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There was a little flurry of activity after that. Some folks got a readymade coffin from the coffin maker and carried it to the church. Hollace was lying there with a hole in his chest and one hand flung over his face like he couldn’t bear to see what had happened with the rest of his body. We stuffed a big blanket inside the coffin like a sponge and rolled Hollace on top. We left the box by the altar and a little while after that, his wife’s coffin joined him up there. When the party commenced an hour or so later, all the blood was cleaned up off the church’s floor and women were bringing in hot dishes of food. The band set up behind the pulpit, underneath Halston Smith’s hand-carved crucifix, while some folks dragged the long pews to the side of the room and started to dance.
Even though I was younger than them both, I considered myself something of a friend of the Whitaker brothers. When I was a boy and John was just a young man, I’d go out hunting with him as a sort of helper, although he always made a joke of calling me his squire. He would shoot the deer and I’d dress the carcass while he got the smoking fire going. When I was older and had a trade, I’d sometimes work repairs around his brother Hollace’s place. Hollace paid me well and often invited me to stay for dinner, and his wife always brought me water or coffee, no matter what I was doing or where on his farm I was working. Neither of the Whitaker brothers ever said much, but they were good men and I always enjoyed their company. So this whole affair left me feeling pretty muddled. It struck me as the best possible outcome that John was the one to shoot Hollace, but it also seemed pretty damn unfair. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I tried to dance but couldn’t dance, my legs didn’t want to, not really, so I kept John company. I know you’re not supposed to have whiskey in a church, but there’s a lot of worse things a man can do in church and we’d all seen some of that already today, so John and I drank whiskey and watched the girls dance and when I asked him how he felt, he said fine, and I believed him.
