Lullaby

stuffed them in his bag. He climbed out, slamming his door. Pat winced but didn’t say anything. Bryan sat, unapologetic, staring at the seat in front of him. We all waited, standing silent on this unfamiliar patch of land, as his jaw got tighter and tighter. He broke before dad could say anything, though, and slid himself out of the car, pushing up his hair with one hand and knocking the door with a hip to close it. Dad nodded, looking satisfied. “All right,” he said. “Pat. Bryan. Let’s get your mom’s body out of the back of the car.”

There had never been any question of burying her. Dad wasn’t religious, though he’d been Southern Baptist by birth if not inclination. Mom, on the other hand, was very religious, even if that religion was not, in what I’d consider the strictest sense, real. They called themselves the Children of the Southern Stars, though everyone in our county called them “the family.” They were some sort of neo-pagan collective, a step up from the Universal Unitarian church in the next big town over but maybe not quite as new age as the Wiccans. Though when we were all born, mom had insisted on getting our star charts read. There were some hardcore believers, I think, but a lot of the members were just hippies or environmentalists or people who didn’t feel like they fit in at the other churches in the area. Carl Wooten, one of the guys from dad’s deer camp, was a member of the family, and he used every part of every deer, and he thanked the earth for every kill. I’d tried to talk to mom about it when she came home, wanting more pieces of her, anything I could cling to as she drifted further and further away from herself. She’d stopped responding to treatment, the doctors said, and the tumor in her brain had grown back. She had months, if even that long, and the best they could do for her was palliative care. Mom decided what was best for her was to die at home. We took turns caring for her, but most of the time the day-to-day stuff fell to me; I didn’t complain. It was getting harder for her to speak, harder for her to remember anything that wasn’t pain or animal need. She didn’t always answer when we talked. She lost her focus sometimes, and by the end she didn’t answer at all. She had gotten so thin she was almost nothing but bone, her eyes big, round and luminous in her gaunt, sunken face.

“Not much to tell, Corinne,” she’d said. I’d been asking about the family again, asking why she’d fallen in with them, and why she’d left. She opened her mouth and

52 CAROLINA QUARTERLY