As Bright as Heaven(2)

But the truth is, I have come out from under the shroud of sorrow a different person. I no longer want to stay in this place where Henry spent such a short time. I don’t want Thomas shading a view of the wide horizon with hands calloused from binder leaves. I don’t want the girls to end up mirroring this life of mine, in a place where nothing truly changes but the contours of your heart.

More than that, I want to know why Death seems to walk beside me like a companion now rather than prowling behind like a shadowy specter. Surely the answers await me in Uncle Fred’s funeral parlor, where he readies the deceased for their journeys home. Thomas would’ve gone to his grave rolling cigars for other men to smoke, but now he will one day inherit Uncle Fred’s mortuary business and then he won’t be under the thumb of anyone.

I don’t know what it is like to be the wife of an undertaker. I only know that I need to remember how it was to keep Death at a distance.

I kneel, kiss my fingertips, and brush them against the H carved into the cold stone.

And I rise from the wet ground without saying good-bye.





CHAPTER 2



Maggie


I will miss the curing barn in autumn, when the tobacco leaves hang from the laths like golden skirts in a wardrobe. I’ve always loved how in October the papery leaves smell like cedar, molasses, and tree bark. There won’t be anything like them in Philadelphia. And we’ll be long gone by the time October comes around again.

The curing barn is my favorite place because it’s either as busy as a beehive or as still as a painting. After that first killing frost it’s like the painting, so still and quiet you can forget there’s a changing world outside. No one has to do anything in the curing barn in the fall except have a look-see now and then to make sure none of the tobacco leaves are getting moldy. In the fall, we’re all in the rolling room. I’m twelve but I’ve the delicate hands of a young woman, Grandad says, so I roll a nice cigar. Evie just turned fifteen and doesn’t like rolling; she’d rather be reading under the locust tree when the weather’s nice, but she likes to buy books with the money she earns. Our younger sister, Willa, is only six. It would’ve been a long while before Grandad told her she had hands as graceful as a dancer and rolled a cigar better than a man did.

I don’t usually spend much time in the barn when the tobacco leaves are finished with their curing, but that was where I was when Mama told Papa she’d seen Uncle Fred’s letter. I’d come home from school, done my chores, and then walked across the snowy field from our house to lie among the few remaining wooden slats that still held their toast-colored leaves. I’d been going to the curing barn a lot since my baby brother died, but Papa had forgotten I was there.

“I’ve been thinking about Philadelphia,” Mama said. Papa had been checking the empty laths for rot and weak spots. He was a couple rows over from me, and I was on my back on the dirt behind a crate, looking up at the leafy ball gowns. The last time Mama had been to Philadelphia was when Henry was still alive. She and Evie had taken him to see a doctor, and they’d come home with the awful news that he wasn’t going to get better. There was no doctor in the city or on the face of the whole earth who could cure Henry.

“I think we should go,” Mama had said.

At first I thought Willa must be sick now, and that was why Mama wanted to go to Philadelphia again. Or Evie. Or maybe I was the sick one and I didn’t even know it yet. But then Mama added she’d seen Uncle Fred’s latest letter asking Papa to come work for him in Philadelphia, and now she was thinking it was a good idea after all.

“What made you change your mind?” Papa sounded surprised.

A second or two went by before Mama answered him. “Everything.”

Papa paused a moment, too, before he said, “If we do this, I don’t think we can undo it.”

“I know.”

“We won’t be able to get back here that often, Pauline. Not at first.”

“I know that, too,” Mama said. “If I can bring the girls back to see the family for a week or two in the summer, I can be content with that.”

“I don’t suppose your parents will be too keen about this. Especially your mother.”

“No, maybe not. But you know how she is. She’ll quietly stew on it a bit, and then she’ll be done. I think in the end she wants us to be happy. I know that’s what I’d want for us if I were her.”

A funny, spirally feeling had started to wind its way inside me as my parents talked to each other. Papa and Mama were talking about moving to the city to live with Uncle Fred, a man I had only met once. He came out to Quakertown when Granny died. Not Mama’s mama, Papa’s. When I was eight.

Papa had said, “Are you sure now? Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

“It’s what you want to do, isn’t it?” Mama replied.

“It will mean a good life for you and the girls. A much better life than what I’m giving you here.”

“You’ve given us a good life, Tom,” Mama said.

“I want to give you a better one.”

Then Papa said he needed to tell Grandad and break the news to the family and they’d need to sell the house. They talked for a few more minutes, but I wasn’t listening to everything they said. I was thinking about leaving my friends and the other family members and the curing barn. I couldn’t remember what Uncle Fred’s business was, but I was positive it wasn’t growing tobacco and rolling cigars. Not in the city. It was so strange to me that my parents could just decide we were leaving and we’d leave. How could we move away from where we’d buried Henry?