— Umm, hmm, no sir, she said, running some water over the dishes and turning off the faucet, drying her fingers on the apron she wore over the skirt of her dress. -I don’t never go out there no more.
— I was just curious, Finus said then, if you could tell me what is in that old mason jar in your kitchen. Strange-looking thing, aroused my curiosity.
She looked out the window, working at the snuff in her bottom lip for a second, then her eyes cut over at him.
— Yes, sir, what kind of old jar was it, now.
— A tall kind of mason jar, had some thing in it I can’t even tell what it was. She was holding his eye then. -You know what I’m talking about then?
She nodded. Her attention seemed to wander a little and she sagged a little more in the shoulders.
— Fact, I got it out in the truck, if you’d like to see it, jog your memory.
She nodded again.
— I’ll tell you, Mr. Finus. That was a long time ago. She stood there a long minute, seeming to think about something. -Yes, sir, I can tell you the story behind that jar, you help me do something here.
— All right, he said.
— You got a minute, then?
He nodded.
— Yes, sir, come on with me.
— Outside?
She nodded, motioning him to follow her. They went out the kitchen door, down the steps to the archway, and across the drive in front of the carport to the old shed out by the pumphouse. He followed her up to a door cut into the sheet metal siding, which was fastened to with an old hasp lock. Creasie reached up and shook the lock once, dropped it.
— I need to get in here for something.
— Do you not have the key?
— No, sir. Don’t nobody know where the key to this old shed is. I didn’t want to bust in there. You reckon it’s all right to bust in, now?
She nodded toward the carport. -They’s some tools in there back by the deep freeze, might be something that would work there.
He found a rusty-hinged toolbox and in the top tray a short crowbar, and brought that back over. He jammed the flat end behind the hasp lever and yanked and pried until the screws came out of the old wood, and the door swung free. He took hold of it and opened it wide, revealing a packed dirt floor with an old cylinder lawn mower and rusted child’s wagon there, and shelves beginning chest high on which sat blackened hand tools and moldered collapsed cardboard boxes and wooden boxes topped with miscellaneous junk. On the shelf to their left sat a cobwebbed and rotten-clothed bizarre thing, a dummy of some kind with minstrel features, faded red lips and yellowed teeth and yellowed eye-whites, gazing at the space where the door now stood open, just over their heads. It almost made Finus jump.
— What in the hell is that thing? he said.
Creasie was standing there staring at it, something about her of the bereaved.
— Nothing but an old nigger dummy, Mr. Finus. What everybody done forgot about but me.
Finus Infinitus
HE SKIPPED THE council meeting that evening, sat at the kitchen table and sipped from a bourbon and water, and looked at the blackened heart inside the jar he’d set down beside his glass. He wasn’t hungry after the plate of food out at Birdie’s.
After staring at the telephone a while, he picked it up, called the press that printed the Comet, and told them not to run Birdie’s obituary.
— Just pull it, he said. -I’ll run it next week.
He took his drink into the living room, thought about turning on the television for late-night crap and decided not to. Mike shambled creakily in and humphed himself to the floor at his feet with a wheeze. About midnight he woke up with his neck in a crick from leaning it back on the sofa in sleep. Mike snored gently on the floor. He sat there awhile working his neck with his fingers, feeling tired to the marrow and last drop of old blood. Then he got up slowly, careful not to wake old Mike, and went down the stairs to the street and got into his pickup. He laid the jar from Creasie’s house on the seat beside him and drove through town past the orphans’ home and turned in at the cemetery, lights off, around to where he knew Earl Urquhart’s grave was.
Wasn’t hard to find, with the earth in a mound over Birdie’s fresh grave. The air was cooler, though there was little breeze. Finus took the jar and walked over to the graves, not sure what he intended to do. But there lying beside Birdie’s grave was a shovel, apparently left there by one of the gravediggers.
He read the stone. Earl Leroy Urquhart, 1899–1955.
— Well, old Earl, Finus said, I don’t mean this as a desecration. Just a restoration, of sorts. If it’s just an old pig’s foot, I’m sorry, no disrespect intended.
He took the shovel and made four neat incisions in the turf at what he figured about chest level for the body of Earl down deep, and lifted it carefully and set it aside. Then he dug enough earth out to place the jar a foot or so deep in the hole. He replaced the dirt, packing it down with the sole of his Red Wing, leveled it, then knelt and placed the piece of turf back on top of it, pressing it and shaping it until as best he could tell the surgery wouldn’t be too obvious.
He stood up, brushed his hands off on his pants, knocked the dirt off his boots with the shovel, and laid the shovel back down next to the mound of Birdie’s earth where he’d found it. Stood there catching his breath. For the first time in his life he seemed to feel every one of his true and earthly years. Maybe it’s coming my time, he thought, where my time here and the way I feel about it have come together and will take me out of this light and into another, or eternal darkness. He figured he could take it either way, wouldn’t make much difference to the man he was here and now. That would be that and then, not this and now. He looked about. Down behind him in the area where he had used to park and rut with Merry Urquhart now there were neat lines of headstones just as there were in every other part of the cemetery, the place was about filled up. He looked up. The night was clear, and the nearly full moon he hadn’t noticed but had worked by stood high above the magnolia trees at the cemetery’s summit, between Finus and the dim penumbra of the lights in town. He heard something and saw it moving toward him along the narrow paved pathway from the street. Some kind of dog trotting along, veered away from him and through the stones between him and the magnolias and stopped there when it saw him watching it. It stood stock still, sideways, head turned his way, to see what he was going to do.
Finus stood stock still, too. It looked just like the dog in his death dream, the one he’d told Birdie about, charged with guarding his body while he slept. Though it was clear the dog didn’t know him and feared him. A guilty, negligent dog.
— Hey! Finus called to it. The dog twitched but didn’t run. Both stood still watching the other. Then after a minute or so the dog seemed to relax. He looked away from Finus, looked around the cemetery, feigning a casual manner, sniffed the grass at his feet, as if something interesting there had caught his attention for a second. It was a transparent attempt to look innocent. He looked back at Finus, as if Finus had said something else. He hadn’t. Then the dog trotted on his way, weaving around headstones, crossed the gravel path at the crest of the hill and disappeared over it down into the lower parts of the cemetery out of sight. Finus watched him go. His heart was racing. When it calmed he looked around at where he was, at Birdie’s grave, at Earl’s stone, at the other stones shining dully in the moonlight, at his truck waiting stunned or suspended, incomplete without him.
HE SLEPT TILL two o’clock the next afternoon, took his time rousing, and went into the office at four, and finished rewriting her obituary early that evening. He took out the addendum about the poisoning, and inserted three new bulleted items: