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stays in the room built onto the kitchen, but her room ain’t got no doors so you have to go in through the kitchen. She’s the one her cheek he sewed up. She feeds Brother biscuits and plays like he’s a dog. Brother is spoilt but they don’t nobody admit it.
    I followed Zack right on in through the kitchen door, him kind of leaning, like he’s leaning into a wind.
    The Chinaman had been took out of the casket. He was still in the blanket and laying on this table that Mr. Copeland had made according to instructions in the book he brought back from mortuary school. The top was made out of tin and had a ridge around it and a stopped-up hole in one corner and you could tilt the top or the bottom up in the air—like a seesaw. You can ride it up and down when Mr. Copeland ain’t around.
    The things that Mr. Copeland and Mr. Blankenship brought back from Denver in a big grip was listed on a piece of paper that had this real fancy writing at the top. He’s got the list stuck up on the kitchen wall over the wash basin:
    The F. B. Darless Mortuary Science College, Incorporated,
Founded 1870.
Twenty years of dedicated service to humanity.
    On the list is: “a hard rubber pump (with check valve), tubes, trocar, needles, forceps, scalpel, scissors, eye caps, razor,” and about fifty other things, ending up with “surgeon’s silk, a dozen collar buttons, cotton sheet, six jars Higgins Glo-Tex skin coloring, two jars Form-All, six jars of plaster of Paris mix, twenty-four gills of Higgins Concentrated Embalming Liquid, and four bottles of Remove-All.”
    The grip of instruments was open and these operating things was laid out on a white cloth. Beside all that was a red stick of dynamite with a five-foot fuse.
    Mr. Copeland unbuttoned his cuffs and started rolling up his sleeves. Then he looked at me. “I thought I told you to hoe.” He started outside. “Come here a minute, Bumpy.”
    The summer kitchen has a little side porch without no chairs. Mr. Copeland sat down on the floor with his feet on the ground. “Sit down,” he said. He got that look like he does, serious look, with his eyebrow going up, when he’s going to teach me something.
    Mrs. Copeland came from around the corner. “You got a dead man in there?” she said.
    â€œYes, I do. And I’m fixing to explain it all to Bumpy. How about doing something with Mama.” That’s Grandma Copeland.
    â€œYour mama ain’t going to like living with no corpses, P.J.”
    â€œTrees. We’re going to call them trees. And I ain’t heard her complain.”
    â€œShe can’t talk, P.J. That’s why you ain’t heard her complain.”
    â€œI ain’t
seen
her complain then.”
    â€œWell, I don’t understand somebody moving corpses into the very kitchen they just built a room onto for their own mama.” She put her hand up in her hair like she does when she’s mad about something.
    â€œWe ain’t going to have no trees in there but one at the time, Ann. And I’m going to show Bumpy how to jump a tooth on this Chinaman. He’s got a loose tooth.”
    â€œFor heaven’s sakes, P.J.” She turned around and left. Mr. Copeland has got this way of going on and on until the conversation turns out on his side. I pretty much learned not to get in it with him.
    â€œNow listen here,” he says to me. He gets that look back on his face. “We’re getting into this whole new business which is going to help people out, and make us some money, and we’re going to practice embalming on this here Chinaman. We’re going to spice him up, more or less preserve him, so he’ll smell good and be sanitary, and in the process I’ll show you how to jump a tooth. But there is a promotion or a sort of advertising part of it all thatBlankenship says we ought to do. It’ll be a kind of trick, but it’s based on di-rect fact.