The Highway Kind(54)

I finished chewing fast as I could, said, “Now wait a minute. I just got to thinking on this good. I’m picking him up in the car, and that means he’s going to go in the backseat, and I see how he could have grown a mite ripe, but Mama, are you telling me he ain’t going to be in a coffin or nothing?”

“The letter said he was lying out in the chicken coop, where he’d been living with the chickens, having to only pay a quarter a week and feed the chickens to be there, and one morning they came out to see why he hadn’t gathered the eggs and brought them up—that also being part of his job for staying in the coop—and they found him out there, colder than a wedge in winter. He’d been stabbed, and he had managed to get back to the coop, where he bled out. Just died quietly out there with their chickens. They didn’t know what to do with him at first, but they found a letter he had from his brother; that would be your father”—she added that like I couldn’t figure it out on my own—“and there was an address on it, so they wrote us.”

“They didn’t move the body?”

“Didn’t know what to do with it. They said in the letter they had sewed a burial shroud you can put him in; it’s a kind of bag.”

“I have to pour perfume on him, put him in a bag, and drive him home in the backseat of the car?”

“Reckon that’s about the size of it. I don’t know no one else would bother to go get him.”

“Do I have to? Thinking on it more, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

“’Course you got to go. They’re expecting you.”

“Write them a letter and tell them I ain’t coming. They can maybe bury him out by the chicken coop or something.”

“That’s a mean thing to say.”

“I didn’t hardly know him,” I said, “certainly not enough to perfume him, bag him up, and drive him home.”

“You don’t have to have known him all that well, he’s family.”

My little sister, Terri, came in then. She was twelve and had her hair cut straight across in front and short in back. She had on overalls with a work shirt and work boots. She almost looked like a boy. She said, “I was thinking I ought to go with you.”

“You was thinking that, huh,” I said.

“It might not be such a bad idea,” Mama said. “She can read the map.”

“I can read a map,” I said.

“Not while you’re driving,” Mama said.

“I can pull over.”

“This way, though,” Mama said, “you can save some serious time, having her read it and point out things.”

“He’s been dead for near two weeks or so. I don’t know how much pressure there is on me to get there.”

“Longer you wait, the more he stinks,” Terri said.

“She has a point,” Mama said.

“Ain’t they supposed to report a dead body? Them people found him, I mean? Ain’t it against the law to just leave a dead fella lying around?”

“They done us a favor, Uncle Smat being family and all,” Mama said. “They could have just left him, or buried him out there with the chickens.”

“I wish they had,” I said. “I made that suggestion, remember?”

“This way we can bury him in the cemetery where your daddy is buried,” Mama said. “That’s what your daddy would have wanted.”

She knew I wasn’t going to say anything bad that had to do with Daddy in any manner, shape, or form. I thought that was a low blow, but Mama, as they say, knew her chickens. She knew where I was the weakest.

“All right, then,” I said, “I’m going to get him. But that car of ours has been driven hard and might not be much for a long trip. The clutch hangs sometimes when you press on it.”

“That’s a chance you have to take for family,” Mama said.

I grumbled something, but I knew by then I was going.

“I’m going too,” Terri said.

“Oh hell, come on, then,” I said.

“Watch your cussing,” Mama said. “Daddy wouldn’t like that either.”

“All he did was cuss,” I said.

“Yeah, but he didn’t want you to,” she said.

“I think I’m gonna cuss,” I said. “My figuring is, Daddy would have wanted me to be good at it, and that takes practice.”

“I ain’t forgot how to whip your ass with a switch,” Mama said.


Now it was figured by Mama that it would take us two days to get to the Wentworths’ house and chicken coop if we drove fast and didn’t stop to see the sights and such, and then two days back. As we got started out early morning, we had a pretty good jump on the first day.

The clutch hung a few times but seemed mostly to be cooperating, and I ground the gears only now and again, but that was my fault, not the car’s, though in the five years we had owned it, it had been worked like a stolen mule. Daddy drove that car all over the place looking for spots of work. His last job had been for the WPA, and we seen men working those jobs as we drove along, digging out bar ditches and building walls for what I reckoned would be schools or some such. Daddy used to say it was mostly busywork, but it paid real money, and real money spent just fine.