Cutler 05 - Darkest Hour

eyes were fixed on Mamma's coffin, now closed. I didn't cry until we were at the grave site and Mamma was lowered to lie forever beside Eugenia in the family plot. I hoped and prayed they were together again. Surely they would be a comfort to each other.
    Papa wiped his eyes once with his handkerchief before we turned away from the grave, but Emily didn't shed a tear. If she cried at all, she cried inside. I saw the way some people looked at her and whispered, shaking their heads. Emily couldn't care less about what people thought of her. She believed that nothing in this world, nothing people did or said, nothing that happened was as important as what followed this life. Her attention was firmly fixed on the hereafter and preparations for the trip over glory's road.
    But I didn't hate her for her behavior anymore. Something had happened inside me because of the birth of Charlotte and the death of Mamma. Anger and intolerance were replaced by pity and patience. I had finally come to realize that Emily was the most pitiful of the three of us. Even poor and sickly Eugenia had been better off, for she had been able to enjoy some of this world, some of its beauty and warmth, whereas Emily was incapable of anything but unhappiness and sorrow. She belonged in graveyards. She had been moving about like a mortician since the day she could walk. She draped herself in shadows and found security and comfort alone, wrapped tightly in her Biblical stories and words, best repeated under gray skies.
    The funeral and its aftermath provided another excuse for Papa to drink his whiskey. He sat with his card-playing friends and swallowed glass after glass of bourbon until he fell asleep in his chair. Over the next few days, Papa underwent a dramatic change in his habits and behavior. For one thing, he no longer rose early in the morning and was at the breakfast table when I arrived. He started arriving late. One morning, he didn't arrive at all and I asked Emily where he was. She simply glared at me and shook her head. Then she muttered one of her prayers under her breath.
    "What is it, Emily?" I demanded.
    "Papa is succumbing to the devil, a little more every day," she declared.
    I nearly laughed. How could Emily not see that Papa had been trafficking with Satan for some time now? How could she excuse his drinking and his gambling and his deplorable activities when he was away from home on his so-called business trips? Was she really blinded and fooled by his hypocritical religious surface while he was home? She knew what he had done to me and yet she tried to excuse it by placing all the blame on me and the devil. What about his responsibility?
    What finally bothered Emily was that Papa had given up even his hypocrisy. He wasn't at the breakfast table to say the morning prayers and he wasn't reading his Bible. He was drinking himself to sleep every night and when he rose, he didn't dress himself neatly. He didn't shave; he didn't even look clean anymore. As soon as he was able to, he would leave the house to go to his haunts where he gambled the night away, playing cards in smoke-filled rooms. We knew that there were women of ill repute in these places too, women whose sole purpose was to entertain and give pleasure to the men.
    The drinking, carousing and gambling stole away Papa's attention from the business of running The Meadows. Weeks passed with the workers complaining about not receiving their wages. Charles tried to repair and maintain the old and tired equipment, but he was like the boy trying to keep the dike intact by holding his finger in the leaking hole. Every time he brought another complaint or another bit of depressing news to Papa, Papa would rant and rage and blame it on the Northerners or the foreigners. It usually ended with him drinking himself into a stupor and nothing being done, no new problem solved.
    Gradually, The Meadows began to look like the neglected old plantations that were either deserted or destroyed by the Civil War. With no money to whitewash the fences and barns, with fewer and fewer employees willing to wait out Papa's fits of tantrum and periods of procrastination when it came to paying them their rightful wages, The Meadows choked and stumbled until there was barely an income to keep what little we had left going.
    Emily, rather than criticize Papa openly, decided instead to find ways to economize and save in the house. She ordered Vera to serve cheaper and cheaper meals. Most sections of the