“Lose the sentiment. The feds are covering their butt.”

He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. I removed it and flipped it out into the dirt.

“Why’d you do that?” he said.

“Because you don’t know how to take care of yourself. Because you’re unteachable.”

“You’ll never change.”

“I won’t change?”

“You’ve got an anvil for a head, Dave. Everybody knows that except you. If it weren’t for me, your life would be a mess. I have to screw up for both of us. It’s a big job.”

Try to argue with a mind-set like that.

KNOW WHY THE FBI write down car tag numbers at Mafia funerals? Because all the players are there, including the ones who put the deceased in the box.

On Monday a funeral notice for Quince Whitley was printed in the Missoulian. The service was to be held the next day in a small Protestant church just south of Swan Lake. On Tuesday afternoon Clete and I drove in my pickup to the church and parked about three hundred feet away, in a grove of cottonwood trees where a family of Indians was selling cherries out of a flatbed truck.

Clete and I stood back in the shade and used my Russian military binoculars to watch one of the strangest assemblages of contradiction I have ever witnessed. The setting and the mourners were a study in juxtaposition. Jamie Sue and the Wellstone brothers arrived at the clapboard building in their white limo, chauffeured by Lyle Hobbs. Jamie Sue wore a white suit and dark glasses and a gray mantilla. The mixed message her choice of clothing sent could have been deliberate or even hostile. Or possibly it meant nothing at all. The Reverend Sonny Click had on yellow-tinted aviator glasses and was wearing a blue polyester suit that, in the sunlight, seemed to have lubricant on it. The faces of Hobbs, Jamie Sue, Sonny Click, and the Wellstone brothers were as opaque as glazed ceramic. The faces of Quince Whitley’s family, who arrived in a rental car, were another matter.

The Whitley family not only resembled one another, they looked as though they had all descended from the same impaired seed. Their skin was the color of dust. Their expressions seemed incapable of showing either joy or grief. Briefly, one of the women looked at Jamie Sue with indignation, as though Jamie Sue were perhaps the cause of Quince’s death. Their ages gave no clue to their relationship with the deceased. An unkind observer might have said they possessed all the characteristics of livestock milling around in a feeder lot, waiting for their roles in the world to be imposed upon them.

The hearse from the funeral home arrived late, and Lyle Hobbs and the Whitley men lifted up the coffin and carried it inside. Five minutes later, we could hear the voice of Sonny Click booming from the church’s interior. In the slanting rays of the sun on the pines and the dilapidated shingle roof of the building, the scene was like a photograph taken in an earlier time, perhaps during World War II, when death came much more violently and prematurely to us than it does today, and disparate elements of the country were drawn together in humble surroundings to mourn the loss of a much admired man or woman. But the scene Clete and I were watching was quite different. Quince Whitley had probably been a misogynist, if not a misanthrope, and his mourners represented elements in our culture whose existence we either deny or whose origins we have difficulty explaining. But maybe what appeared to be myriad contradictions in the mourning ritual we witnessed that afternoon had more to do with the presence or absence of money in our lives than it did anything else.

For Whitley’s people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer’s family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor whites’ domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his by birth. When people talk about class war, they’re dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all.

Or at least that’s the way things were in the South during the era when I grew up.

After the service, the hearse drove to a cemetery four miles away, with the limo and the Whitley rental cars in tow. The grave had already been dug, the dirt piled on one side, a rolled mat of artificial grass dropped nonchalantly on top of it. The sun sliced through the pines and maples. In the spangled light, motes of dust and pieces of desiccated leaves floated like gilded insects. Clete had said few words in the last hour, and I wondered if he was reliving the moments before he had sighted on the side of Quince Whitley’s head and pulled the trigger.

“We haven’t learned a lot here. You want to wrap it up?” I said.

“Let’s see it through,” he said.

We had parked the truck not over fifty yards up the road from the cemetery, but so far the mourners had either not taken notice of us or didn’t care whether we were there or not. Regardless, I didn’t want to see Clete forced to confront Whitley’s family. Sonny Click read from a Bible over the coffin, then the mourners held hands and lowered their heads while Click led them in prayer. Through the binoculars, I saw Leslie Wellstone fight to keep from yawning.

Then the mourners got into their vehicles and began leaving, while the funeral attendants waited to lower the casket into the grave.

“I’ll buy you supper,” I said.

“Hold on,” Clete said, pointing down the road with his chin.

A dark SUV had approached the cemetery from the other end and parked in the trees. When the last of the mourners had left, a big man got out of the SUV and walked to the grave site. A long-necked bottle of beer protruded from his right pants pocket.

“It’s what’s-his-name, the bartender from the club on the lake,” I said.

“Harold Waxman, the blue-collar suck-up guy.”

“Wait here,” I said.

“What for?”

I walked away without offering an explanation. The afternoon sun was waning, which meant Clete’s need for alcohol and the irritability that went with it were growing by the minute. As I entered the cemetery, the funeral attendants were lowering the casket on the motor-operated pulley. Harold Waxman said something to them, then twisted off the cap on his beer bottle and poured the beer on top of the coffin.

“Buying Whitley a last round?” I said.

He looked at me indifferently. “I’m taking over his job. I figured he deserved one for the road,” he replied.

“You’ll be working for the Wellstones?”

“Just for Ms. Wellstone. She doesn’t have a personal driver right now.” He looked past me at Clete, who was standing in the shade by my truck. “Your friend up there is the one who capped him?”

“No, my friend is the one who stopped Whitley from shooting an unarmed woman.”

“Some kill. Whitley couldn’t hit the ground with his hat.” Harold Waxman tossed the beer bottle into the grave. It clanked and rolled off the rounded top of the casket and landed with a thud in the dirt.