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coffee table that would have been an antique hunter’s dream except that one of the cherry legs had splintered off and been replaced by a square hunk of locust.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 mom 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.'
'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.
#
