“I was afraid not. I thought about it. Well, fry me some eggs, and if there’s any cold biscuits from last night’s supper—”

“Yes’m, there is.”

“Cut them in two and butter them the way Myrtis does for me sometimes and put them in the oven to heat up.”

Sallou nodded. “I will do that.”

Nell sat down at Lovey’s dining table to wait. “After I eat I’m going to bed and sleep. You tell them when they get up Mister Felix is dead, and they are to make arrangements as they see fit; only don’t bother me. I want to sleep and sleep. After I eat.”

“Yes’m.”

Nell got up and went to the back door and looked out. It was another frosty morning. “I’m a widow,” she said, without self-pity.

“Yes’m,” Sallou agreed uneasily, as Lotus took a kettle of hot water from the stove and a tin basin and hurried out.

“Are my eggs ready?” Nell said.

“No’m. I just—”

“Do make haste. I’m about to perish with hunger.”

4

For the time of year the funeral was well attended. Most of his adult life Felix had engaged in commerce and the law in Highboro, and almost every family there was represented at the church service by one or more of its members. Quite apart from his business and professional pursuits, Felix had gained the affection of many people, because he had been kind and generous. Without ever having thought of himself as “a good man,” he had been one. Nobody, black or white, poor and in trouble with the law or his fellow man, had been refused his advice and help. Denied children of his own, he had been sympathetic to the wants of others’ children. More than one middle-aged man could have placed the blame for his rotting teeth on the candies Felix had bought and distributed with a free hand to children as he went about from home to office to courtroom to post office; and a large number of middle-aged matrons, both the plain and the still-pretty, remembered with wistful gratitude his flattering looks and compliments when they were awkward young girls. So they came, every man and woman and child of them feeling that theirs had been a special, private, shared affection with the man whose body lay in its coffin on trestles before the pulpit.

There had been another earlier service at Beulah Land, where all the Negros, who if they were old had known him all his life, and who if they were young had known him all theirs, paid their last respects, not from any sense of duty but with freely given affection. Heroes are seldom mourned as genuinely as men with feet of clay.