"Jacob said one time he wouldn’t mind being buried with Old Laddie," the widow said. "Wasn’t there a Civil War general who done that? Buried himself right on top of his horse?"

"Probably a Yankee," Buck said. "Who else would be that damned stupid?"

Alfred lowered the rifle. "If we’d have had ordnance like this, then the stars and bars would be flying over Washington, D.C., right this very minute."

"Don’t make fun of Momma, Buck," Marlene said.

"They was one," the widow said.

"I think it was Jeb Stuart," Roby said. He actually didn’t know, but figured if it had really happened, it was either Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, or Robert E. Lee, and he didn’t think it was Lee, because Lee had lived many years after the war and his horse Traveler probably died long before Lee.

And Stonewall Jackson’s arm was shot off, maybe that was what the widow meant. Maybe they buried Jackson’s arm with the rest of his body. Stuart was a cavalry hero, at that. To bury a man on a horse, you’d need a mighty deep hole. Or maybe they were just planted side by side. Roby wondered who’d baked Stuart’s death pie.

"I want to be buried on top of Harold," Marlene said, and her eyes were looking right into Roby’s. Nobody else seemed to notice that she was talking dirty.

"You got to marry him first," Anna Beth said. "Nobody gets in the Ridgehorn cemetery unless they’re family. Right, Momma?"

The widow nodded, setting her pie plate on the scarred, handmade coffee table that would have been an antique hunter’s dream except that one of the cherry legs had splintered off and been replaced by a square hunk of locust.

There were at least two forkfuls worth of the pie left on the widow’s plate. Roby wanted to say something, like maybe Cindy Parsons would go home and tell her mom that the widow let some of the pie go to waste. But it wasn’t his place. A grieving widow had a right to her own appetite.