While Duck was sorting them out, I took Andrew’s hand and led him to the front row where Tally sat between Daddy and Arnold. She looked up as though in relief at seeing my familiar face, and I gave her a quick hug.

“This is Andrew,” I whispered in her ear, “and he’s scared out of his mind that you’re going to spit in his face.”

Her blue eyes were huge in her drawn face as she looked up at him somberly.

Standing there between the coffin of his grandson and the daughter he’d denied for so long, Andrew suddenly looked as if he’d been hit with a poleax. His face crumpled.

“They didn’t tell me you were so pretty,” he said brokenly. “Oh, Livvie, baby, I’m so sorry. About your boy, about you—I was so dumb back then.”

I don’t know what she’d planned to do or say when she finally met him. What she actually did do was look deep in his eyes, then put out her hand to him and say, “You were seventeen back then.”

Daddy got up and gave Andrew his chair. Duck found him another a few rows back, and I went and stood between Seth and Dwight.

Tally had said they didn’t want a religious ceremony and Duck did the best he could, but it’s hard when you’re so used to Bible Belt rituals. He read Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” and talked about youth’s bright promise cut short. He started to call for prayer, caught himself, and instead suggested that everyone close their eyes for a moment of silence in tribute to Brazos Hartley.

I knew from experience that when Duck says a moment of silence, he means the full sixty seconds. Sixty seconds seems forever when you’re trying to think reverential thoughts about someone you’ve never known.

Eventually, he murmured a soft “Amen,” and there was a general rustling and throat-clearing.

“I’ll ask everyone but his immediate family to rise now and join in while Annie Sue Knott leads us in ‘Amazing Grace.’”

We’re all more or less musical, but Herman and Nadine’s Annie Sue has the best voice in the family and it rang out pure and sweet as she set the pitch and timing for the rest of us. The boys and their wives and children were right there with her by the third note—bass, alto, tenor, and soprano, our voices blended in the old familiar harmonies:

‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

CHAPTER 18

TUESDAY MORNING (CONTINUED)

Most funerals are not totally somber and Braz’s was no exception.

After Duck Aldcroft escorted Tally, Arnold, and Val up to the house, his people quickly lowered the casket into the ground, filled all the dirt back in, mounded the excess, and covered the grave with the blanket of roses. They took away the chairs and the navy blue carpeting, and they left the matching navy blue tent discreetly lettered ALDCROFT FUNERAL HOME to shelter the grave and the flowers heaped there from sun and rain. As Daddy had promised, there were plenty of wreaths and sprays from the rest of the family and one as big as a tractor wheel that Ralph Ferlanski, the other carnival owner, must have sent. It was composed of large white spider mums, yellow daisies, and the biggest bronze mums I’d ever seen. Gold lettering on the burnt orange ribbons read FROM YOUR CARNIVAL FAMILY.