He tried to recover his mind, replacing contemplating death with what to do about the Ashcross property, in which-he’d been told-a set of kids were now squatting. He’d let the place go to seed since the renter died in it nearly three years ago. Its roof and plumbing leaked, its walls drilled out by all manner of nest-builders, but he couldn’t abide the squatting. But apathy or something like it had gotten hold of him; it had embraced him at the same time the numbness started creeping into his legs. In quiet times such as these, something in the boredom and the numbness and the nature of age drew back like a bow and twanged when he tried to move, and a misdirected laugh or, on occasion, a hiccuplike cry sprang from his mouth. He didn’t understand it. But it locked him in his chair, kept him from getting anything done.
He tapped a wooden, bald-headed match on the arm of the chair while trying not to look at the pennies. But images of edemas, time at work, wasting disease, null and vacant and quicklime-covered faces impinged upon his concentration. His pipe hung limply from his lips. He sucked on the raw tobacco packed inside it to get a hint of sweetness mixed with a burned residue.
Jeffers saw the tenant who lived across the street walking up the driveway. As he walked, he smacked at the ash-brown leaves of the spent okra that framed one side of the property.
Jeffers dropped the unlighted match in his palm.
The tenant stopped at the porch steps. A scrawny man with brow-darkened eyes and a fresh crookedness barbing his face as if he’d been howling or banging his head against the wall.
“RD, what’s ailing you?”
“We buried LaRae this morning,” RD said, closing his eyes.
“I was sorry to hear about LaRae,” Jeffers said. He looked down at RD, who shifted his weight between his feet like a child needing to pee. He patted the porch railing, causing it to wobble. “It’s a hard thing to lose a wife,” Jeffers continued, to fill in the silence. He pictured his two wives in his mind, pondered which one might meet him in heaven, if there was a heaven. Age had made him hopeful again that there was such a place. Experience made him doubtful. “I’ve lost two myself.”
RD nodded thoughtfully at the bottom of the porch steps. He shifted his weight and squinted at the pennies and water bags.
Jeffers studied RD. He knew little about him. Looked mid-thirties, but Jeffers had stopped believing he could guess a person’s age a long time ago. A quiet tenant-paid his rent. But RD had a bottom-of-the-litter look, runtish, forgotten. He looked given to schemes. He might have been the skinniest grown man Jeffers had ever seen-his shoulders angled like those on a starved child. He’d known scrounging for sure. RD and LaRae had come from Tennessee.
“She saw haints, you know,” RD said.
“Haints?”
“Ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
RD nodded and splashed a brown vein of spit into the grass. A wind buffeted his face, and he looked a slight better to Jeffers, who supposed the little man had come over just to talk out his sadness. Jeffers struck the match, sheltered its flame, and pressed it to the tobacco while making gentle, moist pops to pull the fire into the pipe.
“In that house of yourn,” RD said.
“What’s that?” Jeffers said.
“Haints in your house.”
“This house?”
“No, ourn. The one you lettin us have.”
Jeffers lowered the pipe and shook out the match. “Rent.”
“Yep. Haints in that house you lettin us rent.”
Jeffers leaned forward and looked across the porch where he could see through a stand of weather-broken pines the squat gables of the house RD rented. Below the boundary of trees, a graying neighborhood dog was working over roadkill flattened on the unlined blacktop that split the properties.
“I’ll be damned.” Jeffers looked back at RD, who had climbed the first step and was leaning toward the porch as if he wanted to come up. He was almost panting.
“Them haints killed LaRae.”
Jeffers leaned back in his chair and drew on his pipe. The spirit of the tobacco warmed his mouth as he considered his next words. RD climbed another step. He shuddered and proffered a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it glare. Behind the spindly man, the sun was low and the sky bloodied in a balsam light.
Jeffers took the pipe down. “I am sorry about LaRae. But what do you want me to do about a ghost? I cain’t charge it rent.”
“You could pay for LaRae’s buryin expense, that’s what, since it was your haints that killed her.”
“How you figure they’re mine?”
“It was in your house.”
“Well, they could have come with you from Tennessee. I’ve had untold number of folks live in that house. Not one of them complained of ‘haints.’ ”
RD squinted, catching the sarcasm in Jeffers’s voice. He quivered.
“If there are haints in that house, as you say, RD, they must’ve come to roost the same time you did. And that house is only supposed to be occupied by two people. The way I see it, you might owe me money, housing your haints, when your lease says only two shall live there.” Jeffers drew on his pipe, satisfied with himself. He felt a pleasant jolt of blood and adrenaline shock his body.
“That house killed her.”
“House or haints?”
RD chewed the inside of his cheek. The broad outlines of his skull were visible. He reminded Jeffers of the half-fed prisoners who worked chain gang years ago.
“RD, how do you make money? You work?”
RD, leering, backed down a step.
Jeffers held his gaze wide-eyed until he squinted from the falling sun breaking from the clouds. If this was a scheme, Jeffers thought, it’s awfully weak.
“Before LaRae passed, she told me that you would take care of her funeral bill. She said it was your wives who told her that you’d cover it.”
Jeffers peered unblinkingly through white smoke.
“You going to pay?”
“What do you think?” Jeffers said.
“I think you will.”
For a brief moment he considered giving in before a surge of meanness rose up. “Get the hell off my porch ’fore I throw you off.”
RD stood up straight and a haughty tic ran through his shoulders. He turned and headed back in the direction he’d come from.
Jeffers called to RD when the little man was equidistant between the porch and the road: “If you see them haints, send them my way.”
RD didn’t respond. As he passed the old dog in the road, he stopped to stare at it, and then for no reason scared it off its tire-mangled dinner.
Jeffers spat a long silvery streak into his boxwoods. He relaxed and puffed, satisfied. But the reminder of LaRae’s passing made him think again about his own shortening time, of what was to come. He lowered the pipe and leaned once more to see the house across the road, looking for the little, dissatisfied man, angry with him for his audacity and privation and for his existence, which Jeffers suddenly considered unearned.
The little spat with his tenant left Jeffers wanting some more excitement and so he went to the Ashcross property to run the squatters out. He found no one there. They had trounced the weeds around the house, creating a cowpath to a five-gallon bucket simmering with turds and urine. In the long-untended shade tree hung wispy catfish skins. Several catfish heads had been hammered into the tree’s trunk and their husky mouths and eyes gawked in bewilderment. Redneck trophies, Jeffers thought.
Standing on the Ashcross porch, Jeffers recalled the last time he’d been inside the house, holding the little girl by the shoulder, quizzing her on her father’s death, and her dry-eyed answers. Her little fingernails had been chewed to the quick.
His remembrance was broken when he glimpsed a young pregnant woman walking down the road, her hair a freak of colors-yellow, red-her stomach full and hanging low. Jeffers thought for a moment she was the squatter, but she passed the weed-lined driveway as if she were headed elsewhere. And then Jeffers felt a twinge of lust, something he hadn’t felt in a while. He stifled a half-laugh. If asked what he thought of the young woman, he would have ranted over her hairstyle and clothes-he knew a slut when he saw one! But in truth she was lovely, and her pregnancy made her all the more so. What if she had been his squatter? Could he have thrown her out? He’d never felt sorry for squatters. One winter he had thrown a whole family out, and learned later that one of their children died of pneumonia. Still he thought he’d made the right decision. He was well-off and thought it was because he’d made good decisions. These people had to earn their place; they couldn’t just take. Wanting something for nothing, that was the problem.