The Funeral Dress Page 6

  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.

  “Oh Mama, not Leona. Don’t take Leona. Do this one thing for me. Just this one thing. This one time. Please, Mama, please.”

  The baby wailed again.

  Nolan cut the engine, and the headlights dimmed. He stumbled out of the pickup and into the familiar morning gray. A knit cap, pulled down over his forehead, highlighted his bloodshot eyes. His cheeks were streaked with dirt and a cigarette hung limp between his lips. His boots were covered in mud and the hem of his pants was stained dark. Even in the dull morning light, Emmalee knew these markings on his clothes had not come from the orange clay varnishing the mountains of East Tennessee. The truck’s rusted door screamed as Nolan slammed it shut, and a mourning dove’s first attempts to greet the day fell silent.

  Emmalee’s long legs had grown stiff and numb. She gripped the post at the edge of the house to steady herself as she stood, holding the baby tight in her other arm. She met her father’s stare head on. “Who was it?” she asked.

  Nolan took a drag on the cigarette as he pinched it between his fingers. He plucked an empty beer can from his coat pocket and tossed it on the ground behind him, turned his mouth up to the sky, and blew a long stream of white smoke in the air. He pulled the cigarette back to his lips and took another drag.

  “Nolan, tell me who.”

  He stumbled past his daughter, smoke spilling from his mouth and nostrils. “The Lanes.”

  The woods grew dark, and Emmalee’s body slid down onto the packed dirt, her long legs tucked underneath her. The baby rocked her head back and forth, rooting for her mother’s nipple. Kelly Faye squirmed and fussed while Nolan rambled on about shattered bodies, not noticing or caring his daughter was slumped on the ground.

  “It was bad, girl. The woman done flew right out of the truck. Found her maybe a hundred feet on down the mountain,” Nolan said. He flicked the stub of the cigarette to the ground. “Shit, must’ve been some more ride. I done thought we’d be looking for pieces here and there, but the body held together pretty damn good. She turned out better than her husband, that’s for damn sure. He was done near crushed flat as a pancake.”

  Emmalee lifted her head. She tried to speak, but her chin dropped to her chest. The baby screamed fiercer. Nolan paid them no mind. His footsteps were clumsy and his speech slurred as he stumbled inside the house.

  “Where’d you put my bottle? Where’s my damn bottle, girl?” he asked, not waiting for an answer before his tone grew rough and anxious. “I ain’t in the mood for a damn egg hunt. I told you quit hiding my stuff.”

  Any other day, Emmalee would have understood her father’s desperation to drown these gruesome pictures in a bottle of alcohol. Any other day, she might have offered it to him, even if she knew his talk and temper would swell with every sip.

  “Damn it, girl, I mean it. Quit messing with me.” He staggered out the door and knelt low behind his daughter, his sour breath washing over the back of her neck and his fist growing tight around her arm. “Get my stuff,” he said.

  “I don’t keep up with your bottle no more. Got enough to care for if you ain’t noticed,” Emmalee said, her cheek resting on her baby’s head.

  “Shit. I see what you care for. Whoring around. Dropping those pants for any boy come your way. Now I got a baby to feed as if your butt ain’t enough.”

  “Shut up, Nolan. I ain’t no whore. And you don’t feed me nothing.” Emmalee leaned away from her father, trying to scramble to her feet and escape his words
and foul stench.

  “Don’t know the daddy’s name, do you? Don’t see him coming around here helping none, do you? Uh-huh. He figured you out right quick. They all do.”

  Nolan’s eyes were red and fiery, and Emmalee grew limp as he tightened his grip around her arm. She drew the baby close. “I don’t need nothing from you!”

  Nolan grabbed her shoulder. “Cindy Faye, I’ve told you, woman, not to hide my bottle from me.” He hissed his wife’s name in Emmalee’s ear and slid his finger down her bare breast toward the baby’s mouth. “It ain’t right the baby got hers, and I got nothing.” Emmalee slapped at his hand and struggled to her knees.

  “I ain’t Mama. I ain’t Cynthia Faye. Wake up, you drunk fool!” Emmalee yelled, her voice choked with anger and fear. She worked to pull free from his grasp, but with the baby bound to her chest, she floundered.

  Nolan tangled his fingers around Emmalee’s long brown hair and yanked her head backward. Cursing and spitting, he dragged her toward the house. Emmalee cradled the baby in one arm. She pushed her heels into the dirt.

  “Under the cot, you damn fool. It’s under the damn cot.” Emmalee cried out and grabbed on to the doorframe with her free hand. Nolan wrenched her deeper into the house and fell onto his back, his head snapping against the wood floor. He let go of Emmalee and covered his face with the palms of his hands, the cuffs of his blue work shirt stained dark with blood.

  “Shit,” he spewed and coiled over and onto his stomach. He lay quiet for a moment and then slithered across the floor, ferreting for his bottle amid crumbs of cornbread and bits of dried orange clay.

  Emmalee crawled back outside, the baby squalling in her arms, and huddled in the dirt on the far side of the refrigerator. The mourning dove plucked another note of its melancholy song while Emmalee waited there in the cold for Nolan to calm himself with his drink.

  Later from her room, Emmalee listened to her father slurping from his bottle and rambling on about all he had seen on the side of Old Lick. She pulled the quilt over her head and hummed another bar of “The Star Spangled Banner,” but his talk sputtered on.

  “Shut up, you old fool.” She did not want him talking about Leona that way. “Just shut your mouth,” she said and rubbed her arm where he had grabbed her, certain to find a bruise there.

  The baby slept in the middle of the bed while Emmalee sat stiffly in a chair placed against the door. The chair legs were uneven, like the broken-down sofa in the front room. She rocked back and forth while she pictured Leona’s death in vivid detail as if she was watching a movie, each frame rolling too slowly across the screen.

  Leona’s eyes grew big, and her arms flailed about the truck. She reached for her husband, desperate for his hand, but she could not find it. She screamed his name as the pickup dropped to the ground. Emmalee wondered if Leona had told Curtis she loved him. She wondered if there was time or the presence of mind to say such a thing as the truck hurtled through the air and Leona’s body was flung against the truck’s roof. Emmalee wiped a tear from her eye and played the scene again, and again. When the house at last grew quiet, the baby woke, angry and loud. Her diaper was sopping wet and her belly empty.

  “Damn it, Kelly,” Emmalee said, her tone harsh. “I ain’t up for you right now.” Kelly’s cries boomed louder, and she kicked her little legs, tossing the covers from her body. “Hush up.” Emmalee stood by the bed and pulled the baby in front of her. Kelly’s face was red and her fussing, sharp. “Stop it. Everybody in Red Chert’s going to hear you if you don’t hush up.” Emmalee’s breath blew white in the room. “I’m doing the best I can, can’t you see that?”

  She slipped the wet gown over her baby’s head and stripped the wet cloth from her bottom. She held her hand on Kelly’s tummy while she reached for a dry diaper on the table next to the bed. “Damn it,” Emmalee said. A half dozen diapers had been left soaking in the tin pail outside the house and were likely frozen hard. A dozen others had been left hanging on the line. “Damn it. Damn it.” Emmalee glanced about the room for a suitable cloth for diapering. “What with you pulling on me all day, I gone and forgot all those damn diapers.”

  Emmalee scrounged about the room for something more to wear. She pulled on a pair of jeans tucked under the bed and a ratty sweater left across the back of the chair. She bundled herself in what else she could find: a hooded sweatshirt and some thick wool socks. “Hush Kelly. Hush now,” Emmalee said as if reciting a mantra. “Hush baby. Hush your crying.” But the baby carried on for her mother’s care.

  Emmalee tugged on the jeans’ denim waistband and drew in her stomach. She wondered if she would ever look or feel like she had a year ago. As her tummy had grown with the baby, Emmalee had never once believed she was pregnant. She never got big like the other women she had seen at the factory. The doctor at the hospital said sometimes that happens. Besides, he figured the baby came a bit early, barely weighing five pounds. Nolan had called Emmalee fat a time or two there at the end, and she guessed she had rather believed that than the truth. Once she suspected her condition, she had hidden her body inside large shirts and baggy housecoats.

  Emmalee crept into the front room. With the baby wrapped in a blanket and held in her arms, she tiptoed to the table and grabbed a dishtowel used the day before to wipe the baby’s face and hands. It was dry and clean enough for diapering. Nolan slept facedown on his cot, dressed in his muddy work boots and bloodstained overalls. He did not stir, and Emmalee rushed past him and back into her room.

  “This’ll do you fine,” she said to Kelly Faye, who turned her head toward the sound of her mother’s voice. Emmalee placed the baby on the bed and opened the blanket, again exposing the baby’s skin to the bitter cold. Kelly cried harder and her lips quivered as her mama tended to her bottom, already growing blotchy and red. Her pink lips shaded icy blue as she worked herself into another breathless tantrum. Emmalee rushed to dress her, struggling to slip Kelly’s rigid arms into the flannel gown the collar makers at Tennewa had given her.

  “Dressing you is like trying to tame a hornet,” she said, jerking matching pink socks onto Kelly’s bare feet. “Shut up. I mean it,” she said. “My head’s full of your wailing.”

  Emmalee wiped her baby’s tears with the tail of her shirt and put her to her breast. The baby tugged hard for her morning meal, only stopping to catch her breath. “Hurry on up,” she said, having grown impatient with her daughter and her demanding nature. She had never understood babies were such a constant thing.

  She listened for any sound of her father’s stirrings, certain Kelly’s fussing would rouse him from his sleep. But the steady rise and fall of Nolan’s breathing was the only noise drifting from the front room. “That’s enough,” Emmalee said and lifted Kelly onto her shoulder. She thumped Kelly’s back, steady and even, as the nurses in the hospital had taught her to do. She held Kelly against her shoulder and carried a long, sturdy stick with her free hand. Emmalee had pulled the stick from a poplar back of the house after one of Nolan’s tantrums and hid it under the bed. Now she kept it close as she went to wake her father.

  “The bodies at Fulton’s?” she asked, poking Nolan’s thigh with the stick’s rounded end. Emmalee repeated her question. “Nolan, you hear me? The bodies at Fulton’s?”

  “Huh, what … you what?” Nolan mumbled and eased onto his back.

  “I’m taking the truck to Fulton’s. Hand me the keys.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” he said, slurring his words and not bothering to open his eyes.

  “That’s right. You ain’t going nowhere. Hand me the keys. I’m the one going to see Miss Leona. Not you.”

  “Miss Leona’s dead. Thrown out the windshield. Shit, girl.”

  “Shut up, Nolan. Give me the damn keys.”

  Nolan held his hands to his head. “Girl, don’t do that,” he said with a softened but exasperated tone. He focused on Emmalee even though his eyes had yet to open. “That woman don’t look right. I know you cared about her, but hell
, girl, let Mr. Fulton do his work. I’ll take you later. They ain’t putting her in the ground today no way.”

  “Don’t need you to take me. Don’t want you to take me,” Emmalee said, rapping the end of the stick against the wood floor. “I mean what I say. Give me the damn keys.”

  Nolan rubbed his right hand across his stubbled chin. He hadn’t taken a razor to his face in weeks and yet his beard was short, mostly black, with just a sprinkling of white. After drinking heavily, Nolan always looked feeble, not the mean and threatening man he had been only hours ago. Again, she rapped the end of the stick on the floor and waited for an answer.

  “All right,” he said and swiped at the stick, but his reach fell short.

  “The keys, Nolan.”

  “Coat pocket,” he muttered and rolled onto his left side, turning his back to his daughter.

  EMMALEE

  FULTON-PITTMAN FUNERAL HOME

  Cars and trucks loaded with men passed Emmalee as she drove into town. She figured most of them were headed over to the DuPont plant in Chattanooga where they made nylon for tires. There was a time when Nolan had talked big about working there. Said he could make a lot of money. But that’s all it was. Just talk.

  Emmalee peeked down at the baby, nestled in a cardboard box set next to her on the seat. Kelly Faye stared back at her mama and cooed dulcet notes. Emmalee gently rocked the box and drove on toward town. The nurses had given her a proper seat for the baby to ride in, but Nolan dropped it on the sidewalk in front of the hospital the very next day. He pulled a box from the Dumpster behind the Ridgeview Trail Apartments. “It’s fine for hauling a baby,” he told Emmalee.