How the Soul Sings

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

          

          When it became clear that there was no hope for my aunt to make a recovery, Willa Jane set her hard feelings toward my mother aside for the sake of the whole situation, knowing well that it's hard for anyone to think with a level head when they've been smacked upside it by a big chunk of tragedy. It also helped when my brother told her that what our mother had failed to mention was that she had in fact offered Caesar that chance to come on home, too. However, in the couple of years of being gone and all the stories and things that my brother had to share, one was that while in Mexico, that in the last year, Caesar had met a girl, gotten married and was due to be a father at any minute. He wasn't about to leave his wife down there and was going to wait until they figured out a way to bring her here, too.

"Well, I don't understand why he just didn't write and tell me all this." Willa Jane had to say.

Then Evee pointed out, "Cause he'd knew how you'd be madder than a wet cat bout runnin' off, then gettin' married someplace else, to some girl you done know, without y'all there."

"Well, he'd have to tell me about it eventually! Wait until his father... Umm-hmm." Willa Jane finished, shaking her head.

"Maybe he bett'a off stayin' in Mexico." And then, that's when it suddenly got very quiet. In front of my eyes, like the blowing out of a candle, I saw her light go dim. I had been sitting on the kitchen counter, eating an apple, while listening to all the banter about what Willa Jane and Evee had to say about Caesar being married and all, when abruptly, Evee had slumped over to her right, at the table. I dropped my apple, sending it rolling across the floor, to rush next to her. Willa Jane screamed out, calling for Jesse Sr. and my mother; she was frantically shaking Evee and patting her cheeks.

"What happened??" My mother says hollering back while coming into the house.

"I don't know! I think she fainted or somethin'!"Everyone had started to gather in the kitchen, my mother kneeled down beside Evee. "Evee? Grandma Evee, you still with us?" She put her head up against Evee's chest, then looked back at Willa Jane. My mother's eyes had grown wide and her face had turned pale. We knew.

I cried out 'NO!' and fell to the floor beside her, laying my head in her lap with my arms wrapped around her, sobbing. She was still warm and soft, she couldn't be gone, I had thought. She had just been talking and dishing it out all that morning about whose being what and who's doing what and what she thought they all should be doing about it. This is not how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to go off to college, find some guy to marry, eventually, and bring him back here to the farm and have her see me have my own children and help me raise them, like she promised...

My brother and Jesse Sr. had to pry me away from Evee and leave me there, crying on the floor. They gently lifted her up and laid her out on the sofa in the parlor. Momma covered Evee with one of the many afghans Evee had made herself. I crawled over to her from the kitchen and lay down beside her on the carpet, next to the sofa where she was. I reached one of my hands up to her and held her hand in mine until the funeral home came. Willa Jane and Momma sobbed quietly together in a corner of the room while Jesse Sr. went out on the front porch to wait for the undertaker and had a cigarette with Daniel and my brother.

I don't care how old someone gets; there are just some people in this world that you never expect to die. Loosing Evee was different than losing my aunt, much different; a part of my heart had gone with her.

        

          The next couple of days, nothing more than the bare necessities went on. The animals were fed like always, the eggs were gathered from the hens and the goats and sheep were milked. But we all hardly ate. Everyone just consisted on coffee and the occasional biscuit sandwich until the funeral came. Afterward, there was an adjustment period of figuring out how to go on and who'd pick up the duties that used to be sacredly held by Evee. After all, it was just about canning season; couldn't let all that came from God's good-Earth to go to waste... "You waste, you goes hungry." She would say. And somehow, it all just naturally drifted over on to me. I just got up one morning and instinctively made a pan of biscuits and while those were going, I got started on peeling up and chopping the vegetables from out of the garden. And when all that was done, I got the fires going out on the brick pits to heat up the kettles. I did it all in a rhythmic routine as though I were channeling Evee and she was working through me. I didn't need anyone to direct me or to tell me when those jars were done; like her, I just knew. I then realized that she was so much a part of me that I didn't need blood for her to be family.

Oh, how my bones ached to hug her again and how my heart sank every time I saw her empty chair at that kitchen table. I went to her gravesite yearning to talk to her again, hoping that maybe I'd go a little crazy from all my grief and think that I actually heard her voice again. But all I did was lie down beside it and cry. She was my very best friend in the whole world and now, without her, I was utterly lost.

My mother said once, that I was more Evee's, than hers. That God brought Evee a second child through her. And when it came to taking care of me, Evee would just butt in and always take over, like that was how it was meant to be or somethin'. Not that my momma wasn't my momma, I just had belonged to Evee, is all.

          A couple of weeks after Grandma Evee was gone, there was a letter delivered in the mail addressed to Willa Jane and my mother, from Evee. Of course, everyone was shocked and surprised. They each took a turn reading it, then as they stood there, chewing on what had just happened, Daniel took a hold of it and read it out loud to the bewildered rest of us. I suddenly could hear her voice in every single syllable of every single word.

"To my deares' MaryAnn an Willa Jane,

          You is readin' this letta because I have passed on an like when a lotta peoples die, they of'en leave unanswered questions wit' their passin'. I was hopin' to leave behin' a virtuous enough life that there would be no sucha thing. As Mark Twain once said, he hoped to live such a life, that when it came his time to die, that even the und'a tak'a would be sorry. I highly doubt I've lived THAT kinda life, but I knows that I've lived long enough, that there will be more than God should allow, left behind, sad, who will miss me.

Firs' all, I gave this letta to the funeral home right afta that tornada came an swept up yo' boys away. I told him to mail it fo' me, two weeks afta I had pass, so's to give y'all enough time to clear ya heads an get used to me bein' gone. If you remembers correctly, I had jus' barely gotten ova that awful bouta pneumonia an so, I didn't think that I was gone be here much longa afta that...

And so, here it is, that unanswered question is that it was my idea fo' them boys to run off, like they did, to Mexico. The tornada commin' through jus' happen to be good timin', I guess. I was broken up by what happen to po' Daniel an seein' all those flag covered caskets of all those boys an their mommas cryin' on TV was jus' mo' than I could bare seein' happenin' to my own kin. I told them to run an to run as fas' as they can. Don't go to Canada; everybody be lookin' fo' ya up there. Go south. At least there it's warm an you can get by 'til ya figure out whatcha gone do 'til the war's ova.

Please done be too angry wit' me fo' too long; life's too short to spen' it miserable.

I love each an ever'a one of ya. I will be watchin' ova all of ya, like I always has.

-Evee "