The Straw Men Read Free

whose texture suggested that a number of industrial processes had intervened between the soil and my plate. It was impossible not to have fries. I discussed the matter on two occasions with the waitresses, but relented in the face of mounting panic in their eyes.
    After the preacher had explained to everyone why death was not the complete downer it might at first appear, we filed out of the church. I was sorry to leave. It had felt safe in there. Outside it was very cold, and the air was crisp and silent. Behind the graveyard rose the foothills of the Gallatin range, the peaks in the distance muted, as if painted on glass. Two side-by-side plots had been prepared. There were about fifteen people on hand to witness the burial. Davids was there, and someone who appeared to be his assistant. Mary stood close to me, white hair strictly pulled back in a bun, her lined face battered smooth with the cold. A couple of the others I thought I vaguely recognized.
    More words were said by the priest, comforting lies in which to swaddle these events. Possibly they made a difference to some of the mourners. I could barely hear them, concentrating as I was on stopping my head from exploding. Then a couple of men—whose job it was, who did this kind of thing every week—efficiently lowered the coffins into the ground. Ropes were gently fed through their hands, and the coffins came to measured rest six feet below the flat plain on which the living still stood. A few more sentences of balm were offered, but muttered quickly now—as if the church recognized that the time to make its pitch was running out. You can’t put people in wooden boxes under the ground without the audience realizing that something very amiss is afoot.
    A final quiet pronouncement, and that was that. It wasdone. Nothing would ever happen to Donald and Philippa Hopkins again. Nothing that bore thinking about, at least.
    Some of the mourners lingered for a moment, aimless now. Then I was alone under a famously big sky. I stood there as two people. One whose throat was locked into fiery stone, and who could not imagine ever moving again; another who was aware of his iconic stature beside the graves, and also that, a little distance away, people were driving past in cars and listening to the Dixie Chicks and worrying vaguely about money. Both sides of me found the other ridiculous.
    I knew that I couldn’t stand there forever. They wouldn’t expect me to. It would make no sense, would change nothing, and it really was very cold. When I finally looked up I realized that Mary was also still present, standing only a few feet away. Her eyes were dry, harsh with a knowledge that such a fate would be hers before very long and that it was neither a laughing nor a crying matter. I pursed my lips, and she reached out and laid her hand on my arm. Neither of us said anything for a while.
    When she’d called me, three days before, I had been sitting on the deck of a nice, small hotel on De la Vina in Santa Barbara. I was temporarily unemployed, or unemployed again, and using my scant savings on an undeserved vacation. I was sitting with a good bottle of local merlot in front of me, and efficiently making it go away. It wasn’t the first of the evening, and so when my cellular rang I was inclined to let the message service pick it up. But when I glanced at the phone I saw who the caller was.
    I hit the TALK button. “Hey,” I said.
    “Ward,” she replied. And then nothing.
    Finally I heard a sound down the line. The noise was soft, glutinous. “Mary?” I asked quickly. “Are you okay?”
    “Oh, Ward,” she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the vain hopethat faux readiness, last-minute rigor, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer was going to fall.
    “What is it?”
    “Ward, you’d better come here.”
    In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the center of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.
    I’d