Chapter 20 Summary

Mattie awakens the next day to the sound of the corpse collector walking down the street with a cart and calling for dead bodies. Although she is disgusted by the thought of loading her grandfather's body onto such a cart, she realizes that in the heat he will begin to decompose quickly and she has no way of transporting him to the cemetery. She flags down the corpse collector and helps him load her grandfather's body. She then assists him in pushing the cart through the streets and out to the cemetery where she watches her grandfather's body be interred in a mass grave. Mattie insists that her grandfather receive Christian burial rites, but a minister is not to be found. Instead, she takes an offered Bible and reads a Psalm. The men then bury her grandfather's body.

Mattie then wanders through the...