Free Love and Lament by John M. Thompson

of wind in the trees. It blew a loose lock of hair across O’Nora’s rosy cheek.
    Mary Bet began crying. But she angrily wiped the tears off her face and stood up and started calling “Help!” After a while she began walking. She finally came to a road, and after a few minutes an old Negro cart driver came along and went with her back across the fields, his cart bumping slowly lest a wheel break in a burrow. “No use in hurryin’ just to be late,” he said.
    It took a lifetime.
    All the way home, the man tried to comfort her, telling her of his wife’s many sorrows and saying, “It’s just a cryin’ shame, missy, a sweet girl like that.” Jackson plodded along with the driver’s mule, and all Mary Bet could do was stare at the driver’s bare toes sticking out through his shoes and wonder why one of his big toes had a cracked yellow toenail that angled off his toe while the others looked fine. She wondered if it hurt, and she wondered why Negroes had brown nails. She wished she could have cracked yellow toenails if it would make O’Nora well. And when she thought of O’Nora and glanced back into the cart and saw her curled up between burlap sacks, she prayed that she would wake up by the time they got home.
    When they arrived, Mary Bet and the black man were praying aloud together, and she couldn’t remember who had started it. Yet when she saw her house she realized that her own grief was not what frightened her the most nor held her in the most suspense. She thought she could not bear to tell her father.
    Siler was the first person she found. She pulled his hand because she did not want to make the word for “dead.” She would show him and let him decide what to do.
    Mary Bet held Siler’s hand through the whole funeral, and it felt to her as though she could never let go. Cicero got the stonecutter to carve a bas-relief hand in the stone, with a finger pointing the way to heaven. The stonecutter had a number of new sayings. None of them seemed just right for O’Nora, but Cicero picked out, “None knew thee but to love thee,” engraved in cursive. He decided it was after all perfect. After the service he had Essie strip O’Nora’s bed and bring him the sheets. “These is good sheets,” she said, shaking her head at the waste, and at her employer’s impulsive, erratic grief.
    “Let the day perish that I was born,” Cicero said, taking the bundled bedding. “Let the stars of the twilight be dark.” He tookthe sheets out into the backyard and tore them into strips, then placed them on the fireplace where Essie boiled the laundry, shoved the cauldron to the side, and burned them. Then he ordered Essie to scrub the floor of the girls’ room.
    The gray-haired servant got on her swollen knees and scrubbed the floorboards to wipe away the curse. “At least he didn’ tear his own close,” she said, hoping Mary Bet would hear. “Ought to be grateful for the livin’,” she said, eyeing Mary Bet and pitying the motherless girl. She shook her head and continued with her work, pausing every so often to glance up to Mary Bet. Essie’s lower lip nearly covered the upper, the way it curled over, hiding an almost bare gum—her ponderous slowness reminded Mary Bet of a large turtle. She liked the comforting slowness of Essie and her heavy smell of laundry and cooking and sweat; besides Myrtle, Essie was the only woman in the house now, with any regularity. She was tall and had heavy eyebrows that knitted together when she was serious and opened out when she was making a joke. Mary Bet could talk to her and not have to think about O’Nora, and the thrown glass, and the soft rabbit that loped through her dreams and followed her in daylight shadows.
    Though she was too old for imaginary friends or guardian angels, she knelt before the small fireplace in her bedroom that evening, the low-banked fire making the angels glow and seem to move upon the black iron. There were two of them—surely enough to watch