The River Widow(26)
She was sincerely pleased she didn’t have to go with them. She hated funerals and funeral homes, and playing the grieving widow while so consumed with her own thoughts and plans would have been difficult at best.
Buck had made no eye contact with her since the coroner, but before he and Mabel left, he glared at her hard and said, “Nothing here means anything to you. Not even that girl you pretend to care about.”
Adah rose to her full height. Buck was the kind of enemy who knew just where to strike. Accuse her of anything, but not about her feelings for Daisy. Stunned by his cruelty and surprised that it still stunned her, Adah stated firmly, “That’s not true.” She was showing vulnerability. She had to arrest the resentment in her voice.
“You’re not her mother. Don’t never forget that,” Mabel said, and Adah paused. These two were capable of cruelty even on the day they would take the first steps in laying their son’s body to final rest. Pain and loss made some people kind; others became even more susceptible to their own demons. They would go to the funeral home and make the necessary arrangements without fuss, never once letting even one sign of vulnerability escape from their shallow souls.
Buck turned on his heel and opened the icebox door, then took a swig of milk from the milk bottle. He said not another word to her before leaving abruptly. Mabel followed solemnly behind him.
When Buck and Mabel were gone, Jesse fired up the tractor and started a second tilling of the main tobacco fields. While he was far away and out of sight, Adah grasped the opportunity to break the lock on the cash box. She put Daisy down for a nap and found an ax in the shed, then took the box with her to the barn, set it in the straw on the ground to muffle the sound, and then swung the ax against the front of the box. The lid broke off easily.
Adah fell to her knees and pushed the lid aside. Inside, a lot of dry bills. The box had remained watertight. She counted out the bills: $122, a small fortune. She’d had no idea Lester had been able to save so much. He’d once told her he kept an emergency fund, but this amount was surprising. Another thing he’d hidden from her.
She folded the money into her apron pocket, determined to later find a good hiding spot in her room, and then half ran to the wooded part of the farm, through a thick stand of maple, ash, and buckeye trees, and finally to a small creek that crossed the corner of the property. Overhead the tree limbs and branches wove a lacy net, blocking all but occasional flashbulbs of the sun. She was alone. This would be a good place to commit a murder. Dump the body and no one would find it.
The water was running high, full of spring runoff dancing and singing over stones and carrying away debris. Now it would take the damning box away from here, so she tossed it in, saw the current catch it, and watched it float away.
Now she had money. Not as much as she still hoped to receive from the farm, but enough to take steps in the right direction. Money could make things happen. Money meant everything. It could buy her freedom from this family. Freedom for both Daisy and her. It was like the glory that preachers promised the poor and downtrodden every Sunday. Maybe now there would be mercy, even for Adah.
Chapter Nine
Lester Branch’s funeral was held in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church, a closed-casket service, followed by burial in Oak Grove Cemetery in a family plot that had held the remains of Branch men, women, and children for almost ninety years. Lester was to be buried beside his first wife, Betsy.
A couple of days earlier, after Buck and Mabel had returned from the funeral home, Mabel had cried for an hour and then appeared to bury her grief with baking, cooking, and cleaning. She had said to Adah, “My son’s funeral is in two days, and I don’t want no trouble. As far as anyone else is concerned, we’re a family. You act right or there’ll be hell to pay.”
So there was Mabel’s secret. She worked hard to paint a rosy picture to the outside world, hiding the fact that the family was awash in strife and probably always had been. Competition between brothers and wary treatment from the outside world aside, what else was hidden under the farmhouse fa?ade? What other secrets?
Adah wandered through the funeral like a lost lamb. Most of the attendees—church members, businessmen from town and their wives, and farm families from the surrounding area—acted as if they were frightened of something, and no one spoke much to Adah. While some lent comfort to Mabel, Jesse, and Buck, Adah kept her head down, almost shaking. By all appearances she was with the family; they were at peace and she was one of them, for the moment.
It was a glorious afternoon. The skies were a charged blue, and a cool breeze carried the sweet scent of early spring and the surging river sweeping down the wide Ohio River valley. After the service, the funeral procession made haste to the grave site, while above them birds sang. It was the first perfect spring day, and yet a sticky film of perspiration encased Adah.
The cemetery grass was still brown with only a few hints of the green to come. Headstones made of fieldstone, slate, limestone, marble, and granite leaned and reached in orderly rows, along with the occasional obelisk and statue. All of the mourners had dressed in black, even Daisy—Adah had sewn her a black pinafore. Everyone had to walk to the Branch section, where a large rectangular hole had been opened in the ground next to the grave of Betsy Branch.
Betsy’s blue granite gravestone gave the dates of her birth and death, her name, and then simply, “Loving wife and mother.” Lester’s matching gravestone had been ordered but had not arrived yet.