The Highway Kind(58)

“He was drunk, all right,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “That might have killed some of the pain for him. Fact was, I don’t know I’d ever heard anyone drunk as he was that was able to stand. I went through his clothes, and he had some serious money on him, and I won’t lie to you, we took that as payment for his room and board.”

“You robbed a dead man for sleeping in your chicken coop?” Terri said. “Why didn’t you just take his shoes too?”

Mr. Wentworth cleared his throat. “Well, they was the same size as mine, and he didn’t need them.”

Wentworth lifted a foot and showed us a brown brogan.

“Them toes was real scuffed up,” Mrs. Wentworth said, “so I put some VapoRub on them, rubbed it in good, and put a solid shine on them, took out some of that roughness.”

“Damn,” Terri said, looking down at the shoes on Mr. Wentworth’s feet. “You did take his shoes.”

“You’re talking like a gun moll,” Mrs. Wentworth said to Terri.

“I’m talking like someone whose uncle was robbed of money and shoes, that’s how I’m talking,” Terri said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Let’s see him.”

As we walked along, Mr. Wentworth said, “When I come to look in on his body yesterday, he wasn’t in the coop, but the coop was broke open, and something had dragged him off. It was either a pack of dogs or coyotes. They dragged him up there a ways and chewed off one of his feet. They got a toe off the other foot.”

Terri looked at me. I gently shook my head.

Top of the hill near a line of woods, we seen his body. The smell was so strong, that VapoRub might as well have been water. I ain’t never smelled nothing that bad in all my life. If at the bottom of the hill it had been strong as a bull, at the top it was a bull elephant.

Uncle Smat wasn’t a sight for sore eyes, but he damn sure made the eyes sore. He was up next to a line of woods, half in a feed bag. It was over his head and tied around his waist with twine. His legs stuck out, and his pants legs was all ripped from animals dragging him out of the coop and on up where he lay. One foot, as Mr. Wentworth had said, was gnawed off, and Mr. Wentworth was right about that missing toe on the other foot; the big toe, if you’re curious.

“So the man dies, you put a bag over his head and leave him with the chickens and write us a letter?” Terri said.

Mr. Wentworth nodded.

“Yeah,” Terri said. “I guess there ain’t no use denying any of that.”

“It’s been too hot for digging, and thing is we don’t know him. We found his name and your address on a letter in his billfold, and we wrote your family. We figured we’d leave the rest to his kin.”

I went over and untied the twine around his waist and pulled the bag off his head. Uncle Smat was not a pretty man, but I recognized the family nose. His eyes was full of ants and worms and such. His stomach was bloated up with gas.

“He’s all yours,” Mr. Wentworth said.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Wentworth. “I guess you ought to have his hat. I put it on the back porch and put corn in it for the squirrels. I like squirrels. Oh, one more thing. He had a car, but the night he died, he didn’t bring it back with him. He come on foot or someone dropped him off. Didn’t want you to think we took his car.”

“Just his billfold and what was in it,” Terri said.

“Yeah,” Mrs. Wentworth said, “just that.”


In the car, Uncle Smat lying in the backseat, tucked completely inside a big burlap bag, we started out. I had paid a quarter for the used jar of VapoRub, which was far too much but at the time seemed a necessity. I poured Mama’s perfume over him, but if it knocked back the smell any, I couldn’t tell it. We drove through the night with the windows down and the car overflowing with the aroma of Uncle Smat. Terri hung out of her window like a dog.

“Oh, Baby Jesus,” she said. “This here is awful.”

I was driving and leaning out my window as much as was reasonable and still be able to drive. The air was helping a little, but there wasn’t nothing that could defeat that smell short of six feet of dirt or the bottom of the deep blue sea.

The Ford’s headlights was cutting a path through the night, and I felt we were making pretty good time, and then I seen the smoke from under the hood. It was the radiator again.

I pulled over where the road widened against the trees and parked. I got the hood up and looked at the radiator. It was really steaming. I knew then it had a hole in it. I decided it was a small hole, and if I could keep water in the radiator and not drive like John Dillinger in a getaway car, I might make it home.

With the car not moving, Uncle Smat’s stink had taken on a power that was beyond that of Hercules.

“Oh, hell.” Terri was in the woods throwing up and calling out. “I holler calf rope. You win, Uncle Smat. Lord have mercy on all His children, especially me.”

I used most of our water to fill the radiator and was going to call Terri up from the woods when the wind changed and the smell hit me tenfold. It was like I was in that bag with Uncle Smat.

Terri was coming up the hill. I said, “You’re right. We can’t keep going on like this. Uncle Smat deserves a burial.”

“We ain’t got no shovel,” Terri said.

This was an accurate observation.