Read Online Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony - Free Book Online

that. About then I couldn’t look at him no more.
    “Not that I’m sick,” he explained, “but because I won’t change any more, I’m tired of changing. Of course being tired has very little to do with it. I’ve had a lot of lives. A great many lives. The people who came to see me?”
    He expected some answer, so I said, “Yeah?”
    “They don’t understand because they’re so much younger. They believe I’m being dramatic.” He chuckled a little at that. “But they pointed out that, if I do die, my soul would become stuck here, so far from home. They say I would spend eternity among strangers. What do you think?”
    The question shocked me, but I answered anyway, “I always figured your God’s same as ours. Never thought about it much, but I don’t see that it’s any problem, dying here or dying there, Dead’s dead.”
    “Yes, Billy, I think so, too. Dead’s dead. Tell me, if they’re right, if I don’t die, but change instead, will I frighten you?”
    That question sort of raised the hair on the back of my neck. I should have said more, but I just told him no, I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I couldn’t imagine him scaring me. I couldn’t imagine that.
    “You’re a good man, Billy,” he said.
    Of the three of us, it was Maxie who went first. I recollect I come out of the barn one winter afternoon and seen her. There was about an inch of snow on the ground, and I wondered what the hell she was doing and if she wasn’t blamed cold lying there. When I come running up to her side, I seen she was cold. Cold as ice. I just sat back on my haunches and looked at her. It took me a while to realize she was dead.
    Now it’s a funny thing, but I always figured I’d go first. So I guess in the little parcel of time I stood in the door of the barn and the while I sat on my haunches feeling the snow steal the heat out of my legs, I couldn’t believe she was dead just cause I didn’t have no reference point for it.
    He made me mad cause he didn’t go by the funeral home. Didn’t go to the service, neither. And when everybody in town come by the house for pound cake and potato salad, I expected to see him there, but he never showed.
    I buried Maxie in the family plot on our land right next to Mama and Daddy. From the back door you can see down to the wrought-iron fencing under the oak. It was better. Made me feel less lonely, ’cause I could still see her grave from the kitchen. The kitchen was the one place she belonged.
    Damned if the day after the funeral I didn’t look down there and see him kneeling by her marble angel in the sleet. I was feeling pretty punky about then, so I didn’t go down there to talk to him. Didn’t feel like talking to nobody. Come back in the kitchen about two hours later to make me some coffee and seen he was gone.
    I visited her the next day. Damn if he hadn’t made her a chocolate cake Sleet’d gotten to it, and a few of the braver ants were having a field day. I left it. A week or so later it was pretty well gone.
    I took the plate back to him.
    “Washed it for you,” I said when he opened the door.
    He looked down at me with them silvery eyes of his and took the plate without word one,
    “Appreciate it,” I told him,
    “It’s nothing,” he said, Then he added, “It is a custom of ours to leave with the dead the one thing that symbolized them.”
    I sort of looked at the plate where he was holding it in them blue hands. “Thank you,” I said. Then I said, “I think you caught her. I think you caught her good. Seemed like she loved to bake cause she knowed people liked it. She wasn’t nothing grand. I know that. But she was a good, solid woman. Somebody you could count on.”
    “Someone to count on,” he said thoughtfully, I’m not sure, but that may well be a grand thing. Are you going to be all right?”
    Instead of answering like I should have, I sort of started to cry.
    He didn’t touch me or nothing, not like a human might have.