“Well, I got a letter from some folks got his body, and you need to bring it back so we can bury it. This Mrs. Wentworth said they were gonna leave it in the chicken house if nobody comes for it. I wrote her back and posted the letter already telling her you’re coming.”
“Uncle Smat’s dead?” I said.
“We wouldn’t want to bury him otherwise,” Mama said, “though it took a lot longer for him to get dead than I would have figured, way he honky-tonked and fooled around with disreputable folks. Someone knifed him. Stuck him like a pig at one of them drinking places, I figure.”
“I ain’t never driven nowhere except around town,” I said. “I don’t even know which way is Oklahoma.”
“North,” Mama said.
“Well, I knew that much,” I said.
“Start in that direction and watch for signs,” she said. “I’m sure there are some. I got your breakfast ready, and I’ll pack you some lunch and give you their address, and you can be off.”
Now this was all a fine good morning, me hardly knowing who Uncle Smat was, and Mama not really caring that much about him, Smat being my dead daddy’s brother. She had cared about Daddy plenty, though, and she had what you could call family obligation toward Uncle Smat. As I got dressed she talked.
“It isn’t right to leave a man, even a man you don’t know so well, lying out in a chicken house with chickens to peck on him. And there’s all that chicken mess too. I dreamed last night a chicken snake crawled over him.”
I put on a clean work shirt and overalls and some socks that was sewed up in the heels and toes, put on and tied my shoes, slapped some hair oil on my head, and combed my hair in a little piece of mirror I had on the dresser.
Next, I packed a tow sack with some clothes and a few odds and ends I might need. I had a toothbrush and a small jar of baking soda and salt for tooth wash. Mama was one of the few in our family who had all her teeth, and she claimed that was because she used a brush made from hair bristles and she used that soda and salt. I believed her, and both me and my sister followed her practice.
Mama had some sourdough bread, and she gave that to me, and she filled a couple of my dad’s old canteens with water, put a blanket and some other goods together for me. I loaded them in another good-size tow sack and carried it out to the Ford and put the bag inside the turtle hull.
In the kitchen, I washed up in the dishpan, toweled off, and sat down to breakfast, a half a dozen fried eggs, biscuits, and a pitcher of buttermilk. I poured a glass of milk and drank it, and then I poured another and ate along with drinking the milk.
Mama, who had already eaten, sat at the far end of the table and looked at me.
“You drive careful, now, and you might want to stop somewhere and pick some flowers.”
“I’m picking him up, not attending his funeral,” I said.
“He might be a bit stinky, him lying in a chicken coop and being dead,” Mama said. “So I’m thinking the flowers might contribute to a more pleasant trip. Oh, I tell you what. I got some cheap perfume I don’t never use, so you can take that with you and pour it on him, you need to.”
I was chewing on a biscuit when she said this.
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.”