The white powder in the capsule had no smell. It sat in my palm like a pinch of flour, pale and fine and perfectly ordinary, and I stood at my kitchen counter with the trash can open at my feet and understood that I would never again be able to look at a bottle of vitamins the same way. Fish oil should be gold and slippery. I pulled the capsule apart a little more, and a tiny drift of that powder floated down to the linoleum, and I realized I was holding my breath. I got a sandwich bag. I got a spoon. I put the bottle in the bag, and the bag in my purse, and I sat down in the chair at the table of Ferris.
The telephone rang. Dr. Amari. She had a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “Mrs. Rutledge,” she said, “I have been on the phone with the state laboratory. The preliminary screen on your husband is back, and I need you to listen very carefully.” I told her I had the capsule in my kitchen. There was a long silence. Then she said, “Do not touch it again. I am sending a police officer and a lab technician to your home. And Mrs. Rutledge, I am so sorry. Your husband did not die of his heart.”
A sergeant from the Florence police came in twenty minutes, a heavyset man named Birdsong with a kind, tired face, and with him a young woman in a white coat who took the bottle from me with tongs. They asked me gentle questions at my kitchen table. I told them about Saturday and the groceries. I told them about the cremation, and Clay in the office, and the pen, and the line that said expedited. Sergeant Birdsong wrote it all down in a little notebook, and when I got to the part about the plot at Greenhill, he stopped and said, “Mrs. Rutledge, was the plot already paid for?” I said yes, and I handed him the receipt.
A man who buys his own grave early is a man who wants to be found where he left himself.
Clay came by that evening with a casserole. I had forgotten how well he could act. He stood in my doorway holding a Pyrex dish with foil on top and his eyes wet, and said, “Nelda, I came to check on you. I am worried. You left so suddenly this morning.” Behind my shoulder, in the living room, Sergeant Birdsong and another officer stood quietly by the piano. I invited my stepson inside. I took the casserole from his hands and set it on the counter. “Clay,” I said, “why did you buy Daddy fish oil?”
He did not blink. “It is good for the heart,” he said. Then the sergeant stepped into the kitchen, and Clay turned, and I watched the whole man fall in on himself. They read it to him there, standing under my kitchen light, the thing the doctor had found. Ferris had been given a heavy dose of a poison that mimics a heart attack, in a capsule of oil bought at the Walgreens in Muscle Shoals and carefully refilled. Clay had been in deep debt to his own dealership, to the bank, and to a man in Tuscaloosa. Ferris had been about to change his will.
“I did not think it would be so fast,” Clay whispered, as they put the handcuffs on him. “I only wanted him to get sick. I only wanted him to need me.” It was the most horrible sentence I have ever heard. His hands shook. I looked at him, forty four years old, a boy I had made peanut butter sandwiches for when his mother left, and I tried to feel what a woman is supposed to feel. I felt nothing, then all of it at once. I sat down at the table. Birdsong put a hand on my shoulder and said that the church ladies had been called, and that they were on their way.
They came in a caravan of casseroles and Buicks, twelve women from First Methodist, led by Doris Pettigrew, who had been the choir director for forty years. They did not ask questions. They washed the dishes. They made up my bed. Doris sat beside me on the sofa and held my hand and said, “Nelda, we are going to bury that man the right way, and we are going to do it where he wanted.” I told her about the plot and about his mother. She said, “Then that is where we will put him. Tomorrow I will call the funeral home myself.”
We buried Ferris on Saturday, at Greenhill, beside his mother, under an old magnolia. The state had finished its work. The hospital had released him. There was a viewing the night before at the very funeral home on Court Street, and the line stretched out the door and around the corner. The director, a nervous man named Mr. Hale, apologized to me three times for the morning of the pen. I told him he had been brave to call the police.
Mr. Hale had indeed called, as it turned out, on Tuesday afternoon, an hour after I left, because he did not like cash in a rush. He had sat on the phone with Dr. Amari while I stood at my kitchen counter holding the capsule. Between the two of them they had stopped a body from becoming a handful of dust. That is what the whole business came down to in the end, a quiet funeral director and a tired young doctor who both decided to care a little more than their jobs required.
At the service, Pastor Bell read from the Gospel of John, and the choir sang Blessed Assurance. I sat in the front pew in a navy dress with Doris on my left and the empty seat on my right, and I did not weep until the last verse. Then I wept in front of three hundred people, and every one of them wept with me. The sun came through the stained glass in long lemon bars across the floor. When we carried him out to Greenhill, the whole town followed on foot behind the hearse, down Court Street, in the June heat, because Ferris was that kind of man.
Clay pleaded guilty in the fall and received a sentence I will not write down. I wrote him one letter, once a year at Christmas, and I never once visited. People say that is hard. It is simply what I can do. Some mornings I am still angry. Some mornings I make coffee for two out of habit. But I have started a scholarship at the church in the name of Ferris, for any young man from Lauderdale County who wants to learn a trade, and the first boy received it last May. He is going to be an electrician. When he shook my hand, I thought of the plot, and the magnolia, and I thought, now there is something that will grow.