They’re Catholics, I guess, the O’Days. A priest come by and said a rosary with everyone. I could hear them all murmuring their Hail Marys across the hall. I recognized the priest. It was that Father Fontanella who was over at the collapsed mill the night of the flood, helping the firemen dig for survivors. Four people got buried alive in the wreckage, and the radio said a fifth is hanging on by a thread. Paper said that if the mill had given way during the day, twenty people or more could have lost their lives, but the night crew’s smaller. Thank the Lord for that. . . . The O’Days’ side had a line of people paying their respects that went all the way down the hall and out the door. Hundreds of mourners, it looked like, when I got up to use the restroom. Compared to that, the number that came to Claude’s wake was puny, but it’s like I told Belinda Jean: the circumstances were so different. Sunny O’Day died unexpectedly, still in her twenties, and the flood took one of her children, too. Claude died from his emphysema, and truth be told, nobody ever said he had a sunny disposition. But he had his good points, too. He wasn’t a drinking man or a womanizer; I thank my lucky stars for that. Our bedroom’s so quiet now. Too quiet. It’s odd; I never in a thousand years would have figured I’d miss the sound of his wheezing in the next bed over. Two packs a day: that was what claimed him is what the doctor told me. Sunny drowned and Claude smoked himself to death.
It said in the paper that Sunny O’Day’s husband is a U.S. Navy veteran and a barber. And it wasn’t till the middle of yesterday that I put two and two together and realized he was the same barber who cuts hair at the place Claude goes to. Used to go to, I mean. It’s on Franklin Avenue: the Shamrock Barbershop on one side of the building and Cirillo’s Grinders on the other. It’s the uncle who owns the barbershop, but Claude was always talking about how that nephew who had the second chair was such a cutup. How he kept all the customers entertained while they were waiting for their haircuts. He’d be sweeping hair off the floor, Claude said, and then, in the middle of it, turn up the radio and start dancing with the broom. Claude said the uncle and him each have a sign above their mirror. The uncle’s says HEAD BARBER and the nephew’s says HEAD SCREWBALL. They keep a mynah bird in the shop, Claude told me, and the nephew trained it so that, after he says “Shave and a haircut,” the bird will say “Two bits.” On the Saturdays that Claude went down there to the Shamrock, he’d come back with his hair all neat and trimmed and smelling good, and he’d have bought himself a meatball grinder for his lunch. He’d sit there at our kitchen table, eating his grinder and telling me what crazy thing the nephew did or said that day. Claude wasn’t usually partial to those show-offy types that call attention to themselves, but he sure got a kick out of that guy.
Charles “Chick” O’Day. Chick and Sunny. He’s so young to be a widower, that poor man. Twenty-nine, the newspaper said. I got a glimpse of him last night at the funeral home. The poor fellow looked like he’d gotten the wind knocked out of him, which I guess he has. He’d best find some nice girl to marry so those kids can have a mother. And maybe he can send the nephew back to where he come from. He looked like trouble to me with that Elvis Presley haircomb and the Elvis Presley sneer to go with it. Back when I worked in the high school cafeteria, I could always pick out the troublemakers when they come through the line—the ones who’d try and swipe an extra pudding or apple goodie. Hide it under their napkin or some such. I’m not saying I caught all of them, but I caught a fair amount. I had an eye for spotting the troublemakers. . . .
The other boy—the son—looked like a nice young man, though: dark suit, shirt and tie, his hair in a crew cut like his father. But the child I keep picturing in my mind today is the little girl, the way I seen her at the wake last night. While they were saying the rosary over there, she come wandering across the hall to our room, looking so lost and sad, her eyes moving back and forth between Claude’s open casket and us. But then Belinda Jean smiled at her and gave her a wave and she gave Belinda a wave right back. “I got peppermint candies in my pocketbook,” I said. “Would you like one?” She nodded and started walking toward us. But then that cousin come in and said, kind of cross like, “What are you doing over here? Get back where you belong.”
I told him I was just about to give her a peppermint. Could she have one? “Maybe later,” he said. He come over to me and held out his hand. I dropped three peppermints onto it, one for her, one for her brother in the other room, and one for him.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” I asked the little girl.
He answered for her. “Her name’s Annie.”
“Well, that’s a pretty name. And what’s yours?”
“Kent,” he said. He closed his hand tight around the candy and pointed his chin over at Claude. “Who’s in the box?”
“My late husband,” I said. I touched Belinda Jean’s arm. “Her father.”
“Oh,” was all he said. He took the little one’s hand in his.
“My daughter and I are very sorry for your losses, Kent,” I told him. I turned to the little one and smiled. “And you, too, Annie.” I reached out to touch my hand to her cheek, to comfort her a little, but he yanked her away from me. Then he walked her out of the room, with her looking back over her shoulder at us. I don’t know. I could be wrong. I hope I am. But to me, that Kent seems like trouble.
After they left, Belinda told me she remembered the little girl from when her mother used to bring her into the library in a stroller. It’s a crying shame Belinda probably won’t ever get married and have children of her own now that she’s let herself go to lard and become so housebound. She always loved children and was good with them. When she used to work at the library, doing the story hour for the young ones was her favorite thing to do. For a while there after she graduated high school, I used to urge her to go on to normal school and become a teacher, but that suggestion fell on deaf ears. I believed she could do it, but she didn’t. And her father was always suspicious of education, so that might have been part of it, too, I guess. . . .
That little girl, Annie, was wearing a blue gingham dress with a lace collar and a petticoat underneath, and patent leather Mary Jane shoes and white anklets. They had her dressed up the way I used to dress Belinda Jean for church when she was little. If someone doesn’t step in and mother that child, it’ll be a crying shame. . . . Belinda Jean took it hard when her mother died, and poor Claude was at a loss as far as how to raise a motherless child. Well, I didn’t know anything about being a parent either, especially to an eleven-year-old girl who was pulling out her eyebrow hair and picking her nose so hard and so much that she’d give herself nosebleeds. First time I met her, all I could think about was one of those sad songs my daddy used to sing whenever he took out his guitar: Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone. That was back when we lived in Alabama. I don’t recall Daddy ever playing his guitar after our farm failed and we moved up here to Connecticut so he could work in the mills, instead, like his brother Emil had already done. Emil was my cousin Wanda’s father. Wanda and I become friends as well as cousins after we both became northerners. I stood up for her when she married Clifford, and she stood up for me when I married Claude. . . . The first thing I did after I told Claude yes, I would marry him, was go down to Cranston’s and buy two books on how to care for a child. One book was saying things like, “Never, ever kiss your child and never hold it on your lap.” As if children were “its” instead of girls and boys. The other book, by that Dr. Spock fellow, said, right off the bat on page one, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” It was a comfort to read that. I threw out the first book and read the Dr. Spock one so much that the pages come loose and had to be held together with a rubber band. But anyway, I stopped those scabby eyebrows and bloody noses of Belinda Jean’s in short order once I come into the picture. I only had to whip her twice with the strap before she quit that foolishness.
Reverend Frickee put on a nice service for Claude today. Earle Potter played the organ and Martha McCoy
sang some of the songs I’d asked for, “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Rock of Ages,” “How Great Thou Art.” I made a list of what I wanted. The only one they didn’t do was “On the Wings of a Dove,” that Ferlin Husky song I always like when it comes on the radio. On the wings of a snow white dove, He sends His pure, sweet love. . . . Pastor Frickee said that song was too modern and for funerals they like to keep things traditional, which I understood, of course. The pastor spoke some nice words about Claude: how he was a good man who had his faults like all of us but was a hard worker and a good provider. Both the newspaper obituary and Pastor Frickee mentioned how Claude won our house the Three Rivers Christmas decorating contest back in 1956 for all that stuff he put out in our yard. I have the electric bill to prove it. I’m a saver, or as Claude used to call me, a “pack rat,” which I never much appreciated because