The afterglow fell clear from the sky on an open grave with dark earth piled high on each side of it. It was outlined by flaming smoking torches held in the hands of the mourners, who marched slowly around it, singing a funeral dirge. One man, dressed in a long white robe, stood at the head of the grave, his deep voice chanting the solemn burial service. Breeze’s mother belonged to the Bury League, and all the members carried a white lily. When the leader gave the sign they held the flowers, arm high, and yelled, “Christ is Risen!” but the leader was a strange man, not his stepfather.
A hymn, or spiritual, was raised, and the whole crowd joined in with great questioning waves of sound, sometimes harmony, sometimes dissonance. Breeze’s heart ached. He wanted to cry out too, to the great Creator of Life. He felt bewildered when Sis gave a piercing shrill wail, that rose high and sharp above the somber death chant. Her cry had scarcely died away before an answer came echoing from the opposite side of the grave. Big Sue looked at Uncle Bill with a mischievous grin that shocked Breeze. How could anybody laugh here? The very woods reechoed the unearthly death-cries!
The mournful singing gradually changed into a confused din, a whirlwind of grief. Men and women shrieked and shouted. They shook and shimmied their shoulders, and jerked their arms and gyrated about in a frenzy of grief and excitement. Some of the women went wild. They beat their breasts and cried above the roaring hubbub. But all the time Sis’ shrill, piercing, falsetto wailing kept steadily calling across the grave. Her screams rose high and then melted into the life of the air.
The tall brown trunks of pine trees around them loomed up until their plumy tops touched the sky. They waved gently, mysteriously, above the confused group of people. Red sweaters and blue overalls, green and purple and yellow dresses, wide white aprons and turban-bound heads, black hands and faces, were all tinged with a rosy glow dropped over them by the sky as night began creeping out of the forest.
The strong damp odor of the woods freshened, and mosquitoes stung Breeze’s face and hands and ankles. He was unhappy. Wretched. When Big Sue said, “De mosquitoes is too bad. Dey got me in a fever! Le’s go,” he felt a relief to get away from it all.
Not even Sis paid them any attention as they turned around, facing homeward. She was too absorbed in grief, in the terrible thought of Death, that strange mystery which had just stricken Breeze’s mother.
Breeze hurried along the road, fearing snakes less than the sound of that inferno of mourning which followed behind him.
Sandy Island was quiet; the cabin on the hill empty; the dusk on the river so deep that the boat was scarcely outlined against the water; but Breeze could see the old dead pine down on the white sand. It’s head had fallen. Its whole length rested on the ground.
His brain whirled in his skull. Cold tremors ran through his body. His mother had buried all her money at the foot of that tree. So had old man Breeze. But nothing less than strong iron chains could have dragged the boy one step nearer it.
Uncle Bill helped Big Sue to her seat in the boat’s stern, where she sat solemn and stiff and ruffled like a sitting hen.