A neighbor had died. She was the widow of a security guard, and she lived in a trailer a quarter mile distant. We often exchanged vegetables and game with her, and she took care of my little brother and sister when their mother had to go into town. At the funeral I expected to see her body, and I did, but the morticians had gone to work on her. They had taken her glasses, and, in place of the blue print smock, they had given her some kind of skirt suit; then, they had tightened her chin somehow, and powdered her hair, so she looked like George Washington, and they put her in a lead coffin. I knew it was her, but she did not look like anyone I knew, and I kept staring at the body.

Finally they mounted the box above a hole, with the steel pipes and the straps, for the lowering. The preacher was a young man, a recent graduate with neck like a stalk, but he meant well; he praised her as 'a fan of good conversation'. The silk flowers smiled, in mauve and off-color pinks, and beneath the canvas that held the dirt, poison ivy was growing. Somehow, the clay and the ivy failed to fit the occasion. The clay was not rich black dirt, like you see in a painting; instead, it was red and cracked, the kind of mud you scatter when you plant a cable. The poison ivy looked like a trinket, something slick and endless, like...the plastic leaves in the boxes at the red army temple. Poison ivy always looks like plastic; that was the connection.

What could I say?  I wanted to know 'How old would you be?'

'Fifty' she had said, 'So I could still row!'

Today, however, Mai Lin was less melodious. Instead she seemed careful, even somber, as we blinked our way back into the plaza. Around us we saw what looked like marble benches, and I almost sat on one before Mai Lin stopped me. She said "See! There a family" was bringing their urn-box to one of these — altars.

They set the case on the marble slab.  It was carved with the usual cranes, and held a photo of an old soldier. A bald man, the father, bowed to the picture. Then he set out three tomatoes, three bananas, three cucumbers, and three plums. Of course, I realized, both three and four are sacred numbers.

A foot from the altar he piled wax paper, which he lit with a match; then he prayed with fanning gestures while his wife fed in more pieces, one by one. His kids scratched themselves, as bored as youngsters at any ceremony; but the man started crying as the smoke bathed the food and photo. Within moments the white column floated into the heavens. There the essence of the fruits would feed his father, the way his father had fed him...