Chapter Six

Ten minutes later, when Spider drove over the cattle guard to his own place, the dried-up corpse was still on its shed-door bier, swathed in a sheet and rattling around in the back of his pickup. Swinging in a wide arc, Spider slammed the gearshift into reverse and, with a spray of gravel, backed into the barn.

Laurie found him there a bit later, standing at the tailgate of his pickup, working with a roll of rabbit wire and a pair of tin snips. “Spider?” she ventured.

“Yeah?” His reply was terse.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m fixing to store a body.”

Laurie leaned up against the pickup bed and looked over the side at the lumpy mound under the printed floral sheet. “Can you do that?”

“I don’t know what else to do. Our good bishop says the county owes him for the last bodies they stored. He’s not going to accept any more until the county pays its bill.”  Spider turned away, muttering, “That’s what comes from calling twenty-nine-year-old bishops!”

“Spider…” Laurie’s tone was admonishing.

Spider looked defiantly over his shoulder at her from the doorway to his shop.

“You’re sounding like a former bishop,” she chided.

He came back with a staple gun in his hand. “I’m sounding like someone who’s just seen his bishop faced with a choice between a Christian duty and the almighty dollar, and he chose the dollar.”  Whack!  Spider stapled the wire to the door. Whack! Whack!

“Are you sure that’s all this is about?”

“What do you mean?  Am I still smarting because when I lost my job and started showing signs of poverty, they released me as bishop to call the one prosperous person in the whole ward?” Whack! Whack!

“That wasn’t the way I was going to put it, but, yes, I guess that’s what I mean.”

Whack! Whack!  “I’ll tell you something, Laurie, it’ll take a while to work through, that one! Here I finally get time to do the job of bishop the way it needs to be done, and I am able to think that there’s one positive thing about not working, and whsst, it’s gone. It’s not that there weren’t seven other guys who could have done better than me. There were. ‘Course, they were all in the same boat I was. Poor.” Whack! Whack!

“Spider…” Again the tone was admonishing.

“No, I mean it. Have you ever seen a poor bishop?” Whack! Whack! “Or better than that. Have you ever seen a poor stake president?”

“Your daddy never had much money.”

“Ah, but that was different. My dad was a patriarch. The question for that one is: Have you ever seen a rich patriarch?”

“I don’t like it when you talk like this!  We’re not poor! The people down in Chiapas where Kevin is are poor. Those starving Africans that we see on the news are poor. We’ve got a home and plenty to eat. There are lots of people in the world who don’t have that. We’re broke, maybe, but not poor.”

“Not everyone sees it that way. People think that if you are righteous you’ll be blessed with material things. So, if you’re poor, you’re not righteous. There’s not a one of us that doesn’t judge another by what he drives and wears and lives in. Me included.” Whack! Whack! Spider looked at Laurie’s troubled face and his eyes softened. “Except for you, Darlin’. You look on the heart. Don’t worry. I don’t know that I really mean what I say. It’s just feelings that come out when I get angry. I don’t say this to anyone but you. You’re my safety valve.”

“I don’t much like being your safety valve.”

Spider laid his tools aside and regarded his handiwork, testing a metal seam at the corner. “Yeah, I know. I guess what set me off was thinking about her.” He nodded at the shrouded figure in the wire cage. “I keep thinking about the line, I was a stranger and ye took me in…” He shrugged.

“So, if Bishop Stowe won’t take the body, what are you going to do?”

“Well, I’ve fixed it so the birds and mice can’t get to it. If you’ll help me, we’ll just put it up in the rafters.”

Laurie shivered. “I’ll help you,” she said, “but let me go in and get a jacket first.”

When she returned, Spider had rigged the wire cage up to a block and tackle. As he raised the gruesome burden in its Springmaid shroud and rabbit-wire sepulcher, Laurie stood in the pickup bed and guided it sideways to allow it to pass through the rafters, then turned it crossways so it would lie across them. She looked down at her husband as he tied the rope off to a staple hammered into the barn wall.

Spider picked up the tin snips and rabbit wire and carried them through the door into his shop as Laurie climbed down from the pickup bed. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she called.

Pause. Then Spider appeared in the doorway. The dim lights hanging high in the barn cast his craggy face in shadow, making his eyes look dark as flint. “You go on in, Laurie,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m hungry right now.”

Laurie went back to the house and ate a solitary supper, keeping a plate warm for Spider. When he finally came through the back door, she looked up from the book she was reading at the table. “It’s on the stove,” she said.

Spider stood and stared at the meal Laurie had saved for him. It was his favorite: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and cream gravy. “Maybe later,” he said.

When they knelt for family prayer that night, the chicken and mashed potatoes still sat on the stove. They were cold, and the gravy had congealed. Laurie threw everything to the chickens the next morning, who cackled over their bonus from the deputy’s first day.