The Funeral Bill

Chapter 1

At one time, the landlord Jeffers had been a busy person, but not anymore. Now he had time to think, and he had recently decided that he was going to die. His stomach was no longer the taut paunch it had been. Food passed his tongue joylessly. He no longer lusted. His feet and legs often went numb, and he'd taken to massaging isopropyl alcohol on them to regain some feeling. The smoke from his pipe remained one of the only things that seemed right—perhaps the craving for vice was the last thing to leave a person. Just before his mother passed away she would only eat soft candies. Jeffers' death wouldn't be immediate: he wouldn't pass away today or tomorrow. It just landed upon him, pressed upon him, that his own passing was imminent, and he had no idea what to expect in the afterward.

Alone on the front porch in a frayed and stretched lawn chair, eyes closed, he imagined funerals. His tenant's wife had died a few days ago. He pictured her supine like all bodies he'd seen in a coffin—clenched eyes, somewhat enlarged nostrils, mouth gently closed as if asleep. Peaceful rest. He remembered the summer evening years before when he'd had a body removed from Ashcross. The renter's daughter draped across her father's swollen body, weeping "daddy... daddy." Her little fists sinking into her father's stomach, her fingers groping at his shirt. The mortician's assistant, grinding his teeth, pulled the little girl off the body, rending the moist stitching around the shirt's collar. The renter didn't appear as if he slept. In the near-subterraneous light, gape-jawed with eyes half-closed and unfocused, his waxy face was constricted into a rictus articulating the ineffable of the beyond. Or perhaps the lack thereof. He didn't look heaven-bound. If Jeffers had not gone when the rent stopped coming in, he wondered how long the kid would have stayed there, caring for her father's corpse.

Jeffers envied those who had seen a person die. He believed they understood what he didn't—what death brought. He asked the renter's little girl what had happened when her father passed. Without a tear in her eye, she said she didn't know. She hadn't seen it.

This envy had taken root when his son, James, witnessed his mother pass away while Jeffers was out making a deal with a man named White who was ignorant enough to believe a handshake was still as good as a notarized contract. For James, watching his mother's passing had been such a powerful thing he'd gone into the seminary. He now ran a church out of the storefront of an old third-rate grocery in the lower part of the state; its sanctuary still smelled of hoopcheese and day laborers. (Jeffers thought his son would have been better off re-opening the grocery.) But James had witnessed many of his parishioners die, some of old age, others from disease. Each time his son told him of another death, Jeffers' resentment grew. He never asked his son what it was like, afraid he'd get an earful of capricious religious nonsense, a tangle of words that would make him feel stupid.

He opened his eyes to stop the images and looked at the clear plastic freezer bags filled with water and four pennies hanging from the upper porch railings. Craziest thing he'd ever heard—a suggestion from James, an article he'd sent Jeffers on how to ward off flies. It said to hang plastic freezer bags with pennies and water outside to keep flies away. It worked. But as the sunlight shot through them casting a liquid-copper glow, he thought of the coins once used to cover the eyes of the decease. He spat over the porch railing. He put his unlighted pipe in his mouth.