“Bet that thing there cost a hundred bucks to rent.” Alfred pointed at the maple lectern at the room’s entrance. It had a brass-plated lamp and on its slanted surface was a notebook filled with thick, creamy paper. The guests had signed their names, a keepsake book. As if this were a time to be remembered, picked over at some future date to share laughs and what-could-have-beens.
Roby had signed it himself, in his looping, swirling death hand, the florid signature reserved for these special times. He had almost written “good pie” after his name, but he didn’t know the widow well enough. He thought of all the lonely nights waiting ahead, an empty space beside her in the bed where Jacob Davis Ridgehorn’s shape had pressed a hollow over the years.
He knew all about lonely. In life, you had to give your heart to somebody. When you died, all you left behind was the love you thought you had given. And when you died, that was all you got back.
Roby had nobody, no family. Except, for the next few days, these Ridgehorns. And he wanted them to appreciate what they had lost, and what they were gaining. “Now, your pa deserves nothing but the best, so don’t skimp on the arrangements.”
“They ain’t much money,” Sarah said. “Daddy worked for himself all his life, pretty much hand to mouth.”
“We’ll work it out.” He nodded to the widow. “I’ll help you straighten out the papers, ma’am. And I know old Barnaby real well. I’ll make sure he does you right.”
Barnaby Clawson had been the county’s sole undertaker for forty years until a corporate chain had set up shop five years back. But Clawson still got the local trade based on brand loyalty. In the tradition of morticians everywhere, he’d found a woman who could put up with hands that caressed the dead. He had two sons by her before she decided she could no longer bear the smell of formaldehyde. She up and moved to California, some said with a Bible salesman, others said with nothing but a suitcase and a scalpel.
Roby had felt neither sorrow nor joy for the undertaker’s luck. Barnaby was under the impression that Roby had a solid streak of Clawson in him, maybe a cousin twice removed, and had even offered Roby a job. But Roby didn’t enjoy that end of the aftercare process, the closed-door operations, the mutilation, the obvious deception. He didn’t have the heart for such casual treatment of the departed. Besides, he was spoken for.
“Barnaby called this afternoon, wanted to bring the rest of the flowers over,” Anna Beth said.
“Probably just wanted to eat again,” Alfred said. Roby could tell the boy was trying to act like the man of the house to make his mother feel more secure. Or maybe Alfred was ashamed of having wept when he heard the news and now was making sure everyone knew he was tough and suspicious.
“I don’t think you ought to sell the tractor right off,” Buck said. “You ought to think it over some.”
“We might keep it,” Alfred said. “Somebody’s got to get the crops in, and there’s always next year. ‘Course, if old Barnaby Boneyard takes us for every penny, we might be selling the farm, too.”
A warmth rushed through Roby, not anger exactly, but a tiny trill of nerves. “I said I’d talk to him. He’s a fine Christian gentleman. You ought to be grateful somebody knows how to tend to all the little details. What would you have done without him?”
Alfred sat forward, a hand on Cindy Parsons’s knee. She looked at his hand as if it were a spider crawling up her skirt.
“Daddy always said, ‘Just toss me in the pond and let the sunfish nibble on me,’” Alfred said. “If he was done and buried, he’d be rolling over in his grave at all the waste of it. How much was that coffin? Two thousand? Two-and-a-half?”
Widow Ridgehorn’s face collapsed, shriveled. The first sob came like a giggle, dry and nasal.
Go to her, Roby silently commanded. For the Good Lord’s sake, comfort the poor woman.
He would have done it himself, but some things were best left to family. Even though they thought he was part Ridgehorn, it wasn’t his place. Marlene was the one for the job. Not only was she the oldest, she was female, and Alfred had shown he wasn’t going to suffer any more uncontrolled outbursts of sensitivity. Anna Beth sat with her mouth hanging open, and Sarah was busy picking stray threads from the hem of her dress.
“When did you say the burial was?” Cindy Parsons said.
“Day after tomorrow,” Alfred said.
Roby searched inside himself, found room to forgive Cindy. She’d not had many funerals herself. The Parsons clan was long-lived and didn’t breed much, so the losses were few and far between. Maybe after the sitting was over, he’d take her aside and advise her to listen to the daily obituaries on the local A.M. station.
The widow coughed a few times, swallowed her sobs, and wiped her eyes again. “Flowers need watering,” she said.
White chrysanthemums. They were one of Barnaby’s specialties. He ran a floral arrangement on the side. One of his boys had turned out gay, but that was just the run of statistics and had nothing to do with growing up in the aftercare industry. The other boy was the one who ran the floral shop. Weddings, anniversaries, births, deaths, Barnaby took a cut from just about every memorable occasion, sad or joyful. He even had his ordaining papers and could perform a marriage if necessary.
“I’ll get the pitcher,” Anna Beth said, trying to be useful.
“Here,” the widow said. She picked up a glass and held it out.
Everybody froze. It was Jacob’s denture glass. When he drank beer at night, too worn to chew tobacco, he’d take his teeth out of his mouth and plop them in the jar, plant the heels of his dirty socks on the hearth and gaze into the fire.
The glass was as holy a relic as Jacob’s fishing pole and pocketknife. Far holier than a tractor. You don’t just go and insult a dead man by abusing his intimate worldly possessions. Roby chalked that one up to the widow’s distraught nature.
“I’ll get some fresh from the kitchen,” Anna Beth said, taking the glass from her mother’s shaking hand.
“I’ll help you,” Roby said, and followed her out of the room. Behind him, Buck was asking Alfred about the condition of the Massey Ferguson’s tires.
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 . . . “
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“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 Pickett County 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.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 60