The Funeral Dress Read Online Free

her last day in Red Chert. Now with morning about to break, Emmalee was eager to set about her chores while the baby finally slept in the back room.
    She would pack the few things she cared about, carefulto leave the house appearing as though nothing had changed. She would bake a fresh skillet of cornbread for Nolan if there was enough meal in the cupboard and cook up the pinto beans she had soaked overnight. When her chores were done, she’d hike to the small cemetery at the top of the mountain. Come spring the azalea would bloom fierce there but for today Emmalee would carry a bundle of cedar and holly ripe with red berries to place on her mama’s grave. A shiver ran through her body, but Emmalee tossed it off as she looked behind her.
    Nolan’s cot sat empty, pushed into the far corner of the room. It wasn’t suspect for her father to go missing for a day or two, but it was never something Emmalee could plan or schedule. Even as a child, she had treasured those days she woke to find herself alone in the holler. Besides, she had never felt truly lonely there—at least not until Kelly Faye was born. But for the first time Emmalee interpreted her father’s absence as more than good fortune. It was an omen, a sign from Jesus or God or perhaps her mama, that her leaving was right.
    An early gray light washed the top of Pine Mountain. Emmalee buttoned her coat snug around her neck and rushed outside. Her body shook against the cold, but she treaded deeper into the wet mist already clinging to her face and hands. A towhee with snips of fuzzy oak gall in his mouth darted past her, nearly brushing her left cheek as he flew to a low-hanging branch. Emmalee did not flinch.
    She primed the pump set off in the yard and filled two large buckets with water. She carried them back to the house, stopping only once to rest her arms. A coupleof pots sat ready on the woodstove. Emmalee struck a match and tossed it into the open hole. Once the fire took hold, she replaced the iron plate and poured the water into the kettles, leaving it to heat while the baby slept on.
    She walked back outside, this time heading toward the narrow dirt road twisting through the holler’s tallest pines and cedars stretching to find the sun. She dug the tips of her boots into the compound of leaves and twigs carpeting her path and kicked them up into the air. The red rocky chert covering this land was still soft and thick from the recent rains, and Emmalee stumbled as her toe sunk too deep into the mud.
    She stopped sharp at the edge of her father’s property and listened for any hint of his beat-up truck rumbling toward home. She leaned forward and turned her ear closer toward the main road. Someone in the far distance hammered a steady note. Emmalee shuffled through the leaves toward the trunk of the large oak left misshapen from a bolt of lightning long before she was born. The trunk stood thick at the bottom and tapered thin like a sharpened pencil at the top. Its woody flesh was nearly camouflaged in her crosses, each no more than half a foot long and crafted from twigs collected from the hillside behind the house. Those from the oak and poplar were Emmalee’s favorites, although not as fragrant as those from the cedars speckled about the holler.
    On occasion Nolan carried a twig home from his long walks among the mountains if the shape called to him right. He’d leave it on the table without ever saying a word, but Emmalee knew its purpose. She preferred to hunt for her own. There was a time when she had feltclose to her mama whenever she was in the woods gathering twigs for her cross-making. She had sworn she once heard her mama’s voice skittering through the tops of the pines, calling her name. But eventually Emmalee felt her mother ease away, and her voice grew silent.
    She continued making her crosses, somehow convinced that with each one she kept a tiny bit of the person passing with her in Red Chert. Even the dead she didn’t know, she was