A White Feather
Rhodie Polhemus who lived on Bear Fork of Puncheon Creek was one who believed in signs. It had started long years ago when Alamander, her husband, had met an untimely fate. That morning after he had gone out hunting Rhodie was sweeping the floor when she saw a white feather fluttering about the brush of her broom. It hovered strangely in midair, then sank slowly to the puncheon floor near the door. “The angel of death is nigh. There’ll be a corpse under this roof this day.” Rhodie trembled with fear. Sure enough Alamander was carried in stark dead before sundown. It came at a time when there wasn’t a plank on the place. They had disposed of their timber, which was little enough, as fast as it was sawed. So that there was not a piece left with which to make Alamander’s burying box. Nor was there a whipsaw in the whole country round with which to work, the itinerate sawyer having gone on with his property to another creek. But folks were neighborly and willing. They cut down a fine poplar tree, reduced a log of it to proper length and with ax and adze hewed out a coffin for Rhodie’s husband, hollowing it out into a trough and shaping the ends to fit the corpse. The lid they made of clapboards. Placing a coverlid inside the trough they laid the body of Alamander upon it, made fast the lid, and bore him off to the burying ground.
“I knowed his time had come,” Rhodie often repeated the story, “when I found the white feather—and when it hovered near the door where Alamander went out that morning.”
There were other signs.
All of a week after Alamander was buried Rhodie claimed she had seen the mound above him rise and move in ripples the full length of the log coffin in which he lay buried. “Could be he’s not resting easy,” the old woman said to herself. “Could be the coverlid under his back is wrinkled.” In response to her question the departed Alamander is said to have assured his widow that it was his sign of letting her know he was aware of her presence. However, when curious neighbors accompanied Rhodie to the burying ground, the mound remained still as a rock. Rhodie said it was the sign that he had rather she come to his grave alone.
Though there was never an eyewitness to the rippling earth on the grave save that of Rhodie, whenever anyone found a white feather about the house he remembered what the old woman on Bear Fork of Puncheon Creek had said, “It is a sign of death!”