Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [93]
They held the funeral at Bushy Creek Baptist. Mrs. Pearl insisted on laying an intricately embroidered baby blanket over the coffin. I gave it one glance and then kept my head down. Mrs. Pearl had put a cherub with pink cheeks and yellow hair on the spot that was probably covering Shannon’s blackened features. I kept my hand in Mama’s and my mouth shut tight. Reese had wanted to come, but Mama had refused to let her and sent her off to Raylene’s for the day. Mama wasn’t too happy that I wanted to go to the funeral either, but she agreed to bring me after I started crying. Daddy Glen had gotten angry at Mama for giving in to my “nonsense,” as he’d called it, and gone off fishing with Beau and Nevil. Over the last few months, he’d started drinking, matching them beer for beer at family gatherings and coming home to fall asleep on the couch.
“Boy can’t drink,” Beau joked, taking great amusement in Glen’s red-faced confusion after a few shots. “Just don’t have the constitution for it.”
“The belly,” Uncle Nevil corrected.
“Right, the belly.” They all laughed at that. Glen suddenly taking up drinking seemed to please them in some odd way.
“Damn fools,” Raylene had complained.
“It don’t matter,” Mama had told her. “Glen an’t gonna be a drinker no matter how hard he tries.” It was true. Where Beau and Nevil could drink for hours and only get noisy and mean, Daddy Glen would invariably fall asleep while they were still sipping away. He’d wake up with an aching head and a sour stomach when Beau and Nevil were starting to sip coffee to get ready for a day of work, both of them still half drunk from the night before but going on anyway. It all made me nervous, but like Mama I couldn’t see anything that could be done about it.
“Did you ever see her?” Mrs. Pearl said to the preacher they’d brought in from their family church in Mississippi. “She was just an angel of the Lord.”
The preacher nodded and laid his hands over Mrs. Pearl’s as she hugged close a great bunch of yellow mums. Beyond them, the choir director had one hand on Mr. Pearl’s elbow. Mr. Pearl was as gray as a dead man. I watched from under lowered lashes while the choir director pressed a paper cup into Mr. Pearl’s hand and whispered in his ear. Mr. Pearl nodded and sipped steadily. He kept looking over at his wife and the flowers she was gripping so tightly.
“She loved babies, you know. She was always a friend to the less fortunate. All her little friends are here today. And she could sing. Oh! You should have heard her sing.”
I remembered Shannon’s hoarse wavering voice humming in the backseat of her daddy’s car after she had told me a particularly horrible story. Was it possible Mrs. Pearl had never heard her daughter sing? I looked over to Mr. Pearl and saw his head dip again. If it had been me in that ball of flame, would they have come to my funeral?
Mrs. Pearl lifted her face from the flowers. Her watery eyes flickered back and forth across the pews. She doesn’t understand anything, I thought. Mrs. Pearl’s eyes moved over me sightlessly, her hands crushing the flowers pressed against her neck. She started to moan suddenly, like a bird caught in a blackberry bush, softly, tonelessly, while the preacher carefully pushed her down into the front pew. The choir director’s wife ran over and put her arm around Mrs. Pearl as the preacher desperately signaled the choir to start a hymn. Their voices rose smoothly, but Mrs. Pearl’s moan went on and on, rising into the close sweaty air, a song with no meter, no rhythm—but gospel, the purest gospel, a song of absolute hopeless grief.
I turned and pushed my face into Mama’s dress. All my hardheaded anger was gone. As if she understood completely, Mama’s hand stroked my neck and down my back while she crooned under her breath her own song—muted, toneless, the same hum I’d been hearing all my life.
14
Shannon’s death haunted me. Suddenly I didn’t feel so grown-up anymore. I tried to make up with Reese, but she had decided that Patsy Ruth was the only