He was a man in his mid-thirties, middle-weight in size, trim, sandy in coloring, and not bad-looking. He had met Clara ten months ago during a business trip to Atlanta and they had married after a brief courtship.
He had brought her back to Pine Needle, which nestled in the barren Georgia foothills, without the courage to tell her the whole truth about himself. She had come to the village knowing only that he was the one mortician in the county, as his father had been before him. His profession put him, in her mind, on a level with the mayor, the leading merchant, and the chief of police.
She’d had to learn the hard way that he was the most poverty-stricken man in town. The dirt farmers had their chickens and hounds, but Howard Alden had only a dreary undertaking parlor and ramshackle house, both heavily mortgaged, and a yellowed sheaf of bills his dead father had never been able to pay.
Clara had envisioned an old plantation-style home with servants, but she found herself cooking on an ancient gas stove and polishing silver plate that had worn to the base metal.
She had first wanted to redecorate the gloomy house. Howard had borrowed all the money he could, yet the best she could manage were some new draperies, a cheap living room suite, and a table-model television set…
“Clara,” he said, his taste for breakfast gone, “if you’ll just be patient I know I’ll collect some of the money due me.”
“Collect from whom? The poor share croppers stuck in this Godforsaken county? The people you bury at two hundred dollars a funeral—on credit? And darn few burials at that. Most of the folks around here are too poor to die.” He didn’t answer—he had no answer. Sometimes he felt he didn’t know much of anything about life, or about women. He knew only the occasional dead who came his way. He wished he could change for Clara’s sake, but he didn’t know how.
Clara avoided his off-to-work kiss. He left the house with something squeezed tight inside of him. She had not mentioned it, but he knew she was brooding on going back to Atlanta. And thinking about her life here in this bleak Southern county, he couldn’t really blame her.
His jalopy of a car rattled to a stop at the lower end of Main Street. There was little activity in town—a few dusty pickup trucks parked along Main, a couple of men swapping talk at the feed store, a few old-timers sitting on nail kegs under the unpainted wooden awning of the hardware store. They whittled irresolutely, argued dogs and women, and crusted the curbing stone with tobacco juice.
Howard sighed and went into his place of business. Once the gold leaf spelling out Alden Mortuary on the front window had no missing letters. Once the walnut benches in the chapel and the foot-pedal organ had been glossy and new. Once the front office had been something more than a gloomy clutter of shabby furnishings.
Today the place held only the old sweet sick smell of dying flowers—and death.
Howard opened the windows to air the office, then went out to the diner on the corner. The diner had been converted from an old street car an enterprising soul had brought in from Atlanta.
The usual crowd was in the diner. Bayliss, who owned the dry goods store. Sheriff Loudermilk. Bill Suggs, who trained horses and hunting clogs for the vanDeventer family.
Suggs was an overbearing man, but it was said that old vanDeventer liked him. This was enough to give Suggs considerable prestige in Pine Needle. The vanDeventers owned practically the whole county—most of the farms, the cannery, even the local telephone exchange.
Maddy vanDeventer, beautiful, young, and blonde, had been educated at a fashionable girls’ school in North Carolina and had traveled in Europe. If Pine Needle had a princess, it was Maddy. The old man prized her slightest whim above the welfare of the entire human race.
Howard ordered a cup of coffee from the hefty, sweaty girl behind the counter. He sat listening to Suggs, Loudermilk, and Bayliss plan a fishing trip. They had acknowledged Howard with the briefest of nods, not quite friendly enough for Howard to take the liberty of joining them. It was unspoken knowledge that he was too poor and too unimportant to be included in any fishing trip.
Howard sat down at the next table and tried to appear as if he weren’t listening. They were going all the way over to Santee in South Carolina. There were bass there half as big as a man’s leg. It was going to be a rather expensive trip, by the time food and liquor were included. It was the kind of trip men talked out—long and detailedly. They wouldn’t leave for ten days yet, but a trip like this took a lot of planning and discussion.
And Howard just sat at his table and tried not to let the warm comradeship of the three other men make itself known to his senses. But he couldn’t help the pictures that came irresistibly to his mind: the car piled high with equipment, screeching to a stop before his house in the early dawn. Bayliss yelling, “Get a move on, Howard! You waitin’ for them bass to have grandchildren?” And Clara kissing him and telling him to be careful as he hurried from the house, loaded with rod, reel, creel, boots, and spare clothing. And Suggs flapping him on the back as he got in the car, thrusting a bottle into his hand, and saying, “Smoothest bourbon you ever drunk, boy. Right out of the old man’s private stock. Take a shot of that to settle your breakfast.”
Over at the next table Bayliss laughed heartily at something Loudermilk said, and the minute of fantasy was gone. Howard sat alone.
The pay phone on the wall at the end
