Patterson sat down at his desk, picked up a pencil and held it poised an inch or so above a sheet of white paper. ‘Well, what’ll it be? Give me a name.’
Ben looked at him wonderingly. ‘Me?’
‘Why not,’ Patterson said offhandedly. ‘Hell, Ben, you’re as close to being her daddy as anybody else right now.’
For a moment he allowed a list of names to flow featurelessly through his mind. He thought of movie-star names, then those of the colored singers he’d heard of. Nothing seemed to fit the way he wanted it to, but he finally called her ‘Martha,’ after his own mother.
‘Okay,’ Patterson said, as he wrote it down. ‘And what about a last name?’
He glanced back toward the small wooden box, then returned his eyes to Patterson. ‘Give her mine,’ he said.
A large middle-aged white man walked into Patterson’s office a few minutes later. He was followed by two young blacks, both of whom were dressed in the uniforms of the city jail.
‘I’ve come to pick up a body,’ the white man said. He squinted hard at Ben and Patterson. ‘Who do I see about that?’
‘Me,’ Patterson said immediately. ‘Where’s Kelly?’
‘Kelly who?’
‘Kelly Ryan from the Property Department,’ Patterson told him. ‘He usually does the colored burying.’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ he said. ‘I work with the Highway Department. I just got a call to pick up a couple of hands from the jail and then come on over here for a body.’
‘You know where the cemetery is?’
‘They got a place dug for it in Gracehill,’ the man said.
‘They give you a plot number?’ Patterson asked.
The man shook his head. ‘They didn’t say nothing but come over to Hillman and pick up a body.’
‘Okay,’ Patterson said wearily. He led the three men into the freezer room and stood beside the coffin. ‘This is it.’
‘A kid?’ the white man asked.
‘That’s right,’ Patterson told him. ‘And it’s a murder, too, so I want you to remember where you put her. Find a tree or a stump or something and remember where it is. I’ll get a plot number later.’
Ben stepped up beside the two young men. ‘I’ll go, too,’ he said.
The white man nodded quickly. ‘Well, with the four of us, we can do it the right way,’ he said, ‘one shoulder at each corner, just like they’d do it in church.’
The four of them took their positions, one at each corner of the coffin, and lifted it up onto their shoulders.
As he headed out toward the parking lot, Ben could feel the body shift slightly as they juggled the coffin awkwardly, and he could imagine the girl’s face jerking left and right inside, as if looking for a way out of the darkness.
A dusty, mud-spattered pickup truck sat waiting for them in the parking lot, its battered front fenders sloping wearily toward the ground. The white man took down the tailgate with one hand while continuing to balance his corner of the coffin precariously on his shoulder.
‘Okay, just set it down real slow,’ he said, after he’d undone the gate. Then he turned cautiously and eased the coffin down onto the bed of the truck.
‘All right, let’s just shove it in now,’ he said. ‘But soft-like. We got a little child here.’
When the coffin was in place, the two black youths hauled themselves into the back of the truck and sat silently on either side of it, their hands resting motionlessly on the top of the coffin.
Ben and the other man crawled into the cab of the truck.
‘Name’s Thompson,’ the man said as he started the engine. ‘Lamar Thompson.’
‘Ben Well man.’
Thompson eased the truck forward, moving slowly toward the avenue and then out into it.
‘You some kind of preacher or something?’ he asked when he brought the truck to a halt at the first traffic signal.
‘No,’ Ben said, ‘I’m with the Police Department.’
Thompson smiled. ‘I figured you might be coming along to say a few words over the body. I thought maybe the state provided something like that.’
‘No.’
‘Want me to do it then?’ Thompson asked immediately.
‘If you want to,’ Ben said indifferently.
‘You got any idea what this child was?’
‘She was a Negro,’ Ben told him.
‘I figured that,’ Thompson said. ‘They don’t bury white people in Gracehill. But what about her religion?’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Well, I’m a Primitive Baptist, myself,’ Thompson said. ‘You know, an old foot-washing Baptist, what you might say.’ He smiled softly. ‘With us, it don’t matter what this child was, because in the end, she was, what you might say, a child of God.’ He pulled a red handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his neck vigorously. ‘So what I mean is, well, I could say a few simple things over her, if that’s all right with you.’