Chapter 33

The day broke with the smell of snow on the air. Anna breathed deep and relaxed. A noise, more a scraping, aroused something within Anna. A gray, shriveled face appeared, almost like a ghost, outside Anna’s window. From her bed, Anna watched it float closer toward the house. She tried to look to the window to identify who was there, but her head refused to move. Yet she still saw the face. It shimmered and came closer. Anna strained her eyes for a better look.

The face stopped when it reached the window. Anna knew the face was her own. But it was old, older than she thought she would ever be. Features she had failed to notice when she was well were obvious. What appeared to be wrinkles around her eyes spread out like scars, but their depth told her they had been sinking for years. Furrows between her brows were deeper still, as if she had set her countenance into a frown from her earliest memory.

The lines had not always been there. She had not been happy with Clint, but she had been conscious of hiding her feelings. She had been happy with Winston, both early on and after the War. She had followed the devil in her heart the first time she met him at the commissary, and she had fallen in love with his touch. Now facing herself through wavy glass, she wondered if God would open Heaven’s gates to her. Hers was a God not easy to please.

Anna wondered if her God would forgive her. Hers was not just a sin of pride. She had committed adultery. She had known lust, lust that had fed her day after day. And, oh Lord, the death of the boy. She had plotted. She had shed innocent blood. She had committed murder.

The face hovered so close Anna could see indentations around the edges of her mouth. It was not a mouth that tempted anymore. She had once been vain about her mouth. It pouted enough to make a man look twice. It smiled a crooked smile that was straight enough to seem happy. Now it was an old woman’s mouth, one that had spoken when unnecessary and had remained silent when words would have helped her Lily know which path to take.

She had no idea what determined Lily’s choices. She could have ingrained her more with her own ideology and kept her away from the granny. But Anna had made her own decisions, and she had lived almost half her life with them. Her dread today was more for herself than for her daughter. Her recognition of such self-centeredness did not surprise Anna. She acknowledged that she had often put her own desires before those of her child. Not that Lily had had an empty life. Her life was filled with the granny Lily trusted so completely that Anna feared the repercussions of taking that away. Lily lived a life filled with the wilds of Turtleback and with joy that lifted her away from the negatives Anna faced.

The face hung outside the windowpane. Though Anna could not look at it directly, she could see it as clearly as if it hung before her on an invisible thread. A green leaf, one that defied the winteriness of December, lingered over the face for a moment and dropped toward the ground, out of sight. With the disappearance of the leaf, Anna grasped the significance of seeing herself and blinked to push the burn away from her eyes. Anna cringed.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” asked Lily.

“I’m going,” the face said.

“I know,” Anna answered. “Are you my sorrow? Aged by my sins?”

“Come with me,” the face mouthed.

“Where you going?” Anna asked.

“I’m not sure,” it said. “Can you tell me?”

“No.”

“Rise and come.” The plea in the voice tugged at Anna’s indecision. “You have to go, you know.”

“But I expected something else. A light. An angel…with wings. Maybe…”

“You have me.”

“Go without me. When you come back, tell me where you’ve been. I’ll decide then.” Anna said. “I don’t like brown. Will it be brown? I’ve been buried in this brown house all these years.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been there yet.”

“Come back and tell me what you find,” Anna insisted. “Tell me if he smells like Wildroot Hair Creme.”

The face did not move.

“I never forgave them, you know, either one, for leaving me alone,” Anna said.

“You’ve not forgiven yourself. You must forgive yourself before you can forgive them.”

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “All this thinking wrinkles my mind. No. I can’t. Oh God, I’m not worthy.” Anna felt tears pool in her eyes. Where was the granny when she needed her? Where was her Lily?

“I know you better than you know yourself. Scars within feed your guilt. You are woman. Women have within them so much love and so much hatred they confuse the two,” said the face. “Come. I can carry your forgiveness forward.”

“Not yet. Come back and tell me if there is pain. I can’t stand pain.”

“I know.” Anger crinkled the face into a grave frown. “You cut your path over time and sowed the seeds of pain.” The face drifted away toward the darkness. Its voice echoed back to Anna’s bed at Boone Station. “It’s time to go,” it said.

“No. Wait.” Anna blinked. “You must carry my sins.”

Anna’s ancient face vanished.

“Come back,” Anna said. “If I’m to go, someone must tell the bees.” A tremor shot through Anna’s body, and she grunted. Her heart stopped. Her eyes, staring at the unpainted plank ceiling, flickered, then fixed themselves in place.

“Mama?” Lily whispered.

 

Sister Sun means to tell Great Spirit about what she has seen. And about the face. But clouds heavy with snow push her light aside. She later decides there is no reason to bother Great Spirit. Anna had not known him at all.

Great Spirit releases the snow’s power. It falls in great flakes and covers Kee Granny’s cedar high on the Turtleback’s ridge within minutes. The sacred cedar stands alone, a shimmering sculpture that might have been carved from marble.

 

Death stepped up on the porch the seventh day of the howling. He did not knock but entered with Anna’s grunt. Lily was finishing her morning tasks. She whispered her mother’s name and moved to her bed. Anna’s face and neck were deep sky blue, as if a high summer light had settled there.

As soon as Death left with Anna’s spirit in tow, Lily steadied the mantel clock’s pendulum at 11:03 and draped the clock face with an old rag Anna once used for cleaning. She cracked a window only for an instant, then shut it, allowing any part of Anna’s spirit that might not have escaped to have a way out. She shuttered the windows and locked the door. Lily lit a kerosene lamp against the dimmed light and spent the remaining daylight hours crooning one of Kee Granny’s low chants to keep evil spirits out, spirits that had power to steal her mama’s soul had it all failed to leave the room. An unexpected yearning to have Kee Granny near to help her face this death overwhelmed her. She chastised herself for such a thought and fell to her knees keening a knife-sharp yowl. The slashing realization that her mama was gone sucked the air out of Lily’s lungs.

Dazed, she let the fire burn low. In time, she placed another log on the embers and moved to the bed to lower her mama into the coffin. Though Anna was thin and bony after her long wasting summer, her weight seemed to double when Lily tried to lift her into the coffin. After a time of failure after failure, Lily climbed onto the opposite side of the bed and nudged, then pushed her mother, rolling her off the bed into the coffin.

Anna landed with a thud.

Lily rushed around the foot of the bed. “Mama, are you hurt?”

Anna lay face down in the coffin.

For the first time her features distorted, and Lily cried silent tears.

Lily could not turn her mama over. If she tugged at her feet, Anna’s chest grew heavy. If Lily tried to roll Anna using her chest, she could not find enough room to put her arms around her to flip her over. After several attempts, Lily left her lay and folded the edges of the worn quilt over her back, under her head and feet.

Lily took a small hammer from the bureau and tapped in the nails. Exhausted, she crawled to the fire. At nightfall, Lily slept. What sounded like Owl woke her after midnight. Lily moved to the bed and nestled herself in the indentation her mama had burrowed into the mattress.

Snow came again in the early morning hours, thick, deep clean snow that covered the road in front of Boone Station. Before midday, snow broke tree branches. With the air’s icy breath, frozen sap caused trees to explode, sounding like rifle shots through the mountains.

The second day, Lily remembered the fruit jar. She added the date, pried up two nails near the head of the coffin and poked the jar inside, not looking to see if it hit her mama’s head or not. She crept back to the bed. Outside, wind battled naked tree limbs and cold blue sunlight, as they threw patterns across the ceiling.

The wind lessened. Silent snow and a realization of finality threw Lily into hard sleep. During the third day, the stench of Anna’s body moldering from heat inside the room forced Lily out of her mother’s place in the bed. She opened the door and dragged the coffin to the porch. Sweat from her exertion chilled her body, and she shook. Huffing in icy air, she lodged the loaded coffin between two tree trunks that supported the roof. There she left it, centered under the wobbly sign that marked the house as Boone Station. If the snow stayed and if more snow fell, the body would freeze and Lily could bury her mama when spring thaw came. Gabe could help her.

It was mid-December, 1961. The road had vanished under a heavy layer of snow. Lily was alone on Boone Station.

Early January, Month of the Cold Moon and Old Christmas, just before dawn. Three weeks it had snowed. Snow sifted down the rock chimney and spit on the logs. Only orange embers remained to warm the room. An interruption in the snow’s silence awakened Lily. Music. The music was back. Hauntingly beautiful, as beautiful as any Lily had heard before. It was a dream. Not Laurel People. Not even Dogwood People. There had never been any Little People. Kee Granny had lied about Little People. “Men and women no taller than my knee,” she had said. “They play their drums, sing and dance in circles deep within the woods.” Their drumbeats had fallen as icicles from her roof at night, and now one sang, just for her, to bring joy into her life. “One of the Laurel People waiting for a break in the cold so they could force the spring buds,” Granny would have said.

Three weeks of temperatures below freezing kept Anna’s body frozen. Days, Lily trudged through knee-deep snow left by the blizzard to feed her goats and chickens. She hung rabbits out for Owl. Nights, strange music, ancient mountain ballads sung in a lonesome tenor voice Lily waited for at dusk, now sung louder. The sun cast indigo shadows on snow. The cushion of snow amplified the voice’s journey. It reverberated night after night, some nights so close Lily could recognize the lyrics. It was as if some spirit from the past had settled on Turtleback and waited to draw Lily back into the forest with the coming of spring. The music soothed her nights and calmed her days. Lily called the voice her dream music.