She woke in the middle of the night and asked the nursing home attendant to get her two chairs.
“I’ve got company coming,” she told the nurse.
Mrs. Verna lived 89 years. One of nine children, she left her home in DeSoto Parish in the ’20s for college, met an oilfield worker, quit school, and had three children.
The family moved to 410 Jefferson St. in Mansfield in the mid-30s, and there she lived for 60 years. Her husband didn’t live there long at all. She bought his half of the house for about $300 and raised the children herself, and that’s hard today but they tell me it was harder in the ’30s and ’40s for a woman with half a college education and no car.
Sewing and cutting hair and working as a sales lady and loving her children hard, she got the babies raised. She never got the car. No telling how many times she walked to town, to work, to the grocery store. No telling how many times one of her many friends passed by and gave her a ride.
They sang her praises Saturday morning in Beulah Baptist Church, a church at its core unchanged since she walked the aisle there as a little girl. It has aluminum siding now. Beige shag. But it’s still the same. Fifteen or so pews deep. Plate-glass windows, stained red. Still small, still a pulpit front and center. Behind that a cozy choir loft, behind that a baptistry, and behind that a painting of a river, peaceful and blue, its banks alive and green.
Not long ago she visited the new funeral home in town. She didn’t like it. “This isn’t home,” she told her daughter. “I want to go home.”
So back to Beulah Baptist, back home, surrounded by pines and off an unstriped road in the Lula Community, friends and children and grandchildren came to say goodbye.
How Great Thou Art. Amazing Grace. It Is Well With My Soul. Quietly in the packed little church the music blended in the air and settled over her friends and the truth of it all set in. Perfect songs for the moment, for more reasons than one. “Part of Mama’s orders,” her daughter said, and everyone chuckled and grinned and some exchanged smiling glances, there at the funeral for Mrs. Verna.
She was tougher than a little bit because she had to be. Maybe a little bossy. When her grandsons cleaned her home the day she moved to the nursing home, they found a pair of slingshots. She’d given them to two grandboys one day, but when a window was shattered, she confiscated them. Didn’t throw them away, though; maybe she was planning on giving the boys their slingshots back.
“I guess,” said a guilty grandson, “that 38 years of punishment is enough.”
More smiles at the funeral.
Tough she was. And so the boys were surprised that day cleaning her home when they found some letters from her college days and references to their grandmama as “Possum,” a class clown, a cutup, always into something, always good company.
And so, under the blue autumn sky on a Saturday morning, grandsons placed boutonnieres on her casket and walked back out through the gate of the little cemetery by the church. They said goodbye to their grandmama, who was busy elsewhere, busy saying hello.
Her company had come.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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