Ugly Ways (29 page)

Annie Ruth stepped back and leaned against the door to get her breath. She looked up at the mortician who was standing there touching his throat and examining his hand. Three red lines appeared on Billy's pale neck and at the end of one of them a drop of blood began making its way down to his stiff white shirt collar.

"Whew, you clipped me there. Don't worry, don't worry. It's okay. A death in the family is a very stressful time. Don't upset yourself." Billy tried to sound like his usual confident self, but the whole time he talked he continued backing off from Annie Ruth, putting as much distance between them as quickly and politely as he could.

"When your pretty sisters show up, I'll tell them where you are," he added as he started toward her for a last squeeze. Then, he thought better of it, turned, and quickly headed toward the back of the building.

Annie Ruth made sure he disappeared down the hall and then slipped inside the room and closed the door quickly behind her. She was still having trouble catching her breath and her heart was vibrating in her chest. She could almost hear it in the silence of the room. This place must be soundproofed, she thought. She couldn't even hear the organ music or the wailing from the two services in progress across the hall.

She closed her eyes a few moments as she leaned against the door. When she opened them, her gaze went directly to the front of the chapel and she let out a long, deep breath.

Under a single soft light shining from the ceiling, Mudear lay on champagne-colored satin in her white oak casket, illuminated like a Madonna. A tall candleholder stood at each end of the coffin with a fake lit candle atop.

It had been a few months since Annie Ruth had seen her mother, but seeing her in a coffin, still, motionless, but not asleep, made her feel five years old again.

Annie Ruth slowly walked to the front of the chapel. Heavy velvet maroon drapes with silk tassels sewn along the top border were hung across the front wall of the room. There was a low platform stretching in front of the drapes and a narrow lectern off to the side with a purple nondenominational streamer draped over the front.

Mudear's white oak casket rested on a collapsible gurney on the low platform. The gurney was like the one they had seen outside at the side of the mortuary. Billy had adjusted the legs of the wheeled stand so Mudear's body came up nearly to Annie Ruth's breasts. Annie Ruth moved in closer.

Mudear's beautiful brown skin looked tight and hard as if it were frozen and glazed with ice. And when Annie Ruth tentatively touched her shoulder through her navy blue dress, she wished she hadn't. It, too, felt hard and unhuman. Mudear's hair did need some hot curls put in it, but brushed back from her face the way she wore it, it looked natural and right. Billy must have put a pillow or block behind her head for Betty to do her hair because the crown of her head was tipped forward a bit with her chin on her chest. The small gold hoops in her ears seemed to hang back against the pillow.

The simple string of pearls Betty had put around her neck still seemed to glow next to Mudear's dead ashen skin.

As Annie Ruth looked down at her dead mother, she realized that she was still furious. Annie Ruth thought that the rage would have drained from her the moment she saw Mudear's body. But it hadn't. She was about to lean down closer to Mudear's face and speak vile mean words when she heard the doors to the chapel crash open. She turned to see her sisters come in.

Betty and Emily burst in the chapel door like henchmen. But they stopped to turn and close the door behind them so no one could see and hear what was going on.

"Still sneaking around closing doors and making excuses, trying to protect her from this town, huh, sister girlfriends?" Annie Ruth asked as she leaned back on the edge of the coffin with her elbows. The whole thing wobbled a bit.

"Annie Ruth! I can't believe you," Betty said in a harsh whisper from the door. "Even if you are pregnant and upset. This is too disrespectful even for you. Too disrespectful of Mudear, disrespectful of the dead." She came racing up to the front of the chapel.

"
Disrespectful?
Oh, I'm supposed to be showing some
respect?
Did you hear that, Mudear?" she said, turning around to face the woman in the coffin. "Betty here thinks I should be more respectful. Well, this is as respectful as it gets.

"I told you both I was coming down here to tell this woman how I feel and that's what I'm gonna do."

Betty grabbed Annie Ruth's arm and motioned for Emily to take the other one. Emily hurried down the maroon runner of the middle aisle with her purse flying behind her. "This is too much, Annie Ruth. You've gone too far. We're not gonna allow you to go on with this. Tomorrow, you'll regret it. Come on, we're taking you home!"

"I'm not going anywhere 'til I've done what I came to do," Annie Ruth said and tried to snatch her arm away, but she accidentally hit Betty in the jaw with the back of her hand. Seeing her sister wince, Annie Ruth stopped and reached out to comfort her. When she did, Emily saw her chance and grabbed Annie Ruth around the waist. Emily tried to grunt quietly. Annie Ruth, feeling tricked, spun around on her high heels and, peeling Emily's arm away from her waist, she pushed her away, causing her to bump into Mudear's casket. The coffin rocked a bit on the gurney with its accordionlike legs, then steadied itself. The movement made Mudear's head seem to shake "no" two or three times.

Emily found her footing, too, and, straightening her red knit dress and throwing her purse over her shoulder, she came at Annie Ruth again. Betty was still rubbing her face, but she had recovered from the blow enough to act. She grabbed one of Annie Ruth's elbows while Emily clasped the other in both her hands.

"Annie Ruth, settle down!" Betty hissed at her sister as they turned her away from the coffin and in the direction of the door.

"I will not be told to go somewhere and sit down," Annie Ruth said in a loud voice. "That's all we've ever been told in one way or another. And I won't be dictated to like that, shuffled aside, brushed aside like so much garbage." And grateful for developed biceps, she yanked her arms away from her sisters. Then, she spun around to face Mudear again.

"I've had a lifetime of that from you, Mudear," she began to shout in her mother's face.

But in spinning around, she somehow lifted one leg and got the sharp heel of her boot tangled up with the long gold and black leather strap of the purse Emily had hanging from her arm and began to fall. Reaching out to break her fall, Annie Ruth let out a little cry and grasped for Betty's broad shoulders beside her. But she caught Betty off guard and brought her sister crashing down to the parquet floor with her. Emily, still hanging on to her purse, lost her balance, too, and was pulled down with her sisters, her hair swinging around her.

They fell near the first row of chairs in the Light and Shadow Memorial Chapel right in front of Mudear's casket, holding on to each other and letting out little cries of surprise and pain as they hit the floor and each other. The soft folds of Betty's royal blue skirt ballooned gracefully up around her chest. As Betty and Emily tried to disengage and right themselves, Annie Ruth just tried to escape. She inched along the wooden floor, dragging her sisters with her because they refused to turn her loose.

As they struggled on the floor in a tangle of high-heeled shoes and purses and silk skirts and lacy garter belts and arms and legs, Betty and Emily attempted to keep their voices down so no one else in the funeral home would hear them. But Annie Ruth was screaming at the top of her lungs and kicking her feet back and forth on the shiny floor. "Let go of me! Let me up," she yelled at her sisters. "I haven't finished telling this woman what I came down here to say."

As she flailed around, trying to elude the grasp of her sisters who still held on to her, she rolled closer and closer to the foot of the gurney that held her mother's coffin aloft. But just as she was finally making some progress, struggling to rise to her knees, her high heel got caught in the accordion spokes of the gurney and, twisting in the space, caused one end of the table slowly to collapse.

The girls all heard the small creaking noise, even above Annie Ruth's shouting, and all three of them turned and sat back on the floor to watch as the gurney collapsed. The end of the oak wood coffin holding Mudear's head tilted toward the floor, then slowly slid off the surface of the gurney. The shiny wooden box gained some momentum when it fell farther off the low platform and sailed across the waxed surface of the floor, coming to an abrupt stop at the edge of the maroon floor runner and tipping over.

Emily let out a small cry as Mudear's body popped out of the satin-lined casket onto the floor like an ice cube out of a frosty tray and came to rest right at the girls' laps.

They all sat or lay on the mortuary floor in silence. The girls were stunned. They sat quietly together on the funeral parlor floor as they had when they were girls and huddled close between their beads and talked. Only this time, Mudear was with them.

They looked down at their mother, stiff and straight as a little Popsicle. They didn't know what to do. They were afraid to move or cry out for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of the situation. But their dead mother was practically lying in their laps.

Finally, in the soft light of the Light and Shadow Memorial Chapel, Emily reached out and touched Mudear's hand stretched out grotesquely as if pointing to the enormous rip in Emily's new red stockings. She reached out and pulled down Mudear's dress hiked up to her thighs and began to weep softly.

For the first time in their lives since the change, they all looked Mudear directly in the face, and because she didn't insult them or shoo them off, they talked to her. They all spoke from the hurt in their hearts.

"Mudear," Emily began, "you shouldn't have told your own daughter that her face looked like a potato grater. That was wrong. Look, my face cleared up years ago. My skin's as pretty as yours, Mudear."

Annie Ruth, in the middle, sat up on her knees and spoke next.

"Was being free, like you always said, Mudear, was that the most important thing? Being free. Shit, what did that mean? Did it mean you were free to hurt us, your own children, to abandon us? To cut yourself off from the world and put the burden of your survival and ours, too, on us? If it hadn't been for us bringing you the world, you would'na had a life! And you didn't even appreciate it. Even though you were there, you might as well have thrown us away like so much trash. Even women who leave their babies in trash cans must think about them once in a while.

"Did you? Did you ever think of us?"

"No, I can answer that," Betty cut in, automatically backing up her sister. She sat right at Mudear's face. Annie Ruth looked at her in surprise. Annie Ruth felt seeing Mudear dead and stiff on the floor had changed Betty as it had touched her. "
No.
'Cause, Mudear, the only person you ever thought of was yourself, the only person. And Mudear, that was wrong. God, that was so wrong. 'Cause you can't live in this world like that. Not and not crush everything you breathe on and touch and claim to love or give birth to.

"I remember how it was for you before, but did you have to go and be like
him?
"

Annie Ruth spoke again.

"Mudear, I don't give a fuck about your freedom. And I know that that don't matter to you 'cause we don't matter to you. But look at you now, Mudear, you dead and gone and free, I guess. But look at what you left us all here with. You left us here with all your garbage to tote around."

"Don't you have anything to say, Em-Em?" Betty reached across Annie Ruth and asked. Emily hadn't stopped weeping since she touched Mudear's stiff hand.

"I just always wanted a mama," Emily said softly and broke into sobs again.

Annie Ruth reached beside her and took both her sisters' clasped hands.

"I know you wish you could just reach up out of death and slap our faces, Mudear," Annie Ruth said. "Slap 'em the way you slapped Betty when she told you about Emily running off to get married. I can feel you wanting to slap me. To tell the truth, I wish you would, wish you could. 'Cause, God, Mudear, I don't want this to be the end. Can't it be better than this? I think it can."

At the memory of Mudear's hot handprint on her face, tears began to well up in Betty's eyes, too. When she had walked into the chapel and seen Annie Ruth leaning on Mudear's casket, she had thought it was the most sacrilegious thing she had ever seen. But now, with Mudear stretched out in front of them like one of those hard plastic life-sized colored dolls they sold when she was a girl, just a corpse like every other human that had to face death, the idea of Mudear didn't seem so sacred to Betty anymore. She-picked up where her sisters had left off.

"It was Annie Ruth's idea, Mudear. But we all came down here to tell you we gonna
make
it better than this. Starting right now, we came down here to tell you that we know we crazy, like all of Mulberry think the Lovejoys are. But now we gonna work on happy and peaceful and appreciative and joyful." Betty looked at Annie Ruth and smiled a bit. "After being with you for forty years, we got being a 'ranting, raving maniac' down pat. Now, we want to move on."

Annie Ruth smiled back and continued. "So, we gonna put you in the ground tomorrow, Mudear. And we're gonna try and bury a lot of pain and hurt and being mad with you.

"We probably won't be able to do it all at one time. We can't stop being the way we are overnight. But we gonna work on it. I'm gonna work real hard the next eight or so months 'cause, Mudear, I'm pregnant. I may not know who the father is, I may have to wait until it come out to see who it favors, and I may not even tell Delbert or any of them they could be the father. But I tell you one thing, Mudear. I sure as hell am gonna be a mother."

Then, at the thought of motherhood and the idea that her body was going to be swelling soon like Mudear's did with her three pregnancies, Annie Ruth began to cry, too.

"That's about all what we had to say, Mudear," Betty concluded, with tears rolling off her face. "We gonna put you in the ground tomorrow. I'm sorry for you that you won't have some good old friend stand and raise a prayer for you or one to raise a hymn for you. But you cut all those folks off just like you cut us off."