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… '
'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.
