The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(43)

“Excuse me?” I said. “They moved the cemetery?”

“The church house, anyway—loaded it on flatbeds and drove down the gravel road to Long Switch. Wasn’t no congregation no more—folks died off or left. So a big company come and turned the land to crops.”

“What’d they do with the people buried there?” I asked.

“Not a blessed thing.”

I wasn’t sure she understood me. “I mean, before they started plowing—what did they do with the bodies in the cemetery?”

Lula braced her forearms on the table and leaned toward me, her smile indulgent.

“Honey, they left ’em. Said they wasn’t no bodies. I know for a fact that cemetery started out back in the slave days. Wasn’t much used after that but by a few old families. When I was young, they was a boy sweet on me—he’s there. His great-grandmother, too—she had the sugar. By the time the company come, grave markers was mostly gone. Onliest thing left was that ol’ beat-down church, and land turnin’ wild like it was back when the Indians had it.”

“You mean . . . they’re farming the graveyard?”

Lula nodded. “Soybeans mostly. Some cotton.”

It was a horrifying image—furrows dug, seeds planted, then roots growing down, down toward bones lying six feet under, smooth as those stones Olin pulls from his fields every spring.

Lula leaned toward me again. “Don’t you fret none—they’s more to eternal rest than where your bones are planted. It don’t make the situation less despisable to me, but ain’t a thing to be done but get on with life.”

She sat back with a smile and asked if we had chocolate cake for dessert. She had a thick slice and a cup of coffee before wrapping her scarf back around her head and picking up her gloves. She paid her bill and turned to leave, but before she got to the door she stopped to throw her arms around my neck.

“You take care of yourself,” she said. “Your little daughter, too.”

Her earnestness startled me. But it wasn’t until the café had closed for the day, the farmhouse chores were finished, Laurel was tucked in and I was back in my room readying for bed that it struck me:

I hadn’t told Lula I had a daughter.





Rain, Rain, Come





I’d been working in the vegetable garden for a good hour when I stood to give my back a stretch. The air was listless and hot. We’d gone nearly two weeks without a good soaking, and the plants weren’t the only things feeling it. I fingered the wilting butterhead lettuce in my basket, then looked up, eager for signs of weather. But the clouds were as thick and dry as cotton batting, and stalled out.

I licked at my parched lips as sweat slid down my back. I was about to head inside for a drink of water when a notion struck that stopped me short.

I turned toward the same field where Olin had stood the morning of the quilting bee—so motionless and unyielding he might have been carved from his own fieldstone, looking for all the world like a man with a purpose. And when he was done, a thunderstorm had swept through this valley.

Olin was a man of many skills; was rainmaking one of them?

Tentatively I looked around, but no one was in sight. I closed my eyes.

So . . . what does a rainmaker say? What does a rainmaker think?

Does she think rain and the clouds come? Can thoughts get caught in an updraft, pulling in water vapor, seeding the atmosphere until they’re plumped up and ready to fall as raindrops?

Suddenly the absurdity of the moment—standing in a garden, trying to catalyze a downpour—cut me to the quick. I felt like a grown woman caught playing hopscotch. I opened my eyes.

But there was more to it than mere discomfiture. While a part of me knew, all evidence to the contrary, that conjuring up a storm was a load of hocus-pocus, still another was sure that even if it were possible, it wasn’t child’s play. It couldn’t be.

And yet . . .

I turned toward the Mountain. A prickle ran up my spine as I sensed it looking back, as if taking my measure. Curious to see what I could do.

Skepticism? Or a challenge?

I set my basket at my feet and shut my eyes again.

This time I didn’t think—not in words, anyway. Instead, I pictured the sky overhead just as it was—a palette of white and blue, the sun a brilliant ball radiating ferocious heat and light. The images clicked into place almost willfully, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.