April 6, 1882
A flash of sunlight glints off the polished coffin as four men, their skin dripping with sweat, bear his remains toward the grave. Zerelda walks next to me, a formidable figure dressed in black crepe. Yet even though she sniffles and mutters, her back is straight as an arrow. Two young children follow us, their eyes red and cheeks damp.
Life around me appears ordinary. Chickens peck the ground for bugs. Bushes unfurl new green leaves. Grass grows soft and lush. Yellow tulips fringe the porch, and white blooms dot my favorite dogwood tree. The rich scent of rain-dampened earth permeates the air while robins chirp and chase each other in their annual mating rituals. The beauty of such an uncommonly warm spring afternoon seemed oddly discordant with the occasion.
On such a day, how can I be burying my husband?
I feel the watchful eyes of the hundreds of people gathered within sight of the old farmhouse. Some sit on wagons, others stand in respectful silence. Most were drawn here, I suspect, by the lure of sensational headlines. Perspiration glues my black silk dress against me, and dampness gathers on my forehead. I hold a handkerchief balled in one hand, but shrink against lifting my widow’s veil to dab my face. The idea of exposing raw lines of grief to those who may have come to witness such a sight makes my stomach roil.
Our sad cortege moves slowly, until, finally, we stand at the burial site. Men have already dug a deep hole under the shade of a towering coffee bean tree. Zerelda peers into the darkness and nods.
She had ordered the men to dig the grave no less than seven feet deep, and in a voice trembling with anguish and rage, later told me why. “We must keep him safe from vandals and ghoulish robbers who would try to steal his body away from us.”
That macabre thought had not occurred to me before. Yet remembering how others had scavenged through our home, I knew Zerelda was right to worry.
After she decreed he be laid to rest at the farm, the place where he grew up, rather than in a distant cemetery, I gave my assent without discussion. It would be a fitting place for him to sleep, for I knew Zerelda would defend his grave with the same passion with which she had defended his life.
The four men wrap thick braids of rope around the casket. Their forearms bulge as they lower it into the ground.
My brother, Robert, awkwardly pats my arm and whispers, “Zee, are you all right?”
I nod, and Pastor Martin steps forward, holding a Bible in one hand and fist full of mud in the other. With his graying hair and spectacles perched at the end of a long nose, he reminds me of a poster I’d once seen of a sad elephant from Barnum’s circus. I can’t bear to watch the clods fall from his hand, so I close my eyes and distract myself by trying to think of something, anything, else.
Memories materialize in moments, and I lose myself in the sounds of hooves thumping on a dirt pathway packed hard as stone. Fists pounding at a door. The crack and echo of a gunshot. Angry voices screaming for revenge. And the most fearsome memory of all—blood flowing in a dark, sticky pool of despair on the floor. If I’d spoken sooner, we might not now be standing beside a deep and dark grave.
My hands clench so tightly, the nails cut into my palms. I long for a different image to hold, one that will comfort me.
As though in answer to a prayer, the shadowy vision of a tall, sandy-haired young man appears. He walks toward me with the muscled stride of a horseman, then he laughs and reaches for my hand. His silver-blue eyes snap with youthful excitement from a time before anger and hate changed him into someone neither reporters nor detectives nor gossipmongers would ever capture accurately. The corners of my mouth turn up in a smile even though my lips are so parched they split when I move them. No one knew the man I married.
Truth be told, I never completely understood him either. Could it have been within my power to change destiny? For I know his past molded him into who he would become.