The sailor’s departure seemed like a good omen to Easter, who’d always thought the workhouse a stepping-stone to the grave. But within the day, the angel of death did take up residence, as the old lady’s cough grew deeper and louder, wearing her out so that every breath became a gasp.
It was Judy Rhines who noticed the solid silence under her blanket.
After the brief, hushed commotion of removing the body, Ruth listened to the steady tap-tap of Judy’s knitting needles and the sound settled her to sleep.
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In the morning, Ruth’s eyes were gummy and
unfocused. She did not blink or glance about, and by midday her face was hot to the touch. She slept all afternoon and Judy could not rouse her for supper. She’d brought a camphor rub, and applied it to her chest thinking that Ruth was sleeping just like Polly’s babies: as though she was working at it. As though it was her calling.
In Ruth’s dream, she was in the high meadow with Tan and Bear and others from the old pack. It was summer, and mice skittered in the brush. There was a swarming of bees, screaming cicadas, and a great symphony of birdcalls: robin, jay, mockingbird, pigeon, pheasant, woodpecker, duck, and goose. She sank into the thicket of wild music, to the beat of her own heart.
Suddenly, a racket of gulls drowned out all the other sounds. Ruth was amazed by the variety of their calls: one was just like a crow’s caw-caw, another sounded like the creaking of a broken tree limb. There was wild laughter, braying, screaming, keening. One of the birds sounded exactly like a weeping woman. “Oh, oh, oh,” it sobbed, nearly human.
“There, there,” Ruth said in her dream. She opened her lips and nearly summoned the words, but not quite. No matter, she thought. It’s only a gull.
Easter decided she wanted a proper burial for the African and got a couple of gravediggers, two of her loyal customers, to help her buy a spot inside the cemetery, not outside the wall, where vagrants and paupers were usually
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buried. Easter was ready to pay for a coffin, too, but Judy told her that Africans had a horror of being buried in a box.
Instead, she volunteered a winding sheet: a fine damask tablecloth from Martha Cook’s trousseau, which had never been used and would never be missed.
“She looks like a lily before it opens up,” Judy whispered as they wrapped her neat and tight.
“I hope this is what she’d have wanted,” said Easter, sadly, for she had no idea.
The day of the burial was sunny and windless and the sea was brilliant in tribute. But only Easter was there to bear witness.
Judy Rhines was sick with the grippe. Oliver would have been there to provide Easter an arm to lean on, but Everett was in Boston that day, which meant he was needed in the store. Polly had a wedding dress to finish and the baby to nurse. No one remembered to send for Cornelius.
Easter met the gravediggers at the workhouse, where they rolled the mummylike corpse onto a plank.
“Wasn’t much left to her, was there,” said one of the men.
“She wasted away that last month,” Easter said.
They carried Ruth, slow and solemn, to the graveside and laid her gently in the hole. Easter watched them fill it in, her nose red as a hothouse poppy. When they finished, the men stood on either side of her, shovels in hand, waiting.
“I don’t know what to say,” Easter said.
“Rest in peace?”
“I hope so,” she sighed. “I should have brought a Bible or a stone, or something.”
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