“WE COULD GO TO THE FUNERAL,” CAT SAID.
“We don’t know them,” Stella answered. “We didn’t know the girls.” Stella stroked the arm of the sofa. She could hardly bring herself to look at her friends.
“We don’t know their families,” Don said.
They sat in the Cartwrights’ living room.
“Did this really happen?” Don asked. He jumped up and paced back and forth over the bare wooden floor, Goliath at his heels. “I find it so hard to believe.” Don pressed the palms of his hands together, and they trembled with the force of his pressing. “That someone would do this.”
Stella had no trouble believing in disaster. She remembered the rolling of the family car, how they had all tumbled, like clothes in a washing machine, the wash of blood. She stroked the sofa arm as though it were a cat. But to bomb a church! Not a chance accident, but someone’s plan. Someone who called himself human.
“It’s important for some white faces to be seen at the funeral,” Cat said firmly. She looked at her brother, at her friend.
“There’ll be an enormous press of people,” Don replied, and Cat knew he was saying it would be too hard to get her chair through.
“There’s quite a bank of steps,” Stella added.
“We could just be in the crowd. Outside,” Cat answered.
His toenails clicking, her little dog ran across the bare floor. He leapt into Cat’s lap, and automatically, she smoothed his head, as soon as he had turned and settled himself. He was part Chihuahua, and he cocked his head, flared his big ears, and looked inquisitively from face to face.
“Goliath’s puzzled,” Don said, with dignified irony. “He’s never heard us talk about this before.”
“I don’t want to stand outside,” Stella said. “We’d be like spectators. It would be offensive to them.”
“The one family wanted their privacy. A small gathering,” Don said. “I’d certainly prefer that.”
“The TV cameras will be there,” Stella said. She imagined the coffins—three dead girls inside. No, the cameras could not look inside, see the little girls in their dark containers. She imagined their ruined bodies lying in their boxes. Stella felt herself there in the church, though the funeral had not yet happened.
No one else was there, just the empty sanctuary, gloomy, in twilight and silence. Tranced, Stella walked alone down the aisle. Three matching coffins were at the front, the fourth already in the ground. Stella pictured herself walking down the aisle of the church, hesitating beside a front pew, close to the coffins. Like three little boats at a dock, the coffins almost bumped the altar rail. Stella lay down on a pew, on her back. She closed her eyes. She folded one hand over the other, placed both over her heart.
“What do you think, Miss Silver?” Don asked her, and the spell was broken.
“I’d feel strange, pretentious going to the funeral of people I didn’t know.”
“The world knows them now,” Cat answered. “At least their faces.”
They heard the postman stuffing letters into the metal mailbox.
“Bombingham,” Cat said, and they all were suffused with shame.
Goliath leapt from Cat’s lap to run barking toward the closed front door.
“Goliath!” Cat called once, sharply, but she did not persist.
Except for the yapping of the dog, they listened in silence to the postman’s steps resounding on the wooden wheelchair ramp, and he was gone.
After another volley of barks, Goliath turned, wagged his tail with satisfaction.
“It’s too awful,” Stella said. It was a stupid thing to say, but she wanted them to keep talking. She wanted somebody to find the right words. She stopped petting the sofa arm.
“Birmingham will never be the same,” Cat said. Her sentence launched itself into the air above the bare boards of the living room and sank.
“King’s coming back to speak,” Don said hopefully.
Stella did not know how a person could be so brave as Martin Luther King. So calm. She wished his words would inspire her. She always listened respectfully. She admired him. Yet he seemed masked to her. She didn’t know him; his message remained impersonal for her.
“I want us to go,” Cat repeated.
Stella thought of those households where parents must be dressing to attend their daughter’s funeral. No matter what their pain, no matter how wrung with grief, now the families must put on their socks or their hose. They must cover their naked feet appropriately. They must slip their arms through the sleeves of a shirt or dress; they must tighten a belt, glance in a mirror. Other family members, friends would be there to help them, finding things, touching their shoulders, fighting their own tears. Glasses of water would be urged on the distraught. Sometimes lovingly, sometimes with a gruffness to hide inadequacy: “Here.”
“I’ve brought you a glass of water,” Aunt Krit had said to her, when she herself—only a child of five—had sat in the front row at the funeral parlor.
Aunt Pratt had sat in her wheelchair beside her. Stella remembered how small and young she’d been when her family was crushed. She was just a little girl, and at the funeral parlor Aunt Pratt, parked in the aisle, had reached over the rim of her wheel to hold Stella’s hand.
Nancy sat on the other side, small as Stella, and held her other hand. Nancy’s mother sat just beyond, with her arm around Nancy.
Stella studied Aunt Pratt’s hand, which was sheathed in a flesh-colored nylon glove. Pratt wore such gloves to hide the ugly veins in the back of her hand and to conceal her thin fingers, twisted with arthritis.
Aunt Krit sat across the aisle, on the end of the row, so she could get in and out easily.
People were crying among the four closed coffins.
“Now he’s dead,” Stella had whispered to Nancy, but Stella felt even her lips were numb, almost too stiff to form words. “No,” Stella managed to add. “Now they’re all dead.”
Nancy’s beautiful eyes were full of sadness, but she kept her promise. She didn’t cry. Stella had made Nancy promise they wouldn’t cry.
“When they all go by,” Aunt Krit had said, thrusting a glass of water at her, “we’ll follow down the aisle. I’ll hold your hand.”
STELLA WONDERED WHERE Darl was this September morning, where was her betrothed, why had he not telephoned her nor she him? Why was she at the Cartwrights’ with Cat and Don and not Darl?
Suddenly Don said, “How can anybody ever paint or dance or put on a play again in this city?” He jumped up and left the room.
“He’s been crying all morning,” Cat said.
“Have you?”
“Some.”
“I can’t. I feel numb.”
From his seat in Cat’s lap, Goliath cocked his head at Stella.