August 1944
While Bessie was rocking me, I heard the screen door open and Momma come out on the porch. She reached for Bobby, so I got up and let her have him. She went and sat on the steps with him hugged up against her like he was sleeping on her lap. Only he didn’t curl up against her the way he always done. He just hung there like one of the twins’ paper dolls that don’t care nothing about the person that’s playing with it.
Ida and Ellie crowded in on either side of Momma. When Ellie felt how cold Bobby was, she come back and got the quilt and covered him up. Momma wrapped it around his body and cuddled him like he was a newborn and said, “Hush, honey, don’t cry.”
But I didn’t know who she was talking to, because every one of us was crying.
Then Bessie went and knelt on the porch floor behind my momma and put her arms around her and said, “Have mercy.” She leaned her forehead into the back of Momma’s hair and said, “We stopped by the Hinkles’ to use the telephone. Reverend Price will be here soon.”
Momma nodded, and I thought she looked grateful.
Bessie said, “I’m going inside and cook y’all a good meal. Junior is out back looking for some wood to build a box for Bobby.”
I knew Daddy had some cedar boards in the shed because he had made a wardrobe for Momma last Christmas. So I started around the side of the house to see if I could help. It was better than watching my momma suffer.
Junior was dusting off them leftover boards when I got there. He had put on his best blue jeans and a blue plaid shirt like he was going to town. I picked up a rag and started helping him. He didn’t look at me or say a word.
When his daddy died, I didn’t know what to say neither. Now I thought how Bessie was the one who always knew the right thing to say. Have mercy. It didn’t try to make you feel better or explain something that couldn’t be explained. It just felt like a prayer.
I spoke up to save Junior the trouble. “Daddy was gonna build Pete a doghouse from these boards,” I said. “When he comes home from the war.”
“I don’t reckon Pete come home with your momma, did he?” asked Junior.
“No,” I said. “Leastways, I didn’t see him.”
I could tell from the way Junior was eyeballing them boards that he was trying to figure how long to cut them. I knew he didn’t want to go around to the front porch and measure Bobby for his coffin. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” he said, “if that dog would come dragging in here to sleep on Bobby’s grave. Dogs have a way of knowing these things.”
I picked up a board and set it on end to make sure it come up to my waist. I knew exactly how high Bobby was, standing next to me. “This one’s a good length,” I said to Junior. “Use it.”
So that’s what we used to cut the others by. Junior put the boards across the porch with the extra part hanging out over the edge. I sat on them to hold them still while he cut them with Daddy’s handsaw.
The sawdust settled like snow on Junior’s black shoes.
When it come time to hammer them boards together, I made Junior let me take a turn. I needed to hit something, and them nails was convenient. I imagined polio germs was on them nailheads. I hit them hard and straight.
It done something for me to smack them nails. It was like being mad took the place of hurting—for a while, anyway.
When the box was all nailed together, I went and got a can of oil from the cellar steps. I rubbed oil into the wood just like Daddy did on Momma’s wardrobe, and it give the box a nice shine. Then Junior and I carried it around to the front porch. Momma was still there trying to cuddle with Bobby and using her thumb to push his curls behind his ears.
Reverend Price was there too. He had brought his wife, Mavis, with him, and Lottie Scronce too. Lottie is the woman from church whose two boys was killed in the war. Now here she was, standing with them other church people around the bottom of the steps, patting my sisters on the head and not saying much. Tears was dripping off her trembly chin. Then all of a sudden, just like she done at church every Sunday, she snapped open her pocketbook and pulled out a mint candy for each of my sisters.
The preacher was trying to make arrangements for the burial, but Momma wasn’t saying much. Sometimes she would nod, like when Reverend Price suggested digging the grave under the mimosa tree. “I think it’ll be easier to dig there,” he said.
But I knew he was looking at the lacy leaves and feathery pink blossoms and thinking how it would always be a pretty site.
Junior set the cedar box on the porch floor, and I took the quilt and folded it so it would fit inside. I made a little pillow for Bobby’s head. And Lottie Scronce put a mint candy inside. She’d given Bobby one every Sunday since he was two years old, so I reckon she wanted to do it one last time.
Reverend Price asked me for a shovel, so I took him around back and let the women help Momma put Bobby in that cedar box.
I got the shovel from where it hung over two nails on the shed wall. Junior found a pickax, and the three of us walked down to the mimosa tree. We took turns digging, and I dug just as good as the men did because I was madder than both of them put together.
And besides, I had to do Daddy’s part.
By the time Reverend Price decided it was deep enough, his white shirt was soaked plumb through and had smears of red dirt on it. He pulled a comb and a handkerchief out of his back pocket and made himself look like a preacher again while Junior and I drunk water from the dipper in the bucket on the back porch. Bessie brought the preacher a cup of cold water from the refrigerator.
I went inside and pulled on my blue Sunday dress. Then I grabbed Ida’s and Ellie’s navy blue dresses with the white pinafores and shoved them over their heads while they sobbed.
“Slick your hair down,” I said. I run a brush through mine and got a barrette out of the little cedar box my daddy made for me last Christmas. I seen a dime and two pennies laying there in the box. They put me in mind of the pennies Daddy give Bobby when he went away. I thought how Bobby hung on to them like they was his last piece of bread.
I took those pennies out of my box and went to the porch and put one in each of Bobby’s hands. “There you go, Bobby,” I said. “That’s from your daddy.”
But they slid right out of his hands onto that crazy quilt.
When everybody was all set, Reverend Price and Junior carried Bobby’s box on their shoulders down to the grave. Ida and Ellie walked between them with their hands stretched up, barely touching the box with their fingertips but still trying their best to carry Bobby one last time. The rest of us followed so quiet all you could hear was our feet crunching on the dry grass. We stood around the grave, and Junior and the reverend wiggled the box into the hole.
I reckon the funeral home would’ve done a better job, but I know it would not have been done with as much love as we put into it. Every one of us took turns shoveling dirt on that box.
Mavis Price started singing “Amazing Grace” and Bessie joined in, singing the harmony. They stood there like two opposites—Mavis thin and neat with her white lace collar and her blue hat, and Bessie large and soft with her green flowered dress and Momma’s pink apron. It was smeared with flour and food stains, and Bessie’s dark hair had some flour in it too.
It really surprised me when I heard my momma singing, and the next thing I knew, I was singing along. I reckon we all sung a part of it at one time or another. Mavis sung every word of every verse in a voice pure as an angel’s.
Then Reverend Price quoted the shepherd’s psalm and we all joined in on account of we had memorized it in Sunday school. Reverend Price said some words that no one had memorized—things only a preacher would know—about the ways of God and how we don’t understand them. About the waters passing over us and how God promises he’ll be with us anyway.
He asked us did anybody want to say some words about Bobby, and I just kept thinking, Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite. But it didn’t seem like the right thing to say, so I didn’t.
But then Momma surprised me by saying it herself. She told how Bobby said that every night to the nurses at the polio hospital.
She said the nurses loved Bobby like he was their own, and when the electricity went out in the middle of a lightning storm, one of them cranked his iron lung by hand for over an hour till the lights come back on. “She saved Bobby’s life,” said Momma.
For a while, anyway.
That started up a bunch of questions about the polio hospital. Mavis Price asked how come the emergency hospital let her bring Bobby home. “Weren’t they worried about you bringing polio germs home?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Momma. “People come and go from the hospital every day, you know. And I never got into the contagious ward—not even when Bobby was in there. But still, I had to get permission from the health officer before I could bring him.”
Ida wanted to know why didn’t Pete come home from the hospital with Bobby. Momma threw her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, my Lord, I forgot about Pete. You know, the whole time I was there, I never told them he was our dog. But I called him by his name, and next thing I knew, everyone was calling him Polio Pete.”
Momma said the nurses would sneak good chicken meat to Pete. “It got to where Pete was everybody’s dog,” she said.
I think we was all just so glad that Momma was talking again. Mavis Price took her by the arm and the next thing I knew we was all wandering up to the house and singing, “I’ll fly away, oh glory.”
Bessie laid out such a spread on the table that a body wouldn’t hardly believe there was a war on. We had mashed potatoes, cured ham, green beans, tomatoes, and biscuits with blackberry jelly.
The blackberries put Momma in mind of another story about the emergency hospital. She said back in June when it was still a health camp for children who’d been sick, Mrs. Earle Townsend promised the campers that if they picked blackberries, she’d make cobbler. Well, she was mixing up the batter when the telephone rang. It was Dr. Whims, the county health officer. He told Mrs. Townsend the campers had to leave in thirty minutes so it could become a polio hospital.
“Well,” said Momma, “Mrs. Townsend said she couldn’t possibly send the children home without their blackberry cobbler. So Dr. Whims gave her forty-five minutes instead. When those children got back with the berries, they started packing their clothes while Mrs. Townsend did the baking. They were eating cobbler when the cars started lining up outside to take them home.
“Mrs. Townsend never did leave,” Momma continued. “She stayed right there and became the hospital cook.”
I looked at us crowded around our little kitchen table with two people on either side and someone at every corner with their knees straddling the table legs. I got to thinking how amazing it was that these people was there, laughing and talking with us after so many weeks with just us three girls.
It was kind of strange that we was laughing on the day of my brother’s funeral. But then again, most of these people had lost their own family members, and maybe that was why they was so good at bringing comfort to other people.
But all of a sudden, right in the middle of a hearty laugh over something Junior had said, Momma got real quiet and laid down her fork. She got up from the table and went outside on the back porch. We watched her go, and our laughing turned to pure quiet and followed her out the door.