Generations of dead lay in the ground and in vaults all around Delroy. Josiah Harte had delivered several graveside services here during his tenure as preacher. Delroy had accompanied his father to those services only if the deceased was someone he knew from the congregation. Josiah Harte had buried several indigent and unclaimed bodies that occasionally had shown up in the medical examiner’s office. A lingering sadness had always accompanied Josiah from those funerals, and Delroy remembered his father had come home a little bit less of himself for a time.
When Delroy had asked his mother why the funerals had affected his father so when he hadn’t even know the men and women that were laid to rest, she had quietly taken young Delroy aside and told him, “He’s your daddy, Delroy, and sometimes maybe you just think of him only that way. But your daddy is a special man. A good man.” Etta Harte’s eyes had glistened as if she was going to cry when she’d spoken, and Delroy could still remember the lump that had risen in his throat.
“But though your daddy is a man and likes his music and his baseball on the radio and his son and his wife, first and foremost, your daddy belongs to Jesus. The Savior took your daddy into His family a long time ago. Gave him a calling that’s as strong as any hurricane you ever heard tell of. We’re just blessed that Jesus saw to it your daddy has a heart big enough to love all of us as much as he loves working for the Lord.” She’d paused and wiped away the tears that had trickled down Delroy’s cheeks.
Delroy still didn’t know why he had cried, but the emotion had come over him quick and strong.
“When your daddy has to bury one of those unmourned people,” Etta Harte had continued, “he feels like he’s missed his calling, like he hasn’t worked hard enough at what Jesus called upon him to do. He feels sorry for those people, because maybe they didn’t know the love of the Lord and that their souls would have been saved if they only had given themselves to Jesus.”
And here you come, Delroy chastised himself as he walked across the cemetery grounds, bringing your doubts and your fears to this place. To your father. He felt nauseous, but he blamed it on fatigue rather than guilt.
Josiah Harte’s grave lay in the back of the cemetery. Other Hartes lay to rest there, as well as Delroy’s mother’s side of the family. The land also had a history. Even before the Civil War, ancestors of both families had worked in the cotton fields, living and dying on farms, then getting put into ground where no one wanted to plant a cash crop because of the trees and the rocks.
Sunshine Hills had started out as an unnamed black cemetery in its early years, but after the Civil War’s reconstruction brought the carpetbaggers from the North, poor whites were buried there, along with once-affluent whites who had lost all their wealth. Interment there was delivered as punishment and insult to the privileged white who had lived in Marbury and the surrounding areas.
Gradually over the years, the stigma had finally washed away, and the cemetery was no longer thought of as black. But only family members of longtime residents were ever buried there. Sunshine Hills remained small and special within the community, a tie to a way of life that was long past but never forgotten.
Josiah Harte’s murder nearly thirty years ago had stirred up all that turmoil again. The late sixties and early seventies had tried men’s souls as civil unrest had threatened to split a nation again.
Rain leaked down the back of Delroy’s neck under his slicker collar. It felt like an icy tentacle spreading against his skin. He rubbed his hand over the area and felt the moisture soak into his shirt. There was nothing comfortable about tonight.
Thunder suddenly broke loose in the dark skies. Lightning flashed and turned the landscape into a sharp relief of white and black. For a moment, no gray existed.
Delroy came to a brief stop, feeling his resolve start to shake a little. Then he took a firmer grip on the shovel and started forward again. What he had to do lay before him, and he knew he couldn’t avoid it.
Gravel covered the narrow path between the markers, but the constant rain had still managed to turn the earth to mud. Muck clung to his boots and made them feel clunky and heavy.
Another flash of lightning revealed Josiah Harte’s final resting place. Near the grave, a statue of Jesus held a shepherd’s crook and a small lamb. Weeks after Josiah’s brutal murder, the church had raised the money to place the statue. Etta Harte had planned on making payments on a small marker for her husband’s grave. She hadn’t asked for anything, even though everyone in the community knew how much the reverend had given to those who had needed.
The sight of the grave weakened Delroy’s resolve. How could he visit his father’s grave with the intentions he had in his heart? If Josiah yet lived, Delroy doubted he’d have had the nerve to ask his father’s blessing in what he was about to do.
But maybe he’d have had the answers to quiet the aching doubt in your heart, Delroy thought.
He stopped for a moment in the shelter of a pecan tree twenty feet away. Standing still was a mistake, though. The wind cut more deeply and even the rain seemed to gain intensity. He let out a long gray breath that disappeared in patches, then walked to the foot of his father’s grave.
As Delroy stood there, hot tears filled his eyes. He worked to get his voice out. “Hello, Daddy.” He didn’t know if that salutation was right under the circumstances. This wasn’t
