Read Online The Funeral Dress by Susan Gregg Gilmore - Free Book Online Page A

crazy,” balled up next to her mama for hours after she died. She clung to her mama’s neck, screaming when anybody tried to pull her free. He said she whined and moped about the house for days until he finally had enough of it one night and took his hand to her bare behind, spanked thesadness right out of her. He took off for the woods, said he couldn’t stand looking at the child that had drained the life right out of his wife. Emmalee remembered sitting alone in the holler that night, too. Back then, she swore she heard the house weeping along with her.
    Nolan certainly had not planned on raising his daughter by himself, and he had reminded Emmalee of that almost every day since her mama’s death. Now she worried she might not do much better by her own baby girl, but Leona had promised things would be different on Old Lick. She had promised life would be good up there.
    “Leona, are you out there?” Emmalee’s teeth chattered and her toes stung in the cold, but she did not dare leave her post. Another hour or more passed as she sat and waited for any measure of her father’s return—the rough sound of the tires rolling across Red Chert Road or a quick flash of the truck’s headlights bobbing in the distance.
    “Oh, Lord, please don’t take Leona Lane from me!” Emmalee hollered her plea, but only an owl in a far tree answered her cry. “I ain’t making another cross. Not for you, Leona. I won’t do it. You can’t leave me.”
    Emmalee rocked back and forth, and the quilt dropped to her lap. She hummed a low note. She did not want to know the details of this night’s accident. Yet she predicted with absolute certainty Nolan would return home all too ready to divulge what he had witnessed firsthand. He would walk into her room and sit down at the foot of the bed and proceed with his telling of the broken bones and torn flesh he had seen on the side of Old Lick Mountain.
    “Stop!” she’d yell, already picturing the fear in Leona’s face as she fell from the mountain’s edge. But Nolan would not stop. He’d prattle on while Emmalee sat limp, trying to crowd her thoughts with prettier things. Sometimes she sang “The Star Spangled Banner” loud in her head to drown her father’s voice. Other times she pretended to be in a deep sleep, hoping to avoid his talk altogether. But Nolan was a patient man when it came to his storytelling. He’d seat himself at the foot of her bed slurping a cup of yesterday’s coffee and wait for her to wake.
    She came to understand that when her father returned from working with Mr. Fulton, he was desperate to purge his thoughts of another lifeless body, too often bloodied and bruised, like the one of Grady Denton who drank too much beer one Friday night and steered his motorcycle square into a tree. Emmalee was barely nine years old when Grady was killed. He was nothing but a name to her, but she had closed her eyes and held her hands tight to her ears. She had sung louder and louder of rockets’ red glare, but her father sat at the foot of her bed, not once looking at his daughter who was desperate to drift away.
    “No shit, Emmalee, we done near had to peel the boy’s face right off the trunk of that split oak out on Highway One Twenty-Seven,” Nolan said. He took a swig from his bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Little bit of his brains here. Little bit there. Like a damn bomb blowed up. Shit. We done found his girlfriend fifty yards on down, hanging limp cross some barbed wire fencing like a damn rag doll. Not a scratch on her. Shit. Pretty girl too.”
    Emmalee shifted her weight against the refrigeratoras images of Grady’s and his girlfriend’s bodies, even her mother’s, flashed in her head. She saw them clear in front of her as if she could reach out and touch them. Preparing for another death always conjured up the ones already done.
    The baby hollered in the back room.
    Emmalee took hold of the refrigerator’s door handle and