Weeping Willow by White Ruth

Author:White, Ruth [White, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

At first Mrs. Clevinger just listened, then she started clapping in time. Then we did the chorus again while Mrs. Clevinger and I hooked arms and started dancing. When we finished we were breathless, and all of us laughed. I completely forgot this was a middle-aged woman I was dancing with.

“That was good!” she said. “Why, Tiny Lambert, where’d you learn to sing like that?”

For an instant the room faded away and I saw me and Willa up on the high porch in the swing, singing softly together.

“Just picked it up,” I said to Mrs. Clevinger.

“Well, don’t you ever lay it back down,” she said, giggling. “And, Bobby Lynn, honey, you played just right—soft in the right places. I can’t believe it. Can you do something else?”

Sure we could do something else, and we did something else and something else again while Mrs. Clevinger fried big slabs of pork and opened home-canned sauerkraut, and made corn bread. Then we sat down to eat in their cluttered kitchen.

“I have to drive up to Big Lick tonight to go to a wake,” Mrs. Clevinger said. “I sure would like for you girls to go with me. I don’t like driving in the dark by myself.”

I didn’t think I wanted to spend a Friday night sitting up with a corpse, but to my surprise, Bobby Lynn agreed.

“I’ve never been to a wake before,” I said, somehow hoping that bit of information might save me, but I was wrong.

Next thing I knew, we were loaded into the Clevingers’ Henry J, me in the front with Mrs. Clevinger, and Bobby Lynn in the back. We drove a long way up to Big Lick, almost to the West Virginia state line. We were cracking jokes and acting the fool all the way, and I never saw a grownup as much fun as Bobby Lynn’s mama.

Then we turned up a gravel road that led to a great big farmhouse sitting in the crook of a holler. We put on some serious faces then and went in. I’m not sure what I expected a wake to be, but it wasn’t what I found there.

The woman who died of old age was the mother of Mrs. Clevinger’s lifelong friend Arbutus Shortridge. Her coffin was set up in the living room with flowers draped all over it, under it, around it, behind it. It put you in mind of a throne all decorated in finery, and the deceased was the queen presiding over the goingson.

In every room there were clusters of people talking softly together, occasionally wiping away a tear as they told cute and touching stories about the star of the show, the deceased. Dead people are always remembered as wonderful.

Besides the heavy smell of flowers there was the smell of good food. On the kitchen table there was every kind of food you could ever want—stuff the neighbors had brought in. There was ham and fried chicken, freshly baked bread and biscuits, all kinds of vegetables and desserts—pumpkin pie and apple pie, pound cake and red velvet cake—and drinks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.