“I’d be surprised if you could,” she said. “It’s a natural talent for a rare few, but then you got to develop it.”
We got to where we were going about dark that day.
“I thought you said three days,” I said. “We made it in two, way Mama said.”
“Guess I figured in too many stops and maybe a cow crossing the road or something.”
“You did that, did you?”
“I was thinking you’d want to stop and see the sights, even though you said you didn’t.”
“What sights?”
“That turned out to be the problem. No sights.”
“Terri, you are full of it, and I don’t just mean hot wind.”
The property was off the road, up in the woods, and not quite on top of a hill. We could see the house as we drove up the dirt drive. It was big but looked as if it might slip off the hill at any moment and tumble down on us. It was even more weathered than our home place. The outhouse out back was in better shape than where they lived.
As we come the rest of the way up the hill, we saw there were hog pens out to the side with fat black-and-white hogs in them. Behind that we could see a sizable run of henhouses. I had expected just one little henhouse, but these houses were plentiful and had enough chicken wire around them you could have used it to fence in Rhode Island.
I parked the Ford and we went up and knocked on the door. A man came to the door and looked at us through the screen. Then he came out on the porch. He had the appearance of someone that had been thrown off a train. His clothes were dirty and his hat was mashed in front. His body seemed about forty, but his face looked about eighty. He was missing all his teeth and had his jaw packed with tobacco. I figured he took that tobacco out, his face would collapse.
“Who are you?” he said and spit tobacco juice into a dry flower bed.
“The usual greeting is hello,” Terri said.
I said, “Watch this, sir.” And I gave Terri a kick in the leg.
“She had that coming,” he said.
Terri hopped off the porch and leaped around yipping while I said, “We got a letter from your missus, and if we got the right place, our uncle Smat is in your chicken house.”
“You’re in the right place. When she quits hopping, step around to the side, start up toward the chicken houses, and you’ll smell him. He ain’t actually up in a henhouse no more. A goddang old dog got in there and got to him, dragged him through a hole in the fence, on up over the hill there, into them trees. But you can smell him strong enough, you’d think he was riding on your back. You’ll find him.”
“You didn’t have to kick me,” Terri said.
“I got a bit of a thrill out of it,” said Mr. Wentworth. “I thought maybe you was a kangaroo.”
Terri glared at him.
A woman wiping her hands with a dish towel and looking a lot neater than the man came to the door and stepped out on the porch.
“You take these kids to their uncle,” she said to Mr. Wentworth.
“They can smell him,” he said.
“You take them out there. I’ll go with you.”
She threw the dish towel inside the door, said, “But I got something you’ll need.”
Mrs. Wentworth went in the house and came out with a jar of VapoRub and had us dab a good wad under our noses so as to limit the smell of Uncle Smat. I was beginning to get a bit weak on the whole idea of a Christian burial for a man I’d never seen and by all accounts wasn’t worth the water it’d take to put him out if he was on fire.
Dabbed up, the four of us started around the house and up the higher part of the hill. We passed the chicken coops, and this gave Mrs. Wentworth a moment for a bit of historical background concerning their time with Uncle Smat.
“He walked up one day and said he needed some work, most anything, so he could eat. So we put him out there chopping firewood, which he did a fair job of. We let him sleep in one of the coops that didn’t have a lot of chickens in it. We couldn’t have some unknown fella sleeping in the house. Next day he wanted more work, and so he ended up staying and taking care of the chickens, a job at which he was passable. Then one night he come up on the porch a-banging on the door, drunk as Cooter Brown. We wouldn’t let him in and told him to go on out to the coop and sleep it off.”
Mr. Wentworth picked up the story there. “Next morning he didn’t come down to the back porch for his biscuits, so I went up and found him dead. He’d been knifed. I guess maybe he wasn’t drunk after all.”
“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.”