Unbury Carol(100)

She thought of Mister Evers on his knees by the bed.

She turned around.

She didn’t know exactly what time the burial was set for and she hadn’t realized she didn’t know this until now. What with the rash of the Illness that came to Harrows, she knew Manders had his hands full; Carol could be lowered at noon or at six and how was Farrah supposed to know when to go there?

You’re supposed to go there all day.

The thought was a bad one. Guilty as hell’s heaven.

And yet…Mister Evers must have decided on a very private ceremony because nobody in town was talking about it and everybody in town liked Carol Evers very much.

This, Farrah thought, more than a little crazed, was because Dwight had killed her. It had to be that. Everything pointed to that. Carol would never have asked for a closed, unannounced send-off.

Farrah thought of that conversation she’d overheard, so long ago now, when Carol told Dwight to let her in. To let Farrah in on…

…what?

Was there a link between what Carol was trying to tell Farrah before she collapsed and the argument she’d overheard that same night?

A light flickered in Farrah’s mind…something fuzzy, deep in her brain.

Then it was vanquished. Then it was gone.

Farrah believed she was walking without direction again, but discovered she was actually walking toward the sheriff’s station. It was time to tell Opal about Dwight coming into her home. It was time to tell Opal that no matter what conclusion the lawman had come to, Dwight Evers had played a part in the death of his wife.

She’d walked half the distance to the station when a woman too big for the vest she wore stepped out of an alley and blocked her way.

“Farrah Darrow?”

She was smiling and Farrah didn’t like her smile at all. Didn’t like her face or the ponytail that hung like an eel over her shoulder.

“My name’s Lafayette. I was hoping you wouldn’t mind accompanying me for a spell.”

Farrah had heard of this woman before. Mister Evers did business with her. Carol did not.

“I’m sorry, Miss Lafayette, but I don’t—”

But Lafayette grabbed her by the arm and took her anyway…



* * *



—

…“There was once a day when you held all the space in her world in the palms of your sooty hands, and you took it, pocketed it, robbing her and leaving her to sweat it out in the claustrophobic horror of true darkness and decay. You sent her to sleep in a box, Moxie. It’s truth. It’s regret. And no man is allowed the chance to pretend it is not.”

“I was young.”

“It is too late. They lower her into the earth already…”



* * *



—

…They were, indeed, lowering her into the earth already.

Lucas and Hank rolled the big wood wheels slowly as Dwight and Manders watched the rope. It was a crude process, and the creaking of the pulley was heard with every revolution. The weight of the Bellafonte tested the strength of the diggers. Hank and Lucas dripped sweat to the grass. Carol was in the hole now, and the men had only to set the gorgeous box carefully on the grave floor. Manders crossed his hands and solemnly waited. All parties were silent. Dwight performed the expressions he’d worked on at home—the Numb Widower was certainly present—but really the diggers were occupied and Manders’s eyes were on the box. Once they had her safely positioned at the bottom of the hole, Lucas removed the rope from his side and then Hank did the same with his. Manders asked Dwight if he had anything to say and Dwight, staring at the lid, did not.

The funeral director and the men stepped silently to the side of the pulley and began taking it apart, placing the pieces on a wheeled platform. When all three had their backs to him, occupied as they were, Dwight knelt quickly to the grave’s side and pulled his watch chain from his pocket. Attached was a penknife; he snipped the bell-string swiftly. Shoving both the knife and the string in his pocket, he rose. Lucas turned as he got up and Dwight wiped false tears from his eyes, feigning such horrible grief that Manders had to escort him up the hill and back to the house.

When the pair passed under the cemetery arch, the diggers began filling the hole…and the heavy thud-thudding of the black earth falling upon the steel lid soon gave way to the softer sound of dirt upon dirt.

With the sound of so much dirt, Manders paused, a hiccup in his step, and he stared blankly ahead, the way a man stares into a memory.

Dirt, he thought. Yes, he’d seen a trifle of dirt near the neckline of Carol’s dress as he clandestinely checked her with the pocket mirror for breath. At the time, her being deceased and him being a funeral director, the sight of some errant dirt appeared natural. The woman’s funeral was today after all. And dirt and dead bodies went hand in hand.

And yet, walking Mister Evers to the funeral home, it struck Manders that a woman ought not to have dirt upon her body until after she’s buried.

“Is something the matter, Robert?”

Manders wondered, briefly, if there was. He thought again of the scratch on Dwight’s cheek and distantly thought one word: struggle. Then he recalled the diggers removing Carol Evers from the floor of the coach and breathed a sigh of relief. Dirt accumulates, of course, on the floors of coaches just as it does on the floors of funeral homes. No matter how hard one cleans.