The day after Poppa's funeral, Scrappy and I went with Daddy to the pound where we found Kudzu, the sweetest, ugliest mutt to ever grace the cells of our local animal shelter. Mammy and Kudzu fell in love the minute they laid eyes on each other and remained side by side until the day she drew her last.

When Mammy got sick and ended up in the hospital, she begged us to look after Kudzu until she got well. It hadn't been long since we buried Sambo, our Black Lab, widely known and discussed around town for sleeping through twelve straight summers. Since we had not yet replaced Sambo, and since Kudzu was in need of a temporary home, we agreed to take him in for a while.

Right away, Kudzu took to eating from Sambo's bowl, slept and snored in Sambo's ratty old bed and even took to snuggling with Sambo's leftover raggedy blanket. We loved Kudzu a long time before he came to temporarily live with us, so he was never a problem. I'd like to believe that old dog appreciated us taking him out of Geriatrickville to enjoy a few more romps around the block.

Mammy didn't get well, and the so-called temporary adoption turned into a permanent blessing all the way around.

About a month or so before she traveled up to that all-you-can-buffet in the sky, Mammy got her lawyer to add something to her Will. She indicated that when Kudzu died, he should be buried right between her and Poppa in the plot we had wrongly figured belonged to the next of kin.

Mama was crying and carrying on something awful the whole time the slow-talking lawyer read Mammy's last Will and deathbed desires. Daddy tried to comfort her, but he finally had to tell the lawyer to snap it up so he could take Mama to the Dairy Queen where a Heath Bar Blizzard was sure to calm her right down.

We figured it would be a good while before Kudzu died, but we were wrong. We also didn't figure on the Greenburg Sanitation Department having definite ideas about where Ol' Kudzu should rest following his lazy demise.

"What the sanitation department doesn't know ain't gonna hurt 'em one bit," my brother Scrappy announced the same day Kudzu gave up the ghost.

He drove out to the cemetery late one night, fully intending to bury Kudzu according to our grandmother's last wish, and the sanitation people could kiss old frog's foot. I went with him, but I was in no way thrilled about it.

The front gate was locked up tight and I wondered about it. "Why do they bother to lock up a cemetery, Scrappy? The residents sho' ain't going nowhere."

"People steal funeral flowers all the time, dumb ass. Don't you know anything?"

"Oh, gimme a break, Scrappy."

"You think I'm kidding? I remember one time Jo Jo stole flowers off a grave so he could give 'em to Nancy Fay Rossler."

"That's just plain tacky. I hope Nancy Fay threw 'em back in his face, Scrappy."

"Nope. She grinned like a chessie cat and told everybody that Jo Jo was a gentleman." Scrappy laughed. "She said, 'Jo Jo's got class. Unlike some other boys I know.' Class my ass. She don't know nothin'."

I didn't think it was a bit funny, but then Scrappy and his buddies grossed me out on a regular basis. "Well I still think putting locks on cemetery gate to keep idiots like Jo Jo from sneaking in and stealing funeral flowers is way past overkill."

But Scrappy didn't pay any attention to me, or my pun. He was on a roll and there was no way of stopping him. "Some people dig up graves and open the coffins. They do it hoping to find valuables to steal right out from under the corpse. I wonder if anybody is doing that tonight?"

He did a goofy thing with his eyes that made his face look more stupid than it normally did, but I didn't need his comment to get myself on the scared side. I was there the minute I left the house.

"What kind of valuables?" I couldn't imagine anybody crazy enough to feel around inside a dead person's eternal bed.

He laughed. "Rings and watches and stuff. Daddy says people always think they can take it with them."

He turned off the car headlights and we drove around to the side of the grave yard where it was so dark you couldn't see your tongue if you could stick it out far enough to look. Kudzu was in the trunk, wrapped up like a baby in Sambo's ratty old blanket. We parked under some trees and sat in the darkness for a few minutes, neither of us saying anything.

Finally Scrappy said, "Well, we might as well get it over with. See that fence over there? I'll help you over to the other side, then you just wait there till I come back."

"Where are you going?" Fear iced over my brain like a February frost. "Listen up, Birdbrain. I gotta get Kudzu out of the trunk, don't I?"

"Okay. So I'll help you." I did not want to stand in that blacker than black cemetery all by myself. No sirree.

"All you need to do is wait over there while I get him out of the trunk, then when I come back, I'll lower him down to you on the other side. You can hold him long enough for me to crawl over the fence, can't you?"

At that moment, my eyes must have looked big as YoYo's, and my mouth was definitely starting to act funny. It would not close. "You want me to stand there all by myself in the dark holding a dead dog?"

"Just for a minute, Boo, for Christ's sake. It won't take me long to shinny over the fence, but I can't do it and hold onto Kudzu at the same time, can I? If he's too heavy for you, put him down on the ground. Jeez!"

It didn't matter to me if that dog was the size of a Chihuahua, weighing three and a half pounds soaking wet. I had no intention of doing anything other than dropping Kudzu's fifty pound butt on the ground where a dead dog truly belonged.

We managed somehow to get over that first hurdle, and then began to wander around in the blackest dark I have ever known. After a while, we finally found Poppa and Mammy's graves.

It was my job to look out for the security guard while Scrappy dug a hole between our grandparents for Kudzu. Much later, I found out that the guard who lived on the cemetery grounds was almost always dead drunk by that time of night, but we didn't know that then.

Scrappy dug down pretty deep and was covered all over with sweat and red clay by the time the hole was big enough to lay the dog to rest, so to speak.

Scrappy had thought of everything. He even remembered to bring along a Bible. When all the dirt was packed down tight over Ol' Kudzu, Scrappy said we should jump up and down on top of his grave so it wouldn't look so much like new dirt. Then he pulled a flashlight out of his pocket and began to read a passage from the Bible. We both said "Amen," and then my brother snapped the Good Book closed.

"First thing tomorrow morning, we'll come back out here and plant one of those big azalea bushes on top of him," Scrappy said. "That way, nobody will ever guess that ol' Kudzu is still fertilizing azaleas like he did when he was alive and pooping on every bush in sight."

Scrappy turned toward me for a second, just long enough for me to notice the shiny spot on his cheek when our eyes met. I stooped down to the ground and retied my left sneaker even though it didn't need it, and pretended I hadn't noticed his tears.

We went back the next day to plant the Azalea we bought especially for Ol' Kudzu, but there was already one there. And it was blooming.