‘Okay,’ Patterson said, as he wrote it down. ‘And what about a last name?’
He glanced back toward the small wooden box, then returned his eyes to Patterson. ‘Give her mine,’ he said.
A large middle-aged white man walked into Patterson’s office a few minutes later. He was followed by two young blacks, both of whom were dressed in the uniforms of the city jail.
‘I’ve come to pick up a body,’ the white man said. He squinted hard at Ben and Patterson. ‘Who do I see about that?’
‘Me,’ Patterson said immediately. ‘Where’s Kelly?’
‘Kelly who?’
‘Kelly Ryan from the Property Department,’ Patterson told him. ‘He usually does the colored burying.’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ he said. ‘I work with the Highway Department. I just got a call to pick up a couple of hands from the jail and then come on over here for a body.’
‘You know where the cemetery is?’
‘They got a place dug for it in Gracehill,’ the man said.
‘They give you a plot number?’ Patterson asked.
The man shook his head. ‘They didn’t say nothing but come over to Hillman and pick up a body.’
‘Okay,’ Patterson said wearily. He led the three men into the freezer room and stood beside the coffin. ‘This is it.’
‘A kid?’ the white man asked.
‘That’s right,’ Patterson told him. ‘And it’s a murder, too, so I want you to remember where you put her. Find a tree or a stump or something and remember where it is. I’ll get a plot number later.’
Ben stepped up beside the two young men. ‘I’ll go, too,’ he said.
The white man nodded quickly. ‘Well, with the four of us, we can do it the right way,’ he said, ‘one shoulder at each corner, just like they’d do it in church.’
The four of them took their positions, one at each corner of the coffin, and lifted it up onto their shoulders.
As he headed out toward the parking lot, Ben could feel the body shift slightly as they juggled the coffin awkwardly, and he could imagine the girl’s face jerking left and right inside, as if looking for a way out of the darkness.
A dusty, mud-spattered pickup truck sat waiting for them in the parking lot, its battered front fenders sloping wearily toward the ground. The white man took down the tailgate with one hand while continuing to balance his corner of the coffin precariously on his shoulder.
‘Okay, just set it down real slow,’ he said, after he’d undone the gate. Then he turned cautiously and eased the coffin down onto the bed of the truck.
‘All right, let’s just shove it in now,’ he said. ‘But soft-like. We got a little child here.’
When the coffin was in place, the two black youths hauled themselves into the back of the truck and sat silently on either side of it, their hands resting motionlessly on the top of the coffin.
Ben and the other man crawled into the cab of the truck.
‘Name’s Thompson,’ the man said as he started the engine. ‘Lamar Thompson.’
‘Ben Well man.’
Thompson eased the truck forward, moving slowly toward the avenue and then out into it.
‘You some kind of preacher or something?’ he asked when he brought the truck to a halt at the first traffic signal.
‘No,’ Ben said, ‘I’m with the Police Department.’
Thompson smiled. ‘I figured you might be coming along to say a few words over the body. I thought maybe the state provided something like that.’
‘No.’
‘Want me to do it then?’ Thompson asked immediately.
‘If you want to,’ Ben said indifferently.
‘You got any idea what this child was?’
‘She was a Negro,’ Ben told him.
‘I figured that,’ Thompson said. ‘They don’t bury white people in Gracehill. But what about her religion?’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Well, I’m a Primitive Baptist, myself,’ Thompson said. ‘You know, an old foot-washing Baptist, what you might say.’ He smiled softly. ‘With us, it don’t matter what this child was, because in the end, she was, what you might say, a child of God.’ He pulled a red handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his neck vigorously. ‘So what I mean is, well, I could say a few simple things over her, if that’s all right with you.’
‘It’s all right with me,’ Ben said. He kept his eyes straight ahead, peering out into the deepening night as the truck moved shakily alongside Kelly Ingram Park and then on ahead into the Negro district. To his right, a string of poolhalls stretched out for nearly a block. A soft green light glowed behind their painted windows, and he could imagine the people inside, lined up along the wall in small wooden chairs or bunched over the tables, their bright, gleaming eyes following the flight of the balls.
‘How long you been a policeman?’ Thompson asked after a while.
Ben drew in a deep breath. ‘Long time.’
‘I’ve worked with the Highway Department for a long time, too,’ Thompson said cheerfully. ‘It’s rough in the summer. You spread that steaming black tar all over everything. It steams right up in your face. You blow your nose when you get home from work, it looks like you’re blowing coal soot out of your head.’
Ben nodded slowly, but said nothing. He could hear the jukeboxes humming noisily in the night air, loud, pulsing, rhythmic, as if they were being played to warn off an approaching danger.
‘I used to think about doing something else,’ Thompson went on, ‘but by the time I got to thinking real serious about that, I was near to forty, with three kids and a big car payment.’ He hit the brake suddenly to avoid a small dog, and the coffin slid forward and bumped loudly against the cab of the truck. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Thompson said quickly. ‘Didn’t want to hit that dog, though.’
The truck moved steadily down Fourth Avenue, then out beyond it, to where more and more vacant lots lined the increasingly bumpy and untended streets.
‘They ought to get a crew out here,’ Thompson said. He peered to the right. ‘There it is,’ he said.
Gracehill Cemetery rested on a small, rounded hill near the far southwest corner of the city. Small unpaved roads snaked windingly among the small gray stones, slowly curling upward toward the crest of the hill. All along the gently sloping banks, tombstones jutted out of the ground in broken clusters, their bases covered by the unmown grass. The mounds of dirt which stretched out from them were decorated by clumps of plastic-flowers rooted in dirt-filled tin cans and quart jars. Here and there a plywood cross leaned unsteadily toward the earth, or a plain brown stone lifted from it, jagged, nameless, accompanied by a small one at the foot of the mound.
‘It’s supposed to be right around here,’ Thompson said matter-of-factly. He craned his neck out the window, his eyes searching through the ever-deepening brush.
The grave had been dug in a slender trench between two others, and when Thompson finally spotted it, he wheeled the truck over, then backed it in, as if preparing to dump the coffin like a load of sand.
‘Okay,’ he said as he turned off the engine.
Ben got out and walked to the back of the truck. The two youths had already lowered the tailgate and pushed the coffin to the edge of it. They now stood above it, their eyes lifted up over the hill, toward the distant twinkling lights of the city.
‘Okay, now,’ Thompson said. ‘We’ll just lower it down real slow. Don’t drop her.’
Within a few minutes, the coffin was in the ground, and Thompson walked to the head of the grave and bowed his head. The two young men bowed theirs as well, while Ben slumped back on a large stone and sank his hands in his pockets.
‘Dearest and most gracious God,’ Thompson began, ‘we commend to your care the soul of your servant…’ He stopped and glanced up at Ben. ‘What’s this child’s name?’ he asked.
‘Martha Wellman,’ Ben told him.