When the preacher was through, the woman with the marcelled orange hair raised up her hand as if everyone had been talking and she wanted silence, though no one was doing anything at that point but clearing throats, blowing noses, and shuffling from one foot to another.
She shut her lips tight and hummed a note.
Then all the Dakins began to sing.
I sang the way Daddy did. Mama sang very loudly, to drown me out. Ford stepped on the side of my foot, which only made me sing louder. None of the Dakins seemed the least surprised that I could sing like Daddy. We all sang the word there to rhyme with afar, which made Mama cast her eyes heavenward very briefly. No archangel of proper pronunciation saw fit to punish us with a lightning strike, however.
It was on the chorus after this second verse that I got into trouble. The words on my mimeographed sheet were different from everybody else’s.
Everybody else had the chorus just as it was before. But the words I sang were just for me:
Uuuuhk shrieked the crow in the raggedy pine.
As soon as we had finished the chorus and all the Dakins were starting on the fourth verse, Mama grabbed the mimeographed page out of my hand and hissed at me, “Calley, what in the hell are you doing?”
I tried to get the page back from her—the mimeographed page that I had chosen from out of the limp stack that the woman with the orange marcelled hair had offered to me. The page I had chosen the way a volunteer from the audience chooses a card from the magician’s proffered deck. The page that had a message on it meant just for me.
But Mama threw it into the hole under Daddy’s coffin in the ground. It fluttered down like Betsy McCall’s head when I sliced it off. Then the Uncles Dakin lowered Daddy’s coffin into the crumbling pebbly earth on top of it. It seemed to me less that they were interring Daddy than that they were making certain I could not retrieve the ripe-pear-smelling mimeograph.
I threw myself onto the coffin, only to be snatched out by the long arms of an uncle. I struggled wildly in the tightening enclosure of those strong arms.
“‘You are my sunshine,’” I sang out, “‘you make me happy when skies are grey.’”
Hushing and shushing me, Uncle Billy Cane Dakin carried me away.
Seventeen
THE funeral reception for Daddy was at Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin’s house—a big old place in the backside-of-the-moon country outside of Montgomery. When I saw the place, I realized that Mamadee must have won this battle too.
Uncle Jimmy Cane’s house was sided in wide weather-beaten unpainted boards. It had narrow doors, narrow short windows with only a couple of panes each, and three or four dormers indicating a warren of half-story rooms that were surely as frigid in the brief Alabama winter as they were sweltering the other ten months of the year. A wide, dusty porch undulated three-quarters of the way around the house. The whole thing stood raised up on stacks of brick five feet high, with cool dark sand beneath where snakes made swirled patterns and raised miniature dunes. A dusty field that in another season would be scabby with a failing crop of some unpalatable vegetable planted by Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin, his wife, Gerry, and their pack of boy Dakins surrounded the house.
Mama had no intentions of going inside. She parked the Edsel a few yards from the house. Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin brung an old twig chair down from the porch and arranged it next to the car for Mama. There she smiled a sad smile and spoke a few soft words from behind her veil to various Dakins when they approached her with their halting condolences.
Ford took off his tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He refused even to look around but slumped into the backseat with his hat yanked down to cover most of his face.
Mama said, “Calley, go inside and see if you can find me something to drink with ice in it. And wash the dead bugs out of the glass before you pour anything into it, you hear me?”
Mama said this last just loudly enough to be overheard by a Dakin or two, and just softly enough that they might think she had not so intended.
The Uncles and Aunts and Cousins Dakin parted before me, creating a winding path that led up to the creaking wooden steps. They murmured and cooed at me soothingly.
The screened door opened before I touched the handle. The woman with the marcelled orange hair, the very one who had played the organ at St. John’s and passed out the hymn sheets at the Promised Land graveyard, beckoned me inside.
I had visited Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin’s house half a dozen times with Daddy but this visit—final, though I did not know it—is what I remember of it. In the Edsel, I had made a surreptitious effort to clear the lenses of my glasses with the hem of my dress without significantly improving their clarity, so I continued to see everything in a haze. The rooms were square and high-ceilinged. The sun had bleached the chintz curtains in the windows almost colorless. Long dried-out wallpaper with patterns faded past comprehension blistered and peeled on the plastered wall. The linoleum on the floor buckled like the coverlet on a slatternly made bed. The kitchen sink wore a homemade skirt made of a worn-out checkered tablecloth, while there were no proper kitchen cupboards, only open shelves on iron brackets. Aunt Gerry cooked on a wood-fired black-iron range, ironed with the flat-iron on the shelf above the burners, and stored perishables in an icebox. The kitchen smelled strongly of the beagles that slept behind the stove.
I kept looking through the open doorways for a glimpse of Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin or Aunt Gerry, or Aunt Jude or Uncle Billy Cane—anyone at all would do, so long as it was not this woman I did not know, who had given me that mimeographed sheet of pear-smelling paper in the graveyard. My stomach roiled with uneasiness.
“I am not really a Dakin,” the woman confided in me, as she drew me deeper into the house. “My half-sister’s niece by marriage married one of Jimmy Cane Dakin’s grown-up boys, but he was killed when his pickup ran into a five-point deer on the Montgomery highway, and later she died giving birth to triplet sons. Only one of the boys survived but he was never right in the haid. So I am not a Dakin, like you are, but I am connected to the family, so I guess I am connected to you.”
I nodded in mute agreement.
“How is Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin taking it? The death of your daddy, I mean?”
It seemed odd how she called Mama Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin instead of your mama. The oddity made me cautious how I answered.