Free Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons

or less unavoidable. She was going through a phase of addiction to magazines like True Crime and Weird Tales and Startling Adventures, and right before this trip she had come into my room, awakened me, and read aloud a story about Bonnie and Clyde and how they were blown all apart, their limbs and things then preserved and later basted together in some slaphappy fashion. Curiosity-seekers apparently lined up to see all this, and one man who was interviewed said he would’ve readily paid money for the privilege, as would have my mother. She asked me as she did with regard to Uncle Otha’s head, “Isn’t that wonderful?” I said it was not. I said it was gruesome, and I thanked her in advance for my nightmares. She argued that it was an example of the marvelous extremes present in human nature, and thus began an argument that made me too tired to sleep. That is why I let the silver dollar in the man’s head pass as wonderful. I never possessed her stamina for debate.
    When we went back inside we saw that four pallbearers and a preacher had arrived, ready to do their business. They all expected to be paid for their services, and my grandmother was expected to pay them. She said she had no intention of doing this, and so she asked my mother to ask Otha if he had any money with him.
    My mother said, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
    My grandmother said, “In my eyes, he does not exist.”
    I asked my mother how much money she had, and she asked me the same. Between us we had sixty cents.
    My mother looked at the old family friend in her too thin dress and red lipstick, and said, “What about you?”
    She said, “I’m broke. He ate up every penny I had.”
    My grandmother pointed first to the coffin and then to the woman and said, “You know, if a woman’s husband comes to your house to pleasure himself and then dies, I’d think you could at least split the cost of the arrangements with his widow.”
    The old woman pled poverty again, and my grandmother said, “That’s okay. Give me that clock on the mantel, and I’ll give these fellows fifty cents each and the preacher a dollar.” The clock was taken from the mantel and handed to my grandmother in the calm manner of all rituals. She carried it as we walked the short way to the cemetery. I still can see her walking along the narrow path through the meadow, holding time against her breast like a baby.
    My mother asked her what she planned to do with herself now that she was officially a widow. She had asked the question in a lighthearted, teasing manner, but my grandmother didn’t respond in the same spirit.
    She said, “What makes you think I’d want a man now? I’d take a poison pill before I’d take a man.” Then she told my mother it was rude and maybe even bad luck to talk nonsense on the way to a grave.
    My grandfather wasn’t so much buried as he was put in the ground. After the preacher finished his dollar prayer, he tried to console my grandmother, who told him, “I don’t want to hear it.” The three of us started back across the meadow without saying much of a good-bye to anyone, except that my mother hugged Otha, who told her he expected to be dead before the end of the year.
    He was, too. We heard through another phone call from the same old woman. My grandmother said to her again, “I imagined you would be dead.” Then she listened a moment and said, “No, I don’t care to come see him buried. You know he did not exist for me. How many does this make now?” She listened again and said, “You may not think it’s your fault, but you get a man in there with a bad heart and do all these things to him, and there he goes. You’ve been doing this for fifty years, you’d think you’d find one with a dime to leave you. You’re stupider than I thought you were.” She hung up the phone, looked at me, and said, “I’d rather you wash chamber pots the rest of your life than conduct business on your back.”
    On the way home from