On Saturdays John would put on his best suit, a wide tie with the diamond stickpin the General had given him so long ago, and a pearl-gray hat, and get into the bus at Mister Thomason’s store and ride into the Municipal Depot in New Marsails, making the trip to the Northside where he’d sit in the dark friendly saloons and talk to the old Negro men, who, like himself, were too old to do anything else.

Then, one Saturday in June last summer, I answered the phone and heard the voice on the other end. “Got a nigger here in the depot, old man, dropped dead. What you want me to do with the body?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ll be right there.”

Tucker, Missus Caliban, Bethrah, and I climbed into the black car. Tucker drove; Bethrah sat beside him, the line of her shoulders well above the back of the seat, a maternity dress sloping straight from her shoulders to her knees like a children’s playground slide. Missus Caliban and I sat in back. She was small and black, was not yet, at fifty-three, graying or growing old, and reminded me of a smooth black China doll Dymphna once had. I felt strange riding with so many Negroes, even though they were my friends.

No one spoke; no one cried. We still waited to see John dead, wished for some mistake, hoped the police had called the wrong house, wanted to arrive at the depot and find a total stranger lying before us.

When we arrived in New Marsails we went to the depot police office. The bus driver was sitting in a small fan-cooled room, a can of beer in his fist, waiting. He was big, balding, and flies seemed always to swarm around his head.

“We’re here to claim the body of John Caliban.”

“Surely.” He pulled himself to his feet, placed his beer can carefully into the circle it had sweat on the table. “Come on then.” He went out of the room and we followed him.

“Knew old John well.” He was speaking to me. “Boarded out at Thomason’s just like every Saturday. I never paid much attention to him after that; only when we got to the depot and everybody’s a-hopping off, I looked up in the mirror before I closed the door, and there he was, sleeping, or so I thought. His head was leaning on the post. So I got up and went on back and shook his shoulder, but I noticed he was sort of cold. I knew then. I says to myself: I ain’t never waking up this old nig—” He stopped and looked at Missus Caliban, who hadn’t even heard him. “This old man, even if I stand here and shake him for the next thousand years. He dead.” We had come almost to the bus. Empty of passengers, it looked ghostly.