It was my senior year. There was a special convocation in the chapel that morning, but I can’t tell you who the speaker was or what they said. After, I went to the refectory but didn’t reveal to my roommates what had happened. If I didn’t utter that my father was dead, he wouldn’t be. And I wanted to call Pat, so much. He was only ninety minutes away in Athens, but nothing would change, no matter how I felt about him. It wouldn’t be fair to use him, just because I was grieving.
I drove to Chicasetta and then back to campus. I looped the journey five more times before driving to the old man’s house. It was dark, but the porch lights were on and he was sitting on the glider. He’d poured some liquor in a glass for me.
“He’s really dead, isn’t he, Uncle Root?”
“Yes, he is. I’m so sorry.”
“How could he leave me? How could Daddy do that?”
As I cried, scotch dribbled out of my mouth and I wiped it away. I moved down and laid my head on his shoulder.
“I know, I know. It’s all right, sugarfoot.”
We drank the whole bottle that night, the beginning of many times that I’d share a drink with the old man. I wished I hadn’t had to lose my father to earn my rite of passage.
Down in Chicasetta, it was a pretty time. A sharp, goose-bump wind was the only indication of winter the day God got in His laugh—the way my mother had let her hopes rise, that my father was going to beat his illness. And the Lord was slapping us blind when He made sure that my father stayed in a cooler for a week up in the City while my mother drove around unsafe neighborhoods, Aunt Diane riding shotgun, as they looked for Lydia.
My other sister had refused those drives. She wasn’t going out there with them. They both needed to forget about Lydia. Pray for her and let her go. But Coco didn’t have a mother’s love. Until a woman births her own, she can’t know what it feels like to have her breasts ache with milk, years later, after a dream, when there is no suckling child. Mama knew that marrow-filled affection, but finally, she let go of her hope that Lydia would return and shipped Daddy’s body to Chicasetta. She laid him to rest in our family cemetery, behind the charred plantation house. Throughout their years together, he’d told her he didn’t care what happened, so long as he was buried where she would be buried. He wanted to sleep beside his woman.
I suspected Nana Claire would have been upset about the location of my father’s grave. That she might have objected, saying she wanted her son buried up in the City, but the previous autumn, she’d had a stroke. The day after my father had died, Mama told Nana her son was gone. Nana cried, but the next morning, she couldn’t remember what had happened. So my mother reminded her, but again, my grandmother couldn’t hold on to grief, and my mother wouldn’t tell her a third time. She couldn’t take the sadness of that daily knowledge, that Nana’s tears were temporary.
*
After my father’s funeral, I stayed nights in Chicasetta, driving to campus only for classes. I didn’t think of graduation or what my future would bring. All I could think about was my father, hoping he wasn’t lonely in his casket.
I still hadn’t told anyone on campus about my loss, for fear of breaking down. My roommates kept asking, was something wrong? But I told them, leave me alone, and in the afternoons, I’d drive back to the old man’s house. He’d stand in the doorway of my room, and ask, could he get me anything? I didn’t seem to be eating. Maybe a slice of pie, and I told him I wasn’t hungry. I just wanted to sleep.
Then, Mrs. Stripling left a pink slip for me under my door: Come see me. Urgent.
When I knocked on her door, she demanded to know where I had been sleeping nights.
“Ailey, this is unacceptable. You can’t just be staying out like this—”
“It’s my daddy, Mrs. Stripling,” I said. “My daddy died.”
I began to shake, unable to continue, and she opened her arms to me. Every time I tried to speak, a new wave of tears, as she held me, whispering, oh, baby. Oh, I’m so sorry. She told me I needed to be with my people. Sleep in Chicasetta as long as I liked. She would make an exception, and we would keep that between us.
Four months later, when my mother came down for my graduation, I told her I’d decided to defer my first year of medical school at Mecca University, based upon family emergency. Classes for med school were supposed to start in June, but I thought deferral was a better option than flunking out. We were in my dorm room, packing up my belongings. I’d asked my roommates to clear out so I could have some time alone with my mother.