Evered

by Ben Ames Williams

VII

WHEN they came into the farmyard night was falling. In the west the sky still showed bright and warm; and against this brilliant sky the hills were purple and deeper purple in the distance. In the valleys mists were rising and black pools of night were forming beneath these mists; and while Evered bore his wife’s body into the house and laid it on the bed in the spare room, these pools rose and rose until they topped the hills and overflowed the world with darkness. The air was still hot and heavy, as it had been all day; and the sultry sky which had intensified the heat of the sun served now to hide the stars. When it grew dark it was as dark as pitch. The blackness seemed tangible, as though a man might catch it in his hand.

Ruth stayed beside her sister; but John built a fire in the stove while Evered sat by in stony calm, and he made coffee and fried salt pork and boiled potatoes. There were cold biscuits which Mary Evered had made that morning, and doughnuts from the crock in the cellar. When the supper was ready he called Ruth; and she came. The most tragic thing about death is that it accomplishes so little. The dropping of man or woman into the pool of the infinite is no more than the dropping of a pebble into a brook. The surface of the pool is as calm, a little after, as it was before. Thus, now, save that Mary was not at the table, their supping together was as it had always been.

And after they had eaten they must go with the familiarity of long habit about their evening chores. Ruth washed the dishes; John and his father fed the beasts and milked the cows; and when they came in John turned the separator while Ruth attended to the milk and put away, afterward, the skim milk and the cream.

By that time two or three neighbors had come in, having heard of that which had come to pass. There was genuine sorrow in them, for Mary Evered had been a woman to be loved; but there was also the ugly curiosity native to the human mind; and there was speculation in each eye as they watched Evered and John and Ruth. They would discuss, for days to come, the bearing of each one of the three on that black night.

For Evered, the man was starkly silent, saying no word. He sat by the table, eyes before him, puffing his pipe. Ruth stayed by her sister as though some instinct of protection kept her there. John talked with those who came, told them a little. He did not mention Semler’s part in the tragedy. He said simply that the bull had broken loose; that Mary Evered was by the spring, where she liked to go; that the bull came upon her there.

They asked morbidly whether she was trampled and torn; and they seemed disappointed when he told them that she was not, that even the terrible red bull had seemed appalled at the thing which he had done. And through the evening others came and went, so that he had to say the same things over and over; and always Evered sat silently by the table, giving no heed when any man spoke to him; and Ruth, in the other room, kept guard above the body. The women went in there, some of them; but no men went in.

John had telephoned to Isaac Gorfinkle, whose business it was to prepare poor human clay for its return to earth again; and Gorfinkle came about midnight and put all save Ruth out of the room where the dead woman lay. Gorfinkle was a little, fussy man; a man who knew his doleful trade. Before day he and Ruth had done what needed doing; and Mary Evered lay in the varnished coffin he had brought. Her white hair and the sweet nobility of her countenance, serenely lying there, made those who looked forget the ugly splendor of Gorfinkle’s wares.

It was decided that she should be buried on the second day. On the day after her death many people came to the farm; and some came from curiosity, and some from sympathy, and some with an uncertain purpose in their minds.

These were the selectmen of the town—Lee Motley, chairman; and Enoch Thomas, of North Fraternity; and Old Man Varney. Motley, a sober man and a man of wisdom, was of Evered’s own generation; Enoch Thomas and Varney were years older. Old Varney had a son past thirty, whom to this day he thrashed with an ax stave when the spirit moved him, his big son good-naturedly accepting the outrage.