him until Cole felt his cheeks blaze.
“You see that?” Vance pointed at a balloon of white material.
Preston leaned over the side of the boat and squinted. “Yeah, I see it,” he answered, and began to pull the oars with great ferocity.
The nose of the boat rammed into the body with a loud thump. The collision tilted the craft dangerously to one side and both Hemmingway and Cole yelped in terror.
They’d rammed into a young boy dressed in slacks and a white shirt knotted at the neck with a bow tie.
“Oh God,” Cole whispered.
Preston sucked air, and shook his head in dismay. “That’s Eula’s boy.”
“Oh yeah?” Vance looked closer. “Which one?”
“J.W.”
Preston set the oars, reached down between his legs, and retrieved a large hook normally used to move bales of cotton. He leaned over, slipped the hook beneath the waistband of the boy’s trousers, and tugged.
The body slammed into the side of the boat.
“Lemme help,” Vance said, and caught hold of the boy’s shoulders. Together, the brothers hauled the lifeless body into the boat.
Short dark hair fanned out across J.W.’s scalp in slick, wet points. His eyes were open and vacant. The mouth hung ajar, and was filled with swarming bottle flies.
“Yeah, that’s J.W. for sure,” Preston said as he slapped water from his hands.
Vance combed his fingers through his hair and moaned, “This is going to kill Eula.”
Preston nodded in agreement.
Vance removed his shirt, and just before he placed it over J.W.’s face, Esther executed a perfect swan dive off of Hemmingway’s shoulder and plunged right into that boy’s open mouth.
***
In Greenwood, the riverbank looked like a battlefield. Scores of people walked aimlessly about hauling items they had rescued from the waters. Many huddled under trees and beneath makeshift tents. The infirm lay stretched out on the wet grass, with friends or family members stationed at their hips.
When the Manning brothers hauled their boat up onto the muddy bank, Hemmingway leapt out, staggered to a nearby tree, and puked.
Cole, weak and nauseous himself, offered to help the brothers carry the dead boy, but Vance waved him off, plucked J.W.’s body from the boat, and slung him over his shoulder as if he was as light as a twig.
“There’s a house up the hill there,” Preston announced. “The people will give you water and food.” His eyes moved to Hemmingway and lingered. “Uhm,” he moaned, pointing his chin downriver, “she gotta head that way, to the colored camp.”
Cole nodded as he watched Vance make his way over a small mound of mud and rubbish.
“Where is he taking him?” Cole asked.
“Funeral home,” Preston responded.
Six months earlier, Charles Williams and Thomas Lord had opened the doors to their brand-new funeral parlor. Since then, they’d only managed to snag three percent of the business in and around Greenwood. That equaled thirty-two corpses. Thirty-two and a half if you counted the stillborn baby. The remaining ninety-seven percent went to the forty-year-old community staple: Ross and Sons.
Business was so bad that Williams and Lord had decided to throw in the towel, and just two days before the flood they had officially closed their doors.
But the havoc God wreaked on Mississippi had resulted in good fortune for Williams and Lord. Business, of course, was now booming. They couldn’t believe their good luck, and when out of sight of the bereaved, it was all they could do to keep from grinning.
Vance delivered J.W. Milam’s body to the funeral home and then went off to locate the dead boy’s mother.
J.W.’s body was taken to the brightly lit preparation room. Williams and Lord owned only two silver gurneys and those were already occupied—so they undressed J.W.’s body and propped one chair beneath his head and another beneath his feet. A large block of ice was positioned below his body to keep it cool and a penny was placed on each eyelid.
Eula Milam was a short, rotund woman with large dark eyes. She wore her wavy black hair pinned in a loose bun atop her head. She arrived at the Williams and Lord funeral home flanked by her son Fleming and Vance Manning. Mr. Lord led them into a large room with walls covered in bright white tile in the shape of playing cards. The room was filled with more than a dozen bodies and at the sight of so much death, Eula’s legs turned to rubber.
“He’s just over here,” Mr. Lord said.
Vance and Fleming hooked their hands under Eula’s arms and guided her toward her son.
“He look like he’s asleep,” Eula whispered. She wrung her hands and wailed, “Oh, my boy. My sweet, sweet boy!”
In a moment of dramatic grief, Eula Milam threw herself onto J.W.; the weight of her body caused the chairs to shoot out from beneath J.W. and both mother and dead son crashed down onto the melting block of ice. The pennies went skidding across the floor and fell into the drain.
Fleming ran screaming from the room, while Vance and Mr. Lord stood watching in stunned silence as Eula flopped around like a fish on land.
Eula grabbed hold of J.W.’s hand and cried, “Oh, God, why, why!”
The men took her meaty arms and tried to pull her upright, but she remained sprawled on the floor, clinging for life to her son.
“Please, Mrs. Milam, please,” Mr. Lord begged.
“Goddammit, Eula, turn that boy loose!” Vance ordered.
“Ouch, Mama, lemme go!”
Mr. Lord stared at Vance and Vance returned the man’s perplexed gaze. They both peered down at Eula, whose eyes were fixed on J.W.’s heaving chest.
Now, you may doubt that this actually happened. But I have no reason to lie to you. People coming back from the dead is a phenomenon that can be traced all the way back to the Old Testament of the Bible. Just the other day I became aware of a sixty-year-old woman who was hospitalized for an unexplained illness. In the night, her heart stopped beating and the physician pronounced her dead. She was taken to the morgue and her children were called. When the children arrived to identify the body, the old woman’s eyes popped open and she began to cough.
Across the world in Nigeria, a Muslim woman died in childbirth and within twenty-four hours, her still body was bathed, wrapped in white muslin cloth, turned onto its side, and placed in the ground. As the mourners recited the Quranic verse and poured handfuls of soil into the grave, the woman flipped over, sat up, and began clawing at the shroud she had been encased in.
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