That night I dreamed the bones. They rested, patient, in a sharp-edged metal box in a sterile lab, bathed in light as hard and yellow as an egg yolk. They knew that their time was coming. A pair of gloved hands turned and sorted them, rearranging them into the shape of the person they had once been. The hands re-created the intricate fan of the phalanges, placed the long shins, the pelvis, a cage of ribs containing nothing.
Last of all they placed the skull. I saw the telltale fissure, cracked and gaping, set high on its domed back. The hands began to pick up the bones, cracking them in two. They were long hands, I realized, with preternaturally long fingers. Jagged nails split open the glove tips, poking out, shiny with deep purple lacquer. The hands lifted the rib bones from the tray, out of my sight. I could still hear, though. The sound of Violence, chewing and snapping, guzzling at the marrow, woke me up.
My subconscious mind was clearly not as fervent in its faith that the bones were ancient history, a sad story too old to matter.
It was already after nine. I got up, creaky and sour-mouthed, and went to check on Birchie. Every step out of my private nest in the sewing room brought me farther into the part of the house that felt so very off.
I found her sitting at her formal dining-room table, eating her egg and watching her town wake up through the big bay window, as if this were any given Sunday. On the wall behind her, her grandfather beamed with lofty benevolence from his portrait to her right, while her father’s portrait on her left was much the same. Maybe a little sterner, a little prouder. I hurried around the table to drop a protective kiss onto her fluffy white bun. She smelled like her rose-scented powder and mint, as always. It was the smell of home, of love and goodness.
“Morning, Birchie,” I said. Lavender was right beside her, not looking at all kissable. She gave me the stink-eye from my own chair. “Hey, Lav. You sleep okay?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. She was dressed up awfully pretty, in lip gloss and her peacock-blue swing dress.
“Morning, sugar,” Birchie said, reaching up to pat my cheek.
Birchie’s face was powdered, and her hair was primped. She didn’t look like a person who was seriously ill. Much less like a person who’d kept human bones tucked away in the back of her attic. It heartened me to see her so put together. She looked more fully herself than I had seen her since I arrived and found her planting orange candies in the pansy bed. In fact, she looked company-ready, as if she were about to engage in one of her usual lady-type activities: a baby shower, a book club, a lecture about horticulture. . . .
I looked from her nice dress to Lavender’s with dawning horror.
“Are we going to church?”
“Is it Sunday,” Birchie said, not at all in the form of a question.
“Frank said we should lie low and not answer any questions.” I didn’t even want them asked. Birchie and her Lewy bodies might say anything.
Excepting for Lavender, we’d spent the week indoors or working in the back garden. We could pretend that we weren’t hiding—the kitchen had been so loaded up with curious-neighbor casseroles and salads that we hadn’t needed to so much as hit the Piggly Wiggly—but I knew we were avoiding both the pity pats of worried friends and the accusing stares of the less friendly. And the questions. Questions I was trying hard not to ask silently inside myself. I didn’t want them coming at me from other mouths this morning, ringing up toward God under His holy rafters.
“Oh, come on, Aunt Leia!” Lavender chimed in. Everyone looked at her, and she put on her pious face. “I don’t like missing church.”
“That’s a good baby,” Birchie said, giving her arm an approving pat. I rolled my eyes, under no illusions that Lavender had recognized an abiding need for corporate worship in herself. Church was where the boys were. Birchie went on, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. The Ten Commandments don’t change, no matter how poorly your own week is going.”
I had to clamp my lips together to keep from asking, What about that sixth one? Did you break that sixth one, Birchie? Half the people at church were probably asking the same question of the other half right now. My hands were getting sweaty.
Wattie came in with her own egg and a basket heaped full of biscuits that she set down on the table. Lavender was already reaching. Wattie sat and helped herself to her own homemade blackberry jam. She was in a church dress, too, field daisies and spring green leaves.
“Do you think we should go to church?” I appealed to Wattie.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Wattie said, which wasn’t the same as saying that she thought it was a good idea.
“We didn’t go to Redemption last week,” I said.
“That was my church,” Wattie said, setting me straight.
“And you didn’t think Birchie should go!” I argued.
Wattie fixed me with an exasperated look. “Child, I did not think I should go.”
I was instantly ashamed. I was thinking only of what the people at the white Baptist church would be saying about my grandmother. Wattie, the widow of Redemption’s longtime, most beloved pastor, was that church’s Birchie. And she had stolen a car and wrecked it while attempting to abscond with human bones found in the attic of the very house she lived in. Her oldest, dearest friend’s house. Of course her church community was reeling.
Birchville still lived mostly segregated, especially in the churches. There were parallel versions of Baptists and Methodists and a small, all-white Presby church balanced by an equally tiny AME congregation. The streets and neighborhoods were divided up, too. I lived in Birchie’s version of the town when I was visiting, just like Wattie’s children lived in hers. I knew this intellectually, but it was easy to forget. These worlds seldom overlapped. The greatest overlap was here, right inside this house, where the matriarchs of both Birchvilles lived together. I was growing another kind of overlap inside me. If Digby were already born, we would have to be back-and-forth members at two churches, as Birchie and Wattie were. Or we’d have to choose a church where one of us belonged less than the other.
“I’m sorry, Wattie, that was thoughtless,” I said. “But I think that going over there is downright crazy.”
Wattie shrugged. “Well, it’s not what I might do, but this is Birchie’s church. Birchie’s decision.”
“Morning, Leia,” Rachel said from behind me, startling me. In her pencil skirt and striped blouse, she looked as church-ready as the rest of them. I was the only one who’d somehow missed the rally call. Her hair was limp and oily, though, and her eyes had a Valium glaze. This wasn’t the full Rachel. This was the depression-drowsing version that had been on the sofa all week, now stuffed into kitten heels and propped upright, with just enough energy left to be kind of a bitch to me.
“You’re going, too?”
“It’s the least I can do,” she said, so tremble-voiced brave that I felt a sour trickle of vinegar cut into my blood, thinning it.
“We don’t want to walk in late,” Wattie said, sweeping her eyes pointedly from my hair, tufting up in cowlicks, down to my bare feet.
I made myself step away from Rachel, saying, “I’ll be ready.”