The Funeral Bill

Chapter 2

He tried to recover his mind, replacing contemplating death with what to do about the Ashcross property, in which—he'd been told—a set of kids were now squatting. He'd let the place go to seed since the renter died in it nearly three years ago. Its roof and plumbing leaked, its walls drilled out by all manner of nest-builders, but he couldn't abide the squatting. But apathy or something like it had gotten hold of him; it had embraced him at the same time the numbness started creeping into his legs. In quiet times such as these, something in the boredom and the numbness and the nature of age drew back like a bow and twanged when he tried to move, and a misdirected laugh or, on occasion, a hiccup-like cry sprang from his mouth. He didn't understand it. But it locked him in his chair, kept him from getting anything done.

He tapped a wooden, bald-headed match on the arm of the chair while trying not to look at the pennies. But images of edemas, time at work, wasting disease, null and vacant and quicklime-covered faces impinged upon his concentration. His pipe hung limply from his lips. He sucked on the raw tobacco packed inside it to get a hint of sweetness mixed with a burned residue.

Jeffers saw the tenant who lived across the street walking up the driveway. As he walked, he smacked at the ash-brown leaves of the spent okra that framed one side of the property.

Jeffers dropped the unlighted match in his palm.

The tenant stopped at the porch steps. A scrawny man with brow-darkened eyes and a fresh crookedness barbing his face as if he'd been howling or banging his head against the wall.

"RD, what's ailing you?"

"We buried LaRae this morning," RD said, closing his eyes.

"I was sorry to hear about LaRae," he said. He looked down at RD, who shifted his weight between his feet like a child needing to pee. He patted the porch railing, causing it to wobble. "It's a hard thing to lose a wife," Jeffers continued to fill in the silence. He pictured his two wives in his mind, pondered which one might meet him in heaven, if there was a heaven. Age had made him hopeful again that there was such a place. Experience made him doubtful. "I've lost two myself."

RD nodded thoughtfully at the bottom of the porch steps. He shifted his weight and squinted at the pennies and water bags.

Jeffers studied RD. He knew little about him. Looked mid-thirties, but Jeffers had stopped believing he could guess a person's age a long time ago. A quiet tenant—paid his rent. But RD had a bottom-of-the-litter look, runt-ish, forgotten. He looked given to schemes. He might have been the skinniest grown man Jeffers had ever seen—his shoulders angled like those on a starved child. He'd known scrounging for sure. RD and LaRae had come from Tennessee.

"She saw haints, you know," RD said.

"Haints?"

"Ghosts."

"Ghosts?"

RD nodded and splashed a brown vein of spit into the grass. A wind buffeted his face, and he looked a slight better to Jeffers, who supposed the little man had come over just to talk out his sadness. Jeffers struck the match, sheltered its flame, and pressed it to the tobacco while making gentle, moist pops to pull the fire into the pipe.