This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [102]
“It’s a siege,” Paul said, counting the cars.
“Keep digging,” Bruce said, down in the earth.
Darkness fell on our little house in the woods with a final sigh, until the pale flashing lights destroyed it. I’d never seen a light like it before, filling our clearing with ghostly fury. Popping and flashing reds, whites, and blues, making the trees into black skeletons in the paleness out the window as engines and radio static ripped the silence of the forest and vibrated on my skin.
“Stand back, stand back,” a voice crackled, and fast hands pulled me across the room to the back addition.
“What, Mama, what?”
“Shush, quiet, Lissie.” Her hand on my mouth. Clara was lying next to me in Mama and Papa’s bed, soft and mewing, tiny fingers clenching and unclenching. Mama pulled at us, pulling us to her, the trembling of her jaw against my arm.
Across the room, the small shape on the padded benches, still wrapped in the blanket.
“Get the fuck off my property!” Papa’s voice was loud at the door.
“Please come out of the house,” said a man’s voice. Mama was whimpering into my hair.
“Papa!” I pushed free and stumbled up the step to the main part of the house. Don’t let them hurt Papa. That strange pale light flooded through the open door, snapping red and blue around the distinct shape of Papa in the space of the doorframe. He summoned all his vitality to stand taut and bowlegged like a cowboy, his head thrown back, shoulders wide. Someone later claimed he braced in his arms the old shotgun for scaring coons, but I don’t remember the shape of that.
“Leave her alone. Leave us alone and get the hell out of here.” His voice had no trace of hesitation. Outside, the dark shapes of men stood near a thick car topped with those eerie flashing lights.
“Papa,” I moaned, my stomach filling with heat.
“Get her back,” Papa said without moving from the door.
Mama pulled me to the addition, fingernails cutting into my wrist. Let me go, let me go, but she held me on the bed.
“No, Mama,” I cried.
“Listen, Lissie, listen, the police are trying to take Heidi,” she said over me. “They want to take her away. We can’t let them. She has to be buried here. On our land.”
When Papa’s anger subsided and the pain returned, he agreed to go down with the deputy and use Keith and Jean’s phone to call the commissioner.
“This fellow here wants to bury her on the farm,” Jean remembered the deputy sheriff telling the DA. “Doesn’t he need to take her to a funeral home? Doesn’t he at least need to take her to a regular cemetery? Doesn’t she need to be embalmed? Aren’t there laws about this? I don’t know. I’ve never had one like this before.”
As it turned out, the district attorney was Jewish, and Jews don’t embalm the dead, preferring to bury the body within twenty-four hours, so the DA said fine, as long as there was a historic grave site like the one we had at the farm. All Papa needed was a permit.
It was nearly midnight by the time we put her to rest. A few of the apprentices acted as pallbearers, carrying the little coffin into the woods and lowering her down into the hole they had dug. Everybody was standing in a circle, holding candles and lanterns. It was beautiful and eerie at the same time. There were words spoken, tears, maybe a guitar. Anner sang “Simple Gifts.”
“After what was a horrendous day,” Paul would say later, “the likes of which no one had seen before, there was a richness and a victory, certainly, that Heidi could rest at last in the earth of the farm.”
Around the cape, the sea swelled and retreated with the ancient comings and goings of the tide,