"It’s not your fault. And people got to find their own way to get over a death."
"But picking and fighting isn’t the way. Daddy would bust a gut if he was here."
"Maybe that’s the way of it," Roby said. "Everybody lost the one person they would look to when something like this happens. When was the last death? Didn’t you lose your aunt a few summers back?"
"Yeah. Iva Dean on my Momma’s side. Had a stroke in her sleep, the doctor said. Was gone before she knew what hit her."
Roby kept working the dishes, getting his momentum, wiping, flipping, stacking. "I remember now. That was some spread."
" What was a spread?"
"The kitchen. Had the sitting over at your cousin Vicky’s house. That was Iva Dean’s only daughter, wasn’t it?"
"Yeah. Iva Dean’s husband died back in the Reagan years."
"Tuna salad. One of you girls brought tuna salad, didn’t you?"
Sarah turned the cold water tap and rinsed the stack of cleaned dishes. "That was Anna Beth. She made it herself, back before she learned how to cook."
"Sweet pickles and mayonnaise and mustard. No onions."
"How do you remember all that?"
Roby looked at the food on the counter, the heaps of it, a feast fit for a king. Probably the most food that had ever graced Jacob Ridgehorn’s kitchen. The refrigerator had enough pork and beans, melons, and corn on the cob to feed a small army.
"Food and death go together," he said. "Because food is life."
"I reckon. I heard that Vicky hid food up in the attic so the preacher wouldn’t eat it all. Somebody said she done it so that those who dropped in to pay their respects would see no food on the table and would run out and bring some more."
"Vicky did hide food in the attic. Some of it spoiled." Roby shook away the memory of Iva Dean’s lean spirit, forlorn among the molded cakes and collapsed souffles. A Beverly Parsons pie was among the food that had gone to waste. How do you apologize to somebody when their death pies don’t get eaten?
The plates were done and he was working on the flatware. The finger he’d cut earlier began to throb, the nerves activated by the warm water. "I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but I think you got the most sense of any of them. You’re married and more or less settled, Buck’s got his own land and a steady job. So you don’t need to worry about who gets what and how much land ought to be sold off."
She stared into the rinse water. "Daddy liked Buck. You should have seen them at the wedding. We had a string band, I got to pick some banjo, and Buck and Daddy were square-dancing together, laughing like crazy. And Buck was only half drunk at the time, Daddy maybe three-quarters."
"I wished I could have made that one." Roby had been away, tending to a death sitting on the other side of the county. Serving.
"At least Daddy got to see one of us settled down. Though I expect Cindy got her claws deep enough into Alfred that he won’t get away."
"Cindy might be good for him. Some men lose their dangerous edge when they get married."
"What about the others?"
Roby got busy with the dirty glasses. He’d been to several sittings where the husband was in prison without bail, the wife dead long before her time. Sometimes with kids running around underfoot who were too young to know that their momma wouldn’t be coming back. All they knew was that there sure was some good pie in the kitchen.
"What I’m trying to say is that it’s up to you to keep the farm together," Roby said. "I know it ain’t none of my business, I ain’t close kin, but I know your Daddy would want it that way. No telling how much of his blood spilled out there on that dirt, how many splinters drove under his fingernails, how much dust he swallowed in the barn. This place is all about him. And soon he’s going to be buried here, gone back to the soil that he loved so much."
"I don’t know. It might be easier on everybody to just sell it. I mean, Anna Beth will soon be wanting to get out on her own, see the world a little, and where will that leave Momma? She can’t keep this place up by herself."
Roby’s nose itched. Probably from the smell of the spoiled eggs. "But you got roots here. Memories. Don’t that mean anything?"
"I’m growing new roots. Me and Buck will probably be having kids in a few years. That’s why he needs the tractor. We probably can’t afford one after that."
"You take that tractor off this ground and it’s the same as if you walked across your Daddy’s grave backwards."
Sarah turned away and carried an armload of dry plates to the cabinet. "Maybe it’s none of your business. I mean, here we are, close family trying to work out our differences, and you come in and start bossing the kitchen and bringing in your big ideas of what the Ridgehorns ought to do and not do."
She paused in her stacking. "Come to think of it, you did that at the Jones house, too. When Granny Aiken died. She was Momma’s great aunt, so that makes you what? Second cousin? Third? Yet you went right ahead and meddled when Momma went after the doll collection."
"Them dolls should have rightly stayed with Granny Aiken’s grandkids, somebody who’d appreciate them. What good would it do to sell them off so they’d get stuck on a shelf somewhere?"
Roby looked at his smeared reflection among the spiderweb cracks of the plate he was rinsing. When had his eyes gotten so old? While he wasn’t looking, that’s when. That’s the way it worked.
"Well, that money would have come in handy when Gertie needed a heart bypass. The hospital in Asheville said they couldn’t turn anybody away, but you can bet your boots they didn’t go the works for a dirt-poor country patient. And when she died on the operating table, why, it’s just one of them things, ain’t it? Happens from time to time, the doctors said. Every surgery a risk. Except you can bet if it was one of theirs on the cutting table, the odds would have been a lot better."
Poor Gertie, God rest her soul. Dead at forty. Beverly Parsons had made a pumpkin pie for that one, sweet as snuff and thick as tar.
"And what good would the money have done her dead?" Roby asked. "At least the kids can look at the dolls and have memories. Money don’t make memories."
"Yeah, but if Buck got the tractor and we got our share when the land sold, we could afford to build a house and move out of that trailer. You can hear the rats at night. They eat right through them aluminum walls."
Roby pulled the stopper and watched the gray water swirl down the drain. "What would your Daddy say?"
"Nothing, because the dead don’t talk."
Roby said nothing. He couldn’t explain, and she wouldn’t believe him if he tried. "There’s still half a pie left. Why don’t you have some?"
"I ain’t hungry. You got me mad."
"It’s not my decision. It’s you-alls."
"Well, just shut up about it, then."
Roby looked out the window. The sun had hit the lip of the far mountains, splashing the ridge lines with molten gold. The shadows around the barn had grown long, the woods dark by the fence. In the quiet, he could hear crickets through the screen door, and a couple of frogs had taken up conversation down by the watering pond.
"Buck’s getting that tractor, no matter what Marlene says," Sarah said.
"Not while I’m breathing," said Alfred from the kitchen entrance. Roby wondered how long he’d been standing just outside the room, listening. Then Roby figured it didn’t matter. This family didn’t have many secrets. At least the living members of the family.
"You don’t give a bucket of horse hockey for this place, Alfred," she said. "You can have everything else you want. Daddy’s got a bunch of hand tools, the hay baler, the old junk Ford Falcon-"
"Hey, that’s a collector’s item. Worth some money. Maybe more than the tractor."
Roby thought of Granny Aiken’s collection, how the dolls had stared down from the shelves with dark glass eyes while her family scratched and hissed over her worldly goods. What did those dolls think about that? Probably wished they’d get sold and not have to witness any more such foolishness.