I knew I had to get the bag out of the house, because when they missed it, they would search everywhere. When the house was quiet, I went down the stairs.
The men who were sitting up with the dead man were all asleep on their chairs. But the front door was locked, and the key wasn’t there. Just then I heard somebody coming down the stairs behind me. I ran into the room where the coffin was, and the only place I could see to hide the bag was in the coffin. The lid was open about a foot, and I could see the dead man’s face under a wet cloth. I pushed the bag in under the lid, just below his crossed hands. They were so cold that my skin crawled. Then I ran behind the door.
It was Mary Jane. She went quietly to the coffin, knelt down and looked in, and then she put her handkerchief to her eyes and cried without a sound. I slipped out and went back to bed.
I felt bad. If the money stayed there, I could write to Mary Jane from far down the river, and she could dig him up and get it. But they would surely find it when they closed the coffin, and the king would get it back.
In the morning the room was shut, and I couldn’t tell from anybody’s face if something had happened. At noon the funeral began. The house was full of people, and they walked slowly past the coffin and looked at the dead man’s face, and it was all very quiet and serious. I could see that the lid was the same as before, but I didn’t dare look under it with people around.
When it was all over, the undertaker went to the coffin with his screwdriver. I watched him closely. But he didn’t look inside. He just slid the lid closed and screwed it down tight. So there I was! I didn’t know if the money was in there or not. What if somebody had taken it? If I wrote to Mary Jane and she dug him up and found nothing, what would she think of me? I could end up in jail. I had tried to make things better and made them a hundred times worse.
They buried him, and we came home, and nothing in anybody’s face told me anything.
That evening the king told people all over town that his church in England needed him, so he had to sell everything quickly and go home, and he would take the girls with him. The girls were so happy that they forgot all their trouble. It made my heart ache to see them fooled like that, but I couldn’t see a safe way to stop it.
The king announced an auction of the house, the slaves and all the property, two days after the funeral. But the very next day two slave traders came, and the king sold them the slaves. The two sons went up the river to Memphis, and their mother went down the river to New Orleans. I thought it would break the hearts of the poor girls and the slaves. They held each other and cried, and the girls said they had never dreamed the family would be separated or sold away from town. I can never forget it. I couldn’t have stood it, and I would have told on our gang, if I hadn’t known that the sale didn’t count and the slaves would be back home in a week or two.
The next morning, the day of the auction, the king and the duke woke me up, and I saw from their faces that there was trouble.
“Were you in my room the night before the funeral?” asked the king.
“No, your majesty.” That was what I always called him when nobody else was around.
“Have you seen anybody else go in there?” asked the duke.
I thought for a while and saw my chance. “Well, I saw the slaves go in there a few times. And on the morning of the funeral I saw them all tiptoe out. I thought they had come to clean the room, found your majesty still asleep, and were trying to get away without waking you.”
They both jumped, and then they looked sick and silly. The duke laughed a dry little laugh. “They pretended to be sorry to leave, and everybody believed them! And we sold them for almost nothing.”
“Has something gone wrong?” I asked.
The king turned on me. “None of your business! Keep your mouth shut.” Then he said to the duke, “We have to swallow this and say nothing.”
They went off arguing, and I was very glad I had put it all on the slaves, because it couldn’t do them any harm now.