It was at the funeral, at the funeral, where we first saw all the wives, and the curtains of the house drew open. We had caught glimpses around Newville for years, but now that we could examine them up close, we wanted blood and wailing, the dramas of fighting, grieving, concupiscent women flinging themselves over Rich’s exanimate body. They met us instead with upturned faces and dignity, pressed clothing and palms. The devil beat his wife that day, as we heard Rich had beaten his. The rain pelted us, the sun pelted us, and sweat, water, mud, and dust dotted our clothes and soaked our ankles, so it was like the Lord punished us for coming to ogle.

There were six pallbearers, the oldest sons, paper-doll cutouts of Rich in descending sizes. We showed up with stuffed Cornish hens, greens, macaroni and cheese, crisp fried chicken, potato salad, pecan pie, ribs, biscuits, cobbler, shortcakes, raspberry cordial, cordiality, and affected pity as our self-charged admission fee for the spectacle. We didn’t like the way our children looked at theirs, not so much with natural curiosity, but with hunger in their eyes. We were hungry, too.

Yet those women, Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne, and their brood of children were civil, respectable, striking, lined up in their plain white cotton dresses and pants, for it was a Friday—and their getups apparently part of Rich’s eccentric practices—along with Rich’s three-legged hound, who barked only once when the first handful of dirt landed on the plain ash casket.

And that was that. No one spoke. Rich belonged to the church of himself and had no reverend. The women and children sang a song we did not recognize and cannot remember, led a cappella by the light-skinned wife with freckles, Vivianne. He was buried in the ground almost unceremoniously, until she tried to jump in after him. The other three women snatched her back with one big hand, then started crying in more harmony than in their singing moments before. Rich came into the world with a bang, lived in it with lightning flashes and flared nostrils, and left it as we all do, alone, with little blues, except what the women made over him, and a slight buzzing in the air. We followed the procession, gaping at the scene, glancing occasionally at the sun, gulping up the raindrops in the field.