As the cortege turned down another road to nowhere,
rolled with the cotton lint across fields like open ovens,
the six pall-bearers wadded into the dusty Buick Skylark
bitched about the local niggers, who after all these years
were still insisting on integrated schools.
Or rather,
four bitched and one defended: give them, he said,
a job pays enough so they can afford a house,
they’ll take care of that house almost as good
as we would. “We” meaning them,
these five friends and near relations
of the dead man, not one of them under sixty.
“We” did not mean me, a stranger dragooned
when, at the last minute, the sixth pall-bearer
failed to show. Not that six were required.
The old man even in his walnut box weighed little more
than a couple sacks of cotton, was now
what he always said he felt when ill: puny.
I was a fifth wheel, a silent partner,
one of those unnecessary people put up with
because even the dead have their needs:
a serge suit, revival hymns and scripture
in God’s well-kept house, relatives teary-eyed
and sweaty from a night in Arkansas motels,
a full contingent of men to lift and tote.
So with the casualness of seeking a fourth for bridge
or hiring someone to help in the fields,
I was asked to lend a hand, who was what to the dead man?
The long-haired northerner who’d carpet-bagged his way
into the old man’s granddaughter’s bed,
who pronounced “Cairo” as though it were a city in Egypt
and forked through his greens as though he thought
his food was somewhere underneath.
As we made our way to where the car would finally stop
and we’d spill from its hot insides like cotton from a boll
to leave the old man in the ground he loved,
talk turned to other out-of-favor neighbors,
to why the Amish were such shits.
No, I said,
if they won’t wear buttons, they’re German Baptists.
They’re German Baptists, I said,
while in the roadside fields our passing dusted,
where men, black and white, bent hoeing cotton,
each, as he saw us coming,
laid down his hoe, took off his hat,
and stood at attention as we passed.