time I was small, and I didn't want them tainted by the memory of this moment, doomed to think of death every time a bolt of lightning lit up the sky.
I supposed that was how it was for Gemma. I think that was the first time I fully felt the depth of her pain and understood how the memory of a horrible time could haunt you for life. At the sound of the thunder, her fingernails dug deeper into my hand, and I peered at her in time to see Tal slip his arm around her waist.
It was good of him to take care of her like that. Maybe he even took care of her in a way I never had.
The preacher told us all to bow our heads to pray, but I kept my eyes open, watching the tops of people's heads, listening to the murmurs of some of the colored folk, who every now and again would repeat the preacher's words in a whisper or say, “Yes, Jesus. Thank You, Jesus.”
All I wanted was an explanation for why they would thank Jesus that they were standing at the graveside of a boy who'd been cheated out of life. That prickle of anger started in me again, and it occurred to me that I was thankful to discover I at least had some feelings left in me.
But those feelings weren't any kind of good, and as I stood there while the pastor finished up his prayer, they grew inside me like the rumble of thunder as the storm drew closer. The second he said
amen
, he launched right into the first verse of “Amazing Grace,” and even though I knew it, I didn't have voice or heart to sing it.
The voices around me grew louder with the thunder like they were bound and determined to be heard over it. Miss Taffy was the loudest. Her eyes were closed, those thick hands of hers raised to the heavens, and I watched her as she swayed from side to side, praising the God who had taken Noah away.
Without thinking and without a word, I slipped from the grasp of my two best friends in the world and walked away from that place toward the noise of the thunder, almost as if I could escape into the clouds and never come back. The singing continued without me, and every few steps I would increase my pace in hopes of outrunning the melody of those words.
“We've no less days to sing God's praise . . .”
Who could praise when death had wounded the soul?
By the time I reached the woods, all I could hear was the trickle of the brook that ran through the trees. I slipped my shoes and stockings off and walked in, letting the cool water run across my feet. I didn't flinch when Luke walked up to the water's edge.
“Jessie?” He didn't even bother to take his shoes off, just splashed on in after me. “Jessie, what can I do to help you?”
“What can you do?” I turned to face him, all those hours of lost sleep suddenly clinging to me like the wet summer heat. “What can anyone do? He's gone, Luke. He ain't comin' back.”
He dropped his head and stared at his feet, his hands on his hips. When he lifted his head again, his eyes were wet with the tears I wished I could cry. “I know he ain't.”
“Then what do you want me to ask you to do? You want me to ask you to say it's all goin' to be okay? Because I already know the answer to that. It ain't!”
“Not for a while, maybe. We've got mournin' to do, sure enough. But someday we'll have to find some way to get back where we were.”
“And how're we goin' to do that? Stand by and watch the Klan burn this town and take it all to hell with them? Let Delmar Custis and them boys run roughshod over colored folk in Calloway while Sheriff Clancy does nothin'? Are we supposed to just stand by till every tree hereabouts has a colored boy hangin' from it like decorations on a Christmas tree?”
My words made him cringe, and he took two steps closer to me. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky, and it occurred to me fleetingly that both of us might just get electrocuted in the brook and that would take care of everything in one fell swoop.
“I'm not sayin' we're supposed to not do anything, Jessie. But I can see what it is you want to do, and I can tell you right now that it ain't the answer.”
“I didn't say what I think we should do.”
“I know you. I know what you're thinkin'. You're the same girl that marched on over to a barnful of Klan that night the colored church burnt down.” He took a step toward me so we were face-to-face. “You're the same girl who shot at Klan when you were only thirteen, and you're the same girl that's had hate growin' in her heart toward those men ever since. Don't you tell me no different.”
“I ain't about to.”
He tipped my chin up so I had to look at him. “Jessie, this ain't the answer. I don't know just yet what is, but what you're doin', what you want to do . . . this ain't it.”
I slipped away from his touch and watched a school of tadpoles swim past my feet. “Well, singin' praises to God ain't no answer neither.” I figured I knew the look I'd see on Luke's face, so I didn't seek it out. It was bound to be the kind of look that made my heart hurt, and I wasn't inclined to gaze on it just then.
He didn't say anything for a few minutes, and we stood there alone in that brook with a foot separating our bodies but miles separating our hearts. “I don't know,” he finally said, his words coming out like he'd just run a marathon. “I don't know about much of anythin' no more, least of all about you. Or about us.”
I don't know what I was thinking then. For all I know, maybe I'd lost all ability to think sense at all. But when I opened my mouth next, all that came out was “Well, maybe you got some thinkin' to do.”
Standing there in those woods with the heat of anger and sorrow suffocating us, those words came out sounding like the death of all we'd thought we'd be together. My next breath caught in my throat, and as he turned away from me and walked off alone, I wondered if I'd ever see him again.
* * *
Once someone becomes a part of your life like Luke had in mine, that person's absence steals part of you, and for the next hour as I made my way home, I felt like more and more of me drained away. Momma, Daddy, and Gemma had gone to the reception at Noah's aunt's house, so no one saw me when I stumbled up the stairs into bed. The lack of sleep took me over the second my head hit the pillow, a sweet relief from the wreck and ruin my life had tumbled into. I slept for sixteen hours straight, but when I woke up, it took me only sixteen seconds to remember the sort of mess I'd left behind. My body felt numb as I dressed, but my mind was anything but, and I wished I could stop the endless stream of horrible memories that ran through my brain.
When I finally managed to steady myself and stumble downstairs, Momma broke into tears at the sight of me. She held out her arms to me like she had so many times when I was a child. “Baby, come here.”
I ran to her just as I had back then and clung to her while we wet each other's shoulders with our tears. The sleep had cleared my head in such a way as to make the whole of the past week seem too crystal clear to manage, and I spilled out all my sadness onto her. By the time I stopped bawling in her ear about how I couldn't live with the pain, how I was so angry inside it hurt, and how I'd let it all ruin everything between me and Luke, she was almost smiling at me.
“At least I got my baby back,” she murmured. “You can still talk the hind leg off a horse.”
“Momma, this ain't no time for jokes.”
“No, it ain't.” She shoved me down into a kitchen chair and went about getting me a plate of food. “But it also ain't time to give up on life and happiness, either.” She slid the plate full of chicken salad and diced tomatoes in front of me. “This ain't much for gettin'-out-of-bed food, but you need somethin' right away, and this is all I've got ready. You're pale as a ghost and five pounds lighter.”
I was hungry enough to eat lard, so I obeyed her without a fight. She sat across from me and watched me so closely I thought at any second she'd pick up my fork and start feeding me. When I was finished, she reached a hand across the table to grab my own. “Baby, you got to tell me what's goin' on with you, you hear? Why's this got you so eaten up inside?”
“That ain't no mystery.”
“But we've seen bad things before in our time, and I ain't seen you this bad off. Even after Mr. Poe left usâGod rest his soulâyou weren't like this.”
I lowered my eyes to the table and shook my head slowly. “Nothin's ever been like this. Nothin'.” I fingered my skirt nervously with my free hand for a minute, then looked up at her. “There's one thing to lose somebody you love. There's another to see them hangin' dead from a tree, all beaten and bruised. That don't leave you the same.”
“Oh, Jessilyn. Baby, think of what you just said.”
I narrowed my eyes at her quizzically.
“You're right, there ain't nothin' like seein' a man hangin' dead from a tree, all beaten and bruised. You're right, that don't leave you the same. That's what I've been tellin' you for all these years. The day I realized that's just what my sin did to Jesus Christ didn't leave me the same, neither.”
“Momma . . .”
“Jessie, you think on that. That's all I ask is that you think on what I'm sayin'. Right now you're feelin' like you'll never heal. Right now you're all full of anger and sadness. And right now's when you need to think more and more about what I'm sayin' because there ain't nothin' none of us can do to help you. Not even you can help you. You need help from somewhere that you refuse to turn to.” She slid my plate out of the way and leaned toward me as close as she could across the table. “But whenever you're tempted to think of Noah hangin' from that tree, you think of Jesus there. You think of that because He did all that willingly and He did all that for you. Noah Jarvis knew that, and if you want to make his death worth somethin', then you do what I'm tellin' you.”