We arrived two hours later. The hearse, which was a black van with a dented door, stitched down the driveway, through the pastures and up the hill.
They carried her out on a gurney, lifted over the jamb by a Mexican who had tucked his t-shirt into his black jeans out of respect, and who spoke no english.
A woman sick herself weeped raggedly, coughing and tears as the body was covered with a heavy paisley veil which hung stiff like a rug and was like a rug in its weight and wear and undignity.
Then we sat around a table and it squalled so soon after she had gone. The rain came off the sky in linen sheets and ran down into the cracks in the red clay yard and into the white caliche.
Later when the rain had just let, we fed the horses. They were wet and smelled saccharine and the air was woolen and a light rain still fell and the muscles in their faces shot like shuttles in a loom.
And overhead was the warp of the power lines, like a ribbon down which the distant thunder rolled past us.
This is the third of four poems in a series called “The Four of Cups”