know?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I always been thinkin’ so – but maybe that just like I been
thinkin’ you gotta know.”
“How could my father keep something like that a secret?”
“I be the only one what seen her up there, ’sides your daddy. After a while he
’member I there, put his hands on my shoulders and say, ‘Boy, you already
forgot what you seen here. My wife been a sickly woman, died in her bed.’ I promised him I ain’t gonna tell no one, ’cept for the Doc and it been your father
what sent me to get him. He needed someone to help him carry her up to bed. I
warn’t strong enough. But Doc Gaylin ain’t gonna tell no one, if your father say
not to. Course people, they always whisperin’. The church ladies come, want to
get the body ready, but your father say he ain’t believin’ in that, he havin’ a closed casket. But they whisperin’, always aksin’ me, but I ain’t never told no one nothin’.”
Olivia felt too exhausted to go on thinking about it and stood up. “I think I’ll
turn in. Thank you for telling me, Mourning. And for not trying to, you know, make it sound not as bad as it was. I appreciate you telling me the truth.”
He nodded. “I remember the way I always been aksin’ folks ’bout my mamma
and daddy. Wanna know the truth, even if it be hard.”
She spread a sheet and comforter over her mattress, let down the canvas flap
Mourning had nailed to the door, undressed, and pulled a clean white nightdress
over her head for the first time since leaving home. She frowned, trying to think
of something to use for a pillow, but was too tired to worry about that. Before lying down she sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing her feet together to brush the
dirt off and thinking what a great bed it was. Solid wood clear to the floor – no
old man to reach out and grab her ankle. Of all things, she scolded herself.
Mourning tells you your mother hung herself and all you can think about isAvis’s old man under the bed?
But her mind refused to focus on this new image of her mother. She sank
back onto the bed. The mattress felt wonderful, as if she were floating on a cloud, and she put her arms over her head and stretched. She could hear
Mourning outside and guessed he must have swept out the wagon and made his
bed in it. For a moment she was conscious of the two of them, alone in the woods, in the dark, nothing but that canvas flap between them. But she was too
exhausted to give much thought to Mourning’s sinewy muscles.
An enormous white moon hung low in the sky, three bright stars at its side, all
in the haze of a pale halo. Wordsworth should be here to write a poem about this
sky, she thought. The night air grew chilly and damp and she huddled under her
quilted blue comforter as sleep crept over her, heavy, dark, and silent.
Chapter Seventeen
“Ain’t you never gonna wake up?” Mourning called through the canvas flap
the next morning, stomping his feet and clapping his hands. “I got work to do.”
Olivia sat up and put her feet over the side of the bed. Beads of dew glistened
on the comforter and cold clung to the air.
“I thought I gonna give you a wood splittin’ lesson first thing.”
“Hold your horses and stop hollering.” She slipped into her dress and shoes
and went outside, running her fingers through her hair and yawning. “It’s early.”
She looked up at the gray sky. “And cold.” She went back in for her woolen shawl.
