![]() Glenndell leaned toward Oba as if this would seclude them into their own conversation. “We’re all still in the throes of grief here. What’s brought you here, son? You weren’t ever in front of Dad’s bench, were you?” The Judge’s first sight, if he were resurrected at that moment, would have been the spidery tangle of their fingers meeting over his face. The Judge’s son put his hand across the casket to Oba. “Never indoors, though,” a skinny man said, his smirk tight on his skull. ![]() “I’ve only ever seen preachers wear a black hat when it’s sunny out.” He had a collection of white shaving scars on his chin. “I only say because of your hat,” the son continued. “Now, if he’s a preacher,” an old woman said. I’m sorry to say Pastor Hollings beat you here.” His gaze traveled to the rug, where on any other day the Judge’s grandchildren might have played in the sun. “From going to and fro on the earth,” he said. Oba looked up, conscious of the separation between him and the gathering. “And where do you come from, sir?” the Judge’s son asked him. The Judge looked exposed in an unnatural way, like a turtle robbed of his shell. Oba approached the casket, where Judge Greene’s son and a small detachment of visitors were discussing which states they were from-the safe, factual kind of conversation that strangers and cousins have in times of upset. A blur of animation clouded the Judge’s features, but his father’s face was caught with the exquisite clarity found only in the dead. A glass cabinet by the stairs carried photographs of Judge Greene’s family and ancestors, tintypes and albumen prints, including one of the Judge himself next to the propped corpse of his father. He thought of himself this way and liked it. He was always at the rim of things, a traveler of peripheries and outskirts. He loitered for a minute between the porch talkers and the mourners at the casket. To the left was the parlor, where death was closest but the conversation was loudest. Middle of the afternoon.” Oba went into the empty hall. Look at FDR last year-he went right after dinner. On the veranda a frog-necked man with a red bowtie was saying, “You never know when it’ll come. ![]() The fatherly distraction in his eyes said he belonged with somebody his invisible family ushered him out of their suspicions and brought him to the Judge’s door. ![]() He was not as welcome there as a Stoleback fellow, but neither was he some bachelor or vagabond, someone lonesome and sinister. The other people on the path ignored him. He glanced behind himself every few moments, as if waiting for a child to follow. Oba followed the other mourners through the stately tunnel of maple trees that led from the road to the house. The house looked like a Confederate general’s imagining of a Greek temple-Corinthian columns and a cane bottom chair on the veranda where Socrates could sip his mint tea. The Judge’s house was far from Stoleback, so that people would know he was not fully a part of the town he oversaw. Nothing tethered him to his apartment in the other city except a lease under the name of Guy Yearwood and a debt, under the name of Harold Dawn, to the local bail bondsman for skipping his arraignment on fraud. He stayed there for five days, waiting for the visitation. Oba had been in the neighboring county when he’d heard of the Judge’s death and felt a sudden hunger to return to Stoleback, the place of his raising. Oba strolled beside the offices and listened, with anonymous pleasure, to the men musing and arguing behind the glass, reckoning new alliances, sketching new territories. The windows at the courthouse stayed bright that evening, long after the clerks had departed. T oward seven o’clock, Obadiah came down from his boardinghouse room above the tavern, intent on a walk in the blue night air.
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