Free The Funeral Dress by Susan Gregg Gilmore Page A

to the bed. “Damn it,” Emmalee said. A half dozen diapers had been left soaking in the tin pail outside the house and were likely frozen hard. A dozen others had been left hanging on the line. “Damn it. Damn it.” Emmalee glanced about the room for a suitable cloth for diapering. “What with you pulling on me all day, I gone and forgot all those damn diapers.”
    Emmalee scrounged about the room for something more to wear. She pulled on a pair of jeans tucked under the bed and a ratty sweater left across the back of the chair. She bundled herself in what else she could find: a hooded sweatshirt and some thick wool socks. “Hush Kelly. Hush now,” Emmalee said as if reciting a mantra. “Hush baby. Hush your crying.” But the baby carried on for her mother’s care.
    Emmalee tugged on the jeans’ denim waistband and drew in her stomach. She wondered if she would ever look or feel like she had a year ago. As her tummy had grown with the baby, Emmalee had never once believed she was pregnant. She never got big like the other women she had seen at the factory. The doctor at the hospitalsaid sometimes that happens. Besides, he figured the baby came a bit early, barely weighing five pounds. Nolan had called Emmalee fat a time or two there at the end, and she guessed she had rather believed that than the truth. Once she suspected her condition, she had hidden her body inside large shirts and baggy housecoats.
    Emmalee crept into the front room. With the baby wrapped in a blanket and held in her arms, she tiptoed to the table and grabbed a dishtowel used the day before to wipe the baby’s face and hands. It was dry and clean enough for diapering. Nolan slept facedown on his cot, dressed in his muddy work boots and bloodstained overalls. He did not stir, and Emmalee rushed past him and back into her room.
    “This’ll do you fine,” she said to Kelly Faye, who turned her head toward the sound of her mother’s voice. Emmalee placed the baby on the bed and opened the blanket, again exposing the baby’s skin to the bitter cold. Kelly cried harder and her lips quivered as her mama tended to her bottom, already growing blotchy and red. Her pink lips shaded icy blue as she worked herself into another breathless tantrum. Emmalee rushed to dress her, struggling to slip Kelly’s rigid arms into the flannel gown the collar makers at Tennewa had given her.
    “Dressing you is like trying to tame a hornet,” she said, jerking matching pink socks onto Kelly’s bare feet. “Shut up. I mean it,” she said. “My head’s full of your wailing.”
    Emmalee wiped her baby’s tears with the tail of her shirt and put her to her breast. The baby tugged hard for her morning meal, only stopping to catch her breath.“Hurry on up,” she said, having grown impatient with her daughter and her demanding nature. She had never understood babies were such a constant thing.
    She listened for any sound of her father’s stirrings, certain Kelly’s fussing would rouse him from his sleep. But the steady rise and fall of Nolan’s breathing was the only noise drifting from the front room. “That’s enough,” Emmalee said and lifted Kelly onto her shoulder. She thumped Kelly’s back, steady and even, as the nurses in the hospital had taught her to do. She held Kelly against her shoulder and carried a long, sturdy stick with her free hand. Emmalee had pulled the stick from a poplar back of the house after one of Nolan’s tantrums and hid it under the bed. Now she kept it close as she went to wake her father.
    “The bodies at Fulton’s?” she asked, poking Nolan’s thigh with the stick’s rounded end. Emmalee repeated her question. “Nolan, you hear me? The bodies at Fulton’s?”
    “Huh, what … you what?” Nolan mumbled and eased onto his back.
    “I’m taking the truck to Fulton’s. Hand me the keys.”
    “I ain’t going nowhere,” he said, slurring his words and not bothering to open his eyes.
    “That’s right. You