barked a welcome then retreated. Two men slid Eva’s sheet-covered body, strapped down as if she might get away, into the back of an open ambulance. Daddy got out of the car and greeted a man in a suit, who approached us holding some papers. I walked away from their voices, turning my back on the face of Eva’s house and its door propped open like a gaping mouth.
The plow horse, Becky, whinnied and pawed as soon as I opened the barn door. Eva’s three cows bellowed. Their bags hung heavily, enormous and painfully pink. Manure soured by too much urine lay over the normal sweet barn smell. I started first with Maybell, the cantankerous one, working my hands gently along her bag, checking for lumps. For once, she seemed grateful for the milking.
Only then, leaning against her warm, firm side, listening to the rhythm of milk hit the tin bucket, breathing the sweetness of it rising, did I begin to cry for the woman who had taught me to milk. I cried for her and for what the war had taken. All those boys dead, a new one in the newspaper every day. Now the war was taking my refuge, the farm. It had fallen into such neglect. That would not have happened just with the death of Uncle Lester. It took the war biting off one son at a time until there were none.
Since I’d been old enough to carry a bucket or wield a hoe, I had done my best to help Eva. But blinded by grief, she had let the place go. A dull darkness slipped over me as if, in her death, Eva’s sorrows had shifted to my shoulders.
After a few minutes, Daddy joined me. He snorted in disgust and stomped the manure off his shoes, then set to work on Beulah next to me. He offered nothing more about Eva’s death. He hated the farm. He had grown up poor on a farm and had vowed never to go back to one. I couldn’t see that we were any better off, the six of us living paycheck to paycheck crowded into the tiny mill-village house, but Daddy trusted the steady income of the textile mills. To him, farmers were a lot to be pitied. “Farmers are at the mercy of nature’s whims,” he liked to say. We finished the milking and started the feeding. While Daddy watered the hogs and chickens, I went into the house, drawn to it now that the coroner was gone. I pulled the screen door closed. Eva hated flies getting in the house. The stove was cold and held the same stillness that permeated the house. A saucer sat on the table, a half-eaten square of corn bread on it, a cup of coffee next to it, a spoon left in the cup. Such a puny breakfast—nothing like the ham, eggs, and biscuits she had always made for Uncle Lester, her boys, and me. I took the dishes to the sink and put them down soundlessly, not wanting to disturb the silence. I lay my hand on the pump handle, letting the cool of it into my palm. Through the window over the sink, I saw Daddy, bent at the hog pen, emptying a bucket of water into the trough. I imagined Aunt Eva behind me at the table, overwhelmed by a sudden urge to see her boys and, taking uncharacteristic leave of her breakfast and chores, going to look at their pictures in the parlor. Or had she known what was coming and decided to die there with them?
I followed her path down the dark-wood hall past the bedrooms. A stench surprised me before I got to the parlor. I sucked in my breath and I turned my head, but kept going. Her bedroom door stood open, the bed neatly made. She’d gotten that far. On the front porch, the rocking chairs sat motionless. I stood out at the edge of the yard where the land dropped to the railroad tracks. The air was calm and empty.
Then I felt the train, first in my feet—that faint, familiar vibration. The 5:40 out of Charlotte heading for the mill. I leapt and waved as the engine chugged rhythmically into sight, bursting into the air. I gave the engineer the bent-armed sign and pumped my elbow up and down. He saluted and obliged: two sharp blasts. The force reverberated in my breastbone, and I was a little girl for a moment,