Cottonwood, Georgia
February 1956
It rained the day they buried her papa. It began early that morning as a fine drizzle, but by midafternoon when the funeral was set to begin it had turned to bitter sleet. In spite of the thickness of her wool coat, it felt like razor-sharp knives pelting against Stella’s body as she walked from the car to the canopied graveside.
She stood in the front row before the casket perched over the dug hole that waited to swallow it. Next to her was Mama, and together with the extended family and myriad friends huddled under large and dark umbrellas, they listened as the preacher—who knew and loved her father so well—spoke briefly, quickly, so as to get the good folks of Cottonwood out of the cold and back to the big house, where warm fires and hot food were being prepared. Stella strained to hear him; his words were barely audible over the flapping of the canopy’s scalloped border and the pfft-pfft-pfft of the sleet against its canvassed top. But it was important that she do so; she’d want to remember these words until she, herself, drew a final breath.
She reached her right hand toward her mama—hunched over and paler than Stella ever remembered seeing her— and slipped her gloved hand into the crook of her arm. She squeezed, and Mama looked over at her, and then through her, as though having her youngest child so close was both consolatory and no consolation at all.
When the preacher had said his final amen and the attendees had spoken their hasty words of condolence, Stella looked across the sea of faces, searching for the most familiar to her now. When she spotted him—her husband Jim—he was holding their six-year-old daughter tightly in his arms, her bottom resting atop his forearm, her arms wrapped around his neck as though she were drowning in a sea of despair. Sometimes, Stella thought, no one loved “Pops,” as the grandchildren called him, more than Doris. It was no wonder she was so distraught.
“You need to get that child out of the cold,” her mother said next to her. Stella turned to tell her she would, but the older woman was moving toward the arms of her oldest living son, Conroy. Hersham, the eldest child born to Loretta and Nevan Nevilles, had died from a heart attack at fifty-two, and was lying in the ground already, soon to be joined by their father. Beside him was Galvin, their youngest son, one of the more than fifty thousand who had not returned alive from the Korean War.
It seemed to Stella life had too often been so unfair, so unkind. It had made her crusty around the edges, Mama said. But it had also given her Jim, the absolute love of her life, and after him, Doris. And, Papa always said, Jim had managed to penetrate the callused to bring out the sugary-sweet.
What Jim had failed to heal, Stella said, Doris had more than restored.
Stella muttered a quick “Yes, ma’am,” then started for her husband. Seeing her approach, he did the same. “Let’s go,” Stella said to him. “We need to get to the house before the rest of the world does.”
Jim took his free arm and wrapped it around her as she pulled the hook of her umbrella from over her forearm and opened it for the two of them. Jim awkwardly attempted to take it from her, to hold it over her, but she jerked it away and said, “I’ve got it.”
Halfway to their car he asked, “You okay?”
“No,” she said. “But I will be.”
“Mommy?” Doris asked from the other side of her father’s broad shoulders.
Stella cocked her head. Doris’s cheeks, round and rosy, were streaked by her tears, and her curly white-blonde hair was wild about her face and held back by a black satin ribbon that threatened to slip off her head at any moment. “What, shug?”
“Did Pops go to live with Jesus?”
“Yes, my love.”
“Is he with Jesus now?”
“Yes. I believe he is.”
“Then who is that in the box-thing back there?”
Jim interjected, “Don’t ask your mama so many questions, baby girl.”
“It’s okay,” Stella said, resting her head against the top of Jim’s arm. “She’s just being a child.”
They reached the car, and Jim opened the front passenger door for his wife, then placed their child on her lap. Stella watched through the rain-drenched windshield as he ran around the front of the car, opened the door of it, and slipped inside. “Let’s go home,” he said to his little family.
“Will Pops be there?” Doris asked.
Stella squeezed her daughter against her. “No, hon. Remember? Pops is with Jesus now.” To which Doris, once again, began to cry.
The big house had settled down. Supper—including Irene Patterson’s banana cream pie and her sister Melba Dawson’s deviled eggs—had been eaten in spite of the family’s mourning and the town’s loss of Nevan Nevilles. Stella had shut the door behind the last of the guests, ignoring the brass key in the keyhole. She’d put the house back in order as the family prepared for bed, and when all had gone quiet, she’d stepped back into the living room to put the fireplace cover in front of embers that occasionally popped and sizzled as they lay dying. She turned off the table lamps, then slipped beyond the French doors leading to the back of the house.
Her mother slept in the middle room to the left of the hallway with her sister Lottie, who insisted their mother not sleep alone that night. Lottie’s husband Charles and one of their sons bunked down in the back bedroom. Upstairs, other family members slept in three of the four bedrooms while a few of the cousins slept on beds and pallets in the rooms reserved as the nursery and playroom, first for the children of her parents and now for Doris. Stella had asked Jim to keep Doris with them in their room for this one night, and he’d agreed.
Stella looked up the stairs; Jim’s form shadowed the landing. “Hey,” he whispered down to her.
She placed her hand on the banister but made no move to climb the stairs. “Hey,” she whispered back.
He came down the staircase slowly, then stopped on the bottom step and sat on the fourth. Stella joined him. “You’re not quite ready to go to bed, are you?” He wore his pajamas and bathrobe and smelled of soap and toothpaste.
She shook her head no, then began to play with an imaginary string between her fingertips. “I have a couple more things to do before I come up.”
“Like what?”
She looked at him and smiled weakly. “Just a couple of things.” She patted his knee.
“You’re avoiding coming to bed.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you don’t go to sleep maybe you won’t have to wake up in the morning and face the reality of your papa’s dying.” She pondered that before answering. “No,” she said at length. “I think I have come to grips with that.”
He slipped his hand around hers and was quiet for several minutes before speaking again. “I saw Valentine Bach this morning when I went up to the store for your mama.”
“Oh?” She didn’t dare look at him now.
“He said to tell you he was real sorry about your daddy.”
Stella nodded, keeping her gaze on her feet.
“He said your daddy was real nice to him over the years; a good man.”
She nodded again. “Yes, he was.”
“He said he’d never forget a long conversation he had with your daddy on the front porch steps. I asked him what it was about.”
“And what’d he say?”
“He just said, ‘Life and such.’ ”
Stella smiled in the semi-darkness.
“And he said to tell you he knows what it feels like to lose someone you love and that he and Bettina Rose would say a prayer for you and the family.”
“Bettina Rose,” Stella repeated the name.
“Sweet girl,” Jim said. “She and Margaret have been such good friends over the years. They’re like two peas in a pod. Hard to believe they’re near-bout grown women.”
“They are that. Margaret told me today she’ll go to business school for sure in the fall.”
Jim leaned over and kissed his wife’s cheek. “I’m going to bed now. Don’t be long.”
“I won’t,” she answered. “I love you.”
Her husband stood and looked down at her. “And I love you. More than you’ll ever know.”
When he’d closed the bedroom door, Stella stood then took deliberate steps to the back door. She plucked her coat from the coat tree, picked up the tin-plate lantern kept there, then opened the door and turned it on. It lit the path toward the barn, and Stella quickly made her way in the freezing cold. The air was crisp and veiled by chimney smoke. She opened the door wide enough for her thin frame, slipped inside and toward her father’s desk. There she pulled open the bottom drawer and reached for a stack of papers in an envelope marked with the words Thursday Nights.
She didn’t open it. She didn’t need to. She’d known what was inside it from the time it was but a single page of paper. “Your secret is safe, Papa,” she said to it, then placed it under the breast of her coat. “No one ever need know.”
Stella hurried back to the house, back to the warmth inside it. She shut the door behind her, set the lantern down, then slipped into the stillness of the kitchen and from there into the dining room, where a feast of covered food was spread across the top of the dining table. She sidestepped it, making her way into the butler’s pantry.
She closed the door firmly behind her then pulled the string overhead to light the miniature room. Only then did she allow the tears that had threatened to spill down her cheeks the whole day to fall. But she willed them to keep silent until she could do what she must do.
She raised herself up on her toes, pushed her hand between two upright ledgers, then inched her fingers along, searching for a tiny lever. When she made contact, she pressed against it and heard the familiar click followed by the sliding of the wall. Then Stella waited for the panel to shift and allow her entrance to the place where only she and her father ever went.
And then she slipped inside.