“Do you want us to sing, Mama?” Lena asked. Marcia was proud of Lena’s efficiency. She knew what to do more than the grown-ups did. When their mother did not hear, Lena repeated the question louder, and this time the sick woman turned her haggard face toward them.

“Little pickaninnies,” she murmured. “Come on, hop on the wagon, pickaninnies, we’re going back to Peach Street.”

Delighted with the game, they climbed on the bed beside her.

“Give her the whip, Harry, we’ve got to get there before dark,” urged their mother. “Hang on, pickaninnies, here we go. Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

They could almost feel the bed rising in the air like a fairy-tale carpet, and they hung on to it tightly, their nervous giggles dying in their throats into whimpers at the sudden strangeness in their father’s face. He knelt by the bed and put his head in his hands.

“Don’t do it, Daisy, don’t do it,” he whispered. “I’ll give up the road. I’ll get you the Furness place—I swear I will. I’ll have the dining room set put in there right away. I’ll do anything you say, Daisy.”

“Don’t fall off,” cried their mother harshly. “Harry, where are you? Look!” She raised herself up on her elbows, her eyes staring fixedly ahead. “Look, it’s the man in the balloon! Look out!”

Their father caught her in his arms and laid her back on the pillow. Miss Hawkins pulled the children abruptly off the bed and pushed them into the hall, closing the door on them. They could hear Florrie burst into a panic of sobs.

“This is it,” they heard the doctor say, but they could tell no more, for Mr. Friend took them back to Aunt Lois’s at once. They did not know what “it” was until late the next day.

13

THE FUNERAL PEOPLE suddenly filled the Fourth Street house, their dim unknown faces haunted the dark hallways upstairs and down, the murmur of their funeral voices rose and fell like the sighing of the wind, their catfeet slipped back and forth on whispering errands. The minute a heart stopped beating, these shapes assembled as if this was the cue that brought them to life, and the final clang of the iron cemetery gates would shoo them back into designs in the wallpaper and shadows behind doors. The first of the funeral people to materialize was a large shapeless whispering woman in black serge, with woolly black hair and eyebrows and fat moist hands, scaly red cheeks, swollen legs (she wore rubber stockings under her black cotton hose), and a mighty black cotton umbrella which might well have been her means of transportation from funeral to funeral. She was wonderful with funerals, everybody said, and she didn’t need to be told to come, but had a sense that informed her of death and even of its direction. Like a hawk circling over the dying sheep, Aunt Lizzie circled over sick relatives, ready to pounce at the right moment. She said she had been packed for a week for Daisy’s funeral and Something told her, the way Something always did, that this was the day. She went to the deathbed at once, and after a sibilant conference with Mr. Fanzer, the undertaker, she took charge of Daisy, bathing her, combing her, permitting no one else in the room, not even Papa or Grandma. Marcia heard her talking, and peeked in, wide-eyed, to see if Mama had come to life.