The Known World - Edward P. Jones [175]
Back in Mildred’s house two hours earlier, Moses said some words over her body but he knew what he was saying was not enough. He had never really listened all the way to a funeral speech and so was at a loss to say the proper thing. Had I only listened, he berated himself as he cleared the kitchen table of everything. He put the bowl of apples on a chair and took off the tablecloth. He knew he was grateful to her and so as he worked he thanked Mildred for helping him and then he picked up her body and laid her out on the table. He closed Mildred’s eyes. A slower death would have given her all the time she needed to lie down and close her own eyes. Moses covered her body with the tablecloth and began thinking of more words to say. “You know, Moses,” she had said only the day before, “I love a good tablecloth. I would rather have a good tablecloth over a good quilt any day. The bed could go naked for all I care, but I got to have my tablecloth for my meals.”
Not long after John Skiffington’s murder, Barnum Kinsey took his family to Missouri, where his wife had people. Barnum died not long after they crossed the Mississippi River, in a town called Hollinger. His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father’s history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father’s name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years of his father’s coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. The letters of the words got smaller and smaller as the boy, not quite twelve, neared the bottom of the wood because he had never made a headstone for anyone before so he had not compensated for all that he would have to put on it. The boy filled up the whole piece of wood and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father’s grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. The boy knew better than to put a period at the end of such a sentence. Something that was not even a true and proper sentence, with subject aplenty, but no verb to pull it all together. A sentence, Matthew’s teacher back in Virginia had tried to drum into his thick Kinsey head, could live without a subject, but it could not live without a verb.
At Mildred’s house the day she died, Counsel stepped out onto her porch and looked but once at his cousin’s body and took out his tobacco and paper and rolled a cigarette. He had no more chewing tobacco. John Skiffington’s foot finally came out of the stirrup and Counsel watched as John’s horse began to walk away. Counsel wondered if the beast knew the way home, or would some bear ultimately come upon him drinking at a stream and take him down. He heard just a little movement from Moses inside the house. He should have picked up the dead woman’s gun after all. The nigger could take it and hit him upside the head. Knowing this was possible, Counsel turned fully toward the doorway so he could be ready. All the gold would mean that he could buy a giant tombstone for John’s grave, one as large as the man himself had been. He envisioned a tombstone so big that wild and insane men would come down from their lairs in the Virginia mountains and worship at the tombstone, thinking it stood over the grave of someone who had been a god.
On the road some two hours later, after Oden had hobbled Moses, he got back up on his horse. He looked down at the man writhing on the ground and at his own handiwork. Moses certainly could not walk back home now and Oden extended his arm down. He had gone out without a saddle that day. Oden said, “He won’t bleed for long. Heft him on up here.” Everyone,