Beautiful Darkness(65)

Gatlin had planned otherwise.

The county fair meant a day of pageants and pies and a night of hooking up, if you were lucky. All Souls meant something else entirely. It was a tradition in Gatlin. Instead of spending the day in shorts and flip-flops at the fair, everyone in town spent all day at the graveyard in their Sunday best, paying their respects to their dead relatives and everyone else's. Forget the fact that All Souls Day was actually a Catholic holiday that took place in November. In Gatlin, we had our own way of doing things. So we turned it into our own day of remembrance, guilt, and general competition over who could pile the most plastic flowers and angels on our ancestors’ graves.

Everyone turned out on All Souls: the Baptists, the Methodists, even the Evangelicals and the Pentecostals. It used to be that the only two people in town who didn't show up at the cemetery were Amma, who spent All Souls at her own family plot in Wader's Creek, and Macon Ravenwood. I wondered if those two had ever spent All Souls together, in the swamp with the Greats. I doubted it. I couldn't imagine Macon or the Greats appreciating plastic flowers.

I wondered if the Casters had their own version of All Souls, if Lena was somewhere feeling the same way I was feeling now. Like she wanted to crawl back into bed and hide until the day was over. Last year, I didn't make it to All Souls. It was too soon. The years before that, I spent the day standing over the graves of Wates I never knew or barely remembered.

But today I would be standing over the grave of someone I thought about every day. My mother.

Amma was in the kitchen in her good white blouse, the one with the lace collar, and her long blue skirt. She was clutching one of those tiny old-lady pocketbooks. “You best get on over to your aunts’.” She pulled on the knot of my tie to straighten it. “You know how they get all worked up if you're late.”

“Yes, ma'am.” I grabbed the keys to my dad's car off the counter. I had dropped him off at the gates of His Garden of Perpetual Peace an hour ago. He wanted to spend some time alone with my mom.

“Wait a second.”

I froze. I didn't want Amma to look into my eyes. I couldn't talk about Lena right now, and I didn't want her to try to get it out of me.

Amma rifled through her bag, pulling out something I couldn't see. She opened my hand, and the chain dropped into my palm. It was thin and gold, with a tiny bird hanging from the center. It was much smaller than the ones from Macon's funeral, but I recognized it right away. “It's a sparrow for your mamma.” Amma's eyes were shiny, like the road after the rain. “To Casters, sparrows mean freedom, but to a Seer, they mean a safe journey. Sparrows are clever. They can travel a long ways, but they always find their way back home.”

The knot was building in my throat. “I don't think my mom will be making any more journeys.”

Amma wiped her eyes and snapped her purse shut. “Well, you're mighty sure a everythin’, aren't you, Ethan Wate?”





When I pulled up the Sisters’ gravel driveway and opened the car door, Lucille sat on the passenger's seat instead of jumping out. She knew where we were, and she knew she'd been exiled. I coaxed her out of the car, but she sat on the sidewalk where the cement and the grass met.

Thelma opened the door before I knocked. She looked right past me to the cat, crossing her arms. “Hey there, Lucille.”

Lucille licked her paw lazily, then busied herself with sniffing her tail. She might as well have flipped Thelma off. “You comin’ by to say you like Amma's biscuits better ’n mine?” Lucille was the only cat I knew who ate biscuits and gravy instead of cat food. She meowed, as if she had a few choice words on the subject.

Thelma turned to me. “Hey there, Sweet Meat. I heard ya pull up.” She kissed me on the cheek, which always left bright pink lip prints no amount of sweaty palm could wipe off. “Ya all right?”

Everyone knew today wasn't going to be easy for me. “Yeah, I'm okay. Are the Sisters ready?”

Thelma put her hand on her hip. “Have those girls ever been ready for anything in their lives?” Thelma always called the Sisters girls, even though they were older than her, twice over.

A voice called from the living room. “Ethan? Is that you? Come on in here. We need ya ta take a look at somethin’.”

There was no telling what that meant. They could be making casts out of The Stars and Stripes for a family of raccoons or planning Aunt Prue's fourth — or was it fifth? — wedding. Of course, there was a third possibility I hadn't considered, and it involved me.

“Come on in.” Aunt Grace waved me in. “Mercy, give him some a them blue stickers.” She was fanning herself with an old church program, most likely from one of their respective husbands’ funerals. Since the Sisters never let anyone actually keep one at the service, they had plenty of them lying around the house.

“I'd get ’em for you myself, but I hafta be careful on account a my accident. I've got complications.” It was the only thing she talked about since the county fair. Half the town knew she had fainted, but to hear Aunt Grace tell it, she had suffered a near-fatal complication that would keep Thelma, Aunt Prue, and Aunt Mercy scurrying to do her bidding until the end of her days.

“No, no. Ethan's color's red, I told ya. Give him the red ones.” Aunt Prue was scribbling madly on a yellow legal pad.