You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [51]
2
Her father’s body was in Sarah’s old room. The bed had been taken down to make room for the flowers and chairs and casket. Sarah looked for a long time into the face, as if to find some answer to her questions written there. It was the same face, a dark Shakespearean head framed by gray, woolly hair and split almost in half by a short, gray mustache. It was a completely silent face, a shut face. But her father’s face also looked fat, stuffed, and ready to burst. He wore a navy-blue suit, white shirt and black tie. Sarah bent and loosened the tie. Tears started behind her shoulder blades but did not reach her eyes.
“There’s a rat here under the casket,” she called to her brother, who apparently did not hear her, for he did not come in. She was alone with her father, as she had rarely been when he was alive. When he was alive she had avoided him.
“Where’s that girl at?” her father would ask. “Done closed herself up in her room again,” he would answer himself.
For Sarah’s mother had died in her sleep one night. Just gone to bed tired and never got up. And Sarah had blamed her father.
Stare the rat down, thought Sarah, surely that will help. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I misunderstood or never understood.
“We moved so much looking for crops, a place to live,” her father had moaned, accompanied by Sarah’s stony silence. “The moving killed her. And now we have a real house, with four rooms, and a mailbox on the porch, and it’s too late. She gone. She ain’t here to see it.” On very bad days her father would not eat at all. At night he did not sleep.
Whatever had made her think she knew what love was or was not?
Here she was, Sarah Davis, immersed in Camusian philosophy, versed in many languages, a poppy, of all things, among winter roses. But before she became a poppy she was a native Georgian sunflower, but still had not spoken the language they both knew. Not to him.
Stare the rat down, she thought, and did. The rascal dropped his bold eyes and slunk away. Sarah felt she had, at least, accomplished something.
Why did she have to see the picture of her mother, the one on the mantel among all the religious doodads, come to life? Her mother had stood stout against the years, clean gray braids shining across the top of her head, her eyes snapping, protective. Talking to her father.
“He called you out your name, we’ll leave this place today. Not tomorrow. That be too late. Today!” Her mother was magnificent in her quick decisions.
“But what about your garden, the children, the change of schools?” Her father would be holding, most likely, the wide brim of his hat in nervously twisting fingers.
“He called you out your name, we go!”
And go they would. Who knew exactly where, before they moved? Another soundless place, walls falling down, roofing gone; another face to please without leaving too much of her father’s pride at his feet. But to Sarah then, no matter with what alacrity her father moved, foot-dragging alone was visible.
The moving killed her, her father had said, but the moving was also love.
Did it matter now that often he had threatened their lives with the rage of his despair? That once he had spanked the crying baby violently, who later died of something else altogether…and that the next day they moved?
“No,” said Sarah aloud, “I don’t think it does.”
“Huh?” It was her brother, tall, wiry, black, deceptively calm. As a child he’d had an irrepressible temper. As a grown man he was tensely smooth, like a river that any day will overflow its bed.
He had chosen a dull gray casket. Sarah wished for red. Was it Dylan Thomas who had said something grand about the dead offering “deep, dark defiance”? It didn’t matter; there were more ways to offer defiance than with a red casket.
“I was just thinking,”