Prayers the Devil Answers (14 page)

Henry reddened. “No, Ellendor, I certainly don't expect to be notified every time one of you is taken ill, but surely you knew how serious this was. You had the doctor in to look at Albert, didn't you? What did he tell you?”

“The doctor reckoned it was pneumonia, Henry, but Albert wasn't old, and his constitution has always been strong. He hardly ever got more than a cold. You know that. I kept thinking he'd get better.” Maybe the doctor had said otherwise, but I couldn't let myself believe it. Somehow I felt that making preparations for Albert's death would seal his fate. Sending for family would have meant that I had given up and accepted that his death was inevitable. Henry and Elva wouldn't
have been any comfort anyway. Their high and mighty attitude since they showed up proved I had been right to dread their arrival.

Henry was puffed up like a Pouter pigeon with indignation. “I would have liked to have seen my brother one last time before he passed away.” He didn't sound like he was grieving, though. He looked angry, as if he had been done out of his rights. Not for the first time I marveled at the difference between Henry and Albert.

“It would have done no good to call you, Henry. You couldn't have told him good-bye. Albert was unconscious almost from the beginning after he took to his bed.”

“And when was that?”

“Nearly a week ago, I think.”

“Nearly a week
.
”
His eyes narrowed into a piggy squint. “I should have been notified, Ellendor.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so, but I didn't have time to think about anything except taking care of Albert and seeing that the boys had hot meals and clean clothes. I could have used some help, but I didn't think I'd get it from you.”

“I'm not a nurse, Ellendor. Neither is Elva. We do have a farm to run.” Apparently, hardship did not interest Henry unless he experienced it himself. Right now he was focused on his grievance and would not be distracted from it. “Since you did not have the courtesy to let me say my good-byes while Albert lived, then I want to see my brother's body.”

I glanced at the boys. Eddie was cutting a deviled egg into dozens of tiny pieces, careful not to look up, but his hand was shaking and his cheeks were red. Much more of this and he'd lose the composure that had got him through the day. Even Georgie looked alarmed. He couldn't grasp what was going on, but he did understand tones of voice, and our raised voices and angry expressions had put him close to tears. Any moment now he would start to howl, and that would only make things worse for everybody.

“Eddie, please take Georgie to your room and put him to bed. Tell him a story if you're up to it. He needs to be settled down.”

We waited in silence while Eddie put their plates beside the sink. With a mumbled goodnight, he led Georgie away down the hall. Elva had not said a word. She kept looking around with a bored, blank expression as if this was a movie she hadn't particularly wanted to see.

When we heard the door close, Henry resumed the attack. “I want to see my brother, Ellendor. Is he back there in the other bedroom?”

“No. Not anymore, Henry. The undertaker's men came and took him away late this afternoon. They said they will keep the body at the mortuary until the funeral, but I reckon it would be closed by this time of a Sunday evening.”

“I might have known, Ellendor.” He sounded like he thought I had arranged for Albert's body to be moved not out of necessity, but simply to vex him.

“You could go first thing tomorrow, though, Henry.” In fairness I had to say it, but I hoped he wouldn't take that to be an invitation for them to stay here at the house.

He glanced at Elva, and she shook her head slightly. I wasn't surprised. The farmhouse was twice as big as our house here, and she had thought it too small to contain the both of us.

He turned back to me, still looking like thunder. “Well, Ellendor, I'll grant that you are pale and haggard enough, but I see no sign of tears. How much are you really grieving?”

I could have blazed back at him and asked what business it was of his, and who was he to judge how I felt, but this was probably as close to grief as Henry could feel for his brother. I would give him more consideration than he gave me. I stared back at him until he looked away. “Let's pretend you didn't say that, Henry.”

He reddened. “I just think you look like you've come through the ordeal well enough.”

“Well, maybe it hasn't altogether hit me yet that Albert is gone.
I haven't had much time to think—nor to eat and sleep, for that matter. I am also bone-tired from sitting by his sickbed for most of the past week.”

He sniffed, not satisfied with my answer, but finding no way to fault it. “All right. What about my brother's funeral then? Have you given any thought to that?”

“Not yet, Henry. I guess I'll talk it over with the man at the funeral home tomorrow.”

“Undertakers!” He spat out the word. “We never bothered with such foolishness up home. The Bible says dust to dust, and that's the way it ought to be.”

I wasn't going to argue the Bible with him. “Well, it's done now. It's how folks do things in town. I think there's a law that says you have to have it done if you want to bury the deceased in the town cemetery.”

“Surely Albert would want to be buried on the farm with our family. Where our mommy and daddy are laid to rest. We could lay him to rest out next to our brother Virgil.”

I was tired. My patience was wearing thin. “Strictly speaking, Henry, in order to bury Albert next to Virgil, they'd have to dig him a grave somewhere in France.”

I should have kept my temper, though. There was no point in quarreling with Henry when his anger was just another way of grieving, because men weren't supposed to cry. But between exhaustion and despair, I had no stomach for putting up with anybody right now, whether his anger was grief or not. As we talked, a part of my mind kept waiting for Henry to get past his own bitterness and sorrow and express anything resembling sympathy for me and the boys, who had just lost their father, but he never did.

“The funeral . . .” he said again.

He was right. I hadn't really considered it. Everything else kept getting in the way and planning seemed to be the only thing that
could wait. I rubbed my eyes and stifled a yawn. “I don't know where Albert would want to be laid to rest, Henry. I haven't had any time to think about it. We never talked about it, because . . .” I could feel the tears sting my eyes, but I would not cry in front of Henry. “He wasn't old. It was all so sudden . . . I wasn't sure what to do, what he'd want.”

“Well, now that we are here, we can talk about it.”

I ignored him. “The preacher at our church here in town came to call this afternoon. He said I could count on him to help us in any way he could—with the undertaker, the cemetery—whatever we needed. I reckon he'd do the funeral service if I was to ask him to. That way the people in town could come. Folks here set a store by Albert. They'll want to be there.”

Albert and I had never even thought about dying or what either of us would want done afterward, much less the details of a funeral. What hymn would he have liked to have sung at the funeral? What inscription on his grave marker? We should have had decades to come up with those answers. I might have asked him toward the end of his illness, when I began to fear the worst, but by then it was too late. Albert never woke up.

When the preacher came by to express his condolences and offer to help, he didn't pressure me to work out the practical details of a death in the family. He could see I was not up to the task of decision-making. I expect he had seen enough bereaved families to know not to rush them into deciding things straight away.

“Don't trouble yourself about those things now,”
he'd told me.
“There will be time enough for planning in another day, or the one after that. Whenever you find that the first shock of grief has begun to wear off.”
I had resolved to do that.
“There is some urgency at the funeral and burial plans, of course. You mustn't leave it too long, but don't worry about the inscription on the grave marker yet. They won't put a permanent headstone on the grave until the ground settles, which will be about six months from now.”

“Town preacher!”
Henry's scowl looked likely to become permanent. He wasn't even thirty yet, and already his face was etched with grooves marking the shape of his bitterness and anger. “Surely you must realize that Albert's real church is the one up the mountain that he attended for most of his life, Ellendor? It's your church, too, come to that. Brother Cavendish, who has known Albert and the rest of us since we were little, ought to be the one to lay him to rest. That's what Albert would want.”

“I'll think about it, Henry.” I didn't know where Albert would have wanted to be buried, or who he would want to conduct the funeral service. Maybe he would want a grave on the family farm far from the new life we'd made, but he never seemed homesick or anxious to go back there. Town was his home now. He might have preferred to be buried in the public cemetery on the hill above the town. And even if he had a preference, what did it matter now? Surely Albert was now past caring where he ended up. If you ask me, graves are for the living. The decision ought to be mine.

Maybe all Henry really cared about was winning this family argument, but aside from that piddling little victory, I didn't think the location of Albert's grave would matter to him one bit. He spent precious little time at Virgil's. After he took over running the farm, he didn't even see to it that his wife took care of the graves. The flowers their mother planted there were long since dead, and the family plot was overgrown with weeds. What was the point of burying Albert there, to be forgotten along with the rest of them?

I stopped mulling over the possibilities and turned back to Henry. “If we buried Albert here in town, the boys and I could visit him more often.”

Henry's anger nearly made him unable to speak. I wished it had. “In town? Away from family? More importantly, could you afford a cemetery plot here? Why, they must cost twenty-five dollars or more. I hope you wouldn't expect us to contribute to such foolishness.
Buying a plot in town when you can have a perfectly good one for free would certainly be throwing away good money, no matter how well off you think you are. Did the county insure Albert's life when he became sheriff? Will they pay for his burial?”

I shook my head. “I haven't asked, but I don't expect they will. There is no insurance, either. We could have bought a policy ourselves, but Albert said he didn't see the need to waste any money insuring people who were young and healthy like us. There were things we needed more, he reckoned. Mostly things for George and Eddie—shoes, winter coats. But we do have a little money put by from his pay, and I reckon I could use some of it to buy him a place in the burying ground.”

Henry shut his eyes and heaved a weary sigh. “Well, I can't think of a greater waste of money. Leave it to a woman to make a hash of practical matters once she is on her own. It's a good thing we came to tell you what to do before it was too late.”

Elva spoke up, perhaps to prove that she could be practical despite being female. “Bury him
in town
,
Ellendor? But where is the sense in that?”

Not that it's any of your business
, I thought. “The sense is this, Elva: when he died, Albert was the county sheriff. He made friends here—men from the railroad shop, the church, the neighbors—enough well-wishers to get him elected to office, in fact. People here respected him. He was the sheriff, and he was proud of that. Here he was somebody.”

“Somebody, indeed! He wasn't sheriff for long, was he? Not even three months. I think you'll find that people have short memories, Ellendor, especially when it comes to dead men who were no kin to them. Three months from now in a town cemetery Albert would be lying forgotten in an untended grave.”

“He will not. I will be here to tend it. And the boys and I would visit him. That's all that matters, really.”

“You'll visit him?” Henry was still glowering. “That brings up another matter, doesn't it? I took it for granted that you'd agree with me about Albert being buried at the homeplace, not only because that is where he belongs—with family—but also because the three of you will be moving back there yourselves.”

I looked away. “That hasn't been decided.” But where would we go now? That was another thing I had not had the time or the will to think about. Moving in with Henry and Elva again. I supposed that it did seem inevitable to everyone. What else could I do? Now Henry was forcing me to think about it. I looked over at Elva's smug face and pictured myself going back to sharing a kitchen with her . . . only this time I wouldn't be there as an equal. Now that Albert wasn't around to stand up for me, I wouldn't put it past Elva to treat me like a servant. What was there to stop her from doing it? Albert was dead, and everyone would expect us to go back to live with family.

Family . . . But I couldn't stand it there, and the boys weren't close to Henry either. He seldom took any notice of them. Since they were too young to help with the farm chores, Henry had no use for them, and consequently no interest in them. I knew that regardless of what I felt, all that mattered was what was best for Eddie and George. Should I take them back to their father's homeplace on the mountain, where they could count on having a roof over their heads and enough to eat, however grudgingly it was given? At least they would be safe that way. But if I took them back to the farm Eddie would have to attend the settlement's one-room schoolhouse that hadn't changed since Albert and I went there: just one teacher for all eight grades and not enough books to go around. As for Georgie, with the farm's nearest neighbors a mile away, he would have no one to play with, and without Albert to teach him skills, Georgie would never learn the pleasures of living in the country: hunting, fishing. Henry had no interest in any of that. He had never learned those things himself.