Burial to follow

by Scott Nicholson

The congealed salad had a ghostlike tint, the peaches floating among the red Jello and whipped cream. Red was the proper choice of gelatin for a death. Someone knew the rules. Roby would have to check the formal book on the lectern to see who was responsible for that particular tribute. Such small tokens paved the way to healing far better than any minister’s words.

  Anna Beth put the denture glass on top of the refrigerator. A film of paste and flecks of white settled to the bottom of the glass. Barnaby had taken the dentures with the corpse. The false teeth would be fitted into Jacob’s mouth so that he wouldn’t be slack-jawed at the viewing. If Barnaby attended to the details with the usual care, then Jacob would be haler and heartier than he’d looked in decades.

  But the viewing wasn’t until tomorrow. There was still the sitting to get through.

  Anna Beth was at the sink, rinsing out a chipped coffee mug, when the tears came. The first sign was the tremble of her shoulders, then her head dipped, and Roby saw her reflection in the window behind the sink. Her hair hung over her face, tangled strands on either side of the faucet. Roby went to her, patted her on the back just below the neck, rubbed softly.

  "Here, let me," he said, taking the cup.

  "I shouldn’t be carrying on so."

  "Hey, now." He squirted some Joy into the cup, let a trickle of water run into its bottom, then ran his forefinger around the ring of stain in the bottom. "You only get one daddy, and he only gets to die once. So you go ahead and do whatever you need to do."

  She wiped her eyes, then wiped her hands on a dish towel hanging from a cabinet knob. "I think I need to eat something."

  "Try the pie," he said. "Beverly Parsons made it."

  "Maybe so. You know what’s funny?"

  "What?"

  "I can’t taste nothing. Ever since… "

  "Ain’t unusual." He rinsed the cup and filled it with water. Spring water, come from a fresh rocky crevice in the hills. Roby had found it with a dowsing rod, not that you needed a dowser to find water in these parts. But Roby had the gift with water witching, could make that forked stick dip down for water or precious metal or even lost bones.

  He handed a knife to Anna Beth, handle first, so she could take it without cutting herself. She snicked off a sliver of sweet potato pie and used the blade to push it into her mouth. She stretched the plastic wrap back over the pie. Roby frowned. The wrap was wrinkled.

  "Take this to your ma," he said.

  She licked the knife clean and set it on the counter, then took the cup with both hands. "Good pie."

  A good-bye pie, Roby almost said aloud.

  She left the room, and Roby was once again alone with the heaps of food. Deviled eggs, left out for at least two hours. The paprika had dissolved into a rusty blur among the yellows. That was a sign. The eggs had turned. Only four of the dozen had been eaten.

  Roby poked a finger into the mushy yellow of one of the remaining eggs. He sniffed his finger. Definitely turned. But maybe he could get Buck to eat a few, if only to shut him up about the tractor. If Buck churned his guts up later, that was okay.

  The pie called to Roby again, almost with a whisper of human voice. He picked up the knife, wiped it on the leg of his jeans, and looked at his reflection in the blade. The fluorescent light made him look green and sickly, as if he himself were two days dead instead of Jacob. But Barnaby would take care of the skin. Barnaby was as reliable as the sun.

  He reached the blade to the pie and was about to cut a thick wedge when Marlene entered the room.

  "Momma wanted some of that," she said.

  "I thought she wasn’t hungry."

  "You know how it goes when you got sorrow. Half the time you can’t stand a bite and the other half you want to stuff yourself blue."

  "I’ll cut her a piece, then. Mind handing me a plate?"

  "Momma’s all the time going on about Beverly Parsons’s pies. Daddy raved about them, you know. Ever time we come home from a church social, he’d lay on the couch and put his hands over his tummy and said if he’d married Beverly instead of our ma, he’d weigh four hundred pounds. And Momma would throw a pin cushion at him, sometimes not even taking the pins out first."

  "Well, they’re good pies."

  "And Daddy stayed skinny as a rail, even though Momma ain’t so bad a cook herself."

  "No offense, Marlene, but your momma is best with casseroles, when she has some garden harvest to work with. Beverly’s good for all seasons."

  Marlene almost smiled. "Hush up, now. She might hear you."

  Roby eased the slice of pie onto the plate. The crust collapsed and lay on the plate among some brown crumbs. He hoped the widow would eat that part. Every crumb added to Jacob’s burden, and if the dead man couldn’t even count on his own wife to help him make the passage, then he was in deep trouble.

  Roby had handled visitations and sittings where the widow was practically sending out feelers for a new husband, right there during the mourning period. Some, you’d think they helped their poor old menfolk into the grave, they were so cold. Such things had been done before. A farmer’s wife had a dozen dirty ways to get rid of a man. Most of them had bad arteries from eating too much fat, because no part of an animal was wasted.

  For evidence, all you had to do was look at the sausage patties from the Clemens place.

  Peggy Clemens had already put the headstone to two husbands, and was known to boil down the entire pig’s head, brains and all, then debone it and run it through the grinder. Roby took no sides in the moral issue of whether brains were proper eating or not, but you had to admit that a Clemens patty had enough grease in it to shine a barn door.

  "You gonna help your momma keep up the place?" Roby said.

  "I don’t know. I got my place in town and you know things with me and Harold Pennefield are getting sort of serious."

  "So I heard. You could do way worse than marrying a mechanic. As least you’ll always have something to drive."

  "Yeah. I hate he smells like gasoline and always has those black curves under his fingernails. But he’s regular in church of a Sunday and lets me pick out which movie to see. He took me up to that fancy inn over in Glendale Springs, you know the one."

  "The Inn at Glendale Springs, they call it. A rich couple from Florida bought the place and fixed it up. Reckon they couldn’t come up with a good name."

  "That meal was over thirty bucks, but Harold didn’t bat an eye. He even ordered me seconds on wine that was four dollars a glass. I didn’t tell him the wine tasted like brake fluid."

  "You better learn to cook so he doesn’t have to spend so much money on you."

  Marlene cocked her hip a little, not flirting, exactly, but just letting Roby know she could if she wanted. "He says I’m worth spoiling."

  Roby nodded at the pie. "Well, you best get that in there before it spoils."

  "Give me another minute. Sarah’s going on about what to do with Daddy’s war medals. Daddy couldn’t give them away while he was alive, and all of a sudden they’re something to fight over. Like Buck and that damned tractor. I say sell everything and split the money all around. With Momma getting the biggest chunk, of course."

  A fly landed on the pie. Marlene didn’t notice.

  Flies were the worst thing that God had ever put on this earth. They laid eggs in your food and, if you didn’t die where somebody could find you easy, they laid eggs in your nose and eyes and mouth.

  Roby waved the fly away, then watched as it cut a lazy arc in the air before settling on a whole hog hunk of Clemens sausage.

  "You don’t mean to sell the land?" he asked.

  "No, nothing like that. Momma needs a place and she’s liable to live for another ten years at this rate. Anna Beth is set on staying here, too, and ain’t any men lining up to woo her away from the nest. Sarah’s got her own problems, but at least she has Buck to take care of her."

  Roby didn’t see the attraction that Buck had for Sarah. She was a little bookish for these parts, not much good with her
hands. She could play a banjo, but that was about it for useful skills. She had fancy ideas and talked about going to a big-city college, but she was three years gone from high school and the longer you put off things like that, the harder it was to make happen, especially if you were married. Still, no kids yet, so you could never say never.

  Roby himself had once thought about joining the Air Force, even though his eyes weren’t great so he’d never make jet pilot. But maybe he could have worked on an aircraft carrier or something, seen the world beyond Barkersville. Maybe he would have found somebody, got married.

  And if he’d gotten away from these parts, he wouldn’t have driven out in that backroads part of PickettCounty under the dead moon, drunk as the devil, his foot heavy on the pedal. That night had touched him and shaped him and tied him to these mountains like a Billy goat on a chain.

  "Reckon your momma will ever marry again?" he asked.

  Marlene smiled this time, though the grief cut shadows beneath her eyes. "No, she was a one-woman man. Some are like that. I can see things with Harold maybe giving out one day, especially if he never opens his own garage. Me, I might get impressed with a traveling salesman or a long-haul truck driver or something. My generation ain’t as stable and reliable as Momma’s."

  Roby nodded. He was between those generations, and he was only half-stable. He was reliable on the job, though. He had to be. There was job and there was duty, and he put his heart into it. On the night that changed his life forever, he hadn’t asked the consequences of failure. He took the job. It was the lesser of three evils, or so it had seemed at the time.

  "Think she’ll want some coffee with that?"

  "All we got is Maxwell House instant. It’s rough enough stuff in the morning. This late, you’re better off with tea."

  "Well, I guess she’s sleeping restless as it is. Maybe a glass of milk."

  "Lordy, as long as you don’t use the denture glass. I don’t know what she was thinking."

  "The grief-struck mind takes an odd turn once in a while. You ever heard of ‘gallows humor’?"

  "No, but I’m sure going to hang Buck if he don’t shut up about that tractor. He could at least wait until the other vultures got their fill."

  "It’s a damned good tractor."

  "A real man deserves that tractor, not somebody like Buck. I want to see a real man on that thing."

  "I got to wrap up this sausage. The flies are going to carry it off."

  "Are you a real man, Roby?" She moved closer, lowering her voice.

  Roby looked at the Frigidaire. On it was a Polaroid of Jacob and the girls, taken maybe a decade before. A young Marlene was barefoot, in a calico dress, with pig tails and uneven teeth. Jacob was smiling like somebody had a pitchfork in his back.

  "Marlene, your momma’s probably starving by now."

  She cocked her hip again. "It’s some damned good pie."

  "You had some?"

  She grinned, her teeth still uneven, and leaned back her head. She looked at him through half-lidded eyes. "Harold says it’s the best in town."

  Roby felt his throat tighten. Here was Jacob barely cold, and his daughter was acting like a floozy on his grave. Harold was going to have his hands full with this one, but probably only for a few years. She had the itch. He could see Marlene talking her momma into selling the place off, then jumping a bus for Raleigh or Wilmington or even Pigeon Forge. She looked like the Pigeon Forge type, with her styled hair and shirts that were always a little too tight.

  "Ought to get that pie to her," he said, working to keep his voice level. "I’ll fetch along the milk."

  Marlene pouted a little, as if she’d used her best bait and hadn’t got so much as a nibble. She gave a little extra shake of her rear as she left, but Roby forced himself not to watch. It wasn’t his place. She had given her heart to Harold, at least for the time being.

  Biscuits. A time like this, a good scratch biscuit eased the troubled soul.

  He took one out of the Tupperware container and ate it dry, without the butter that sat on a porcelain dish, its yellow edges soft in the heat of the kitchen.

  III

  By the time Roby entered the sitting room, the widow had eaten half the piece of pie. She chewed with a crooked yank of her jaws, as if she had an aching tooth on one side. Her gaze was fixed across the room where Alfred and Buck were studying over one of Jacob’s rifles. It was a war relic, brought home from Japan by Jacob’s father.

  "What caliber is it?" Buck asked.

  "Japs don’t use calibers. Why do you think they lost? Besides being yellow Commie slants and all that."

  "Well, it had to have had a bullet."

  "Daddy showed me one, once. Long as your little finger."

  "I remember that," Sarah said. "Maybe the bullet’s in that old cigar box with his medals."

  The widow cleared her throat. A tarry crumb stuck to her lower lip. "He threw that stuff out. Figured they’d be grandkids running around here before long."

  She shot a stare at Buck, as if his worthless seed had refused to take root in Ridgehorn soil, as if he were personally responsible for Jacob’s dying without ever meeting a third-generation descendant.

  Alfred lifted the barrel of the gun, pressed the thick wooden stock to his shoulder, and sighted to a spot somewhere near the setting sun outside the window. "Man, bet you could really knock down a deer with this thing."

  "Or a buck," Marlene said.

  "Ain’t you funny?" Buck said. To the widow, he said, "Reckon this will go up on the block, too. No grandkids, you might as well sell it off."

  "We don’t have enough money to buy it and the tractor, too," Sarah said.

  "Don’t be dumb," Buck said. "You don’t buy it, you inherit it. I say if we get the tractor, then Alfred here deserves the Jap rifle. Marlene can have-well, what would you rather have, Marlene, the Dodge pickup or Old Laddie?"

  Old Laddie was Jacob’s horse, high-spirited in his day, before they gelded him and turned him out to pasture. He was experienced with plow-and-harness, but when you had a tractor you didn’t need to mess with draft animals. Now Laddie mostly spent the day in the shade of the willows by the creek, his dark tail sweeping flies, his nose wet with age.

  "Jacob said one time he wouldn’t mind being buried with Old Laddie," the widow said. "Wasn’t there a Civil War general who done that? Buried himself right on top of his horse?"

  "Probably a Yankee," Buck said. "Who else would be that damned stupid?"

  Alfred lowered the rifle. "If we’d have had ordnance like this, then the stars and bars would be flying over Washington, D.C., right this very minute."

  "Don’t make fun of Momma, Buck," Marlene said.

  "They was one," the widow said.

  "I think it was Jeb Stuart," Roby said. He actually didn’t know, but figured if it had really happened, it was either Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, or Robert E. Lee, and he didn’t think it was Lee, because Lee had lived many years after the war and his horse Traveler probably died long before Lee.

  And Stonewall Jackson’s arm was shot off, maybe that was what the widow meant. Maybe they buried Jackson’s arm with the rest of his body. Stuart was a cavalry hero, at that. To bury a man on a horse, you’d need a mighty deep hole. Or maybe they were just planted side by side. Roby wondered who’d baked Stuart’s death pie.

  "I want to be buried on top of Harold," Marlene said, and her eyes were looking right into Roby’s. Nobody else seemed to notice that she was talking dirty.

  "You got to marry him first," Anna Beth said. "Nobody gets in the Ridgehorn cemetery unless they’re family. Right, Momma?"

  The widow nodded, setting her pie plate on the scarred, handmade coffee table that would have been an antique hunter’s dream except that one of the cherry legs had splintered off and been replaced by a square hunk of locust.

  There were at least two forkfuls worth of the pie left on the widow’s plate. Roby wanted to say something, like maybe Cindy Parsons would go home and tell her m
om that the widow let some of the pie go to waste. But it wasn’t his place. A grieving widow had a right to her own appetite.

  "The cemetery will be a problem if you ever need to sell out," Sarah said. "I done some studying on it. Once you make a graveyard, it puts an easement on it so you can’t never do nothing else with the land."

  "Goddamned government," Buck said. "Next thing you know, they’ll be telling you what color to paint your barn."

  "How big is the graveyard?"

  "The fenced-in part is half an acre," Alfred said. "You got grandpaw and grandma up there, his parents, the two oldest, plus that one baby that died. With the hole for Daddy, there’s still probably about two generations’ worth of dying room left."

  Roby clenched his fists, then stuck his hands behind his back so no one could see his anger. This was a family affair, after all. It wasn’t his duty to make sure the survivors behaved like they had a lick of human decency. He had other worries.

  "Turk’s cap lily," the widow said. "I want to plant Turk’s cap on his grave. He always liked those."

  Turk’s cap was a drooping yellow-orange mountain flower that bloomed in early summer, its petals curling up so that it looked like one of those fancy, old-fashioned caps. Roby figured a dead man’s wishes were to be respected, even if it involved a horse and a deep hole, keeping a farm together, or passing a tractor down to an in-law.

  "So, Momma, when do we get to read the will?" Anna Beth asked.

  "When the time comes," Alfred said, not easing his grip on the Japanese rifle. "Best get him buried first. That’s only proper."

  "Well, you know they ain’t no savings," the widow said. "And the government trimmed the tobacco allotment again. Down to four acres next year. Why can’t they treat us like they do soybean farmers and pay us not to grow it?"

  "They sued the ass off the cigarette companies, that’s why," Buck said. "It won’t look good for them to turn around and say, ‘This is good for farmers but bad for everybody else.’ Hell, I almost want to take up smoking just for spite."

  "Snuff has sure gone up," the widow said. "Eight dollars a jar now, and the jars ain’t even fit for putting jelly in no more. Used to be pretty glass things, little diamond patterns on the outside. Now they’re plastic."