20

Bayou City

The man still walked with a sprightly step considering his age. Observing him from a distance one would find it impossible to determine either his age or occupation by watching his back as he walked. He had the gait of a person twenty years his junior, and from the shiny, black, poor-boy suit, one might have pegged him as a preacher from an impoverished congregation, a third-world missionary, or somebody down on their luck. Nobody would have surmised, from watching the back of Dr. Solomon Royal, that they were looking at one of the most successful physicians in southeast Missouri.

The man in the wrinkled and worn black suit walked briskly through the doors of Van Estes's Funeral Home.

“Howdy, Doc,” the greeter, who doubled as chief medical examiner/embalmer for Bayou City, Eddie Roddenberg, said in his professional whisper of respect.

“Howdy, Eddie.” The men smiled and the doctor went to the left, a pathway he'd traveled many scores of times. Between the two of them they'd seen more death and pain than any fifty men would normally encounter in a lifetime. Both were older men, reasonably at home with the social graces, but perhaps each sensed the aura of darkness around the other and they tended to communicate as little as possible.

“Emily,” Dr. Royal said to the first woman he saw in the room where his former patient was being viewed, “my condolences to your family.” He hugged her and she responded with the same feeling of tenderness and warmth she felt toward her own kinfolk.

He shook a few hands and walked over to the open coffin and looked at what was displayed between the two large groupings of floral arrangements. He bowed his head.

Across the room two women of the town watched him.

“What a fine man. I just love Dr. Royal. I don't know what Bayou City will ever do without him."

“He delivered me, did you know that?"

“Did he really?” The woman had to bite her tongue to keep from adding, “I didn't know he was that old."

“He's like my own family."

No he's not, he's not an alcoholic, she thought, smiling a wicked little smile. She said, however, “Same here. The man's such a saint. I hope he never quits. You know, I hear he still goes in every day, rain or shine. You almost have to force money on him. Such a dear, sweet man."

“A real saint. I agree.” The two women who secretly hated one another stood watching the kindly physician across the room from them.

What Royal was thinking, as he looked down at the cadaver in the expensive box, was Brother Roddenberg got a bit rushed there with the jawline. Barbaric custom. Open casket rituals were nonsense to begin with, but this cancer-ravaged corpse would be displayed only briefly prior to cremation: what was known in the spade trade as a “shake and bake."

“He looks so good, doesn't he?” a man said, patting Royal on the back.

“He does. How are you, Bob?” You idiot.

“Fine doc. You doing okay?"

“I'm good."

“I'm sure gonna miss him."

So shall I. Royal thought it had been rather enjoyable taking him through the final weeks of structured agony, ringing the changes on him with a carefully orchestrated regimen of injections calculated to send him screaming to the utmost wilderness of his pain threshhold, bring him back, send him out a little further, bring him back, send him out again. “I miss him already,” he said.

“You know what, Doc, you'uns brought him some relief there at the last, and that was a real blessing,” the smiling man patted Royal again, as if he were a dog.

Take your wretched hand off me, you drooling imbecile. Or would you prefer I amputate it at the wrist?

“I did what I could,” he said, softly.