A girl died in first grade

A girl died in first grade. Nobody ever said what she died from. She was at school on Friday but not on Monday, and on Tuesday, first thing, the teacher said, “Mary died Sunday. The funeral is at two o’clock Thursday at the Methodist Church. We will get on a school bus and go to the funeral.”

Everybody was quiet when the teacher said Mary was dead. We all were of an age to know somebody who had died, grandparents or aunts or uncles, old age or car wrecks or accidents at work or in the fields. But nobody was supposed to die at six years old. The shock was too much to talk about or even think about, for a while anyway.

At first recess that morning, near the swings, Jimmy Holliday said it was a sad thing, Mary dying. “I claimed her,” Jimmy said. That’s what a boy said about a girl he decided was his girlfriend, “I claim so and so.”

Bobby Bradford was there by the swings, too, and when Jimmy said what he said, Bobby said, “I claimed her first.”

“No you didn’t,” Jimmy said.

“I did, too,” Bobby said. “I claimed her two weeks ago.”

Bobby and Jimmy got close to each other and doubled up their fists and stuck out their chins and swelled up their chests, all rooster-like. Then one of the teachers said, “What are you boys doing over there?” Bobby and Jimmy settled down and went to the jungle gym and climbed to the top and had a contest to see who could hang longest by his hands.

It was a strange thing, Bobby and Jimmy threatening to fight over which one had claimed Mary first. Neither one of them had ever said that much about Mary when she was alive and now when she was dead, they said they claimed her. Maybe they were trying to make Mary’s dying a part of them, or maybe they were just trying to understand and by claiming to have been closer to Mary than they really were, they could look at what had happened and figure out at least a little.

I don’t remember trying to understand anything. Maybe I figured that was the way things were. Maybe what I was thinking at the time has all gone away over the years.

Like everybody else, I knew a little about death. Momma’s mother and her father had died the year before, when I was five. Grandma died first and Poppa about six months later. I remember Momma and Daddy coming back from Poppa’s funeral. It was raining that day, a cold rain, and I was on the front porch when Momma and Daddy drove up in the Model A Ford. They hadn’t let me or my older sister Carolyn go to the funeral. I remember the sound of the Model A when Daddy and Momma drove into the yard and every time after that when hearing a Model A, I remembered standing on the porch and the rain on the tin roof.

On Thursday morning, the morning of the funeral, right after taking roll, the teacher called two other boys and me to her desk. We went up and stood there. The teacher said, “You boys are wearing overalls. Overalls are not proper wear for going to a church. When the rest of the class goes to Mary’s funeral, you three will go to Mrs. Tomlin’s second grade class.”

We three mumbled “Yes, ma’am” and went back to our desks.

I don’t remember feeling shame because of my clothes, but remembering might have changed over the past 60 years. I remember what the teacher said. I remember mumbling “Yes, ma’am” with the two other boys and walking back to my desk. The fact was, my mother bought overalls for me because overalls didn’t cost as much as blue jeans, certainly not as much as slacks. For me, my parents could not afford any clothes other than overalls. Overalls lasted longer than blue jeans or slacks. They were made that way.

That Thursday afternoon, around one-thirty, the teacher told the other two boys and me to go to Mrs. Tomlin’s room. Everybody else lined up and marched to the hall and out the door and onto the bus.