The Last Road Home Read Free Page A

to break frozen ground.” It took him three tries to get his old Chevy truck cranked. I was too cold to argue.
    Grandma had started to cook dinner, the house smelling up with collards and fatback, expecting Granddaddy to be home any minute. The men could usually get a grave dug in three or four hours. I’d just added a couple of oak pieces to the potbellied stove when somebody knocked on the screened-in-porch door. I saw Mr. Jackson, Mr. Wilson, and Preacher Mills standing in front of the steps, hats in their hands.
    â€œMorning.” I looked out, expecting to see Granddaddy’s truck in the yard.
    Mr. Jackson said, “Junebug, we need to talk to Miss Rosa Belle.”
    A knot twisted in my stomach. “Where’s my granddaddy?”
    Grandma came up behind me. “Come in and get warm.” We went to sit in the living room close to the stove. Wood cracked and popped as it burned.
    Grandma sat on the couch, and Preacher Mills squatted in front of her. He took her hands in his. “Miss Rosa Belle, we got some bad news.” He looked down at the linoleum. When he raised his head, he said, “Ernie fell over a couple of hours ago while the men were digging the grave for Mrs. Luter. By the time the ambulance got to the church, it was too late. The medic suspects he had a heart attack. They just left a little bit ago; they’ll carry him by the hospital first, then to Apex Funeral Home. We figured you’d want to go to him.”
    I couldn’t have heard him right. I stood up. “My granddaddy’s dead?” I wanted to hit Preacher Mills in the face.
    Grandma pulled her hands from the preacher’s and grabbed my arm. “I’m grateful to you for coming to tell me. Let me change my clothes.” She went into the bathroom. I knew she’d do her crying in private, it was her way.
    Nobody talked as Grandma and I rode in the backseat of Mr. Jackson’s car. I listened to the whine of rubber tires on the pavement and watched pastures of brittle brown winter grass and fields of sad-looking cornstalks, dried up and bent over like a crowd of cripples, pass by the window.
    At the funeral home, heavy gray carpet and whispered conversation made for unsettling quiet. I held Grandma’s cold hand while the man in charge guided us to a room in the back of the building. When he opened the door, I could see Granddaddy’s body covered in a white sheet on a rolling metal table. I stopped. Grandma tugged on my elbow. “It’s all right. We need to say good-bye, Junebug.”
    I had to make myself look when she pulled back the sheet. His skin was a pale off-white. There was a big purple bruise on his chest and scratches on the side of his face. What struck me the most was the unnatural stillness of him, how it was so different from a person who was just asleep, how strong you could feel the absence of life. Grandma rubbed his head and used her fingers to comb his gray-specked dark curly hair. She stroked his face, her lips moving but making no sound. I gripped his arm, and when I let go, the skin stayed indented.
    At his burying, snow mixed with sleet rode on a freezing wind. Sitting beside Grandma in the ice-covered cemetery, I thought about six years before when I watched my parents disappear into this ground. Now I watched Granddaddy’s box being lowered into a hole, and heard the preacher say to Grandma it was “ God’s Will .” I looked at the dark sky, and bit my tongue. Granddaddy had been the fence post I’d leaned on since Momma and Daddy died. “Junebug,” he’d said back then, “when things are hardest, all a man can do is not quit, even though nobody would blame him if he did.”
    That night I dreamed I saw Jesus standing on a mountain. Lightning bolts flashed around him. He held out a long staff and roared, “ I AM THY GOD AND YOU WILL BOW DOWN. ” On the other side of the valley stood the devil, a giant dark