Burial to follow

by Scott Nicholson

  "You need to quit that, anyway," Marlene said. "Stuff will rot your mouth."

  "I only do it of an evening," she said. "After dinner. When me and your daddy-"

  She looked down at her hands. Her voice grew quiet, and even Alfred stopped his fidgeting.

  "We’d sit out on the porch this time of year, rock and snap beans, Jacob with his chew and me with my dip. Never felt like no sin to me. Nowhere in the Bible does it say tobacco’s wrong."

  Cindy Parsons stood up, went to Alfred, held the hand that wasn’t gripping the rifle. "You don’t need that gun."

  "Don’t tell me what I need or don’t need."

  "Honey-"

  "We got the land," Marlene said. "Forty acres split four ways, we’ll all do okay."

  "Except you’d sell your share off in a heartbeat, and before you know it, we’ll have a row of condos popping up on the ridge," Alfred said. "You’d open it up to the same rich Yankee trash that caused the rest of Barkersville to go to hell."

  "You’re forgetting about Momma," Sarah said. "Forty acres split five ways."

  "Won’t be no splitting ‘til after I’m dead," the widow said.

  "What about we sell it all in one chunk and just divide the money?" Anna Beth said to her. "You can move into the Westfield Estates. It’s real nice in there, air conditioned, satellite TV, an indoor pool, a cafeteria right there on the spot."

  The widow worked her lips as if she were holding back too much snuff juice. "It’s an old folks’ home, no matter what fancy name you give it."

  "But, Momma, you are old."

  The silence fell again, as thick as the ash dust in the back of the hearth.

  "Dishes," Roby said. "There’s a whole sink full in the kitchen."

  He moved across the room, every eye on him. He took the widow’s plate, almost asked her if she were going to finish that last bit of pie, then took her glass. A ring of milk had hardened halfway up the glass.

  "Mind giving me a hand, Sarah?" he asked. Buck gave Roby a suspicious look, then turned his face out the window, toward the barn where the Massey Ferguson sat in the shadows.

  Sarah got up. Marlene crossed her legs and folded her arms. Cindy moved closer to Alfred, who planted the stock of the rifle on the floor as if he were a soldier at parade rest. Anna Beth watched the black screen of the TV.

  The fork fell off the widow’s plate as Roby lifted it. Crumbs flipped onto the gray rug. The fork bounced across hardwood. Roby counted the crumbs. Three big enough to see, maybe six more too small for a mouse.

  Sarah stooped and gathered the fork and Roby followed her into the kitchen.

  #

  IV

  Lemon-fresh Joy. Roby not only enjoyed its smell, but the lather was richer than that of Ivory or Dove. The dishes were stacked to the left of the sink. Sarah had scraped them clean and was busy putting away the morning’s plates from the drying rack.

  "That’s one thing people don’t consider," she said. "They bring over food, but nobody remembers to bring paper plates."

  "It would be even worse if you had to cook, too," Roby said. "Greasy frying pans, tomato sauce clinging to the bowls, egg yellows that set up and get stubborn on a plate."

  "I’m sorry about what happened in there." She wiped her hands on a dish towel.

  Roby lowered the first stack of dishes into the soapy water. He wiped the scrub pad over the surface of the top plate, flipped it over, wiped a circle in the back, and placed it in the adjacent sink.

  "It’s not your fault. And people got to find their own way to get over a death."

  "But picking and fighting isn’t the way. Daddy would bust a gut if he was here."

  "Maybe that’s the way of it," Roby said. "Everybody lost the one person they would look to when something like this happens. When was the last death? Didn’t you lose your aunt a few summers back?"

  "Yeah. Iva Dean on my Momma’s side. Had a stroke in her sleep, the doctor said. Was gone before she knew what hit her."

  Roby kept working the dishes, getting his momentum, wiping, flipping, stacking. "I remember now. That was some spread."

  " What was a spread?"

  "The kitchen. Had the sitting over at your cousin Vicky’s house. That was Iva Dean’s only daughter, wasn’t it?"

  "Yeah. Iva Dean’s husband died back in the Reagan years."

  "Tuna salad. One of you girls brought tuna salad, didn’t you?"

  Sarah turned the cold water tap and rinsed the stack of cleaned dishes. "That was Anna Beth. She made it herself, back before she learned how to cook."

  "Sweet pickles and mayonnaise and mustard. No onions."

  "How do you remember all that?"

  Roby looked at the food on the counter, the heaps of it, a feast fit for a king. Probably the most food that had ever graced Jacob Ridgehorn’s kitchen. The refrigerator had enough pork and beans, melons, and corn on the cob to feed a small army.

  "Food and death go together," he said. "Because food is life."

  "I reckon. I heard that Vicky hid food up in the attic so the preacher wouldn’t eat it all. Somebody said she done it so that those who dropped in to pay their respects would see no food on the table and would run out and bring some more."

  "Vicky did hide food in the attic. Some of it spoiled." Roby shook away the memory of Iva Dean’s lean spirit, forlorn among the molded cakes and collapsed souffles. A Beverly Parsons pie was among the food that had gone to waste. How do you apologize to somebody when their death pies don’t get eaten?

  The plates were done and he was working on the flatware. The finger he’d cut earlier began to throb, the nerves activated by the warm water. "I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but I think you got the most sense of any of them. You’re married and more or less settled, Buck’s got his own land and a steady job. So you don’t need to worry about who gets what and how much land ought to be sold off."

  She stared into the rinse water. "Daddy liked Buck. You should have seen them at the wedding. We had a string band, I got to pick some banjo, and Buck and Daddy were square-dancing together, laughing like crazy. And Buck was only half drunk at the time, Daddy maybe three-quarters."

  "I wished I could have made that one." Roby had been away, tending to a death sitting on the other side of the county. Serving.

  "At least Daddy got to see one of us settled down. Though I expect Cindy got her claws deep enough into Alfred that he won’t get away."

  "Cindy might be good for him. Some men lose their dangerous edge when they get married."

  "What about the others?"

  Roby got busy with the dirty glasses. He’d been to several sittings where the husband was in prison without bail, the wife dead long before her time. Sometimes with kids running around underfoot who were too young to know that their momma wouldn’t be coming back. All they knew was that there sure was some good pie in the kitchen.

  "What I’m trying to say is that it’s up to you to keep the farm together," Roby said. "I know it ain’t none of my business, I ain’t close kin, but I know your Daddy would want it that way. No telling how much of his blood spilled out there on that dirt, how many splinters drove under his fingernails, how much dust he swallowed in the barn. This place is all about him. And soon he’s going to be buried here, gone back to the soil that he loved so much."

  "I don’t know. It might be easier on everybody to just sell it. I mean, Anna Beth will soon be wanting to get out on her own, see the world a little, and where will that leave Momma? She can’t keep this place up by herself."

  Roby’s nose itched. Probably from the smell of the spoiled eggs. "But you got roots here. Memories. Don’t that mean anything?"

  "I’m growing new roots. Me and Buck will probably be having kids in a few years. That’s why he needs the tractor. We probably can’t afford one after that."

  "You take that tractor off this ground and it’s the same as if you walked across your Daddy’s grave backwards."

  Sarah turned away and carried an
armload of dry plates to the cabinet. "Maybe it’s none of your business. I mean, here we are, close family trying to work out our differences, and you come in and start bossing the kitchen and bringing in your big ideas of what the Ridgehorns ought to do and not do."

  She paused in her stacking. "Come to think of it, you did that at the Jones house, too. When Granny Aiken died. She was Momma’s great aunt, so that makes you what? Second cousin? Third? Yet you went right ahead and meddled when Momma went after the doll collection."

  "Them dolls should have rightly stayed with Granny Aiken’s grandkids, somebody who’d appreciate them. What good would it do to sell them off so they’d get stuck on a shelf somewhere?"

  Roby looked at his smeared reflection among the spiderweb cracks of the plate he was rinsing. When had his eyes gotten so old? While he wasn’t looking, that’s when. That’s the way it worked.

  "Well, that money would have come in handy when Gertie needed a heart bypass. The hospital in Asheville said they couldn’t turn anybody away, but you can bet your boots they didn’t go the works for a dirt-poor country patient. And when she died on the operating table, why, it’s just one of them things, ain’t it? Happens from time to time, the doctors said. Every surgery a risk. Except you can bet if it was one of theirs on the cutting table, the odds would have been a lot better."

  Poor Gertie, God rest her soul. Dead at forty. Beverly Parsons had made a pumpkin pie for that one, sweet as snuff and thick as tar.

  "And what good would the money have done her dead?" Roby asked. "At least the kids can look at the dolls and have memories. Money don’t make memories."

  "Yeah, but if Buck got the tractor and we got our share when the land sold, we could afford to build a house and move out of that trailer. You can hear the rats at night. They eat right through them aluminum walls."

  Roby pulled the stopper and watched the gray water swirl down the drain. "What would your Daddy say?"

  "Nothing, because the dead don’t talk."

  Roby said nothing. He couldn’t explain, and she wouldn’t believe him if he tried. "There’s still half a pie left. Why don’t you have some?"

  "I ain’t hungry. You got me mad."

  "It’s not my decision. It’s you-alls."

  "Well, just shut up about it, then."

  Roby looked out the window. The sun had hit the lip of the far mountains, splashing the ridge lines with molten gold. The shadows around the barn had grown long, the woods dark by the fence. In the quiet, he could hear crickets through the screen door, and a couple of frogs had taken up conversation down by the watering pond.

  "Buck’s getting that tractor, no matter what Marlene says," Sarah said.

  "Not while I’m breathing," said Alfred from the kitchen entrance. Roby wondered how long he’d been standing just outside the room, listening. Then Roby figured it didn’t matter. This family didn’t have many secrets. At least the living members of the family.

  "You don’t give a bucket of horse hockey for this place, Alfred," she said. "You can have everything else you want. Daddy’s got a bunch of hand tools, the hay baler, the old junk Ford Falcon-"

  "Hey, that’s a collector’s item. Worth some money. Maybe more than the tractor."

  Roby thought of Granny Aiken’s collection, how the dolls had stared down from the shelves with dark glass eyes while her family scratched and hissed over her worldly goods. What did those dolls think about that? Probably wished they’d get sold and not have to witness any more such foolishness.

  "Eat some pie, Alfred," he said.

  "You and your damned pie."

  "Where’s Cindy?" Sarah said. "I didn’t think she let you out of her sight these days."

  "She’s comforting Momma, since you girls are doing such a bang-up job of it."

  "She’s sucking up, more like it."

  "Look, I don’t know what you and Marlene are scheming behind my back, but I’m man of this house now, whether you like it or not. Daddy wanted it that way."

  "How do you know what Daddy wanted?" Roby said. "You were hardly ever in the same room with him since the day you turned fifteen."

  Alfred’s cheeks burned red, his eyes narrowed to quick, cruel slits. He glanced at his sister, then back to Roby. "Don’t you dare say another word," he said in a half-choked whisper.

  "You carry your sins inside you, whether they’re spoken of or not," Roby said. "In your heart."

  "Shut up in front of her," Alfred said.

  Roby looked at the half-empty jar of apple butter on top of the refrigerator. Made from Macintosh apples in the orchard that covered the slope above the meadow. Cooked down over a kettle in October, an all-day event, with taters wrapped in tin foil and tossed into the embers, pan-fried cornbread, fresh-squeezed cider.

  "Don’t trouble yourself none," Roby said. "Your daddy told me all about it."

  "What’s he talking about, Alfred?" Sarah said.

  Alfred looked around like a mountain lion caught in a cage. He lunged forward, grabbed a ceramic urn, and flung it across the room. It bounced off the Frigidaire and fell to the floor, unbroken. A spatter of cream blurred and ran in tiny white rivulets down the refrigerator door. The murmur of conversation in the living room eased off.

  "You all okay?" the widow said in her loudest voice.

  "We’re fine, Momma," Sarah said. "I just dropped a cake plate, is all."

  "Cake wasn’t on it, I hope."

  "No. Nothing broke."

  Alfred stared at the cream as it dripped to the floor.

  "Get a mop," Roby said to him.

  Cindy Parsons came into the kitchen and hurried to Alfred. "What’s wrong, honey? You took ill?"

  "I’m all right," he said. He looked at Roby as if daring him to speak, as if the secret of Alfred’s fifteenth birthday was something he’d never shared with his lady friend. With anybody, for that matter.

  Roby crossed the room, scooped up the urn, and examined it under the kitchen fluorescents. "Lucky bounce."

  Sarah brought a wet dish rag and wiped down the front of the Frigidaire. Then she got on her hands and knees and began soaking up the pool of cream. Roby put the urn back on the crowded counter, then pushed the sweet potato pie toward Alfred.

  "Here," Roby said. "Have a piece. Take your mind off your anger."

  Alfred looked into the surface of the pie, more than half of it gone, the dull aluminum pan grease-smeared beneath the part that had been eaten.

  "Go on, honey," Cindy said. "Momma made it special for the Ridgehorns. Spent half the day on it."

  "I don’t want no damned pie."

  "Eat it," Roby said. "You don’t want to disappoint your ma. No more than you already have, I mean."

  Alfred scrambled around the counter, sweeping a bowl of green beans with bacon to the floor. He grabbed for the glazed ham, its hunk of exposed bone slick among the red meat. He raised the ham and charged Roby, wielding the weapon like the Bible’s Sampson flailing around the jawbone of an ass. Roby ducked the two blows, hearing the shallow breath squeezing from Alfred’s lungs. Roby spun, grappled at the counter, and came away with Beverly Parsons’s death pie. He shoved it into Alfred’s face.

  Alfred froze, more stunned than hurt. The ham slipped from his fingers and hit the floor. Cindy squealed in panic. Sarah stood at the far end of the counter, the wet rag limp in her hand.

  Alfred took two steps back, then began wiping the sweet orange goo from his eyes.

  "Sorry about that," Roby said, his voice barely audible.

  By now, the rest of the family had clustered in the kitchen, the widow hunched and squinting, trying to make sense of the scene. Buck fought through the group of his in-laws to Sarah’s side. Marlene let out a laugh that sounded like a pig’s last call at a slaughterhouse. Anna Beth was saying three or four things at once, none of them complete sentences and only a few of the words recognizable as English.

  They all watched Alfred, waiting for his reaction. He peered through the mess that clung to his face and looked at
the pie filling and ruptured crust on his hands.

  "Sorry," Roby whispered.

  In the silence, the sounds of the mountain dusk leaked through the windows and screen door. The cows had come down from the high pasture and bumped against the warped locust gate that led to the barn. A hound dog bayed on a distant ridge, the tolling of a death bell for a treed raccoon. The crickets had risen up in armies now, emboldened by the cool darkness. A lost gray moth battered against the wire screen in the kitchen window.

  Alfred held his hands out, palms up, as if he were experiencing stigmata and wanted the others to witness the miracle.

  The silence grew deeper until the room was swollen with it.

  "You’re right, Roby," he finally said. "That’s one hell of a pie."

  Marlene laughed for real. The widow eased forward on legs that were worn by age, each step a creaking curse on gravity. Roby felt his muscles relax and he rose out of the fighting crouch that had knotted his gut. Alfred’s tongue flicked out and licked at the pie that surrounded his lips. Then he lapped the thick substance from his palms.

  The tension that had filled the house all day fell away like mist burned under a strong dawn. Everyone began talking at once, Sarah gave Alfred the towel so he could clean himself, Roby picked the pie pan and ham off the floor, collecting the larger clumps of pie. Buck took a clean plate from the cabinet and heaped it full of mashed potatoes, then broke the skin that covered the cold gravy. He dolloped some gravy on the white mound, then ladled some sliced carrots on his plate.

  Cindy helped Alfred wipe himself, kissing him on the mouth before all the pie was gone, so that her lips were stained and smeared as well.

  "Hope your momma teaches you how to cook that good," Alfred said to her.

  Sarah got out plates for everybody. The widow was in the mood for casserole. Roby washed the ham off in the sink and put it back in its foil platter. Anna Beth carved a slice and stuck the meat between the split halves of a scratch biscuit. Marlene had a fat, out-of-round piece of Clemens sausage. Roby started a pot of tea and everybody worked on the pile of food, all standing gathered around the kitchen counter except the widow. She sat on an uneven stool, head bent forward like a minister leading a flock in some joyous ritual.