Chapter 35

The burying had been those few days in February when false spring appears and then vanishes, killing all leaf and bloom it had duped into coming out. Lily buried her mother in the middle of the road. A stretch, more track than logging road, abandoned when the mine on the face of the mountain played out, created the only strip of land suitable for burying without climbing to Flatland. She had decided early on that she would bury her mother there. Her daddy had never been a part of their lives, so no need to take her to Breakline to bury her next to Clint Goodman. She had no idea about her Covington folk.

The ground, brown from last season’s leaves and musk, lay soft from rains that had beaten trees naked after the blizzard and melted ice. They survived as no more than stark grey shadows, barren of winter ice and its weight for one more season.

Morning of the first February break in the weather, Lily walked the road to Breakline Camp, the road soggy by melted snow. At the top of Turtleback where the road dipped into Breakline, she saw in the distance the open hole of the mine’s black mouth. She wondered about life in tunnels that had at one time been little more than burrows. Tunnels that bent men double under their low ceilings. She wondered if her father had walked with his face to the ground like so many others. Dark miners moved about the camp like impatient insects, as they manipulated massive yellow machines that would soon eat away at what had once been an underground mine.

At the commissary, she found Gabe and Seth White. She brought them back, offering to pay twenty-seven dollars, all she had left from her father’s pension, if they would put the body easy in the grave.

Lily took her long-handled shovel and helped dig the grave, while her mother lay on the front porch threatening to thaw. Because her mother had been a slight woman at her death, they dug the grave shallow.

Gabe and Seth lifted the coffin, each supporting an end, and set it down feet first, before positioning it straight in the trench.

“Ought this hole to be a mite deeper?” Seth asked.

“It’s deep enough to keep varmints away,” Lily answered and turned her back to them.

“These ruts that old mining road?” Seth asked. “Seems the old mine used to run right nigh here.”

“No matter,” Lily said. “I won’t have my mama buried on a slope. I want her steady in the ground. Not where she’s standing on her feet through eternity. Here’s where she’ll lie.” Lily stood with her legs slightly apart, in lopsided comfort, with one foot in a rut, one slanted on the loose dirt. Turtleback Mountain stood behind her. The town of Covington below to the south and east; Breakline Mining Camp, north and to the west, she stood in the center of all that had been her life.

“Reckon this’ll do then,” Seth replied, and he shoveled dirt and rock in on the coffin. The sound muffled itself against the wood like rain on shingles too long on the roof.

“Wait.” Lily set out for the porch. “Stop your shoveling,” she called back. From the edge of the porch, she picked up a pint fruit jar, its ring at a cocked angle, its lid flat against the glass mouth. Inside dead fireflies stuck to the bottom, stiff, their once vibrant ends the color of dried wood. Lily placed the jar of insects in the grave, next to the coffin’s head, and stepped back.

“Now. Do what you’re here to do.” Lily walked back toward the house in step with the thuds of dirt as each hit against the coffin. “Don’t you break that jar, Gabe Shipley.” She spoke without turning.

From her mother’s old chair on the porch, Lily stared past the scene in the side road, leading up the Turtleback. Beyond, a band of blue opened from between skeletal white clouds. Lily sat on the porch and wailed a chant-like dirge neither of the men had ever heard. She took three or four notes from one of Kee Granny’s old minor scales and worked them back and forth, weaving a lament that reverberated off the mountain wall, a nagging melody that rivaled a whippoorwill’s sorrow:

 

Bring me a fruit jar and fill it with light

of fireflies and wonder to stave off the night.

No spirits born evil dare enter the door—

bring morning—not darkness—

for fireflies no more

gleam bright in the moonlight—not fireflies—

but wonder will outlive the night.

 

Gabe and Seth never looked up. When Lily’s funeral song ended, they patted the filled grave with the backs of the shovels and stood the tools against a sycamore trunk.

Lily thought the uniqueness of her mother’s service unimportant. The burial would not be worth the telling in Breakline. The men would not be remembering words. They probably thought burying the fireflies was something else again. They had not seen lightning bugs since cool weather had set in. The power of fireflies to ward off sinister spirits lay in their glow against a black night. Dead bugs don’t shine. But all that had not mattered when Lily had gathered the insects.

Two weeks of heavy rain and ditches filled to the brim with gushing water brought an imposingly deep and full rumble from the earth. The sound signaled a transformation Lily had not expected. Gabe would later tell her that the mouth of the abandoned mine between Boone Station and Covington had collapsed.