The Cotton Queen Read Online Free PDF

front row to be observed by all. Extended passages about fleeting life and eternal glory. Long mournful hymns by trembling sopranos. And, at the end, the procession of mourners to view the open casket. Thankfully the family went last.
    The corpse lay stiff and silent, his dress blues, stark against the white satin. There was not so much as a scratch on his cheek to mar his tan complexion. His face was in uncharacteristic repose, the laugh lines wiped away. He looked like my Tom, but not so much. I felt a strong sense of relief that he only resembled the man that I loved.
    It’s just a shell, I thought to myself. It’s the place where Tom lived, but it’s not Tom.
    That seemed good. It seemed like something positive that I could take away from the moment. Something that I could live with over the long run.
    Then my gaze drifted down to his hands. Hands do not have expression. They’re not susceptible to decoration. They are simply what they are, completely honest and without deception. Laying on his chest, the left atop the right, these were Tom’s hands. Those long fingers, callused and scarred, were too familiar to be denied away. I couldn’t maintain my distance from what was happening. This was my husband, the man that I loved, the father of my child. And he was lying in this box. In five more minutes they were going to close it up and I was never going to see him again.
    A great abyss of loss and longing and regret opened up before me, threatening the very ground I stood on. It would have been so easy, comforting, to simply cast myself in that pit. I knew I could not. Deliberately I stepped away from the casket, determined to keep myself composed and in control.
    I was apparently the only person who felt that way.
    The Hoffman family, most particularly the women, did not hold back at all. Mama threw herself across her son’s body wailing with such plaintive grief, I was forced to look away. I focused my attention on a stained-glass window. It was beautiful, all reds and blues and greens. The Good Shepherd descended a rocky landscape with the lost lamb slung around his shoulders.
    Tom’s sisters began to cry loudly along with their mother. My eyes narrowed as I carefully memorized every detail of the shepherd in stained glass. Noting how each tiny leaded piece worked together to create the total picture. I decided that it would be the image to remember. The window would be the memory of that day that I would keep closely. My Tom, not lifeless in a box, but carried away on the shoulders of a great protector.
    Whether it was two minutes or twenty minutes that passed, I truly will never know. But eventually the anguish of family mourning began to quiet. I glanced back to see each of the Hoffman women being held and comforted by husbands or brothers or sisters. None of them faced the closing of the box alone.
    Only me.
    “We’re ready,” I told the funeral director.
    The howling commenced again. Once more I turned my attention to the Good Shepherd window, until it was time to head to the black limousines parked outside.
    Tom’s brothers and brothers-in-law were all pallbearers. They rode together in a car that followed the hearse. I rode with Tom’s parents and his two sisters. They carried on a running conversation all the way to the cemetery.
    The new Memorial Gardens had only a few graves near the entrance. The area Tom was taken to was completely empty.
    “I went ahead and bought a whole section out here,” Papa Hoffman told me as we walked from the car. “Mama and I can be buried near Tom. And there’ll be room here beside him for you, too, of course.”
    “Ah...thank you,” I answered, a little uncertainly.
    “Of course, you might not want to be,” he admitted. “As young and pretty as you are, you’ll probably marry someone else.”
    I couldn’t think of any kind of response to that, so I simply ignored it.
    We gathered under a green awning, the flag-draped casket in front of us. Flowers in every