A Land More Kind Than Home Read Free Page B

almost looked like a young girl, even though she was a woman a couple years past thirty who’d just buried her son. When we’d come in from the funeral, she’d gone into the bedroom across the hall and closed the door. I heard the old springs on the bed give a creak when she laid down on it. I imagined her in there on that bed with her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling until the room got too dark to see it. Then she’d opened the door and come across the hall with her hair let down just as long and pretty as it could be. About the color of sweet corn. I could see she’d done a little more crying.
    â€œYou fixing to turn in?” she asked me. I nodded my head and tried to smile at her.
    â€œI was thinking about it,” I said. “You need anything before I do?”
    â€œNo, ma’am,” she said. “I think I’ll be all right. I just want to tell you again how much I appreciate you letting me stay here. Shouldn’t be but just a while. Just till I decide what I’m going to do.”
    â€œLord, girl,” I told her, “you can stay here just as long as you’re needing to. You don’t need to make no kinds of decisions, especially not tonight, especially after what all has happened.” She looked down at that pretty yellow hair where it draped over her shoulder and fell down to her chest, and she picked up the ends of it and swished it over her fingers like she was dusting something off her hands.
    â€œPastor told me he wants to see you,” she said. “Tomorrow afternoon, down at the church. He said about three o’clock.” She dropped her hair and used both her hands to move it back behind her shoulders, and then she raised her face and looked at me.
    â€œI wish he could’ve told me himself,” I said. “And I wish he’d been out there today at Christopher’s funeral. Don’t seem right that he wasn’t.”
    â€œHe thought it’d be better if he didn’t come,” she said. “After all that’s happened, I mean.”
    â€œIs that right?” I said. “A little boy dies during his church service, and he thinks that’s a reason to stay away. It don’t seem right to me.” I stood up from the bed and turned on the lamp on the bedside table and went to the closet where my nightgown hung on the back of the door. “I don’t reckon you want to go down there with me?”
    â€œHe said he wanted you to come alone,” she said.
    â€œI can’t say I’m too surprised by that,” I said.
    T HERE WASN ’ T A SINGLE CAR OUT THERE IN THE PARKING LOT BESIDES mine and Chambliss’s old Buick. I opened the door and put my feet out on the blacktop and looked across the road where the land sloped down toward the riverbank. Downtown Marshall sat about a mile or so up the river, too far away to hear the sounds of cars or people’s voices or other things you might hear on a Thursday afternoon in a little town. It looked to be real still, like there wasn’t even anybody on the streets at all. I looked back toward the church and saw the green field spread out behind it, the trees rising up from the woods farther out at the field’s edge. There weren’t any sounds except for that little bit of breeze and the sound of the river running softly across the street. I climbed out of the car and closed the door and just stood there for what seemed like forever, trying to wrap my head around what might’ve happened up here on Sunday night, trying to imagine what was going to happen to me.
    I can tell you that opening the door and stepping inside that church was like walking right into the dark of night. The newspaper over those windows blocked out the sun, and with that dark wood paneling on the walls it took a good while for my eyes to get used to all that blackness; I couldn’t hardly see a thing until they did. Once my eyes got fixed right, I could