The Funeral Dress (7 page)

Nolan slid across the floor. “Sounds like a couple from Old Lick.”

“But who? What couple?” Emmalee crawled on her knees to the end of the bed. “Nolan!”

The door slammed closed, and the house shook. This time Emmalee’s body heaved forward as though she were going to retch. Her head grew dizzy, and she dropped back onto the bed. She reached for her baby, looking for someone, even a newborn, to comfort her.

The hearse rolled past her window and down the drive, kicking up mud and rock in its wake. Nolan followed in the pickup. Its suspension rattled as it hit the holes washed deep by the week’s rains.

Emmalee tried to move her arms and legs, but her body felt weighted to the bed. Tattered pieces of tar paper flapped against the sides of the plywood covering the house, and bare branches from the forsythia bush rooted outside the bedroom window scraped the panes as if begging for her attention. The baby whimpered some more, kicking her legs and straining to lift her head. Emmalee lay frozen on her back, peering through the pinpoint holes that peppered the tin roof.

The clock read seventeen minutes past two. Emmalee pulled herself out of bed and began the long wait for her father’s return.

L
EONA

O
LD
L
ICK

1956

Leona fiddled with the thin gold band on her finger. Curtis had placed it there that morning promising to love and cherish her forever. The young bride followed close behind her boyish husband, holding his hand tight, as he led her to a patch of open land flecked with purple crowned thistle and wild lettuce. She listened without interruption as he gushed about the house he promised to build her some day—a frame house, he told her, painted yellow, her favorite color.

Curtis planned to add a wraparound porch in a year or two so Leona would have the perfect place to watch the sun set while rocking their babies that were sure to come. With his warm blue eyes, he nodded toward the laurel hell rooted among the pines and hardwoods and promised by the time they bloomed bright again she would have the home of her dreams.

Leona stood in the spring grass and admired the new home. She watched intently as Curtis pointed with his free hand and etched into the air the tin roof he imagined. It would cost a little more, he warned her, but he wanted his bride to hear the rain falling on a summer’s night even when she was standing in the kitchen, cooking him a pot roast dinner. He winked, and she kissed him on the cheek. The blue trailer sparkling in the sun like a piece of fine crystal there on the bluff of Old Lick Mountain was only temporary, he said.

“My wife is going to live in the prettiest house in all of Sequatchie County. Can’t you see it?” Curtis asked. The hem of Leona’s skirt lifted in the breeze, and she laughed as she pressed the fabric against her thighs. She leaned into Curtis and snuggled against his broad chest. He wrapped his arms around her waist and slipped his hands beneath her panties.

“Yes, I do see it,” she said and fell further into Curtis’s embrace.

Curtis pulled Leona to the ground. He yanked on her skirt and kissed her long on the mouth. Leona raised her arms above her head and closed her eyes, easing into her husband’s touch. Curtis stroked her neck with more kisses and tickled her ear with the tip of his tongue. His talk grew quiet as his arms tightened around Leona’s body. He unbuttoned her blouse and cupped her breasts against his cheek.

“I love you,” Leona said softly, answering her husband’s caress.

Curtis wrapped her slender body between his thighs and pushed the palms of his hands against the ground.
And when he was done loving his wife, he fell back into the tall grasses by her side and kissed the tip of her nose, his rough lips tender on her smooth skin.

Leona tugged on Curtis’s belt and cooed in his ear, “Carry me inside, Mr. Lane.”

Curtis took her by the hand and lifted her onto her feet. A meadowlark hidden in the field’s tall grasses flew high above their heads, but its sudden flight did not startle Leona, still dazed by their lovemaking. She moaned, longing to linger there in the nest they’d shaped with their bodies. But Curtis pulled her along.

“Keep those eyes closed,” Curtis said as he held on to Leona’s hand. With eyes closed, Leona followed in her husband’s path across the field and up three short steps. “Now keep ’em shut. I ain’t told you to open them yet.” Curtis lifted Leona into his arms. She giggled and gripped his neck. She kissed his lips, and he carried her into the trailer.

Leona took a deep breath and held it in her lungs, savoring the scent of a home untouched.

“I love it,” she said.

“You ain’t even seen it yet.”

“I don’t need to.”

Curtis laughed. “Go ahead. Take a look. I didn’t spend all that money for you to stand there and sniff.” Curtis set Leona on her feet and kissed her cheek.

“Oh Curtis,” she said as she opened her eyes.

Leona slipped her canvas shoes from her feet and ran her bare toes across the carpeting. She reached for the wall looking like real knotty pine and smiled. She walked deeper into the trailer and stood between low bookcases
mounted to the left and right sides of the room, separating the kitchen from the rest of the living space. She already imagined the books and curios she would place there over time.

She glided across the kitchen’s glossy white linoleum. The window above the sink allowed plenty of light. She knelt low and stroked the floor with the palm of her hand. She had never seen a kitchen gleaming like this one.

“I love it, Curtis. I really do.” She jumped to her feet and hugged his neck. But Leona turned back to her kitchen and admired her new green refrigerator. She opened the door to find a half gallon of milk and a pound of butter already cold on the top shelf. She paused in front of the stove and looked for her reflection in its shiny top. She opened the oven door and pictured the casseroles and peach pies she would cook for her husband. She took another breath and savored the newness.

“There’s more,” Curtis said. He took his wife’s slender hand in his and led her down the narrow hallway to the other end of the trailer.

Leona grinned as she tiptoed behind him, stopping at the first bedroom door. Curtis admitted it was a tiny room, but Leona did not see it that way. He promised by the time their first child came along, their house would be finished and the nursery would be at least twice this size. Leona already imagined a baby sleeping sound in his crib tucked in the corner near the window. “It’s perfect,” she said and walked on behind her husband.

“This is our room.” Curtis said. He tugged on Leona’s skirt again. She giggled as she gently pushed his hand away.

A bed was placed against the far wall. It was made up and draped with a creamy white cover. “You done all this?” she asked while she stroked the cover with her hand.

“All for you.”

“Nobody’s ever been so good to me,” she said.

Leona suddenly spotted the blue sky outside the room’s window. She crawled across the bed to get a better look. “It’s so pretty here. The valley. The sky. It’s all so beautiful,” she said and pointed out the window. She pictured herself floating on a passing cloud.

Curtis told her that on a clear day, like this one, she could see all the way to Kentucky. She leaned closer to the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Kentucky bluegrass from her spot there on Old Lick.

“Take me there someday, Curtis,” Leona said and collapsed on the bed, pulling her husband along with her. “You know my mama told me not to marry some poor boy from Old Lick. She can’t imagine anyone with any sense wanting to live way up here. Said it’s twenty minutes farther to everywhere but heaven.” Leona petted Curtis’s cheek. “Mama said only people up here are no-good fools. Are you a no-good fool, Curtis Lane?” Leona whispered in his ear. “Tell me now.”

E
MMALEE

R
ED
C
HERT

A band of fast-moving clouds slid in front of the moon, shrouding the Bullards’ land in darkness. But the dark did not scare Emmalee. She had grown up there at the head of the holler, when even on the brightest days, long shadows crossed the mountain’s folds.

Wrapped in a quilt thinned with age, she raised a flashlight and cast its beam across the clearing. The neon-lit eyes of a wandering possum, spotted low beneath a patch of rhododendron, lanced the otherwise pitch-black night and reminded Emmalee she was not alone. She lowered the light and huddled on a stool under the plywood porch cover extending across the front of the house. She relaxed her shoulder against a broken-down refrigerator Nolan had hauled home before she was born. It was only good for leaning against.

Emmalee was drawn outdoors whenever Nolan was
driving for Mr. Fulton. Whether she knew the dead or not, she believed it was a somber time. And she felt comforted behind the copse of tall white oaks and pines even on a cold night like this when the trees’ branches danced above her head and the valley prepared for its winter’s sleep.

She raised her arms above her head and stretched her back. Her spine creaked and popped as if her bones belonged to an ancient hag, not to a teenaged girl left to mother a child of her own. Her breasts hung heavy and ached from the weight of too much milk, yet she did not dare disturb the peace of her baby sleeping in the back room. She pulled the quilt up around her waist and stroked the fabric, a kaleidoscope of faded hues. She wondered if there was anything left of Cynthia Faye Bullard among these worn threads.

Emmalee didn’t carry many memories of her mother anymore, other than those final ones of her lying sick in bed—her skin a pale yellow stretched loose across her bony frame, her lips split and dry, her eyes vacant. Sometimes, when she was real quiet and alone in the back room, she felt her mother’s lifeless body next to hers or smelled the sour scent of urine and death tainting the air. But even after all these years what haunted Emmalee most was the silence that came at the very end.

Nolan said Emmalee “liked to drove him crazy,” balled up next to her mama for hours after she died. She clung to her mama’s neck, screaming when anybody tried to pull her free. He said she whined and moped about the house for days until he finally had enough of it one night and took his hand to her bare behind, spanked the
sadness right out of her. He took off for the woods, said he couldn’t stand looking at the child that had drained the life right out of his wife. Emmalee remembered sitting alone in the holler that night, too. Back then, she swore she heard the house weeping along with her.

Nolan certainly had not planned on raising his daughter by himself, and he had reminded Emmalee of that almost every day since her mama’s death. Now she worried she might not do much better by her own baby girl, but Leona had promised things would be different on Old Lick. She had promised life would be good up there.

“Leona, are you out there?” Emmalee’s teeth chattered and her toes stung in the cold, but she did not dare leave her post. Another hour or more passed as she sat and waited for any measure of her father’s return—the rough sound of the tires rolling across Red Chert Road or a quick flash of the truck’s headlights bobbing in the distance.

“Oh, Lord, please don’t take Leona Lane from me!” Emmalee hollered her plea, but only an owl in a far tree answered her cry. “I ain’t making another cross. Not for you, Leona. I won’t do it. You can’t leave me.”

Emmalee rocked back and forth, and the quilt dropped to her lap. She hummed a low note. She did not want to know the details of this night’s accident. Yet she predicted with absolute certainty Nolan would return home all too ready to divulge what he had witnessed firsthand. He would walk into her room and sit down at the foot of the bed and proceed with his telling of the broken bones and torn flesh he had seen on the side of Old Lick Mountain.

“Stop!” she’d yell, already picturing the fear in Leona’s face as she fell from the mountain’s edge. But Nolan would not stop. He’d prattle on while Emmalee sat limp, trying to crowd her thoughts with prettier things. Sometimes she sang “The Star Spangled Banner” loud in her head to drown her father’s voice. Other times she pretended to be in a deep sleep, hoping to avoid his talk altogether. But Nolan was a patient man when it came to his storytelling. He’d seat himself at the foot of her bed slurping a cup of yesterday’s coffee and wait for her to wake.

She came to understand that when her father returned from working with Mr. Fulton, he was desperate to purge his thoughts of another lifeless body, too often bloodied and bruised, like the one of Grady Denton who drank too much beer one Friday night and steered his motorcycle square into a tree. Emmalee was barely nine years old when Grady was killed. He was nothing but a name to her, but she had closed her eyes and held her hands tight to her ears. She had sung louder and louder of rockets’ red glare, but her father sat at the foot of her bed, not once looking at his daughter who was desperate to drift away.

“No shit, Emmalee, we done near had to peel the boy’s face right off the trunk of that split oak out on Highway One Twenty-Seven,” Nolan said. He took a swig from his bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Little bit of his brains here. Little bit there. Like a damn bomb blowed up. Shit. We done found his girlfriend fifty yards on down, hanging limp cross some barbed wire fencing like a damn rag doll. Not a scratch on her. Shit. Pretty girl too.”

Emmalee shifted her weight against the refrigerator
as images of Grady’s and his girlfriend’s bodies, even her mother’s, flashed in her head. She saw them clear in front of her as if she could reach out and touch them. Preparing for another death always conjured up the ones already done.

The baby hollered in the back room.

Emmalee took hold of the refrigerator’s door handle and pulled herself to her feet. She hugged her breasts with both arms as she straightened. She imagined her father was well into his work, and she feared the preacher had already offered up a prayer, willing the souls of the newly departed to a better place, perhaps a place where the streets really were lined with gold and speckled with pearls.