He went along regularly after that, perhaps once a week and doing more and more of the work as time passed (although he was restricted to digging only; he had always been small for his age, and even at ten could still barely lift, let alone carry). “But you can be grateful you’re learning a trade,” the cousin said, “especially since I been right upset, ‘times, remembering what a unpromising start you had in life, and I weren’t sure a unwedded feller like myself could bring you up Christian and respectable.”

“I appreciate it,” Dingus said.

It was around then that it struck him to ask Magee about his mother also, but Magee could tell him nothing. “I never even heard tell your pa had got spliced,” he said. “But you take a incompetent chap who slips a ace out’n his sleeve without he remembers it’s the same ace of diamonds he’s already got in his hand, I don’t reckon he’ll hold onto a wife any longer’n he’s about to hold onto his money. Or his life. But anyways, I done my best to be a mother to you, likewise.”

“I appreciate that too,” Dingus said.

But then the cousin died. It was rain, an unseasonal downpour which lasted two full nights and those ironically the first two in the cousin’s life on which he had ever had consecutive employment. Dingus had caught a mild sniffle himself. Magee gave him nine dollars cash, and the engraved watch that had belonged to Dilinghaus, and the address of another cousin — a woman this time, in Galveston. “The nine dollars will get you there, I reckon,” Magee said. “But what about burying you?” Dingus asked him. “Now lissen here,” the cousin said, “what’s the use of having a profession in this life if’n you can’t calculate all the merits of it? There’s a good one hundred graves out there with nothing but empty coffins in ‘em, ain’t there? And you’re the sole individual after me knows the whereabouts of the most recent thirty or forty, ain’t you?”

“Oh,” Dingus said, “sure now, I jest weren’t myself fer a minute, is all.”

“Well, I forgive you,” the cousin said, “since it’s probably jest your grief over me has got you a little abstracted. I reckon a tyke would feel stricken at that, watching the demise of a cousin who give him everything he’s got in this world.”

“I appreciate it all,” Dingus told him.

That was about four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. The cousin died at sundown, and Dingus borrowed a neighbor’s mule to remove him to the cemetery. He gave the matter considerable thought, finally committing the remains beneath the headstone of someone named McNutt, which seemed the closest he could come to Magee.

Then, when he was about to lead the mule homeward again, it stumbled into a freshly dug grave. Dingus could not get the animal out, nor was there much point in trying, since it had broken a foreleg. He brained it with his shovel. He told the neighbor about the mishap the next morning. “How much cash inheritance you got?” the neighbor asked.

“Nine dollars,” Dingus said.

“Well, that were a useful mule, but it’s the Christian thing, to take pity on a orphan newly sorrowing over his kin. Give me eight.”

“It’s gonter be right hard on me, getting to Galveston on only one dollar,” Dingus said.

“Nonetheless it’s proud experience for a boy,” the neighbor insisted. “Like that Eastern feller Waldo Emerson is always saying, folks has got to learn self-reliance.”

“Yes sir,” Dingus said.

He debated selling the watch, and went so far as to ask a jeweler about it, but the jeweler told him it had never been worth very much to begin with. And the cousin had left nothing pawnable either, save perhaps for the old anatomy book. Dingus took that to one of the doctors.

“I really ought to keep it for a souvenir,” he told the man, “since cousin Magee were so generous and kind in all the years, even to giving me one third of what we earned when all I done were the digging part. But I jest got to have some money.”

But the book was out of date. “Why not wait a few days,” the doctor suggested, “until the next time I hear about a burial, and then you could—”

“I still can’t lift them,” Dingus said, “being only eleven years old. I’d have to have a mule again, and then if I broke another leg I’d be in a real—”

“Borrow mine,” the doctor insisted. “Yes, do. Because I’d hate to have it on my conscience that I hadn’t assisted the nephew of a colleague. It can’t be too long, and then you would have the full twenty dollars for—”

“How much?” Dingus said.

“Twenty dollars. What I always paid Magee. You’re new at it, of course, but I’d be willing to pay the same amount that—”

“Oh,” Dingus said. “Well, I appreciate that, I truly do. Where’d you say you kept that mule again?”

“Just out in back. But you can’t simply go dig up any old thing, you know. The specimen has to be only recently interred, or—”

“I jest heard of one,” Dingus said. “From yesterday evening, Tuesday, which ain’t even twenty-four hours, and—”

“But who was—?”

“Feller named McNutt,” Dingus said, already turning out. “I’ll have him back here soon’s it turns dark.”

The next cousin was crazy, Dingus saw that immediately, although he could not have said precisely how. She was about forty, quite gray, and her skin was oddly colorless also, the hue of wet cardboard. She lived in an enormous old house, not her own, built in the Mexican style with linked, contiguous rooms facing an open inner courtyard, and before his arrival she had been completely alone.

But it wasn’t that. Nor did he mind the prayers either, to which she woke him the first morning and which he learned he was expected to endure each evening as well, in dumb formal ritual not before any altar or image but in the unroofed garden itself, under the sky. “It is not God,” the cousin said. “It is nature — the trees, the stars, the flowers — the all-embracing, transcendental oneness of things.”

“Yes’m,” Dingus said. “Nor do I speak words when I kneel,” she added. “I merely commune.”

“Yes’m,” Dingus repeated.

So it took him a few days, and then he had to go to a keyhole to find out. It was wine. She had a bottle in her hand which she was just opening. When he went back to the door two hours later she was removing the cork from a second one.

Her name was Eustacia. He did not know what she lived on, and she complained repeatedly of poverty. “Moreover it costs a pretty penny to feed an extra mouth,” she informed him, “although I do it gladly, out of a sense of the transcendental oneness of earth’s creatures. I merely hope that you appreciate it.” Frequently she had visitors, a group of anonymous and undifferentiated women of her own age and of an equal drabness who came singly or in clusters to sit for an hour. They were all unwed.

Like Magee, this cousin gave no thought to sending him to school either, although she finally did remark something she felt ought to be contributed to his up-bringing. This was just after he had gone to bed of an evening, perhaps at nine o’clock. He had not yet reached his fourteenth birthday. The cousin came into the doorway, considering him dubiously from beneath an upraised lamp. “I believe it is time you became cognizant of the facts of life,” she said.

“What’s them?” Dingus asked sleepily.

“Miss Grimshaw has volunteered to explain.” Miss Grim-shaw was one of the drab ladies, although Dingus could not have said which, even after the several years. Certain of them were teachers, and he expected her to appear with a book. But it was the cousin, Eustacia, who reappeared first, carrying a bottle of the wine instead. “Drink this,” she told him.

“Drink it?” Dingus said.

“Drink it all,” she insisted.

So when he awakened the next morning he still could not have said which one was Miss Grimshaw. “That’s quite all right,” the cousin said, “Miss Youngblood has volunteered to give you some further instruction tonight.”