Vespers were at seven. Julia bowed her head next to me and we clenched hands as a Methodist minister with a marled eye read from the Good Book and Grat slunk in from the kitchen and dug at his teeth with a thumbnail. After prayers were finished, everyone just sat around and looked uneasy and drank coffee. The cups clacked loudly in the saucers. The women comforted my mother until she began to cry, and then they took her to a back bedroom. “Lean on the Lord, honey,” they said. Mom sat on a spring bed and wiped her eyes while a woman professed that Simon had been taken unto his heavenly Father’s bosom and to that special place where the righteous know not fear.

I left Julia cutting chocolate-frosted cake and discovered Bob in the master bedroom with my father, who sucked at his pipe and spit into an empty peach can by his chair. “Your mother wants to divorce me, did you know that?”

“Yes,” said Bob.

“The doctor says I should drink castor oil for my liver.” He tapped his pipe into the peach can. “Minnie’s been seeing a boy with a criminal record. That’s news, I’ll wager.”

Bob leaned forward from his seat on the bed. “What’s his name?”

“Charles Montgomery. Good manners, about thirty years old. Has a prominent nose that carries a wart. Served time for burglary, introducing.” Dad blinked in my direction. “Which one are you?”

“Emmett.”

“And you’re Bob?”

My brother said, “This is the hired hand, right? Sleeps in the loft of Ted Seymour’s barn?”

My father tossed his pipe onto the bed quilt. “I’m seventy-four years old and I don’t care if I’m married or not. When I was a boy we used to poke heifers. You know what Simon loved most in the whole world? Licorice. I remember him better than I do either of you two fellas.”

I think Bob closed Minnie’s bedroom door behind him and had violent words with her while the assembled drank milk that my twelve-year-old sister Leona poured straight from the pail. Along about nine o’clock those people not family left and Ben took a kerosene lamp to the outhouse with him and I took Julia to a widow’s house where she was being put up until the funeral. I played three games of pinochle there and returned to see that drapes were blowing out through Minnie’s shuttered bedroom window.