And how important is time to a gravedigger?

“What a great funeral,” Harry Rex finally said. He was an expert on such matters.

“He would’ve been proud,” said Forrest.

“He loved a good funeral,” Ray added. “Hated weddings though.”

“I love weddings,” said Harry Rex.

“Four or five?” asked Forrest.

“Four, and counting.”

A man in a city work uniform approached and quietly asked, “Would you like for us to lower it now?”

Neither Ray nor Forrest knew how to respond. Harry Rex had no doubt. “Yes, please,” he said. The man turned a crank under the grave apron. Very slowly, the casket began sinking. They watched it until it came to rest deep in the red soil.

The man removed the belts, the apron, and the crank, and disappeared.

“I guess it’s over,” Forrest said.

LUNCH WAS tamales and sodas at a drive-in on the edge of town, away from the crowded places where someone would undoubtedly interrupt them with a few kind words about the Judge. They sat at a wooden picnic table under a large umbrella and watched the cars go by.

“When are you heading back?” Harry Rex asked.

“First thing in the morning,” Ray answered.

“We have some work to do.”

“I know. Let’s do it this afternoon.”

“What kinda work?” Forrest asked.

“Probate stuff,” Harry Rex said. “We’ll open the estate in a couple of weeks, whenever Ray can get back. We need to go through the Judge’s papers now and see how much work there is.”

“Sounds like a job for the executor.”

“You can help.”

Ray was eating and thinking about his car, which was parked on a busy street near the Presbyterian church. Surely it was safe there. “I went to a casino last night,” he announced with his mouth full.

“Which one?” asked Harry Rex.

“Santa Fe something or other, the first one I came to. You been there?”

“I’ve been to all of them,” he said, as if he’d never go back. With the exception of illegal narcotics, Harry Rex had explored every vice.

“Me too,” said Forrest, a man with no exceptions.

“How’d you do?” Forrest asked.

“I won a couple of thousand at blackjack. They comped me a room.”

“I paid for that damned room,” Harry Rex said. “Probably the whole floor.”

“I love their free drinks,” said Forrest. “Twenty bucks a pop.”

Ray swallowed hard and decided to set the bait. “I found some matches from the Santa Fe on the old man’s desk. Was he sneaking over there?”

“Sure,” said Harry Rex. “He and I used to go once a month. He loved the dice.”

“The old man?” Forrest asked. “Gambling?”

“Yep.”

“So there’s the rest of my inheritance. What he didn’t give away, he gambled away.”

“No, he was actually a pretty good player.”

Ray pretended to be as shocked as Forrest, but he was relieved to pick up his first clue, slight as it was. It seemed almost impossible that the Judge could’ve amassed such a fortune shooting craps once a week.

He and Harry Rex would pursue it later.

As he approached the end, the Judge had been diligent in organizing his affairs. The important records were in his study and easily found.

They went through his mahogany desk first. One drawer had ten years’ worth of bank statements, all arranged nearly in chronological order. His tax returns were in another. There were thick ledger books filled with entries of the donations he’d made to everybody who’d asked. The largest drawer was filled with letter-size manila files, dozens of them. Files on property taxes. medical records, old deeds and titles, bills to pay, judicial conferences, letters from his doctors, his retirement fund. Ray flipped through the row of files without opening them, except for the bills to pay. There was one—$13.80 to Wayne’s Lawnmower Repair—dated a week earlier.

“It’s always weird going through the papers of someone who just died,” Harry Rex said. “I feel dirty, like a peeping Tom.”

“More like a detective looking for clues,” Ray said. He was on one side of the desk, Harry Rex the other, their ties off and sleeves rolled up, with piles of evidence between them. Forrest was his usual helpful self. He’d drained half a six-pack for dessert after lunch, and was now snoring it off in the swing on the front porch. But he was there, instead of lost in one of his patented binges. He had disappeared so many times over the years. If he’d blown off his father’s funeral, no one in Clanton would’ve been surprised. Just another black mark against that crazy Atlee boy, another story to tell.

In the last drawer they found personal odds and ends—pens, pipes, pictures of the Judge with his cronies at bar conventions, a few photos of Ray and Forrest from years ago, his marriage license, and their mother’s death certificate. In an old, unopened envelope there was her obituary clipped from the Clanton Chronicle, dated October 12, 1969, complete with a photograph. Ray read it and handed it to Harry Rex.

“Do you remember her?” Ray asked.

“Yes, I went to her funeral,” he said, looking at it. “She was a pretty lady who didn’t have many friends.”

“Why not?”

“She was from the Delta, and most of those folks have a good dose of blue blood. That’s what the Judge wanted in a wife, but it didn’t work too well around here. She thought she was marrying money. Judges didn’t make squat back then, so she had to work hard at being better than everybody else.”

“You didn’t like her.”

“Not particularly. She thought I was unpolished.”

“Imagine that.”

“I loved your father, Ray, but there weren’t too many tears at her funeral.”

“Let’s get through one funeral at a time.”

“Sorry”

“What was in the will you prepared for him? The last one.”

Harry Rex laid the obituary on the desk and sat back in his chair. He glanced at the window behind Ray, then spoke softly. “The Judge wanted to set up a trust so that when this place was sold the money would go there. I’d be the trustee and as such I’d have the pleasure of doling out the money to you and him.” He nodded toward the porch. “But his first hundred thousand would be paid back to the estate. That’s how much the Judge figured Forrest owed him.”

“What a disaster.”

“I tried to talk him out of it.”

“Thank God he burned it.”

“Yes indeed. He knew it was a bad idea, but he was trying to protect Forrest from himself.”

“We’ve been trying for twenty years.”

“He thought of everything. He was going to leave it all to you, cut him out completely, but he knew that would only cause friction. Then he got mad because neither of you would ever live here, so he asked me to do a will that gave the house to the church. He never signed it, then Palmer pissed him off over the death penalty and he ditched that idea, said he would have it sold after his death and give the money to charity.” He stretched his arms upward until his spine popped. Harry Rex had had two back surgeries and was seldom comfortable. He continued. “I’m guessing the reason he called you and Forrest home was so the three of you could decide what to do with the estate.”

“Then why did he do a last-minute will?”

“We’ll never know, will we? Maybe he got tired of the pain. I suspect he’d grown fond of the morphine, like most folks at the end. Maybe he knew he was about to die.”

Ray looked into the eyes of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who’d been gazing sternly on the Judge’s study from the same perch for almost a century. Ray had no doubt that his father had chosen to die on the sofa so that the general could help him through it. The general knew. He knew how and when the Judge died. He knew where the cash came from. He knew who had broken in last night and trashed the office.

“Did he ever include Claudia in anything?” Ray asked.

“Never. He could hold a grudge, you know that.”