Nell had visited Deborah’s grave before church services and put on the tombstone a fruit jar filled with fresh water and with roses that had been cut for her house only yesterday and could be said to be almost fresh. Anyhow, they were good enough for a grave, and who would see them after this morning, when others too strolled among the mounds of their dead? Nell sighed, meeting Sarah on the church porch to tell her what she had done, adding that Deborah had dearly loved a rose. If she had said that Deborah dearly loved a bale of cotton and therefore she had put one on her tombstone, that would have accorded nearer honesty, but such self-complimenting stories as that of Nell’s visit to her sister’s entombed flesh are seldom listened to and may be as extravagant as the speaker cares to make them. To that end: Deborah dearly loved a rose.

By earlier agreement, Felix and Nell drove their buggy back to Beulah Land after services, alongside Leon’s where the road was wide enough, just behind where it was not. Birds chirped and sang in roadside hedge and tangle, and ungathered blackberries hung dusty in their briary vines along the way, not needed even by the birds, who found plenty to feed on in the fields.

At Beulah Land, after a suitable interval of rest for the ladies and business talk for the gentlemen, the family, including Selma today, who had had a mild disagreement with Pauline and so decided to leave her for an hour to grow more tractable, gathered in the dining room for the Sunday dinner Myrtis and her helpers had provided.

There were platters piled high with fried chicken, deep bowls of potato salad, plates of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, a tureen of roasting ears of corn, fried okra, fried squash and onions, boiled snap beans with ham hock, rice, two boats of thickened, greasy chicken gravy, a dish of pickled peaches studded with cloves, another of pickled beets, plates of hot biscuits, and jars of hot pepper sauce and cucumber pickles and chowchow. There were large pitchers of iced tea with lemon slices floating in them. And on the sideboard, covered with a thin, light cloth so the flies could not get at them, were a chocolate pie and a peach pie, both with high, perfectly browned meringue, and a large, cut-glass bowl of strawberries.

Before the family came in, Otis and Lotus, who took their responsibilities seriously, had been stood on the seats of chairs and given long, tasseled plumes to move to keep the flies from lighting on the food. Now that the family was there, Myrtis herself, leaving the serving to her helpers, stood with both plumes doing what she could to keep the flies and air in motion.