“You’re sure?” Marilyn asked.
“No. But I want to see him.”
“All right, baby,” Marilyn said. “I fixed him best could be done. He ain’t dressed now. But he’s covered in ice. I’ll show you his face.”
Marilyn lifted the quilt and they took off the basket lid. Marilyn raked ice away from Pete’s face. Sunset stared at the candle wax pushed into the bullet hole. Marilyn had added some rouge to Pete’s cheeks and a touch of lipstick to his lips, powder to the rest of his face. This had been done before the ice, and the ice had turned it all to a mess. Sunset thought Pete looked like someone about to try out for the circus.
“It’s kind of overdone,” Marilyn said. “But he looked so pale. So blue around the lips. The ice messed it up. I didn’t know at the time we were gonna put him on ice. I’ll redo him before the funeral.”
“Cover him,” Karen said, and staggered off toward the sleeping porch. About the time she made it there, she began to cry.
Sunset started that way, but Marilyn caught her by the arm. “She needs to be let alone for a bit.”
Sunset nodded.
Marilyn pushed ice over Pete’s face, put the lid on the basket with Sunset’s help. They covered the basket with the quilt.
Sunset swallowed, said, “Can you have me around? Knowing I done this?”
“Come on, girl. Let’s go on the porch and sit.”
They sat on the warm front steps and from there they could see the men and animals working at the mill. They could hear the saws whining, especially the Big Saw in the Big Saw House. The air was stuffed with the sappy smell of fresh-cut sawdust and the black smoke from the power house and the gray smoke from the drying kilns. The sunlight shining through smoke and sawdust made the air over the mill, and much of the camp, look green, but where the smoke was thin, some of the tin roofs caught the sun and threw it back to the sky in a silver flash that made Sunset squint.
She reminded herself that Mr. Jones was not far away, up there in the Big Saw House most likely, doing paperwork to the grinding sound of the saw. He did a lot of that these days, a lot less of the hard manual labor, a lot more of the firing and hiring and distribution of lumber. He had earned the right, she supposed.
She idly wondered if the man she had met by the creek had actually asked for a job. He may have been a hobo, but he didn’t look like it. His clothes were not perfect, but she could tell right off he was a man who cared about his appearance, and he had a good one. She could tell too that he would only work hard work if he had to. He was not the kind of man who looked forward to a life holding a plow, stepping in mule mess, or working at a sawmill, for that matter.
There was something about that that appealed to her.
Then she thought: If I am such a good judge of character, then why did I marry Pete?
Marilyn said, “When I was a girl my great-granddaddy decided lumber was the future. He was born up North but moved to East Texas and went to work here doing farmwork. He looked around, saw this land was full of houses yet to be cut, and thought the thing to do was to start up a mill business. This was in about nineteen ten. He come here and took it over from a few loggers who cut trees and hauled them all the way to Nacogdoches. He hired them to work for him, instead of freelancing. He put in a real mill, and the mill took. It made money and he got rich. I own a big chunk of that mill, along with Jones, and Henry Shelby. You know all this.”
“I do. Except I didn’t know you owned part of the mill. I guess I should have, but I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t think about women owning much of anything. I just figured Jones owned all your share when he married you.”
“Here’s some more things you don’t know. You don’t know that my daddy liked Jones all right at first, but later not so much, so he made a contract that says if I ever decide, for whatever reason, to not want Jones to have any part of the mill, I can make that decision. Cause Henry married Daddy’s sister, Henry gets his share no matter what.”
“Are you saying you’re going to fire Jones?” Sunset said.
“No. I even plan on letting him keep a large part of the mill. Less than before, but a large part. He’s earned that.”
Sunset nodded, not exactly sure where this was going, why Marilyn was telling her stuff she already knew, even why she was telling her stuff she didn’t know. She could hardly look at her mother-in-law without feeling like she wanted to burst out crying.
“I met Jones when we come here from Arkansas, and I wasn’t nothing but a girl and he wanted to marry. Wanted to get into a family had money. Mine had money cause of the mill. I think I knew that then, that he wanted to marry me because of the money, but I didn’t care. I thought Jones was a good man. But he wasn’t. He beat me. Of course, you know what that’s like, don’t you? I wanted to make the marriage work. I was told a woman made the marriage work. That it didn’t matter how many whores your husband laid with, if he beat you or cussed you, or whatever, you made it work, you made it work for the children.
“Pete, he growed up seeing his daddy talk to me a kind of way you wouldn’t talk to a dog, and he seen his daddy ‘correct’ me, as Jones liked to call it.”
“That’s what Pete called it,” Sunset said.
“I took it, because I was making my marriage work. What I was doing was teaching my son to be like his father. Now, his father has good points. He’s a hard worker, and he never just laid back and lived off money that was mine cause of who I was. He liked the fact it got him a position in the mill. Position was everything to him. Big man. Big house. Big job. Wife that knows her place and a good strapping son that doesn’t take anything from anybody. Jones had other good points. He treated Pete well. He got angry, he didn’t take it out on Pete, he took it out on me. Jones was strong too, and when I was younger, I liked that. A strong man. Later, when he held me down and did what he wanted, I wasn’t so proud of him being strong. I loved him once.”
“I loved Pete once.”
“I know you did. I saw the light in your eyes.”
“He was good sometimes. He could be funny when he wasn’t mad, and he had a fine voice. He was good to Karen, and she has a good voice too. He taught her to sing. But he had spells. Ways.”
Marilyn nodded.
“I thought Pete wouldn’t be like his daddy, but I was wrong. Another trait Jones has is he’s hung like a horse. But I never really got to enjoy it. He just sort of jumped on me and did it, you know. If I’d have blinked, I’d have missed it.”
Sunset blushed. She had never heard a woman discuss such things, and had certainly not expected it from her mother-in-law.
Well, she thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Pete got that trait. The horse part. And the jump on you part. He didn’t ever love me good but once. And I reckon that’s the reason Karen was born from it. He wanted other babies, but I didn’t never take again and didn’t want to. With him it was like I was some kind of breeding stock.”
“You not getting pregnant again shows God watches out for good folks.”
Sunset thought: He was watching out for me, he wouldn’t have let me marry that sonofabitch Pete Jones in the first place. And when he mounted me, God would surely have made it more fun.
She remembered that every time Pete finished, he made a little noise like a sick mouse trying to clear its throat. It came out when he finished. His hips died and the sick mouse went to work. A kind of cough followed by a soft choking sound, like maybe there were cobwebs down there. Then silence, and drool along her shoulder. She never did figure what that was about, the mouse sound, but it was constant and Sunset wondered if he did it with his whores and mistresses. Mount them, squirt, and make that little sick-mouse noise.
“Reckon you’re wondering what I’m leading up to here,” Marilyn said.
“I know Mr. Jones is gone,” Sunset said. “I know that.”