"Is there a rent?"
"Si, senor. Twenty pesos a year. Or, if they desire the permanent interment, one hundred seventy pesos. But our people, they are very poor, as you must know, and one hundred seventy pesos is as much as many of them make in two years. So they carry their dead here and place them into the earth for one year, and the twenty pesos are paid, with fine intentions of paying each year and each year, but each year and each year after the first year they have a burro to buy or a new mouth to feed, or maybe three new mouths, and the dead, after all, are not hungry, and the dead, after all, can pull no ploughs; or there is a new wife or there is a roof in need of mending, and the dead, remember, can be in no beds with a man, and the dead, you understand, can keep no rain off one, and so it is that the dead are not paid up upon their rent."
"Then what happens? Are you listening, Marie?" said Joseph.
Marie counted the bodies. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, "What?" she said, quietly.
"Are you listening?"
"I think so. What? Oh, yes! I'm listening."
Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.
"Well, then," said the little man. "I call a trabajando and with his delicate shovel at the end of the first year he does dig and dig and dig down. How deep do you think we dig, senor?"
"Six feet. That's the usual depth."
"Ah, no, ah, no. There, senor, you would be wrong. Knowing that after the first year the rent is liable not to be paid, we bury the poorest two feet down. It is less work, you understand? Of course, we must judge by the family who own a body. Some of them we bury sometimes three, sometimes four feet deep, sometimes five, sometimes six, depending on how rich the family is, depending on what the chances are we won't have to dig him from out his place a year later. And, let me tell you, senor, when we bury a man the whole six feet deep we are very certain of his staying. We have never dug up a six-foot-buried one yet, that is the accuracy with which we know the money of the people."
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Marie's lips moved with a small whisper.
"And the bodies which are dug up are placed down here against the wall, with the other compañeros."
"Do the relatives know the bodies are here?"
"Si." The small man pointed. "This one, yo veo?" It is new. It has been here but one year. His madre y padre know him to be here. But have they money? Ah, no."
