“Ecclesiastes twelve-fourteen,” she said. “‘For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’” Then she added, “A funeral, Vio, is our last chance to contribute to people’s lives before they step into the past.”
But as the sisters well knew, stepping into the past did not mean Gone, and the Brasso home offered as many walkways into that frozen zone as there were stars in the southern sky. Their white clap-board house provided a veritable launching pad into the past. Every book, chair, teapot, beveled windowpane, spring-wound clock, and door frame covered in darkening layers of varnish offered direct passage into a time somehow more established, meaningful, and real than the present moment.
At the end of one long, dusky hallway was a room; in the room was a small table near a window; on the table stood a framed photograph. The picture beneath the glass had yellowed until there was no visible image, only an oblong space of cloudy mustard colors. Yet Violet and Olivia would often stare fondly into it, contemplating the likeness it had once contained.
Happenings, friends, neighbors, relatives, and others who had long ceased filling their lungs with air had left indelible clues to finding their current hiding places, and anyone able to decipher them could at once begin solving the mystery of their seeming, habitual absence. The sisters were constantly surrounded by the presence of things not there.
This was equally true of the village of Words. Like the Brasso sisters themselves, Words attached more firmly to the past than to the present, and only tentatively engaged the future. Named for the surveyor who had first donated land for the village, Elias Words, the community had little to contribute to the modern world, having already forfeited all of its inhabitants who entertained a keen interest in actually being somewhere. Indeed, the only residual relevance of Words remained more a subjective secret than an objective fact—a secret collectively shared with other small towns throughout the world.
As three generations of rural people had migrated to cities like woodland creatures fleeing fire, the current denizens of Words remained stubbornly rooted in an outdated idea. Like people who refuse to update their wardrobes, they simply ignored all evidence that their manner of living had expired. Their fierce loyalties were often provoked but never progressed, and they clung to the particular, the vernacular, in the face of ever-encroaching generalities. Consequently, they were losing their habitat, and empty buildings accumulated—somber, withered monuments lacking inscriptions—memorializing a once-functioning cheese factory, school, post office, dry goods store, lumberyard, mill, grocery, furniture store, dress-maker, garage, wagon factory, implement dealer, and gas station.
The town stood in its own shadow of better times, when families depended on agriculture for their livelihood, on work for exercise, on common sense for intelligence, on each other for entertainment, and on faith for health. Seasonal rhythms of nature had permeated every aspect of living and everyone, in one way or another, had danced to the same fiddler. Shared ethical standards fought crime, and inexorable obligations linked individuals together in a single, unbroken human chain.
Violet helped settle her sister onto the living room sofa, tucking a quilt around her. She cleared the dishes from the table and packed away the leftover food. Placing water, pills, remote control, and telephone on the end table, she told Olivia she would be home before dark. In case there was more talk of the mountain lion that people kept hearing at night, she brought in the police scanner. On the chance that their young neighbor might be outdoors doing something interesting—like last week when she jumped up and down on her lawn mower—she pulled back the curtains on the south-facing window.
More groceries were needed for the lunch following the burial service, as well as additional cleaning supplies. Mildred Fletcher, Rachel Wood, and four others were meeting Violet in the church basement at two o’clock. Their pastor might also come, but this was uncertain. Her movements had been unpredictable lately. The young woman was highly sensitive and overly intelligent—not stable traits in a pastor. Her heart was too full to be completely trusted with the customs of the church, and for some unknown reason she had asked the pastor of the Methodist church in Grange to conduct the funeral. She had done this with the permission of the family, of course, but it had been her suggestion, and no one knew why.
Violet’s Buick started without hesitation and she drove slowly through town toward the highway.
The golden years of Words, she speculated, must have begun sometime after the territory joined the Union in 1848 and then extended somewhere into the post-European War period. They did not, however, reach as far as the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on August 8, 1974, which coincided with the death of Margaret Brasso, the mother of Violet and Olivia and wife of James Brasso, pastor for twenty-five years of Words Friends of Jesus Church. During those blessed times the nation had defined itself in terms common to Words—farmers, shopkeepers, and reliable traditions. People had mattered then, and provincial citizens had waxed confident in the knowledge that they represented—in every movement and thought—the soul of the nation.
But times changed. First the railroads came, or rather didn’t come to Words, then electricity and telephones, cars and interstate highways, all promising more community, commerce, and culture. But one by one, those promises were broken to Words. The economy restructured, large families divided, and Words filled with abandoned homes, rusted automobiles without wheels on streets named for families no longer there.
Driving slowly over Thistlewaite Creek Bridge, Violet remembered the exodus years, when people she had known all her life, even whole family trees, simply vanished into the wider civilization. And even when some had tried to return, something prevented it. They had forgotten how to be themselves; the old ways of thinking could no longer conceive. The human chain had broken inside them.
The new, dominant culture moved on, forgot about Words and thousands of similar rural communities as though they had never existed.
But of course they did exist, and of the people presently living in and around Words, about half could remember the village as a vital business and community center, though this group was rapidly aging. A smaller portion of the local residents were the offspring of this shrinking majority, who refused for whatever reasons to follow their brothers, sisters, cousins, and children into distant cities. A third group, smaller but growing in relative size, were people now escaping those same cities, moving into the area from Chicago, Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Des Moines. Generally better off, this group usually built new homes and, to Violet, seemed like tourists on permanent vacation. And finally, there were the Amish, coming in with their black buggies, blue bonnets, and strange Anabaptist customs. About them, no one knew what to think.
But in real numbers, the population of Thistlewaite County had been shrinking for decades. Sometimes the only reflection of earlier homesteads was patches of daylilies and iris growing in ditches, perennial reminders of bygone housewives sowing blue and orange along driveways.
The only businesses in Words today were the Words Repair Shop and the church. And though some would argue that a church was not a business, it was, as Olivia was fond of pointing out, “God’s business.”
In the Grange grocery store, twenty-three miles away, Violet accepted a free cup of coffee at the bakery counter and spoke with Florence Fitch about the funeral. Florence was bringing her Crock-Pot chicken and dumplings, and her cousin Margie was making her usual macaroni and four-cheese casserole, with ham. She wondered if Violet had arranged for anyone to bring a bean or rice dish.
They discussed the deceased briefly. Both already knew the pertinent details of the death and the family, and they soon exhausted all there was to share on the subject. Then they drifted into a more fertile conversation about the national decline. Things had changed for the worse.
The whole country, it seemed to Florence and Violet, suffered from a moral ailment whose symptoms could be readily identified: high divorce and crime