Excerpt
The main thing I remember about Butch Slade was the grin plastered on the face of his corpse. I don’t suppose anyone thought anything about it, because that’s how he always looked: bloodshot eyes and tobacco-stained teeth bared between those lips screwed up at the corners. Now that he was dead and laid out in a pine box in front of Pa’s furniture store, everyone came to look at him. Come to think of it, I don’t reckon he’d of minded.
I was only ten at the time. My Pa had the only furniture store in Lander, Wyoming. Besides bedsteads and tables, he sold caskets. That’s kind of the way they did things back then. A hundred dollars would buy you a fancy hardwood casket stained and varnished like your parlor table. He didn’t sell many of those. Most folks went for the twenty-five-dollar pine box with the nailed-down lid. It didn’t seem to matter. None of his customers ever bragged or complained about their accommodations.