It is told by Squire Robnett at the Bellystretcher Cafe:
I never cared for undertakers in general and Fenton Breece in particular. There was just always something about him. I done some work for him out there when he was buildin that mansion he built, but times was hard and I’d of worked for Hitler if he’d of been hirin.
Whatever it was, he was born with it because I knowed him when he was a boy, and he was just as peculiar then as he is now. Fenton was a rich kid, and that’s when I first begun to suspect rich ain’t all it’s made out to be.
Fenton’s daddy was a undertaker, too, but they had plenty of money besides. That’s one reason why I never understood him takin up undertakin. Why not medicine, or the law? Now I don’t know if you choose your trade or the trade chooses you, but at the very least you’ve got to have an inclination for it. I’ve always believed that Fenton just liked foolin aroundwith dead folks.
He just didn’t fit in. Didn’t or couldn’t. He used to get dead animals off the side of the road and play like he was embalmin em. Cut em up and see what they was made out of. If he couldn’t find none and the mood was on him he took to killin em hisself. Strangle em. There for a while he was hell on the neighborhood cat population.
He’s got that smarmy act down pat, but a act is all it is. You know that hangdog sorrowful look that he can turn on and off. But the truth is he just don’t give a shit. He ain’t got no respect for the dead. I was workin out there at his place buildin a rock wall around what he called his duck pond when one of these fellers works for him drove up in a flatbed truck with a casket strapped to the back. It was some feller that had died off from here, and they hauled him back to be buried with his folks. You would have thought he would take it on into town to the funeral home, but he didn’t. It set right out there in the boilin sun all day. Like a piece of machinery or a load of lumber or somethin while he was prissin around settin out peonies and box elders.
What I’m sayin is that it ain’t that he’s a undertaker. Undertakin’s just a job, like anything else. It’s him. There’s just somethin about him that makes your skin kindly crawl, like turnin over a rotten plank and seein one of them slick brown centipedes. I never wanted him pawin over any kin of mine, and that’s why when my sister passed away we took her to Ackerman’s Field. And that’s why when I kick off, the arrangements is done made for a feller in Memphis to cremate my ass and spread the ashes in them hills back of Allens Creek, back in the Harrikin where I was raised. I sleep a little better ever night knowin he won’t ever lay them soft white hands on me.
Here was wealth beyond measure. Beyond even Tyler’s powers of comprehension. Set on the gently rolling slopes of grass, the house might have been the counting house of some wicked ruler living in exile. Or yet an evil magician with spells cast on the rightful heirs, legions of familiars to do his bidding.
Scarcely five years old, already the house is part of the folklore of the region. There is conjecture as to just how many miles of electrical wire, how many miles of copper tubing. So far does the hot water travel there must be an auxiliary water heater to maintain Breece’s chosen temperature. The glittering bricks came wrapped five to the bundle and woe to the mason who marred one in the laying. The tile came from Italy, the light fixtures from France. The bay windows are roofed with braised copper, and the workmen who installed it spoke no language the local workers could understand. Some kind of Chinese gobbledygook, they said.
There was even an interior decorator imported from Memphis who talked with a slight lisp and whose airy hand gestures were of great interest to local craftsmen. Just to listen to that son of a bitch talk, you’d think the only thing on God’s green earth that mattered was winder curtains, one of them said. He could talk about drapers till you never wanted to hear about drapers again. This decorator’s vision of the house clashed with Breece’s and he left in a snit, pressing upon Breece in parting a slip of paper whereon was written the name of the builder of a Beale Street whorehouse. The house had started out vaguely Georgian but ended up with a decided bent for the grotesquely opulent. Gables and peaked roofs and turrets had been added seemingly by Breece’s whim or a coin toss so that the house came to resemble the temple of some old king overthrown solely because of his sorry taste.
Tyler had been watching the house all day, and so far nothing at all had happened save the movement of light and shadow and he was about ready to give it up when Breece came out of the house and got into a silvergray Cadillac hearse and drove away toward town. Tyler sat for a time waiting to see if there was to be further movement but he didn’t expect any and he was proven right. He came out of the spinney of sassafras he’d been concealed in and wended his way down the slope to the house.
For a time he just wandered around the outside of the house staring upward. He felt a deeprooted contempt for Breece but at the same time he couldn’t help being impressed by the sheer size of the house. Breece had simply outdone himself here, and Tyler wondered at the number of unoccupied rooms and the number of caskets sold and crying kids and widow women it had taken to accomplish this.
He didn’t know what he was looking for. Or where to look. Something he could hold in his hand, something incriminating. The gun still warm and smoking, the dagger with a drop the color of claret forming at its tip.
In a land where folks seldom even locked their doors Breece was an anomaly: there was no way in save stoning out a window, and his desire for evidence fell short of that. He tried every door, but they were all locked, and there was no key hidden about that he could find. He looked under matsthat lied welcome, in flower urns, and ultimately decided that the only keys existing rode in Breece’s pocket.
He came on around the house, wandering through curious oriental-looking hedges he didn’t have a name for and strange dwarf twisted trees and to a covered carport laid in flagstone where sat a Lincoln convertible with the top up. The car gleamed and the flagstones were still damp and he guessed Breece had been washing it, he hadn’t been able to see this side of the house from the slope.
The hearse made so little noise it was almost too late when he saw it. He couldn’t believe it was already back. Breece must have only gone to the mailbox. Sunlight off its lustrous surface caught his eye and it was already wending its way up the curving drive past marble fountains and the stone eyes of arcane statuary and he looked about wildly for somewhere to flee to: the woods were too far away and the way to them open territory.
At the end of the stone floor opposite the house was a garage or shop but he had no doubt it was locked and no time to try for it anyway and he had barely made the cover of the far side of it when he heard the Cadillac’s tires hissing smoothly on the concrete drive. He sat crouched against the glittering brick wall fearing he’d left some spoor, triggered some crafty snare that would show evidence of trespass.
He heard the no-nonsense click of the hearse’s door closing, footsteps crossing the flagstones. He grew bolder and chanced a look.
Breece was standing behind the Lincoln, a tan leather briefcase by his side. He had a set of keys in his hand, unlocking the trunk lid. He raised it and set the briefcase carefully inside and slammed the lid. He stood for a moment as if abstractedby some new notion, then strode purposefully to the back door of the house and withdrew yet another set of keys and unlocked the door of the house and went inside and pulled the door to after him.
Tyler didn’t plan his next move or even think about it. There was just something in the careful way Breece had stowed away the briefcase. If Tyler had thought about it, he wouldn’t have done it, but the keys were still in the trunk of the Lincoln and in an instant he had darted across the carport and wrenched up the trunk lid and seized the briefcase. He was already fleeing with it when the door of the house opened and the undertaker came down the steps.