Doing It at the Dixie Dew Read Online Free PDF Page B

his red eyes like two tiny coals in the darkened rooms. Verna’s old galleon of a house begged for paint, gallons and gallons and gallons of paint, and a team of ten men with ladders and buckets and brushes to apply it. Verna’s house was even worse than Mama Alice’s. If Scott Smith was smart he’d open up a paint store in this town and take food stamps in trade. Except people like Verna didn’t get food stamps. They had money, probably lots of money, yet lived like street people once removed.
    I’d walked to the cemetery a lot in the months I’d been back.
    It had been six months since Mama Alice died, been buried next to Granddaddy McKenzie, who died when I was a week old. Beside their graves was my mother’s, Alice McKenzie Henry’s. Mama had stepped off the curb in front of the courthouse straight into the path of a transfer truck. She was killed instantly. I was seven, in the second grade. Mama Alice had come for me, walked me home and been mother, grandmother and good friend until last year. Beside my mother’s grave was a flat, empty space, marked and set aside for Andrew Buie Henry, who went to Vietnam and never came back. Missing in action. All my childhood, those words haunted me. I wanted to believe they meant my father was still alive, that Andrew Henry was more than a framed photograph on my dresser and a few scattered memories of a tall man with dark hair and a deep laugh. The grave was empty. That meant it waited for something or someone, as an empty space lay marked and waiting for Lavinia Lovingood, who’d come home to die. I hoped that she, herself, had come home to live, make a life for herself in Littleboro.
    The Lovingood mausoleum was a solid cement little house on the hill in the back corner of Littleboro. It had been there all my life, and I never thought much about it. The name Lovingood never meant anything to me before either.
    The mausoleum was big, impressive, carved with pillars and scrolls, ornate columns. Tall cedars stood at each corner of a rusted iron fence. Several dogwood trees leaned near the two tombs, tombs impressive enough to encase Pharaohs.
    The Lovingood section was only equaled in Littleboro by another heavily fenced family plot in the opposite corner which held the Merritt mausoleum. Inside the Merritts’ fence, a woman in a faded yellow dress knelt over a grave.
    I stopped, stood very still. I felt as if I’d been caught somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. My own family plot with Mama and Mama Alice was far down the hill, beyond the fountain, little benches, plantings and trees.
    The woman at the Merritt mausoleum arranged a vase of brown plastic chrysanthemums on the ground at her feet and talked to herself. “I miss my sweetheart, my love, precious…” I started away, but my footsteps on the gravel startled the woman, who turned around. “Oh,” she said. Both hands flew immediately to her cheeks. “Who’s there? What do you want?”
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
    â€œI’m not used to anyone being in this cemetery,” the woman said. She seemed calmer now, walked toward the fence and peered at me. “You’re Alice McKenzie’s girl, aren’t you?” Her small eyes, black as onyx, were bright and piercing in her patchwork face of heavy rouge over extremely white skin and a thick stitching of wrinkles. “Miss Tempie?” I asked. I’d taken piano lessons from Tempie Merritt for a year when I was eight, came home crying with red fingers after each session. After the nightmares began, Mama Alice let me stop the lessons. The nightmares also stopped. I couldn’t tell my grandmother then how Miss Tempie whacked my hands with a ruler for every wrong note, how the huge Merritt house two blocks over was always cold and smelled of rubbing alcohol. To this day the smell of rubbing alcohol made me gag. Tempie was