After much calling on the holy trinity and the blowing of milk smoke into his mouth by a man who never saw his father, the placing in his ear of a lock of hair from a child the same color as the sufferer, the forcing of a cup of hot boiled and strained mule manure tea down his throat, his chest painted with turpentine, and a bag of asafetida from the mountains tied around his neck, the sick man dies choking from the pneumonia. When Delvin looks in from the door he sees the man’s gray pinched cheeks and his nose like a stob and his eyes already sunk into the sockets like ball bearings dropped in mud and he thinks here is something familiar but he doesn’t go into the room. The next morning they bury the man in a little africano cemetery down the sand road a mile from the house. The cemetery is set off by itself inside a low twisted stake fence at the edge of a pasture that has a half dozen stringy cows in it. Delvin never mentions that he knows something about preparing the dead. He doesn’t mind fiddling with a corpse but he doesn’t anymore care for sticking himself into anybody’s grief. A stubbornness in his soul, a disheartened doggedness, maybe a divination, some shaky repudiation of the former life, has taken him. The wasted man drowned in his own spit, coughing and gasping and squinting into corners for God or the devil or who knows what — Jacob’s ladder maybe to climb him out of that sticky place — and an abrupt wild panic had come erasing the squint and then a blankness erasing that and no god came.
