Free The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks

on Coleman Road. April had been a cook and May the housekeeper. The two girls often dreamed of becoming tavern keepers, though they’d never before set foot inside a tavern until they’d opened one themselves.
    Minnie Bostick was there, too, and all the folks from the Thirsty Bird—the blind piano player, Hooper the ragman, the carpenter. Many white folks had shown up, and Mariah was gratified to see them, as if they owed her to come: the sawyer Thomas Hoosier and his family, who were always partial to Theopolis and used to give him sweets when they saw him in town; the postmistress and resident busybody Anna McArdles; William Johnson and Ben Bettson, who bought shoes from Theopolis; and many others besides.
    Presiding quietly from the back stood Carrie McGavock, her old mistress, clad in black mourning, with her black veil, and her good black lace gloves that came all the way from Paris, long before the war, and which Carrie kept for special funerals such as this.
    “Psalm 103,” the preacher said. From where she stood Mariah couldn’t see the top of the poplar coffin, now that it had been lowered. All she saw was the hole.
    She stepped forward, stood at the edge of the grave, and looked down. The coffin had been joined nicely, but it was still just an unfinished poplar box, canted slightly from one side to the other on the uneven bottom of the grave. It wouldn’t last long against the worms and beetles. She shook her head as if to shake the thought out of her ears. She wanted never to think of that again. There was a knot in the wood, a nearly perfect circle just above where Mariah imagined Theopolis’s face lay. An eyehole? A portal. If she could squeeze through that knot she could visit the next world. His days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone , she heard the preacher saying. That’s an ignorant thing to say out loud , Mariah thought.
    She remembered the pale yellow rose in her right hand. Who gave her that? Carrie. It seemed a long time ago, when she arrived in Hooper’s cart and Carrie helped her step down. For you , Carrie said while handing over the flower on its long stem. But no, it was not for her. She stood on the edge of the grave and accepted that this was what it had come to, that this was how it would be. She didn’t much care about being alone; she cared that this life of her son would end so badly, so commonly: in a wooden box at the bottom of a hole.
    Mariah tossed the flower in as if casting aside dirty laundry. With a gentle thump, almost a whisper, it covered the portal knot. It looked very pretty there on the lid. Mariah took three steps to the pile of dirt that the gravediggers stood next to, leaning on their shovels. She shoved her hand wrist deep into that pile and the gravediggers stepped back. She came away with a fist full of brown clay that spilled out between her fingers. She stepped back to the edge of the grave and threw the dirt in as hard as she could. It made an awful drumming sound, the sound of something knocking to come in. The flower had been thrown off center and befouled.
    Good. That is how it is and ever was .
    No, she did not accept that. She would not accept that. How it is and how it ever was? That’s talk that kills.
    She would do something.
    And what would she do? What could she do?
    Time slowed. She stepped back as others stepped forward to toss their own fistfuls of dirt. Mariah felt a little wobbly and sought out the oak tree to lean against. She felt the rough knobbiness of it on her spine, and it caught the back of her black veil, borrowed from Carrie. Carrie had a whole collection of such things.
    Around her the crowd whispered and shifted. She thought, Did you do it? Did all of you do it? You all did . She let her mind take off on its own, and then reeled it back. What if they had? All the killers, now shuffling forward to the grave and back again, past her, nodding their heads and clasping