The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,35
land’s been in my family quite a spell. Matter of fact, my pappy and grandpappy’s both buried on it. And I— Well, I know it may sound kind of silly, but to be truthful I’m afraid it might get to weighin’ on my mind later on, thinkin’ of them being buried in the same ground with a couple of low-down men that’d do a thing like shootin’ a rabbit out of season.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Dr Severance says. “It sure might, at that.” Then his face brightened up. “But say, just for the sake of argument, that if it did start to bothering your conscience later on. What do you figure it would cost to have your folks moved to a regular cemetery?”
“Why,” Uncle Sagamore says, “I expect about five hundred dollars.”
“Well, that sounds like a reasonable figure,” Dr Severance says. He counted some bills out of his wallet and handed them to Uncle Sagamore. “Six hundred altogether.”
He sure carried a lot of money around with him. It didn’t hardly make a dent on what was in the wallet. I could see that even from where I was. Pop and Uncle Sagamore looked at what was left, and then at each other.
“Well, I reckon that takes care of everything,” Uncle Sagamore says. He started to get up.
Then he stopped all of a sudden, looking kind of thoughtful, and hunkered down again. “Well sir, by golly,” he says, “do you know what we plumb forgot?”
Dr Severance looked at him real sharp. “Now what?”
“The sermon,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Ain’t no man deserves to be buried without preachin’, no matter what he done. We just naturally couldn’t send these two sinners to their last restin’ place without a minister. Couldn’t even think of it.”
“Minister?” Dr Severance says. “How the hell are we going to have a minister at a private funeral like this?”
“Well sir,” Uncle Sagamore says. “It’s easy. Seems like the luck is right with us all the way. It just happens my brother Sam here is a ordained minister of the gospel, and I know we could get him to say a few words.”
“Hmmmm,” Dr Severance says. “That is a piece of luck, ain’t it? And how much does his fee run?”
“Well,” Uncle Sagamore says, “as a usual thing, a hundred dollars a head.”
“That sounds like a nice round figure,” Dr Severance says, reaching for his wallet again.
“However, in this case,” Uncle Sagamore went on, “seein’ as how these men died with all that sin on ‘em, right in the committin’ of a crime, so to speak, Brother Sam might have to throw in a few extra flourishes to get ‘em over the hump. Still and all, though, I reckon that two hundred dollars a head ought to just about cover it.”
Dr Severance counted out some more money and handed it to him. “You boys are wasting your time farming,” he says. “You got too much talent to be rusting away out here in the sticks.”
“Well sir, it’s downright nice of you to say so,” Uncle Sagamore says. He stood up. “Well, I reckon me an’ Brother Sam can take care of all the arrangements. You figure on comin’ to the services?”
Dr Severance shook his head. “I’d sure like to, but I thought I’d drive back down the road and see if these boys didn’t leave a car somewhere.”
Uncle Sagamore nodded. “That’s a right smart idea. Kind of drive it back to town, or somewhere, an’ make it easier for their families to find it.”
“That’s about what I had in mind,” Dr Severance says. He went off up the trail.
Pop was sitting on the log, puffing on his cigar. As soon as Dr Severance had went out of sight, he says to Uncle Sagamore, “If these is the same bunch of rabbit hunters I seen in town, there was three of ‘em.”
Uncle Sagamore pursed up his lips like he was going to sail out some tobacco juice. “Three?” he says.
“Reckon we ort to tell him?” Pop asked.
“Ain’t no call for us to go stickin’ our nose in things that don’t concern us, Sam,” Uncle Sagamore says. “If he don’t find no car up there, he’s going to know it hisself.”
“But supposing he does find the car? One of these might have the keys.”
“Well it still ain’t none of our business, Sam. We wouldn’t want to cause him no worry, would we? A man that pays his bills like that and minds his own business? If he got to frettin’ about what happened