Mt. Moriah's Wake Read online

  Mt. Moriah’s

  Wake

  Copyright © 2021, Melissa Norton Carro

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2021

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-138-0

  E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-139-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021900675

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1569 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Excerpts from The Optimist’s Daughter reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for Eudora Welty, copyright ©1972, by Eudora Welty.

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Gabe—

  Best friend, safe haven, North Star

  Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

  —Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter

  1

  THE BIG SECRET

  FOR EVERY PERSON, THERE IS A PLACE.

  A magical place—magical if only because it is yours. With smells and tastes and sights so familiar your throat catches. A place that begs recall at the errant spring breeze or the first hint of snow. A backdrop of Christmases and proms, porch swings and avenues. A place like nowhere else. Somewhere called home.

  My place was Mt. Moriah.

  I swore I would never return. Four years earlier, mere days after college, I had buried my best friend Grace and, with her, my youth. Be a writer, someone once told me. And so, still reeling from grief, I had moved to Chicago. There my dreams of being a writer were buried in a cubicle on the twelfth floor of an ad agency. In the Windy City, careful practice erased the last vestige of Southern twang from my voice. Along Michigan Avenue, I learned to run in kitten heels, balancing a Starbucks latte without a spill. And in Chicago I found and lost the love of my life.

  I said I would never come back, but a taxi, plane, and rental car later, here I was. No longer the girl who left, just who was the woman that returned? Not only did I not know the answer; I didn’t know how to find out.

  And so I just stood still. With my heels dug into the wild patch of monkey grass bordering the guardrail, I leaned my knees against the cool steel, closed my eyes, and breathed in a hundred aromatic triggers.

  The heady scent of wisteria blankets on garden gates. Lemony jasmine vines and wild clematis creeping up fence posts. The Lunch Box’s unmistakable perfume of greasy ground chuck. And the cover of morning rain. These were the fragrant reminiscences of my childhood.

  My place.

  Behind me, the smell of exhaust. My rented Corolla was idling patiently, waiting to drive me the rest of the way into town. I twisted the gold band on my left hand, and my heart raced impatiently. Atop the hill, I knew I would unearth senses long forgotten, intentionally repressed—that I would be reentering a life that seemed a lifetime ago. Returning to feelings and fears I had tried to escape.

  With the humidity covering me like a lead blanket, my shoulders bent with the knowledge of what I was here to do. The long road lay ahead, but an unspoken grief—a haunting secret—made me want to retreat. I didn’t know quite how to feel on that day in August 2001, and part of me wondered: had I really left home or just moved away?

  Squinting up at the unforgiving Southern sky, I inhaled those scents, and just like that I was a young child again.

  Pardoning their pun, people said that my aunt Doro came alive at funerals. To her, they were the ultimate venue for Southern poise and finesse, sacraments to be savored. In her two decades in Mt. Moriah, there was hardly a funeral that Doro had missed. As she aged, she had the misfortune of witnessing more and more friends and acquaintances become one-way patrons of the Woodbury Street Funeral Parlor.

  Where funerals are concerned, the Woodbury Parlor left nothing to be desired: no table without a bursting box of plush tissues, no candle sconce unlit. Every window was adorned with stained glass apostles and complemented by a brocade swag: the preeminent sanctuary for grief.

  For Aunt Doro, grief wore a distinctive face. Doro’s resounding voice bounced off every indigo padded folding chair. Her laughter fluttered the leaves of the funeral sprays and, some say, rustled the hair of the dead. You see, death for Doro was the living’s last and finest affair.

  As a young child at my first funeral in Atlanta, I remember Doro leading me to the casket, my black patent Mary Janes trudging as if weighted by cement. I was sure that in that box awaited bone fragments, rotting flesh, and an oversized skull. What I saw instead, as I stole a terrified peek, was the simple, sleeping face of Betty Mahoney.

  “She does look lovely, doesn’t she?” Doro quipped as we stood together, me awkwardly clinching the hem of my poplin skirt. “I always thought that was the most glorious shade of pink lipstick she wore. Brought out her blue eyes so much.”

  Even at the tender age of six, I felt like pointing out that nothing could bring out poor Betty Mahoney’s eyes that day: They were closed forever. But there was something I could not yet understand. To the funeral goers, Betty was another weary face of death. But to Aunt Doro, she was something else.

  “Death is sad only to the living, doll,” she told me in her trademark stage whisper as we drifted back into the crowd of mourners. “But to the one who’s died, it’s the joy of suddenly understanding the Big Secret.”

  Aunt Doro referred often to the Big Secret and always in whispers. To be precise, there wasn’t one secret, but several. The Big Secret was in bread rising, and in a woodpecker’s work, and in the fact that her apricot day lilies came up year after year; it was anything that Doro didn’t understand—any fragment of the world that touched her and made her wonder.

  On that day, however, Doro wasn’t referring to birds or breads or blooms. She was speaking of God—the biggest mystery of all.

  I wanted to understand the Big Secret, believe in it. Aunt Doro had brought me because Betty Mahoney was our distant cousin. It was time I attended a funeral, Doro told my parents. But to me, Betty was nothing more than my first glimpse of a corpse, my first funeral—and my first opportunity to wrestle with the Big Secret.

  Two years later, on March 17, I would attend my second funeral—that of my mother and father. A car crash suddenly, without warning, forced me to take a hard look at the Big Secret.

  After a long night stifled in the hospital waiting room and two days holding an inconsolable little girl, Aunt Doro’s eyes were small dots of fire that mid-March morning at my parents’ funeral. Yet the voice still carried and the laughter, though dampened by tears, was there. For you see, my Aunt Doro was a Southern lady, and she knew the Big Secret.

  That day, at my second funeral, I decided the Big Secret was a lie.

  It has been eighteen years since my parents died. I’ve accompanied Doro to other funeral visitations, always positioning myself in the back, nearest the door and as far from the casket as possible. I detest the stale gardenia air and metallic mutter of ai
r conditioning, the hard softness of the chairs. The last funeral I attended was Grace’s.

  Today I tug open the cumbrous wooden doors and step into the crowd of murmuring guests at Woodbury Parlor. Heavy drapes frame the windows, light in entrapment. Baskets and pots and sprays of flowers stand throughout the room. In another place, they could be so beautiful.

  There is an auspicious silence at Woodbury Parlor today: a shadowy rumble of something out of place. Something lost, something absent.

  Of course, it is Aunt Doro: She is what’s missing.

  Tomorrow is her funeral.

  2

  THE IDES OF MARCH

  IT WAS THE IDES OF MARCH, one week into my eighth year. As crocuses and buttercups prematurely dotted the landscape in the Southern spring of 1983, I found myself orphaned by a 1970 blue Impala, driver unknown. Drunk beyond comprehension, he wandered from the scene of the crash, never to be heard from again. As the Impala was stolen, it seems the driver was hiding a host of sins, not the least of which were the murders of Joe and Anna Wilson.

  Joe plus Anna: my name. Beyond the name, I was a merger of the two gene pools—a collage of hair color (a blending of chestnut and black) and eye color (hazel). From nose to brow I was my father, but people say my smile was my mother’s. Rarely have chromosomes mixed and mingled so well as in my case: fortunate, as fate would have it, as I am the only remnant of the two distinct people who were my parents.

  I never thought my name was very glamorous, instead wanting a name that meant something. After my parents’ death, it did.

  The night of my parents’ accident, I was in Jenny Webber’s den, playing Monopoly when Jenny’s mother stepped into the room and asked Jenny to go to the kitchen. Then Frances Webber took eight steps across the worn dhurrie rug—each step seeming to take an hour. When she reached me, my hand poised over the Chance cards, Mrs. Webber embraced my cheeks with manicured fingers and simply knelt there, her eyes spilling tears onto the game board.

  I had just drawn a Get Out of Jail card. The jailbird on the card was laughing at me.

  “JoAnna, dear, something horrible has happened …”

  I have no idea what other words she said. My throat closed and a burning flush of panic numbed my body and mind from further comprehension. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Jenny, or climbing onto the front seat with Mrs. Webber, or arriving in the porte-cachère of the hospital. I remember neither the elevator ride nor the skin color of the nurse who took my right hand.

  But I do remember the sight of Aunt Doro sitting alone in a cinder box waiting room, her head resting on the chairback. My pulse throbbed inside my head; my hands and feet were rigid. I lacked the energy I needed to move, until Doro spoke.

  “The child,” she said softly, before lifting her head to see me standing in the doorway. Perhaps she heard my footsteps or sensed my presence. Perhaps the abominable grief she felt reached across the room and locked arms with mine. Whatever the explanation, Doro knew I was there before her eyes saw me, and she simply opened her arms, and I trotted across the floor to be held.

  The hug was punctuated by a short kiss on the ear. Doro arose, taking my hand and leading me out of the hospital—away from the nurses and the ambulances, the revolving doors and revolting smells. I wanted to ask where my parents were, where they had been taken. I wanted to know what was next; I wanted to hear all of the awful truth. But on that mild March evening, I could do nothing more than clutch Doro’s thick hand and ride the eight miles back to her apartment in stony silence.

  That night, almost two hours after Frances Webber’s tears had stained the Short Line railroad space, Doro unlocked the studio apartment she rented on the west side of Atlanta, and motioned for me to sit at the tiny kitchen Formica table. She poured a glass of milk, and set the cookie jar in front of me. Waiting for me to act.

  I wasn’t hungry, not in the least, but I took two cookies and drank all the milk and then asked my question: “What am I going to do?”

  Doro didn’t answer me right away. She pulled the Murphy bed down from the wall and began rummaging through the corner armoire. She handed me a flannel pajama top, XL, and I began to slip off my clothes. The top hung off my shoulders and arms, of course, but it was soft and warm and perfect. Then she handed me a toothbrush, her own, filled with Colgate, and led me to the brightly lit little bathroom. When I had brushed, Doro sat me on the commode and washed first my nose, then my cheeks, my mouth, my forehead. I had been doing these things for myself for years—but that night I let Doro care for me as if I were three years old again. Time was suspended, and I was ageless.

  At some point, Doro changed into her pajamas. With exacting movements, she rolled her hair onto the pink foam curlers—twelve of them—and removed the crimson lipstick that made her face so dramatic. Grabbing my hand once more, she led me to the bed.

  All this time, in the back of my mind was the idea that the world would right itself—that my parents would walk through the door and I would be able to breathe again. Yet somehow I knew the world would never change back.

  Up had become down.

  On the bed, as Doro reached to turn off the light, I grabbed her hand and asked again.

  “What am I going to do?”

  My eyes were burning now from fresh tears and the panic that had been repressed by cookies and milk and toiletries. Filled with the sudden, urgent sense that I was not home—that I would never be home again—that there was no home anymore.

  “I want my mom. I want to go home.”

  Aunt Doro kissed my hand, reached to turn off the light, and crawled under the covers, dragging me with her.

  “We are going to cry, sweet girl. We’re just going to lie here and cry. We will figure things out tomorrow.”

  And so we did. Beneath the lavender chenille bedspread, under the yellow cotton sheet, Doro held me against her heavy chest, and we wept. And wept. There was nothing else to say, nothing else to do.

  On that night Doro began to take care of me. In my grief, in my terror, she was steady and calm and gave me a sense of control. Before that time, I had seen Doro only at holidays and occasionally on weekends. She was a favorite, eccentric aunt, who blew into a room with a whoosh of ruby lipstick and bright perfume, her visits always brief. “She’s always got a hundred irons in the fire,” my dad would chuckle after her departure. I didn’t know what that meant, but I deduced it had something to do with the little scraps of paper spilling out of Doro’s purse.

  And so in mid-March 1983, I stepped out of one life and into another. As my parents’ only sibling, Doro was the heir of fifteen years of married assets, including me. Christened JoAnna Patrice Wilson, I ceased being the only daughter of Joseph and Anna Wilson on that day and became the only daughter of Dorothea Wilson.

  After that first night, Doro packed her bags and moved across town into my parents’ house. My mother’s coffee cup was on the counter, my dad’s scuffed loafers in the den. Walking down the hall, I think I expected my room to be different. Gone. But I opened the door to find my seven stuffed rabbits, one for each Easter. There, where I had left them, were the autograph hound, my oversized teddy bear, Clue, Battleship, Chatty Cathy, all my Barbies, my jeans, my baby-doll pajamas with spots of syrup on them, the new boom box that had been a birthday gift.

  I was back in my world but it felt like a stranger’s.

  In her mid-fifties, an old maid by some accounts, Doro adjusted amazingly to the radical changes brought by life with a child—by life in a house that was not her home. As an adult now, I wonder if Doro was hesitant, scared of the responsibility. Surely she felt the burden, yet it seemed there was never any doubt in her mind that we belonged together.

  Doro’s pragmatism kept us together throughout the funeral and the aftermath. She learned my routines, grew to understand my needs, and in the days of unmitigated grief, when neither of us knew what to do, we sobbed. We simply held each other and sobbed.

  Two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, I awoke to find my Ea
ster basket complete with the eighth bunny, a pale peach fellow with droopy eyes. I knew it was my last gift from my mother. But it was also the first from Doro.

  People are always curious about orphans. At age twenty-six, I have been asked the same question repackaged a hundred ways: Can you remember your parents? Do you look like them? Where were you when you found out?

  A whole host of questions hint at the coveted information: how does it feel? In a society hardened to random shootings, addictions, and disease, it is an affirmation of the good in the world that people cannot fathom the grief of a little girl who has lost her parents. People still want to believe in families, and the thought of being orphaned wrings America’s collective heart.

  So how does it feel? Truthfully I have difficulty recalling time before that spring of 1983. That is not to say that I do not remember my parents, but I do so mostly with my senses, through fleeting vignettes. Closing my eyes, I can smell my father’s aftershave or my mother’s Jean Nate perfume. I can hear the gentle swish-swish of Mom’s seersucker robe as she made her way out of my bedroom at night, the scent of Jergens left on my cheek.

  I see the flashing lights of our Christmas tree and the muted sea tones of our kitchen tablecloth. I taste the pancakes and bacon, Saturday morning fare. I remember games and giggles and arguments—the same of any family submerged in their daily routine. Unaware of the tragic disruption mounting the front porch.

  And although my parents’ voices were the first parts of my memory to dim, I recreate them to my own liking. My mother’s, I have made less Southern, my father’s less scratchy. Like hidden treasures, I take out those voices and put words in their mouths—imagining what they might say to their daughter of twelve or sixteen or twenty-six. In this way, they are not gone.

  How does it feel? The grief, the emptiness have been reduced and resized until they are a comfortable blister on all that I am and do. An orphan: it is what I am. But a little girl, happily setting a place for her Care Bears at the dinner table with Mom and Dad? That is who I am too.