Free Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir by Frances Mayes

something wrong and won’t go anywhere except to drive Julie because she might pee-pee on herself. My mother picks me up sometimes, but usually she is busy. The Magnolia Garden Club has to replant the parks that went to weeds during the war. They have luncheons to plan the flowers. They play bridge constantly.
    I run across Blue and Gray Park (named for the uniforms of both sides in the real war), passing the Northern marker near the street and the Confederate one close to the creek. Once I saw a Negro man in the sour grass, spitting on the Confederate stone.
    From a block away, Willie Bell recognizes the triangle of my red skirt running under the pine trees and begins to wave. She’s ready to go. She has changed from her uniform into a skirt and a sweater set that used to be my mother’s. “We’re going by a viewing on the way. Now if you’re good—and you know what good means—we’ll get you a drink afterwards.”
    “What viewing?”
    “There’s nothing for you to pay no mind to. My auntie”—she pronounced it
ont-ee
—“passed away and she’s up at George Riggs’s. I want to pay respects.”
    “Do what?”
    “It just means good-bye. Her funeral’s tomorrow. She was my daddy’s baby sister. You knowed Auntie, she worked for theEarlys.” We turned down Sherman. Willie Bell walked fast toward colored town.
    “Was Sherman a Southern or Northern, Willie Bell?” The town of Fitzgerald was a refuge for both sides.
    “I don’t know. That was too long ago but we’re almost there. I want you real quiet. It’s disrespectful to the dead to make noise.” She opens a door under a flaking sign that says NEARER MY GOD TO THEE . An oily man in a suit with white lines on the pants looms in the dim light. The smell of roses feels so heavy it’s as if we’ve stepped inside a flower. Pink shades on hanging lamps make the room glow like inside a shell. I see racks and wreathes of flowers. “You stay right here till I get back, you hear?”
    I hunch down on the red rug between the feet of a coat-rack. I understand dead. People die all the time. I’d just seen a hump of clay at the cemetery with a pot of purple plastic tulips. Mother said how cheap that was of Mrs. Parker, him not dead two months. In the flower room, I see Willie Bell talking to two old women. All around them are roses, carnations, bows sprinkled with sequins, and big gold flowers like my sisters wear to football games. Waves of scent roll out of the room every time the front door opens. The old women come out. Leaning on one another, they almost step on my outstretched legs. The shriveled woman has a handkerchief pressed to her nose and her cheeks are streaked with tears. As they leave they sign in a book on a stand. God and Santa Claus write down everything you do in a book then look you up when you get up to heaven and when you send your Christmas list. I stand up and walkto the doorway. The man in the suit slowly walks over to me with his hands behind his back. He leans over. I don’t like his stuck-together mustache. It curls down around fat pink lips that look like a plucked dove. He smiles a big gold smile at me. I see a long box up on a table draped with a shiny pink skirt. “I expect you better wait over here. You just wait pretty.” The fat man goes to the door to greet someone and I slip around the corner and quietly into the flower room. Willie Bell’s kneeling, her face in her hands. Everything’s swagged like a puppet show. There’s another smell now, the same as the back of my mother’s closet where the old shoes get mildew on the insides and the summer dresses crush together with their stale perfume. I look in the box.
    Auntie Gray. But her face doesn’t look like polished wood anymore. It’s the color of rust and she has on her little gold glasses even though her eyes are closed. Is she really dead? In the tiny space between her lips she might, secretly, still be breathing. Her hands are folded over her stomach like Daddy