In the time of May, always, Pettigrove would wander in Tull Great Wood as far as the hidden pleasaunce where the hawthorn so whitely bloomed. None but he knew of that, or remembered it, and when its dying petals were heaped upon the grass he gathered handfuls to keep in his pocket till they rotted. Sometimes he thought he would leave Tull and see something of the world; he often thought of that, but it seemed as if time had stabilized and contracted round his heart and he did not go. At last, after twenty years of widowhood, he died and was buried, and this was the manner of that.
Two men were digging his grave on the morning of the interment, a summer’s day so everlasting beautiful that it was incredible anyone should be dead. The two men, an ancient named Jethro and a younger whom he called Mark, went to sit in the cool porch for a brief rest. The work on the grave had been very much delayed, but now the old headstone was laid on one side, and most of the earth that had covered his wife’s body was heaped in untidy mounds upon the turf close by. Otherwise there was no change in the yard or the trees that grew so high, the grass that grew so greenly, the dark brick wall, or the door of fugitive blue; there was even a dappled goat quietly cropping. A woman came into the porch, remarked upon the grand day, and then passed into the church to her task of tidying up for the ceremony. Jethro took a swig of drink from a bottle and handed it to his mate.
“You don’t remember old Fan as used to clean the church, do you? No, ’twas ’fore you come about these parts. She was a smartish old gal. Bother me if one of they goats didn’t follow her into the darn church one day, ah, and wouldn’t be drove out on it, neither, no, and she chasing of it from here to there and one place and another but out it would not go, that goat. And at last it act-u-ally marched up into the pulpit and putt its two forelegs on the holy book and said ’Baa-a-a!’” Here Jethro gave a prolonged imitation of a goat’s cry. “Well, old Fan had been a bit skeered but she was so overcome by that bit of piety that, darn me, if she didn’t sit down and play the organ for it!”
Mark received this narration with a lack-lustre air and at once the two men resumed their work. Meanwhile a man ascended the church tower; other men had gone into the home of the dead man. Soon the vicar came hurrying through the blue door in the wall and the bell gave forth its first solemn toll.
“Hey, Jethro,” called Mark from the grave. “What d’you say’s the name of this chap?”
“Pettigrove. Hurry up, now.”
Mark, after bending down, whispered from the grave: “What was his wife’s name?”
“Why, man alive, that ’ud be Pettigrove, too.”
The bell in the tower gave another profoundly solemn beat.
“What’s the name on that headstone?” asked Mark.