Dirty Faces - Book 2

Chapter 5: Keepsakes, Junk, and Wares

Chapter 5: Keepsakes, Junk, and Wares

They buried Granny on Kody's birthday. Mama didn't forget, but understandably, birthday festivities were not a priority. Uncle Kent left that evening, and the next day they began the arduous task of sorting through sixteen years worth of the stuff a family goes about accumulating from living life. There was to be an estate sale because they surely couldn't take all these things back with them to the little house in the holler. Everything that wasn't Adam's or Uncle Kent's had to be gone through. "If it looks like something worth keeping," Mama had said, "keep it. If not, we'll sell it. Unless it's not worth selling. In that case, throw it away."

Those instructions afforded too much responsibility for Ginny's taste. How was she supposed to decide what was worth keeping and what wasn't? While Mama went through all the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, Kody and Adam quickly realized that Ginny was not going to be much help to them in Granny's bedroom. Adam gave her the top drawer from the chest to pilfer through and at least appear to be useful.

While they moved about the room going through drawers and closets and pulling things from beneath the bed, Ginny sat cross-legged in the floor, sifting through the contents of her drawer. It was like Kody's pockets, but on a larger scale. There was probably nothing in the drawer that would be of any value to anyone outside her own family, and even she couldn't imagine what the purpose for hanging onto most of it had been. There were old handkerchiefs, a couple pairs of reading glasses (one of them had two broken lenses), a pair of white crocheted baby booties, several boxes of matches, a pipe, a can of snuff, a few combs. Worthless items, all of them.

Then, she spied in the back corner of the drawer something that did interest her: photographs. They were in a neat little stack, all six of them. The first couple were of some young people she didn't know, the third of a woman who favored Mama a little bit, if she squinted her eyes just right. The next to last was a picture of Kody and herself when she was just barely old enough to stand up, both of them dressed in Sunday clothes; probably taken on an Easter before church. The last one was undeniably a baby picture of Adam.

But it was the fourth picture in the stack that caught her attention. Two little blonde girls and a very little tow-headed boy stared solemnly into the camera. They stood next to a pine box, and in the pine box was a dead man. Not a sleeping man; a dead one, and very much so.

"That was the day we buried our daddy."

Ginny jumped. She hadn't heard Mama walk up behind her. She squatted and looked at the picture from over Ginny's shoulder, but didn't say anything for a minute. "We'd just buried Mommy and Baby Brother not even a week before that," she eventually continued. "Daddy was sick then, but we didn't expect it'd take him that fast." Standing back up, she shook her head and muttered under her breath, "Guess it comes in threes."

A sharp chill shot down Ginny's spine. She had thought those words a lot these past few days, try as she may not to think them. She had tried not to think about what little she remembered of that dream at all. At first she had wanted to remember, but those words frightened her. And even though she managed to not think about the dream itself, those words her Granny had spoken kept coming back to her. She stared at the old photograph, hoping no one would notice her unease.

"You've seen this picture, haven't you, Adam?" said Mama. "It's got your mama in it."

Adam stepped behind Ginny and looked down at the photograph. "Yes, I have." He smiled weakly at Mama then returned to doing whatever it was he had been doing.

Mama looked around the disheveled room and nodded in approval. "Well, it's coming along. Slowly. But we'll get there. I'm gonna get supper started, and after we eat, I say we call it a day."

The boys nodded to acknowledge her, and she turned to walk out. Ginny listened as the sound of her mother's footsteps faded, then turned to be sure she was gone. She looked back around the bedroom, at Adam and his clear system of three boxes: keep, sell, and trash; and at Kody and his pile of stuff in the corner. There was, of course, no logical organization to it, except maybe inside his head.

She refocused her thoughts on the picture in her hand, trying desperately to hush those words that repeated and just seemed to keep getting louder in her ears. Mama looked to be about her age and she stood in the middle, holding Addie and Uncle Kent by their little hands. She imagined Mama had been the only one of the three newborn orphans who understood the gravity of what was happening the day the picture was taken. The man in the pine box, who she only now made the association of having been her own grandfather, looked much older than he probably had been. His face, or what she could make of it in the grainy old picture, was hollow and sunken.

She had seen pictures like this in other people's homes: pictures of people, both children and adults, next to the corpse of a loved one. She had seen them on on side tables, nightstands, vanities, and in curio cabinets. And every time she'd seen them, she'd thought it strange, eerie even, that people would pose to have their picture taken with the dead.

"Why do y'all think it is that people take pictures like this? The living with the dead?" she wondered aloud.

Neither her cousin nor her brother stopped what they were doing, but after a moment, Adam replied, "Well, for some people, back then, the only pictures that exist of them were taken after they had passed. Maybe it was so folks wouldn't forget them."

Ginny still stared at the picture. It was a valid explanation, but no less unsettling. "Maybe so," she said, more to herself than them.

Until the day before, the only relatives she'd seen buried had been Daddy and her cousin Julie, and she couldn't remember either of those days. She looked up at Kody, sifting through a foot locker or chest of some sort on the other side of the room, thinking way too hard.. That was precisely the reason she hadn't wanted to assist in this sorting business. Adam at least had the luxury of knowing what most of this stuff was and what it meant, but Kody was in the same boat as her: clueless.These people were strangers to them. They may as well have been hired to go through these belongings, but they had Mama, Uncle Kent, and Adam to answer to. It was not an enviable position in which to be.

"Kody?" she asked.

"Mm?" he mumbled, never ceasing from tending to his pile of keepsakes, junk, and wares.

"You reckon there's any pictures of us like this? With Daddy?"

"No," he answered, without even a thought.

She looked at the sunken face of the man in the pine box. Her brother had been very young, too, when their daddy died; he'd said it himself once. Maybe he couldn't remember it all. And the way Ralph was when it came to mementos of their father, who was to say? "You don't think, maybe, Aunt Betty has one stashed away somewhere?"

He didn't say anything, but she watched his every move until she was sure he felt her eyes on him. When he finally answered, he still didn't look up from what he was doing. "The lid was shut."

"Oh," she said, in a weak little voice. She found she'd suddenly lost interest in the photographs and placed them back where she found them. The boys continued cleaning out the bedroom and she continued pretending to help, all of them uncomfortably quiet,  until Mama said supper was ready.

When she was walking to the kitchen, something shiny caught Ginny's eye as she passed a box of trash sitting against the back wall of the living room. She picked up the broken pocket watch laying at the top of the box and gave it a good look-over before dropping it in the pocket on the bib of her overalls.