The Amulet

  “First,” Becca said, “they had to send out for five chil­dren’s coffins for them Coppage kids that got burnt up, and that was only Wednesday night. And now the under­taker says if another grownup dies in Pine Cone, and he’s full size, he’s gone have to put him direct in the ground, ’cause he is running out of caskets.”

  “And we were talking to James Shirley Thursday morn­ing. And now he’s dead.”

  “Well,” Jo said at this point, “looks like you ought to stay inside, Sarah. Anybody you talk to dies that very same day!” She cackled at her little joke, and Becca stared at the fat woman strangely. The series of deaths was hardly a joking matter, she thought.

  “Who’s gone take care of the funeral?” asked Sarah in an attempt to change the subject.

  “James’s sister is coming down from Montgomery to head up ever’thing. She used to work at the plant, ’fore you were there, ’fore you married Dean, in fact,” said Becca. “But she and her husband moved up to Montgom­ery about two years ago. He sells insurance but he’s still real nice, what I remember of him. Only saw him twice, and one of them times he had his back to me.”

  But now it was late afternoon, and still raining. “It’s real bad, nine people dead in three days,” sighed Sarah. “I just hate to think about that ice pick!”

  “Well,” said Jo, with a smile that was inappropriate to the subject, “a ice pick can’t be no worse than a gun blow­ing up in your face, tearing the teeth right out of your gums, ripping your eyelids off.”

  Sarah was shocked that Jo would say such things in the hearing of Dean (if Dean could hear); it could only make him feel much worse.

  Jo continued, but without the inappropriate smile, “Them people are all dead now, and who gives a damn? Nobody cares any more about them than they cared about Dean! I care about Dean, and I’m the only one! The only reason you’re here, Sarah, is that you’re married to him and you can’t get away. He’s your responsibility. He’s not mine. I own this house. I could throw him and you out on the sidewalk and not even wait till the rain let up, and nobody could say a word. But I’m not. I want Dean here with me. It was worse when Dean got his head blown off than when his daddy got bit by a infected ’coon down where we had the blackberry bushes. And he died! Dean didn’t die, but I don’t know he’s ever gone get out of that bed ’less we pull him out of it!”

  Jo could easily see Sarah’s discomfort, but she went on with hardly a pause. “He likes to hear it, likes to hear what happened to these people, he wants to know he’s not the only one in Pine Cone that suffered. Serves ’em all right. It’s their fault that Dean, my boy, is right there in that bed and not off enjoying himself in Southeast Asia. He wanted to get out of this town, get out of the trap he had got hisself into.” Here Jo glanced up at Sarah and it was obvious that she considered that Sarah was part of the millstone around the neck of her son. “I’m not sorry, not sorry for a bit of it.”

  Sarah faltered. “Are you . . . sure that’s what he’s thinking? Did he tell you that? He didn’t say nothing, did he, Jo?” The worst part of all this was the uncertainty.

  “He don’t need to talk to me, Sarah. I know what he’s thinking. He’s hearing everything, and he don’t need to say nothing, not so long as I’m here with him. It’s worked out real good that you’re at the plant ever’day, because you wouldn’t be no company for him anyway. You don’t know what he wants, you don’t know what he’s thinking—and I do. That’s why I let you change the sheets and stuff, ’cause you’re his wife, and you ought to be doing something for him. I sit here all the day long, when I suppose I could be out doing other things, sit here all day long just keeping Dean company. I don’t mind, ’cause Dean is my boy. Even though you think it’s hard to look him in the face, I don’t.”

  Sarah trembled. Jo was being vicious, but for the most part it was an accurate representation of their situation.

  Chapter 27

  The rain finally let up during supper that Saturday night, and the sky cleared almost immediately. The moon was on the wane.

  Jo Howell was in fine spirits and Sarah was at a loss to account for them. Her first thought was that it had some­thing to do with the nine deaths that week—but that was uncharitable—and Sarah then supposed it was just as likely that Jo was pleased with having got so much the better of her during the argument that afternoon.

  But now, at any rate, Jo was a little more agreeably disposed toward her daughter-in-law. “Sarah,” she said, “why don’t we all do something tonight?”

  Sarah was very surprised. Was ‘we all’ meant to include Dean? Or who else? Or what could they possibly do to­gether? “Well,” said Sarah cautiously, “like what? What do you want to do?”

  “Why don’t you go ask Becca if she’ll take us out to the drive-in tonight?”

  “Well,” said Sarah, “all right. But who’s gone take care of Dean when we’re gone?”

  “What do you mean!” cried Jo, “you don’t think we’d leave Dean here, do you, when we went out to the picture show! Dean always loved the picture shows, and they was times he went to the drive-in three times a week even when they was showing the same things.”

  “Will he be all right, just sitting up for two, three hours like that in the car?” asked Sarah.

  “I’ll sit in back with Dean,” said Jo. “Why don’t you just go ask Becca if she’ll take us out there.”

  Becca was agreeable to this proposition, with one pro­viso: “I won’t go look at no monsters on the screen. I cain’t do that. There we are out in the middle of the country, ever’thing black all around us, out in the middle of nowhere, and I’m s’posed to look at monsters jumping out of the bushes . . .”

  Sarah reassured her. They were going to see John Goldfarb Please Come Home and Harlow, on a double bill.

  “Well,” said Becca, “that’s all right. Maybe it’ll do Dean a little good, get him out of that house, get him out of that bed.”

  “You don’t mind that Jo’s going?” said Sarah doubt­fully.

  “Honey,” said Becca, and hugged Sarah, “if I could, I’d give you the world, and then fence it in. Taking Jo to the drive-in is not as bad as some things I could name.”

  “Like what?” laughed Sarah.

  “Well,” said Becca, thoughtfully, “it’s probably not gone be as bad as, say, spending the rest of my life with Mike.” Mike was Becca’s ex-husband, who used to beat her.

  Becca and Sarah asked Margaret to go along with them, but the young girl cried, “Ohhh, Mama! You are going to the drive-in tonight! Tonight is Saturday night! Only high school people go on Saturday night! I’m going! I am going with Mary-Louise. We have got a double date—I already told you about it—with the Beasley twins. And I don’t want you to park anywhere near us, you hear me!”

  Becca laughed, and said that she would not, that she wasn’t going to spy on her.

  “Well,” said Margaret, a little ashamed that she had put her mother off so, “we can meet at a certain time in the refreshment stand if you want to.”

  Becca laughed again, and said that the reason that they were going, really, was to take Jo and Dean.

  Margaret looked darkly at Sarah. “Dean’s going to the pictures?”

  Sarah nodded. “Jo says he’ll enjoy it.” Margaret said nothing. “And even if he don’t, maybe we will.”

  It was a strange evening. Becca parked at the very edge of the lot, so that people wouldn’t stare in at Dean when they passed by on their way to the refreshment stand. Jo had propped him up in a corner of the backseat, with blankets and pillows arranged all around him, and provided him a running commentary on the two films, crying out, at appropriate moments things like: “Did you see how she did that?” or “I wouldn’t put up with some­thing like that! Would you, Dean?” or “Somebody’s like to get hurt they keep on that way!”

  Sarah suggested that since the night was very warm and humid, she and Becca might sit outside. Becca took up this notion gladly, and retrieved a beach blanket from th
e trunk of the automobile, and spread it on the ground so they could lean against the car. Here they sat cross-legged, and watched the previews, the cartoons, and the two films. But sometimes they talked quietly together, about Jo and Dean, about their work at the factory, and about the sum­mer lightning that broke every ten seconds over the west­ern horizon.

  The next morning at breakfast, Sarah asked Jo, “Did Dean like the movies?”

  Jo nodded. “He liked it a lot. He liked getting out and doing things, just like he used to. He ought to do more things like that.”

  Sarah said nothing. But she knew that Dean had been stuck like a straw figure in the corner of the backseat, that he had not moved at all, had not even shifted his posture for comfort, had not even tilted and slipped from his own weight. Jo had a peculiar notion of what it was to “get out and do things.”

  Chapter 28

  All the Coppage family were buried in the cemetery in Brundidge, where Larry Coppage’s wealthy kin had had a large lot and an option on as many more square feet of property adjacent. It was an option that was now exer­cised though the family had never anticipated that the grave sites would fill so quickly. Though Larry was well liked throughout Pine Cone, and was thought to be the best of all his large, moneyed family, most of the town did not want to mingle and mourn with the owners of the Pine Cone Munitions Factory. They used the recent rain as an excuse for not attending.

  The funeral service for Thelma and James Shirley was held on Sunday, in the afternoon, at the Baptist church; it was respectably attended. Dorothy and Malcolm Sims, with little Mary between them, had one pew to themselves; the one directly behind contained more distant relatives of the husband and wife, whom Thelma and James them­selves had never seen except at someone else’s funeral; another was filled with county policemen and their wives. There were neighbors and friends, those who knew James Shirley only by sight, and those who were only idly curi­ous to attend the funerals of two who had died so vio­lently. These last were disappointed that Dorothy Sims had insisted on closed coffins.

  James Shirley was known and respected in the black area of Pine Cone, and therefore the choir loft in the back of the church, reached by narrow winding stairs from the vestibule, was packed with men and women paying their respects to the dead. Gussie was recognized as the chief mourner among them, and given the place with the best view of the pulpit and the two coffins, which stood, end to end, on trestles before it.

  Sarah Howell, Becca Blair, and her daughter Margaret sat on a pew by themselves toward the back of the church. The eulogy was short and avoided all reference to the manner of the deaths of the couple; the minister concentrated on the good that James Shirley had done within the community by his valiant efforts on the Pine Cone police force (here the wives of the other officers began to weep), and praised Thelma for her work with the poor and undernourished in the county.

  There were but six pallbearers altogether, so that two trips had to be made to and from the hearse before any of the mourners departed. The Simses and little Mary went out first, and climbed into a large black car directly be­hind that which contained the coffins. Slowly the other mourners filed out of the church, and got into their auto­mobiles, sitting quietly and lighting cigarettes, in prepara­tion for the slow drive to the cemetery, and the brief graveside service there.

  When all the white congregation had exited, the black people climbed down from the choir loft. As was correct Gussie was the first to emerge from the door. As soon as she saw the black woman, little Mary Shirley leaned out the car window and shouted, “You coming to the grave­yard, Gussie? Get in! Go with us!”

  Gussie approached the car quickly, and said, “Shhhhh, child. I’m gone walk there.”

  “Well,” said Mary, disappointed, then excitedly, “We’re gone beat you there, Gussie!”

  Dorothy pulled the child back into the automobile, and all up and down the street at the signal from the under­taker, the car lights went on and the funeral procession took off, in almost complete silence. Irritatingly, a dog set up a hoarse barking, but someone threw a stone at him, and he scampered off. The last three vehicles in the procession were police cars, with their blue lamps revolv­ing at lowest speed.

  A much larger crowd was present at the cemetery than had been at the church. You didn’t have to dress to at­tend the graveside ceremony in Pine Cone, but if what you chose to wear was not entirely respectful to the mem­ory of the dead, then you were careful to stand on the fringes of the circle surrounding the holes in the earth and you ducked behind a tree if any of the bereaved family came by. Children could also be brought here, without fear of disturbing the proceedings.

  Sarah and Becca stood a little apart, behind a large cedar tree that had rooted itself in an old grave, eventu­ally knocking down the tombstone with its increasing girth. They talked quietly over the distant drone of the minister’s voice by the graveside.

  “Jo don’t get out much,” said Becca quietly. “She ought to have come to the service. Do her good.”

  “She said she wanted to come, but that someone had to be there with Dean. But if she had really wanted to go, Becca, you know she would have had me stay there with him while she went off.”

  “I guess,” agreed Becca. “Jo Howell wouldn’t have nothing to do with the police or their families. Don’t know why that was.”

  “It’s impossible to tell anything about Jo Howell,” said Sarah. “I live with her, and I’ve lived with her for some time, and I still don’t know how she’s gone react to things, what’s gone make her mad at me, for instance. Can’t never tell when she’s gone be displeased with something you do.”

  “Odds on though,” said Becca, “she’s not gone like it, no matter what it is.”

  Sarah’s short laugh had little humor in it, but Becca took exception anyway.

  “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” said Becca sternly, “ ’cause in your place, I wouldn’t crack a smile the live­long day. In your place, I wouldn’t put up with it at all. You take care of that old biddie, and you take care of Dean, and you practically support the whole house as it is—”

  “Things ought to be easier when Dean’s benefits come through.”

  “Well,” said Becca, “you just make sure you get those checks. You go down to the bank and you tell them that you are Dean’s wife and that you and nobody else has the right to cash or deposit them checks. You tell them not to give a penny to Jo Howell or to Dean’s dead bird dog, whichever of ’em comes in with the thing trying to cash it. Don’t let Jo Howell get hold of them checks, you hear me?”

  Sarah nodded obediently.

  “ ’Cause,” said Becca, “I don’t know what she’d do with that money—heaven knows she don’t spend it on clothes and the beauty parlor—but I know you’d never see a penny of it and she’d expect you to support her same as usual.”

  Sarah said nothing. She couldn’t in all conscience dis­agree with Becca because Sarah knew that her friend was right, but she felt that she owed some loyalty and respect to Jo. And besides, Becca always said enough for two.

  “Now,” said Becca, “Jo Howell lived next door to me for two and a half years ’fore you came to live there, and I tell you something—it wasn’t what I’d call paradise. We didn’t exactly get along—ever. But she was always calling me up, asking me to do this and that and I’d do it—be­cause she was fat, and my daddy was fat and I know how hard it is for fat people to get around. But soon I found out that Jo wasn’t just fat. It wasn’t the fat! She was just lazy. She could have taken her stuff to the washateria herself. She could have got Dean—”

  Sarah drew Becca’s attention to the graveside.

  The funeral was over. Mary had stood between her aunt and uncle all the while the preacher had read scrip­ture, craning her neck to catch sight of Gussie, standing a little apart. The black woman and the white girl ex­changed several winks, though Gussie did this only to keep the child quiet. Mary seemed not to know what had happened to her or that it wa
s her mother and father that filled the two boxes supported on canvas straps across the open graves. The minister tossed handfuls of earth onto the two coffins, then turned away; the crowd turned with him and began the slow procession back to the parked cars on the edge of the cemetery.

  “You know James’s sister?” Becca whispered to Sarah.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “She was down three from me on the ’ssembly line, on your side, like I told you. I didn’t like her then and I don’t like her now. I wouldn’t like to be little Mary Shirley, having to go off with a woman like that.”

  “They’re going to take care of her then?” Sarah asked.

  “She’s going back with ’em this afternoon, to Mont­gomery. I spoke to Gussie this morning and she was there at the house, packing the clothes and trying to keep Mary out of the room where it happened.”

  Sarah shuddered, and turned her attention to the be­reaved family, which was passing near them just then: Malcolm and Dorothy Sims, and a little behind them Mary walking along beside Gussie. The child was quiet, at Gussie’s behest.

  Just as Dorothy Sims passed, Sarah’s attention was drawn to the woman’s dress, a simple black shift, orna­mented only by the necklace which Jo Howell had given to Larry Coppage three days before. Sarah was astounded. How on earth had Dorothy Sims got hold of it? The thing had been destroyed in the burning house. Was it possible that somehow Larry Coppage had got the thing to Dorothy Sims? It was not: Larry was dead two hours after Jo had given it to him and Dorothy Sims had been in Montgomery at the time, and anyway why would he have given it away as soon as he had received it? Sarah thought Larry hardly knew Dorothy Sims. But how else could she have got hold of it? Maybe there were two of them, maybe Dorothy Sims had bought it from the same place that Jo had. Maybe she had had it for years. By the time that these thoughts had passed through Sarah’s mind, Dorothy Sims was being helped into the black car by her husband, and Mary Shirley was getting in behind her.