Rubies from Burma by Anne Lovett

Author:Anne Lovett [Lovett, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996070966
Publisher: Words of Passion
Published: 2016-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

People deal with death in different ways, and now I understand what I didn’t then, about Ava and Duke after the funeral.

I felt Momma’s spirit all around us, when we were making plans, almost as if she was telling us what to do. I felt that she wanted Brother Ben Higgins who was here so many years ago to come from Augusta, where he was pastoring a big church, to speak over her. At the time I suspected Ava just wanted somebody important.

But when I saw Momma cold and dead in her casket, on that white satin, I felt that it could not be her, that it was not my momma in that casket. My momma would have no truck with being dead. She still had too much to do—to see me go to college, to see her first grandchild, to hug me goodnight before bed. How could she go off and leave us?

But she had, and the church was filled with people to tell her good-bye. All the students she had taught all those years were there, and my grandmother Mimi, willing herself to be strong. It is not a fitting thing, she said, for the child to go before the parent, as if admonishing God. Mr. Linley, my step-grandfather, did not come to the funeral, because he was already weak from the disease that would kill him before too much longer.

Ava set a black straw hat with a face veil on her hair, and I wore a black suit and little black crescent hat that Aunt Talley got me from somewhere. Ava arranged for a spray of white carnations, lilies, roses, and ferns for Momma’s mahogany coffin that Duke’s folks had paid for, as well as the rest of the funeral. At the cemetery, remembering what Momma had said about sweet shrub being not showy but mysteriously beautiful with its scent, my tears fell when I worked a couple of branches in when no one was looking.

Starrett Conable came over and took my damp hand. And I let him hold it, for just a little while, and he walked me back to the car. He gave me a hug before he opened the door for me to get in, and I gave him a sad little wave when we drove off.

After the funeral, I was back at the farmhouse to stay. I could not go to Mimi’s house, not with Mr. Linley so unwell. I was confused and my tummy was tight. I didn’t want to be there with Ava telling me what to do all the time, but I did want to be there with Duke and the horses to comfort me.

That night after we’d put Momma in the ground next to Chap, her name already carved on the double headstone, I lay awake in my bed until the moon rose high about the tops of the pines. Still numb with it all, I could not believe she was gone.

I wondered if Ava was awake and felt a strange yearning to talk with her, to be close like we had never been, so far apart in age.

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