Barnaby Clawson had been the county’s sole undertaker for forty years until a corporate chain had set up shop five years back. But Clawson still got the local trade based on brand loyalty. In the tradition of morticians everywhere, he’d found a woman who could put up with hands that caressed the dead. He had two sons by her before she decided she could no longer bear the smell of formaldehyde. She up and moved to California, some said with a Bible salesman, others said with nothing but a suitcase and a scalpel.

Roby had felt neither sorrow nor joy for the undertaker’s luck. Barnaby was under the impression that Roby had a solid streak of Clawson in him, maybe a cousin twice removed, and had even offered Roby a job. But Roby didn’t enjoy that end of the aftercare process, the closed-door operations, the mutilation, the obvious deception. He didn’t have the heart for such casual treatment of the departed. Besides, he was spoken for.

"Barnaby called this afternoon, wanted to bring the rest of the flowers over," Anna Beth said.

"Probably just wanted to eat again," Alfred said. Roby could tell the boy was trying to act like the man of the house to make his mother feel more secure. Or maybe Alfred was ashamed of having wept when he heard the news and now was making sure everyone knew he was tough and suspicious.

"I don’t think you ought to sell the tractor right off," Buck said. "You ought to think it over some."

"We might keep it," Alfred said. "Somebody’s got to get the crops in, and there’s always next year. ‘Course, if old Barnaby Boneyard takes us for every penny, we might be selling the farm, too."

A warmth rushed through Roby, not anger exactly, but a tiny trill of nerves. "I said I’d talk to him. He’s a fine Christian gentleman. You ought to be grateful somebody knows how to tend to all the little details. What would you have done without him?"

Alfred sat forward, a hand on Cindy Parsons’s knee. She looked at his hand as if it were a spider crawling up her skirt.