August 1944
Not even a week after we seen Momma at the hospital, that big black hearse drove up to our house again.
Ida and Ellie was playing hopscotch in the dirt and I was picking green beans in the garden. Momma was in the front seat, but I didn’t see no sign of Bobby. I went running to the car to see if they had him laying in the back.
But then I seen Momma’s face and she wasn’t smiling. When I got to her door, she just sat there, unraveling the blue trim she had crocheted onto her handkerchief. She didn’t look at me. But I could see her eyes was all red from crying.
Ellie and Ida was crowded up to the car door, asking for Bobby. I pulled them back and said, “Let Momma out. Can’t you see Bobby ain’t with her?”
I could see they was fixing to hit her with a flood of questions. But even with the door shut and the window rolled up, she was shrinking away from them like she was scared of her own young’uns. So I just blurted it out, which I should not have done. But it’s not like I had time to plan the right way to say such a terrible thing. So I just said it fast and straight.
“Bobby ain’t coming home. He’s dead.”
And even if I did know it in my heart already, it still got me by surprise. I still felt like somebody had put a knife in my stomach.
I held the girls back while the driver helped Momma into the house. She sunk into the sofa and didn’t say a word. Ida and Ellie was hanging on to her, begging her to say it wasn’t true. She didn’t answer them one way or another. Instead, she shrunk herself into the corner of the sofa till it seemed like she was smaller than the twins.
The man stood at the screen door. “Where should I put your boy?” he asked.
That’s when I knew they had brought his body home and we was going to bury him ourselves.
Momma just stared at her raggedy handkerchief and didn’t bother to answer. So he turned to me.
“Does he have a box?” I asked.
The man shook his head and looked kind of sorry. “No, I offered. But your momma said you couldn’t afford it.”
I didn’t know what to say about where to put my dead brother. I couldn’t stand the thought of carrying him into the house. Bobby always slept with me, and I was afraid that if I laid him on my bed I wouldn’t ever be able to sleep there again.
I run and got a baby-sized crazy quilt that Grandma Honeycutt had made. I folded it and laid it on the porch floor. Then the man opened the back of that hearse and laid my brother out on that quilt with all them colors and shapes and zigzaggy stitches. And I kept thinking how him dying didn’t make no more sense than the design in that quilt.
At first I couldn’t even look at him. I didn’t want to see what my baby brother looked like dead.
But that man put his hand on my shoulder. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked. And I knew he wanted to leave and go on with his life—whatever that was.
So I forced myself to look at Bobby.
In some ways it wasn’t so bad. His face was round and cute as ever. His curly brown hair had got almost as long as a girl’s while he was at the hospital. But his legs and arms and body was skinny and shriveled up to nearly nothing.
After the man laid him on the quilt, I didn’t have no idea what to do next. All I could think of was to run for Junior. But I just couldn’t leave the twins alone like that, with Bobby’s dead body on the porch and Momma coming apart like that handkerchief she was picking at.
So I asked the man, “Will you take my sisters to Junior’s house on the way out? It’s just up the road a piece. They know where he lives, and he’ll know what to do.”
Ida threw both arms around my waist and screamed, “No! I ain’t getting in that car.” Ellie grabbed onto both of us and said she wasn’t neither. So I hobbled as best I could to the car with them stuck onto me like that. I started pulling their hands loose.
“Help me,” I said. “They’re whiners, but once they get to Junior’s you won’t have to worry with them no more.”
Somehow we shoved the twins in. As they was driving away, I seen them clinging to the dashboard and looking all scared toward the back of that car. That’s when I realized I had just shoved my sisters into a hearse.
I reckon they must have been terrified of what else was in there. Well, I knew the closer they got to Junior’s house the safer they would feel, so I didn’t try to stop that car.
Suddenly the world was so quiet I could hear the grasshoppers clicking around in the yard. A crow cawed just like it was any other day when I was in the garden or hanging out the wash.
I sat down on the porch floor beside my dead brother and listened to the birds and insects. A fly walked across Bobby’s eyelids. I shooed it away. It come back, but I stayed right there and waved my hand over his face every time it tried to land.
I looked at Bobby’s thin little body that had lost all its chubbiness while he was shut up in that iron lung. I seen close up what polio can do to a person.
How was I going to explain this to my daddy? Somehow I knew if he was here, he would’ve stopped it. But he put me in charge and I messed everything up.
I thought how Daddy told Bobby to play some every day and Bobby was doing his best to listen to him. But I made him work till he dropped.
My tears started dripping onto Bobby’s face and running down his cheeks and into his ears. I didn’t wipe them off because I knew he was cold and I couldn’t bear to feel the coldness. I just wanted to remember him warm and snuggly.
I could still feel how he would climb onto my lap and beg me for a story. And I could hear how he giggled when I told him his pictures was so good they should be put in a magazine.
Then I remembered that I had burned every last one of his pictures. Now what was I going to remember him by? The crying overtook me then, and next thing I knew, I was laying half across him, sobbing like a baby.
And his body cooled me like the creek does on a hot summer day. I didn’t even hear Junior drive up in Daddy’s truck, but all of a sudden I felt Bessie’s big arms around me. She hugged me like a momma and I felt her rocking me like a big cushiony rocking chair.
She kept saying, “Have mercy. Have mercy on this poor child.” At first I thought she was talking about Bobby. But then I knew she was talking about me because she said, “She’s just a young girl and life has hit her so hard already. Have mercy.”