“How is Mama taking it?” Jane said.
“She’s quiet.”
After a while, Jane said, “Was he in the house?”
“She found him down at his shed. He’d been down there all night. She woke up and he wasn’t at the house, and she made coffee and breakfast, all but the eggs. When he still hadn’t showed she went down and found him there. Lying on the ground next to the little fire pit. It was just smoldering a bit. There was a nearly empty jug. Doesn’t mean he drank it all last night, though. He was lying like he’d lain down to go to sleep. Not like he’d fallen. Gets chilly at night, this time of year. Alcohol lowers the body temperature, actually. Could have been exposure involved, too. His little fire seemed long cold, time I got there.”
After a while, Jane said, “I wonder what she’s going to do now. She always seemed like she just wanted people to leave her alone, but being alone like this, with nobody. I’ll be around of course. I was going to move back, anyway. I can’t live with Grace. Not anymore.”
With that she gave just a glance at the doctor, who seemed to have taken on a momentary rictus himself.
He slowed and turned off the main road onto the dirt road that her father had taken so often on his trips to and from town, crossed the old bridge, and at the top of the rise turned left onto the drive to the home where Jane had grown up.
Grace was in the kitchen with her mother. A single bare bulb burned in its outlet in the ceiling there. They’d had a power line strung to the house the year before. And a phone line, too — the new crank telephone on the wall. Her mother’s face was set in some kind of slackened flatness, her hair combed straight back on her head. She looked up at Jane and the doctor, her face set and pale in the glaring light. Jane reached up and pulled the string to turn it off.
Her father was in the bedroom, in his clothes and shoes, on top of the made-up counterpane, arms crossed over one another on his chest. She was surprised, almost alarmed, to see that a bright copper penny rested on top of each of his closed eyes. She almost reached over to remove them but heard something and her mother came in.
“Well,” her mother said. “There he is.”
She took in a heavy, tired-sounding breath, and let it out.
Dr. Thompson said he would arrange for the grave to be dug, and that the notice would be in the next afternoon’s papers for the service and burial on Sunday.
“I’ll send telegraphs to your brothers, if you like,” he said.
“Thank you,” Jane said.
“He’ll be fine in there if you keep it cool, closed off from the heated rooms, with the shades down. Mr. Finicker will come by with a casket for when you have him cleaned up and dressed. I doubt you’ll need ice beneath him unless we have to wait for burial, but if you think differently, just give me a telephone call and I’ll have some delivered.”
No one said anything in response and the kitchen was quiet but for the ticking of the stove from the dying noon-meal fire in there.
AFTER DR. THOMPSON left, Grace said she was going back into town to take care of business and arrange time off. Then she left, too.
Later that afternoon, Uncle Virgil came by. He accepted a cup of coffee, apologized for his wife Bea not coming along, but said she would come by tomorrow with the children unless they’d rather them not come along. And then after a few sad pleasantries he cleared his throat and withdrew from his jacket’s inside pocket an envelope.
“That’s a check from my company, money from the insurance policy your father took out on himself when he took them out on his tenants, if you recall. I had to pull some strings, lord knows they can drag their feet these days.” He placed the envelope on the table. Jane’s mother sat looking at it a long moment, then got up and left the room. They heard her rocker start up on the porch.
Virgil and Jane sat for a while in silence. Then Virgil got up, thanked Jane for the coffee.
“Do you know who the beneficiary is, Jane?” he said.
She just looked at him.
“The primary beneficiary is you,” Virgil said.
“Me.”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t it my mother? Or Grace or one of my brothers, for that matter?”
“He didn’t say,” Virgil said, placing his hat on his head. “I don’t know. I guess he figured you’d be the one to end up taking care of your mother.”
Jane opened the envelope and looked at the figure on the check.
Virgil said, “I guess he didn’t think your mother would know what to do with it. She never handled money. I know he thought highly of your good sense, knew you’re a smart one. Responsible with things.”
“Or maybe he was angry with Grace.”
Virgil ducked his head. “Could be.”
“He didn’t think I was acting very levelheaded when he sent me to live with her.”
Virgil looked away, as if knowing this wasn’t his territory. Jane studied the check.
“It’s more than I thought it would be,” she said.
“He did increase it a couple of years ago.”
She looked up at Virgil and he was looking back at her.
“How did he afford it?” she said.
“Well,” Virgil said, taking his hat off again and straightening the brim. “Must’ve thought it was better than putting what little he had in some bank to be lost. Increase didn’t really cost that much.”
Jane looked at the check again.
“I guess he figured his time was short,” Virgil said.
When Jane, still looking absently at the check in her hand, did not respond, Virgil let himself out. She was wondering, was this what he thought his life had been worth, or was it simply all he could afford to buy against it? Or had he thought it worth less but, being a businessman, took advantage of the system when he could?
THEY COULD NOT WAIT the days it would take for Sylvester, Jr., and Belmont to travel all the way from Wyoming for the funeral, even had the brothers been able to come. Jane had Dr. Thompson inform them by telegraph that there would be photographs taken, and they could visit when it was most convenient.
They held the funeral service at graveside, there in the plot near their house, instead of the church. Most of the mourners were neighbors and men he’d done business with in cattle. It was an early afternoon. The crops were in, fields turned under. He had apparently at least waited for that. Always a man to finish a job he had already started.
When the words were spoken and the mourners dispersed, she saw a young man at the edge of the little graveyard, standing next to the road. His eyeglasses glinted in the sunlight. She went over. He took off his hat but not his glasses. He was looking at her. She saw the wedding band on his finger. She looked up to see that he noted she had seen it. He was as handsome a young man as he had been a beautiful boy. Hands squared and strong-looking. A nice, mild creasing of fine lines about his blue eyes and closely shaven cheeks, chin stronger than when he was younger, even though he was still just twenty-six years old. His kind nature still evident in his eyes, his expression. Weathered in a way that suggested farming, and when she asked he said yes, he had a place up north of Scooba. The gray wool suit he wore looked just a bit snug on him, as if he’d put on a little weight since buying it but no doubt would wear it as long as the suit and his frame would allow.
“And family?” she said.
“Yes. Two little boys, I’m afraid,” he said with a soft laugh at what that meant to him.
“No more?”
He grinned. “Well, so far. But I kind of think two’s enough, these days. Especially boys. They’re a handful.”
He turned slightly away as if to check the weather. His cheekbones seemed more defined, face matured into a man’s, little trace of the boy’s softness.