He is buried in the little graveyard behind Redwine Church, along with most of the men and women to whom he preached in it thirty years ago.
I can feel that I am not setting things down right, not making the latitude and longitude of experience clearly so that you may see as I can when I close my eyes the staggering tombstones in the brown shadows behind the little brown church. But when one has been in the Methodist itinerancy a lifetime one cannot do that.
I used to wonder why Paul, passing through all the grandest cities and civilizations of his times, never left behind him a single description of any of their glories, only a reference to the altar to An Unknown God that he found in Athens; but now I know. Paul lost the memory of sight. He had absent-minded eyes to the things of the world. So it is with the itinerant. The earth becomes one of the stars. I cannot remember roads and realities. I recall most clearly only spiritual facts, like this: Timothy Brown was a bad man, soundly converted under William's ministry; but how he looked, on which circuit he lived, I have forgotten long ago.
In spite of a really well-settled, worldly mind William prayed away its foundations during those thirty years, until now the very scene of his passing floats a mist in memory. I know he lay in the same house where he had brought me on our wedding day. Through the window in the pearl light of the early morning there was the same freshness upon the hills, the same streams glistening like silver maces between; there was the same little valley below, fluted in like a cup filled with corn and honey and bees and flowers. The same gray farmhouses brooded close to the earth, with children playing in the dooryards. It was all there the morning he died, as it had been that blue and glad morning thirty years before; but I could not see it or feel it with him lying stretched and still upon the bed, with the sheet drawn over his face, and the people crowding in, whispering, shuffling, bearing the long, black coffin among them. I say, it is dim and blurred and I cannot think it or write it properly. There seemed a rime upon the window-panes; the hills were bare, and the cup of the valley lay drained and empty before me, with the shadow of death darkening all the light of the day.
A very old woman, bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face when she had a "body" to prepare for burial.
"Come, Sister Thompson, you must git up and go out. We air ready to lay him out now."
"Oh, not him!" I cried; "you have laid out so many. Let some one else do it!" For I could not forget the frightful pleasure she had taken years ago in her ghoulish office.
"And why not him? I've helped to put away every man, woman and child that has died in this settlement since I was grown, and I ain't goin' to shirk my duty to Brother Thompson—not that I ever expected to do it for him." She babbled on, gently urging me from the room, where her presence was the last blinding touch of horror for me.
So far, my autobiography has been mixed with William's biography, just as my life seems to mingle with the dust in his grave. But I came to an experience now of my own; unglorified by William, so strange that I cannot explain it unless there is what may be called a reversion to type in spirit, like this: that a person may be absolutely dominated for years by certain influences and not only feel no antagonism to them, but actually yield with devotion and inconceivable sacrifices, yet, when the influence is removed and there is no longer the love-cause for faithfulness the illusion not only passes, but the person finds himself of his original mind and spirit, emancipated, gone back to himself, what he really was in the beginning before the domination began. Such at least is as near what happened in my own case as I can tell it.