The landlady had a tramp of a daughter named Lena with eyes like white pools in her brown face and straightened hair and a hot mouth that played on his body and one night he lay in the room with the girl, trying to make love on the mattress under which the money was hidden, and their lovemaking being spoiled by the sound of somebody’s broken heart.

When he asked the girl who was crying she told him it was her mother.

When he asked her why, she told him the white bank in which her mother had kept her burial money had just failed, and she wept for the funeral she would never have.

After the girl had left him he thought about Old Sarah and the burial money she had once pinned to his underwear. He remembered the mean pauper’s grave in Justin, Georgia.

The following morning he walked around Memphis. Then after lunch he hiked out of the city, past the outskirts and into open country. After five days of looking, the land he decided on was two acres of tired meadow nestled between a stand of pines and a snaggle-banked river. It cost him six one-hundred-dollar bills and his hands trembled as he paid the money over and collected the deed, but nothing could have stopped him because he had thought it all out and he knew this was something he was going to do.

It cost him another twenty-one dollars and fifty cents for a fine big black and white sign saying Shadowflower Cemetery. He took the name from the verse of the Book of Job that had been Sarah’s favorite, He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.

He found his landlady in the kitchen of the boardinghouse, boiling up a big pot of clothes, her red eyes streaming in the lye steam. There was a pitcher of buttermilk and he sat and drank three glasses without saying anything, then he put a nickel and a dime on the table to pay for the refreshment and began to talk. He told her his plans for Shadowflower, about the beautiful plots, bigger than any white man’s; about the singing birds in the pines, and even about the big catfish in the river which, although he had not seen them, he somehow knew had to be there.

“It’s no good, boy,” she said. “My burial money’s gone.”

“You must have some money. You got boarders.”

“No real money I can spare. Not even for burial.”

“Well, now.” He touched the coins he had left on the table. “You got this.”

“A nickel an’ a dime? You gonna give me a buryin’ place for a nickel an’ a dime?”

“Tell you what,” he said. “You come up with a nickel an’ a dime each and every week and the burial place is yours right now.”

“Man,” she said, “what if I die three weeks from this very moment?”