The Dry Grass of August(69)

Reverend Perkins said, “You all right now, Miss Watts?”

I nodded. “It was a good service.”

He touched my hand. “Mrs. Luther told me all about you. All about you.You were . . .” He stopped. “She said you—” He cleared his throat. “She loved you, that’s all.”

Tears came to my eyes. He put his arm around my shoulders. “You’ll find a way to get on without her. Lord doesn’t give us more’n we can bear.” He looked into my eyes. “You know that?”

“That’s what Mary always told me.”

“Just you remember it.” He spoke to Leesum. “I’ll see you later.”

“Yessuh.”

I said to Leesum, “I have to go. My folks don’t know where I am.”

He looked like a man, dressed up, serious, as he walked with me to the street. “We sendin’ somebody to Georgia.They gone find out what happened to Miz Luther.”

“The church is?”

“Yeah, Deacon Hull, the one what spoke up in the service. Maybe one or two others.”

“The sheriff’s working on it.”

“They never try too hard to find out who killed a colored.” Colored. Leesum was colored. I kept forgetting what that meant.

A yellow cab drove up, the taxi I’d come in. I took Leesum’s hand. “I’ve got to go now.”

He stared at me with his green eyes. “I be thinkin’ of you, Jubie.”

“Same here. Good-bye, Leesum.”

From the backseat of the cab, I watched him standing on the curb.

The driver asked, “How was the funeral?”

“Good. I’m glad I went.”

“Reckon you were the only white there.”

“Yes.”

“Did you forget your tote?”

“Oh, no, that belonged to the woman who . . . I took it to her family.”

We passed the House of Prayer for All People and Daddy Grace’s red, white, and blue mansion across from the ice house. When we turned left onto Morehead, I scrunched down in the seat in case any of Mama’s friends were at the Junior Woman’s Club. When I sat up, I asked the driver, “Why’d you come back for me?”

“Got a girl your age. Wouldn’t want her in colored town by herself.”

I liked him for not saying nigger town. When we pulled up to the house, he said, “That’ll be a dollar. You gonna be okay, now?”

I gave him a dollar and a quarter. “Yes, sir. Thank you for your kindness.”

My heels tapped on the slates of the front walk as I ran to the house. Back in my room, I sat at my dresser, trying to think what to do. In the mirror my hands went to Stell’s straw hat, removed it, put it down on the glass-topped dresser, like a lady in a movie, taking off her hat after a tea party. I put it back in the hatbox exactly as it had been, returning the box to the shelf in Stell’s closet. I folded the white cotton gloves Meemaw had given me, which I’d never worn before, and put them in the top drawer of my bureau, putting away a girl I’d never really been. When I pulled my T-shirt over my head and zipped up my jeans, I felt I was myself again. I left my room neat, not like my room at all. If I got the car away from the house, there’d be no way for anybody to tell I’d ever been home. Even the shining kitchen could have been Aunt Rita or Young Mary.

I had backed the car into the driveway and was pulling down the garage door when Linda Gibson hollered from her upstairs window, “Hey, June! When’d y’all get home?” I jumped in the car, pretending I hadn’t heard her.

At the corner I turned toward town. Traffic was getting heavy as men came home from work, and I felt nervous driving among so many cars. I turned onto Princeton and pulled into the crowded lot at Freedom Park. A breeze came through the open windows. Boy Scouts and their dads were playing ball in the diamond next to the parking lot, yelling and raising dust.

I stretched out on the front seat to decide what I should do, but all I could think about was Mary in her coffin, in the ground, cold, still—forever. I closed my eyes and tried to talk to her, not praying, just speaking out loud. “Hey, Mary, I went to your funeral, and it was fine.You would have—” I stopped, thinking that she already knew everything, just like when she was alive.





CHAPTER 27

I woke to the sound of laughter. The pole lamps in the picnic areas made the park an island of light in the gathering dusk. People sat in the grass around the lake. A man cooking on a grill beside a nearby station wagon handed a hot dog to a boy. A woman filled tumblers from a thermos. I smelled hamburgers cooking and my mouth watered. I locked the car and walked the five blocks home.

The house was quiet. I wanted to turn on the lights or the attic fan, anything to help me feel I wasn’t so alone. I got Daddy’s water bottle from the fridge and gulped from it, water dribbling down the front of my T-shirt. The dim light from the fridge danced on the bulletin board where we’d left a handmade card saying, “Good-bye, Daddy. We’ll miss you. See you at Pawleys!” It had been only a week and a half since I’d taken down the swim meet schedule and pushed the thumbtacks into Daddy’s card. All of us had written something personal, even Davie—Mama dipping his hand into green poster paint, pressing it to the card. A piece of paper had been added with a brass thumbtack that was pushed into the palm of Davie’s handprint. On the paper was writing that I couldn’t read in the dim light, except for the signature, “Mary.” I pulled at the note. The tack popped out, hit the floor with a ping.