Chap. 7
Do You Think I Bury the Dead with My Love
The days were shorter and the nights longer. It was time to bury the dead. Baby Doll, Amber, Blondie, her father. Rocket. Her baby sister.
It was autumn long ago and yet only yesterday. Sweet Pea lay on her bed below the little window in her room. Outside the sunlight was bright, but the air was cool. Occasionally, the cool air filtered through the screen, into the warm room, and over Sweet Pea's face like a passing ghost. Rocket stood in the doorway, a book from the library in her hands. Rocket read aloud the words of the Paiute prophet Wovoka. Blondie with her tomahawk. Sweet Pea heard Blondie's voice:
"'Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are still alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring.'"
The words circled around her.
Like a cloud. Like a cloud. Like a cloud.
The words circled around Sweet Pea.
Like a faux Garden of Eden, flowers surrounded her father's coffin; but they could not mask the smell of the house of death. The smell of embalming fluid hung in the air like mustard gas over Flanders' Fields. It made Sweet Pea's head float. It made her guts ripple. It followed her like an evil ghost, ever lurking with malevolent spite. Twice a day for three days there were calling hours at the funeral parlor. Friends came, family came, cousins that Sweet Pea had not seen for a long while came. A stranger came. And they all spoke with soft voices like clouds. And every time she returned home, Sweet Pea vomited. Still she could not expel that evil odor. It clung to her like mildew on a damp tombstone.
In the receiving line every evening, Sweet Pea saw Colleen approach. She looked right at her former lover and did not recognize her until she spoke. Colleen was with a handsome young man. Sweet Pea was puzzled - he did not belong.
"This is John," Colleen said.
John?
"I'm sorry to meet you under such circumstances," he said softly.
"Would you give us a minute, sweetheart," Colleen said to him.
Sweetheart?
He drifted away.
Sweet Pea and Colleen slipped into an empty room behind the curtain in back of her father's coffin.
"I hope you understand," Colleen said. "I had to come."
"You didn't write," Sweet Pea said almost to herself.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know what to say."
"You could have written that you loved me and couldn't wait for us to be together," Sweet Pea said. "That's the way my heart said it should be."
"Mine too," Colleen said.
"I believe you," Sweet Pea whispered. "...And John?"
"I'm going to marry him."
"You will be happy," Sweet Pea declared after a pause.
Colleen was silent.
They shared a tearful embrace. When they separated, Sweet Pea giggled. A nervous, incongruous, wet twitter, as if she were ashamed of her tears.
After the funeral, Sweet Pea did not surrender to the arms of Davey. From her closet she pulled her old ragged teddy bear. She wanted to touch something from long ago, when life was bigger and not made small by strangling sorrows.
[contd]