Cold Sassy Tree (7 page)

There were some who said later that Grandpa, stingy as he was, wouldn't have used that expensive coffin for Miss Mattie Lou if he wasn't trying to make it up to her for something he'd done wrong—such as lusting in his heart after Miss Love or being too stingy to give Granny electricity and a bathroom.

If he wasn't ashamed about the lights and plumbing, maybe he
should of been. But personally I didn't think guilt had anything to do with the nice coffin. I thought he used it because he loved her. Despite all I found out later, I still think so.

Grandpa told Granny one time that dead folks ought to be put right in the ground as the Lord intended. I was there and heard it. "And I want me a party when I die, not a funeral. Remember thet."

She didn't act shocked like Mama would of. As a matter of fact, she laughed. "Don't go talkin' bout dyin', Mr. Blakeslee. I druther live in the past than dwell on that part of the future. Still, since you brung it up, I'll say this: my feeling bout buryin' ain't the same as your'n. You remember that." She said the dead body was sacred, it having been a house for the mind and soul, and as such it deserved proper respect. "A nice funeral is a sort of thank-you," she added. "A person's body oughtn't to be treated like no old dead dog."

What she said didn't change Grandpa's thinking about buryings in general, but that being the way she felt, then he was going to see to it she got her thank-you. For Grandpa, that was a sign of love, because usually he did what he wanted to and never noticed that Granny might welcome a little consideration.

By the time he finished covering another sack with roses, he was as excited as a little boy digging worms to go fishing.

They were really something, those rose blankets. It seemed a shame to plan on covering up a fine coffin with them, but they were sure pretty.

I stood up to stretch and scratch. I was hungry. After milking that morning, I had poured me a big glass of sweetmilk, warm right out of the cow, but that wasn't enough to call breakfast. I slumped down in a chair, tilting it against the side of the porch. "We picked way too many roses," I said, yawning.

"No, we ain't. Now make haste, son. I don't want no kinfolks or neighbor ladies seein' what we done and buttin' in with suggestions. Fore you know it, half a-Cold Sassy'll be down here a-cryin' and carryin' on, tryin' to see how I and yore ma and Loma is a-takin' it. I cain't stand thet. So we got to git th'ew."

I figured the real reason he didn't want anybody to see the rose blankets, it would spoil his surprise for the funeral. But of course he couldn't admit that.

Before long we heard somebody at the front of the house. Probably Mama, but I knew he was scared it was Aunt Loma. He made me drag the zinc tubs full of watered-down rose blankets into the shed room by the back porch. Then, with me on one side of the tub and him on the other, we toted the rest of the roses to the barn and finished out there.

When he thought we had enough, he told me to cut a sack half in two for him. Leaving an oval space the shape of a head on a pillow, he put the last rosebuds around the oval. I guessed what he aimed to do with it.

First I had to go ask Mama to clear folks out of the parlor where Granny was. Then me and Grandpa went in there from the dining room. I couldn't believe how many big vases and baskets of yard flowers had been brought in and set on tables and on the floor around the coffin.

It gave me the creeps, helping Grandpa slip his pillow sham of roses under Granny's head. But touching her didn't seem to bother him. He patted her face and smoothed her hair, and even pried up her stiff hands and moved them a little. Then all of a sudden his face scrooched up, and in a choky voice he ordered me to leave and tell Mama not to let nobody come in on him.

It was ten o'clock, and like I say, I was hungry. Folks had already brought over more cakes and pies, and platters of fried chicken and ham, and their good china bowls full of string beans, butterbeans, okra, and tomatoes. Enough to feed a ox, really. So I ate. I was in the kitchen finishing a piece of Miss Effie Belle's caramel cake when Grandpa found me again.

My mother stuck a glass of buttermilk in his hand and he drank it, but I'm not sure he even noticed. He was all business. "Will Tweedy?"

"Sir?"

"Go hitch up Big Jack."

"Yessir."

He walked with me to the back porch. As soon as we were out of earshot of the others he said, "When you git Jack hitched, lay them rose thangs in the buggy and bring it on up here."

"Yessir."

When I got back with the buggy, Grandpa was out on the porch picking long nails from a dusty glass jar on the long-legged,
blue-painted old slab table. A hammer handle stuck out of his pants pocket. "Load up, son."

"Yessir."

The mourners were all up front with the corpse—admiring the roses that framed her head, I expect. So not a soul except Mama saw me bring the zinc tubs out of the shed room. She marveled, I could tell, but said nothing as I dragged each one to the edge of the porch, tilted it to drain the water out, then loaded "them rose thangs" on the back of the buggy. I didn't know how many blankets we had, but I was sure it was too many.

Grandpa said, "Naw, son, it's jest enough."

Enough for what? He didn't say, I didn't ask, and neither did Mama, who watched as we drove off.

He let me keep the reins. Said we were bound for the cemetery—"but first, son, we'll go by yore house." I didn't have to wait till the whiskey was on his breath to guess why.

The grave was already dug, of course, close behind all his and Granny's children that hadn't lived to grow up, and just a little ways from the Toy plot, where Granny's daddy was buried between her mama and his second wife. He had a granite tombstone. His wives had slabs of brown marble off of washstands.

I always thought a single marker joining the graves of a man and wife looked like the head of a double bed. In the moldy old Crane plot was a wide granite headstone that joined three graves—like a triple bed, you might say. This is what it said:

Here Lies Luzon Theophilus Crane
A Good Man

Eugenia Lamson Crane And Lucy Wylie Who

His Wife Should Have Been His Wife

"Did the Wylies put that up, Mama?" I asked her one day. "I know it wasn't the Cranes did it."

"Aw, shah!" she snapped, jabbing a cone-shaped tin cemetery urn into the ground for the jonquils we brought. "Quit readin' that trash and bring me that quart jar of water for the urn."

Not far from Mr. and Mrs. Crane and Miss Wylie was a little bitty headstone that said "
In Memory of Tweety, Jan. 4, 1894.
" I used to think that was a baby cousin of mine with the Tweedy name spelled wrong, but Mama said it was somebody's pet canary. "The Tweedys are always buried at Hebron," she reminded me. "I mean the older generations. This family"—she solemnly indicated the grave of my baby brother—"has started bein' buried here."

Always before, the graveyard had seemed real interesting and peaceful. Just a quiet and reverent place. But in mid-June, 1906, the deep yawning hole that would swallow up Granny looked horrible, like it could suck me down.

"What we go'n do, Will Tweedy, we go'n line yore grandma's grave with these here roses."

It took two of the blankets to cover the floor of the pit. The others he nailed into the grave's damp red-clay walls while both of us lay on the grass, me holding a croker sack blanket and a long nail, him propped on his left elbow, hammering. It was only as the last nail went in that Grandpa sagged. As if he was too tired to get up, he lay there looking down, and so did I. It wasn't awful anymore. The heavy smell of roses drifted up, and I thought I'd never seen anything as beautiful.

A tear dropped off Grandpa's nose and watered a red rose. Seeing that, I choked up. I ached for Grandpa, grieving. And for Granny. I knew she wouldn't want to be dead. And then I thought about my friend Bluford Jackson, the one who got lockjaw after firecrackers burned his hand last Christmas. He had died soon after New Year's Day and now nearly six months later I was just finally seeing that Blu was gone for good.

"Why'd Blu Jackson have to go and die, Grandpa?" I hit my fist on the grass. "Why'd God take him like that? He hadn't lived yet. He wasn't old like Granny. He had so many things to do.... He was scared of dyin'....I bet Granny was scared of dyin', too."

Grandpa put his arm stub around me, and we lay there, staring down into the grave. "Like they say, the old must die and the young may die," he muttered softly. "Hit's what you git for livin'. But thet don't seem so awful as you grow older, son. You'll see." He gave a deep sigh.

"How you go'n stand it, Grandpa? I mean goin' home every night and she ain't there."

"Thet's what I don't know, son. Thet's what I don't know.
Yore granny was—" He choked up again. When he could go on, he stretched both arms down into the grave, dropped them, helpless-like, and said, "But do I got a choice, Will Tweedy? I got to stand it, ain't I? Livin' is like pourin' water out of a tumbler into a dang Coca-Cola bottle. If'n you skeered you cain't do it, you cain't. If'n you say to yoreself, 'By dang, I can do it!' then, by dang, you won't slosh a drop."

We lay there a while longer. Finally Grandpa sighed again and said, "I wouldn't ast the Lord to steady my hand for a thang like pourin' water into a Coca-Cola bottle. But I'll be astin' Him for hep on this." He indicated the grave. After a moment he said, "Miss Mattie Lou shore was a fool about roses." Silence again. "Two or more year ago she was out workin' in her rose garden one mornin'—did you know, boy, she's got over sixty different kinds out there?—and she said to me, said, 'Mr. Blakeslee, I wouldn't even mind dyin' if'n I could be buried in a bed of roses.' Thet's jest the way she put it. I laughed and said it would be her luck to die in the dead of winter.... Well, son, we better go git cleaned up for the funeral. Wisht it was over with. I'm plumb wore out." We both got up. "If'n I had my way, wouldn't be no sech a thang as funerals. They's jest a long hot time full a-hypocrites and kinfolks—grievin' some maybe, but mostly bein' glad to be alive theirselves and tryin' to pretend they ain't havin' a good time seein' one another."

"It wasn't like that at Blu's funeral."

"No, course not. They ain't no hypocrites at a youngun's funeral."

When I brought up the buggy, Grandpa stood by old Jack, absently stroking the huge gray forehead, and looked back at the grave site. Then he spat a wonderful stream of tobacco juice and climbed in beside me. "She was a plumb fool bout roses," he said softly.

Later, remembering that morning, I had no question in my mind: Grandpa's eloping wasn't a matter of him not loving Granny or not respecting the dead. He just needed a cheap cook.

T
O ME
, all that went on during Granny's sickness and dying and getting buried was more like a dream than real, till we got back from the cemetery and I watched Grandpa stop at the little pine desk in the front hall and write down her end in the Toy family Bible.

Miss Love Simpson was standing nearby, come to think of it, as Grandpa put on his glasses and opened the Bible to the page where his and Granny's life together was written down in different handwritings and different shades of faded ink. Miss Love and I watched as he read it, muttering out loud to himself:

"
Matilda Louise Toy, born April 10, 1850, in Cold
Sassy Community, Jackson County, Georgia.
Married Enoch Rucker Blakeslee May 27, 1871.
Children:

— Mary Willis, born March 5, 1872.

— Trix Esperance, born Jan. 19, 1873.
Kicked by a mule and died July 1, 1880.

— Rachel Aleez, born Nov. 25, 1875. Died
April 5, 1877, of the smallpox.

— Emma Frances was born Dec. 29, 1876. Died
April 30, 1877. Pneumonia.

— Missouri Mathis, born Wednesday Spt. 2, 1878. Died Spt. 5, 1878, of water on the brain.

— Loma Louise was born Dec. 6, 1886.

— Fannie Marie was born January 28, 1888, died a little Lamb of God the same day.
"

Then Grandpa wrote in fresh, black, final-looking ink beside Granny's name:
Died June 14, 1906.

The
Cold Sassy Weekly
said it was "one of the saddest deaths that has ever grieved the people of Jackson County, because Mrs. Blakeslee was so beloved by so many."

I saved the write-up. It had a black border and was long and fancy, beginning,

Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep From which none ever wake to weep....
Mrs. Mattie Lou Blakeslee, a sacred mother of Israel, has gone to receive the crown of righteousness which God has promised to all those who love His appearing. Born Matilda Louise Toy, great-granddaughter of Capt. Josiah Toy who pioneered the settlement of Cold Sassy in 1804, she embraced the religion of our Blessed Master when young. Since that time her life and character has been that of a pure Christian ministering to the comfort of all, especially her beloved husband and consort, E. Rucker Blakeslee of this city, who now must walk alone. She gave up this life "
As one who wraps the draperies of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams.
" We must believe that the gates of Heaven were thrown open to receive her ransomed spirit, and that a crown resplendent with glory was placed upon her peaceful brow whilst the plaudit "
Well done, thou good and faithful servant
" echoed and re-echoed through the mansions of bliss....

There was a lot more. Grandpa read it all, but instead of tearing it out to put in the Bible, he just dropped the newspaper on the floor, the way he always did when he was through with it, put his glasses in his pocket, and got up to go feed his mule.

He went back to work the day after the funeral, which most folks thought not fitting. But as I said before, he wasn't the same. No laughter in him. No jokes or funning. No neighborly talk, and wouldn't talk about Granny, either. If a customer started saying her condolences, Grandpa would nod and cut her off with "You be needin' anythang else, ma'am?"