"What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing wrong with her. She's dead is all. That's why I got to raise some money on a Sunday. I got to pay the undertaker some money in advance so he'll go down to the morgue and get her body."

The Jew grinned at his helpers to show he appreciated the story. "Well, that's all right," he conceded, relaxing. "Now we got everything straight." He turned again to his helpers and called them to witness. "You boys heard what Mr. Wright said."

They nodded.

"All right, Rufus boy, let's get down to business. Is that the set you want to sell?" he asked, pointing toward a huge blond-oak television set on a gate-legged table.

"I've decided to sell all of my furniture," Rufus said. "This funeral is going to be expensive, and I got to make a down payment of five hundred dollars."

"For that much, you had ought to got the whole Blumstein's department store," the Jew said drily.

"There's a lot of good stuff here," Rufus contended.

The Jew looked over the room, and his expression went sour. The room was jammed with a motley collection of worn-out furnishings arranged about a potbeilied stove like molting chickens about a mother hen: threadbare rugs; moth-eaten overstuffed chairs and a sofa, broken-legged tables; clocks without works; ceramic statuettes that had been through the Inquisition; a stuffed pheasant with a bald patch on its back; a set of scarred antlers mounted on the wall, flanked by faded lithographs of English hunting scenes; cutout photos of Negro blues singers hanging beside reproductions of the Virgin Mother and Child, The Last Supper and The Crucifixion cut from calendars given out by undertaker H. Exodus Clay.

"Do you call this furniture?" the Jew asked.

"These are mostly antiques in this room," Rufus said. "But there's a brand new set of furniture in the bedroom."

"Your wife couldn't say no to her white folks, could she?" the Jew cracked. "She must have brought everything home that they left for the trash man."