Darkest Hour (Cutler 5)

That afternoon, the morticians arrived and prepared Mamma. Papa at least permitted me to select the dress she was to be buried in, saying I would know better than Emily what dress Mamma would want herself. I chose something happy, something very pretty, one that truly made her feel like the mistress of a grand Southern plantation, a gown of white satin that had embroidered trim along the hem of the skirt. Emily complained of course, claiming the dress was too festive for a burial dress.

But I knew we would have mourners visiting the open casket to pay their last respects and I knew that Mamma wouldn't want to look morbid and dreary.

"The grave," Emily declared in her characteristic prophetic manner, "is one place you can't take your vanity." But I wouldn't yield.

"Mamma suffered enough when she was alive in this house," I said firmly. "It's the least we can do for her now."

"Ridiculous," Emily muttered, but Papa must have told her to avoid conflict and acrimony during the mourning period. There were too many visitors and too much gossip about us being whispered in the corners and behind doors as it was. She simply turned on her heels and left me with the morticians. I laid out Mamma's wardrobe for them, even including her shoes and her favorite bracelets and necklace. I asked them to brush her hair and I gave them her scented powder.

The casket was placed in Mamma's reading room where she had spent so much of her time. Emily and the minister set up the candles and draped the floor beneath the casket in a black cloth. She and the minister stood just inside the door and greeted people who came to pay their final respects.

But Emily really surprised me during those days of mourning. For one thing, she never left the room except to go to the bathroom a

nd for another, she began a strict fast, taking only water to her lips. She spent endless hours on her knees praying beside Mamma's casket and was even there praying late into the night. I knew because I came down when I couldn't sleep, and I found her there, her head bowed, the candles flickering in the otherwise darkened room.

She didn't even look up when I entered and approached the casket. I stood by it, looking down at Mamma's wan face, imagining a slight, soft smile on her lips. I liked to believe her soul was pleased and liked what I had done for her. How she looked in the presence of others, especially other women, was so important to her.

The funeral was one of the biggest in our community. Even the Thompsons came, finding it in their hearts to forgive the Booths enough for the death of Niles to mourn alongside us at the service and grave site. Papa dressed himself in his finest dark suit and Emily wore her nicest dark dress. I wore a dark dress, too, but I also wore the charm bracelet Mamma had given me on my birthday two years ago. Charles and Vera put on their best Sunday clothes and dressed little Luther in his one pair of slacks and his one nice shirt. He looked so confused and serious holding on to his mother's hand. Death is the most confusing thing to a child, who wakes each day to think that everything he does and sees has immortality, especially his parents and the parents of other young people.

But I didn't really look at the mourners very much that day. When the minister began his service, my eyes were fixed on Mamma's coffin, now closed. I didn't cry until we were at the grave site and Mamma was lowered to lie forever beside Eugenia in the family plot. I hoped and prayed they were together again. Surely they would be a comfort to each other.

Papa wiped his eyes once with his handkerchief before we turned away from the grave, but Emily didn't shed a tear. If she cried at all, she cried inside. I saw the way some people looked at her and whispered, shaking their heads. Emily couldn't care less about what people thought of her. She believed that nothing in this world, nothing people did or said, nothing that happened was as important as what followed this life. Her attention was firmly fixed on the hereafter and preparations for the trip over glory's road.

But I didn't hate her for her behavior anymore. Something had happened inside me because of the birth of Charlotte and the death of Mamma. Anger and intolerance were replaced by pity and patience. I had finally come to realize that Emily was the most pitiful of the three of us. Even poor and sickly Eugenia had been better off, for she had been able to enjoy some of this world, some of its beauty and warmth, whereas Emily was incapable of anything but unhappiness and sorrow. She belonged in graveyards. She had been moving about like a mortician since the day she could walk. She draped herself in shadows and found security and comfort alone, wrapped tightly in her Biblical stories and words, best repeated under gray skies.

The funeral and its aftermath provided another excuse for Papa to drink his whiskey. He sat with his card-playing friends and swallowed glass after glass of bourbon until he fell asleep in his chair. Over the next few days, Papa underwent a dramatic change in his habits and behavior. For one thing, he no longer rose early in the morning and was at the breakfast table when I arrived. He started arriving late. One morning, he didn't arrive at all and I asked Emily where he was. She simply glared at me and shook her head. Then she muttered one of her prayers under her breath.

"What is it, Emily?" I demanded.

"Papa is succumbing to the devil, a little more every day," she declared.

I nearly laughed. How could Emily not see that Papa had been trafficking with Satan for some time now? How could she excuse his drinking and his gambling and his deplorable activities when he was away from home on his so-called business trips? Was she really blinded and fooled by his hypocritical religious surface while he was home? She knew what he had done to me and yet she tried to excuse it by placing all the blame on me and the devil. What about his responsibility?

What finally bothered Emily was that Papa had given up even his hypocrisy. He wasn't at the breakfast table to say the morning prayers and he wasn't reading his Bible. He was drinking himself to sleep every night and when he rose, he didn't dress himself neatly. He didn't shave; he didn't even look clean anymore. As soon as he was able to, he would leave the house to go to his haunts where he gambled the night away, playing cards in smoke-filled rooms. We knew that there were women of ill repute in these places too, women whose sole purpose was to entertain and give pleasure to the men.

The drinking, carousing and gambling stole away Papa's attention from the business of running The Meadows. Weeks passed with the workers complaining about not receiving their wages. Charles tried to repair and maintain the old and tired equipment, but he was like the boy trying to keep the dike intact by holding his finger in the leaking hole. Every time he brought another complaint or another bit of depressing news to Papa, Papa would rant and rage and blame it on the Northerners or the foreigners. It usually ended with him drinking himself into a stupor and nothing being done, no new problem solved.

Gradually, The Meadows began to look like the neglected old plantations that were either deserted or destroyed by the Civil War. With no money to whitewash the fences and barns, with fewer and fewer employees willing to wait out Papa's fits of tantrum and periods of procrastination when it came to paying them their rightful wages, The Meadows choked and stumbled until there was barely an income to keep what little we had left going.

Emily, rather than criticize Papa openly, decided instead to find ways to economize and save in the house. She ordered Vera to serve cheaper and cheaper meals. Most sections of the house were kept dark and cold and weren't even dusted anymore. A pall fell over what had once been a proud and beautiful Southern home.

Memories of Mamma's grand barbecues, the elaborate dinner parties, the sound of laughter and music, all dwindled, retreated into the shadows and locked themselves between the covers of photograph albums. The piano fell out of tune, the drapes began to sag with dust and grime, the once beautiful landscape of flowers and bushes succumbed to the invasion of weeds.

All that remained interesting and beautiful for me was gone, but I had baby Charlotte and I helped Mrs. Clark care for her. Together we watched her develop until she took her first step and uttered her first discernible word. It wasn't Mamma or Papa. It was Lil . . . Lil.

"How wonderful and proper that your name be the first sensible sound on her lips," Mrs. Clark declared. Of course, she didn't know how wonderful and proper it really was, although I thought at times that she knew more than she pretended to know. How could she look at my face when I held Charlotte or played with her or fed her and not realize that Charlotte was my child and not my sister? And how could she see the way Papa avoided the baby and not think it strange?

Oh, he did some of the very basic things. He stopped by occasionally to see Charlotte dressed in something pretty or see her take her first steps. He even had a photographer take pictures of his "three" children, but for the most part, he treated Charlotte like some ward he had been assigned.

A month or so after Mamma's passing, I returned to school. Miss Walker was still the teacher and she was quite surprised at how well I had kept up with my learning. In fact, it wasn't more than a few months before she had me working beside her, teaching the younger children and functioning as her teacher's aide. Emily no longer attended school and was not interested in the things I did there, nor was Papa.

But all that came to an abrupt end when Charlotte was a little more than two. Papa announced at dinner that he was going to have to let Mrs. Clark go.

"We can't afford her anymore," he declared. "Lillian, you and Emily and Vera will look after the baby from now on."

"But what about my schoolwork, Papa? I was thinking of becoming a teacher myself."

"That will have to stop," he said. "Until things improve."