spare him shoes, shoes being so rare to begin with. “Where he goin’,” they assured themselves desperately, “he ain’t gon’ need ’em.”
Still, the pale white bottoms of his feet seemed accusatory in their bareness, even after they had washed the worst of the blood from between his toes and from beneath his splintered toenails. That task, too, fell to Miss May Belle, who had the most knowledge, it seemed, of what was needed to make ready the dead. She surrounded him with flowers to keep him sweet smelling and cleaned his skin, gentle, as though he were her own son. The feet she saved for last, and Rue watched as the cleaning made her strong mama finally weep.
“He look like yo’ daddy,” she was saying under her sorrow.
Rue nodded, but he did not. Her daddy was stronger, older, darker. Alive.
* * *
—
How beautiful they’d made him when it was time for him to go on. Rue knew they’d cinched the suit in the back, so it pulled about his shoulders in the right way, and she knew the coffin was nothing much more than spare bits of wood left from the repair of other things: chicken coop stake, cracked church pew, things worked together and hastily painted one hue, as if that made for belonging.
They held the funeral at night after the work was done, and though they were tired they danced and though they had sorrow they sang. They made themselves a slow procession going by him in a manner strangely similar to when he’d first appeared to them. The dead man’s head was pillowed by flowers, by quilted bits of pretty fabric, the finest anybody could spare. In death he looked himself like a celebration, though surely his life had never been. But here it was, close up, freedom. He’d reached finally what he’d been running toward.
Rue lingered back with the other children, all of them giddy like it was Christmastime and overtired besides. They did their best imitation of their mourning daddies and mamas, bowed their heads when bowing was necessary, keened when others keened. So, this was grieving. Rue followed last in the line that visited the dead man’s motley coffin. She was not sure what she was meant to think or feel when she touched the splintery surface as others before her had done—what message she was supposed to be imparting through her fingers. Goodbye? Sleep well?
She looked out into the wood, focused on fixing her face in solemn dignity, for the sake of others if not for the sake of the dead man—and that’s when she first saw them, there amongst the dark of the trees, looming white faces watching from afar. Had the dead man’s white folks come for him after all? They weren’t advancing to pay their respects, only looking on, eerie-still in comparison to the commotion of all the black folks’ mourning. Rue took her hand from the box, moved on. Surely she was not the only one who had seen them. For certain everyone felt their presence. Their eyes, watching.
The movement of mourning had turned to a tight circle around the coffin. The four strongest men lifted the coffin up high onto their shoulders. Rue’s daddy made up the back left corner and she watched closely as he and the other men bent as one, like something they’d practiced, to heave the dead man forward. They made the lifting of it look easy, and for sure it was compared to the back-breaking labor to which those sun-blackened field hands were accustomed. It was an honor to lift this burden and so the burden was light.
They processed through the wood and someone far back kept time with just the clap of their two hands in lieu of a drum, which was surely a devilish instrument to hear white folks tell it, but those two hands were as good as one drum, thundering off the trees so that it was joined up a hundredfold in furious echo. Rue kept an eye to the white faces, tried to keep solemn sight of them. They kept an equal distance from the black mourners, but they did follow, all the way up through the trees and there they stayed as the casket borne by the black men