Barren Ground

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

The old minister had finished once, but he was beginning again in a florid oratorical style. How long would he go on, she wondered, and would it be like this at the funeral? There was much to be said, she conceded, for the Episcopal service which circumscribed the rhetoric of clergymen. When at last he sat down, wiping his glasses, in the cushioned rocking-chair close to the fire, Bob Ellgood stood up and explained the funeral arrangements as if he wished her to understand that they were to be worthy of Nathan. This was Wednesday, and the public funeral, the funeral of a hero, would be held at three o'clock on Friday afternoon. Then he handed her a list of the pallbearers, many of them merely "honorary," Dorinda perceived, and among them there were several names that she did not know.

"They were on the wrecked train," Bob replied to her question, "and wish to pay this last mark of respect." These were the men, he told her, who had started the list of contributions. "It is our idea to build a monument by public subscription," he concluded, "over his grave in the churchyard. Then future generations will remember his heroism."

"Poor Nathan," she thought, while her eyes filled with tears. "If only he could hear what they are saying." There had never been a monument erected by public subscription at Pedlar's Mill, and she could not help thinking how pleased Nathan would have been if he could have taken an active part in the plan. Well, some people had to wait until they were dead to get the things that would have made them happy while they were living.

As soon as Bob Ellgood stopped speaking, a general droning began in the room, and she grasped, after an instant of confusion, that everybody was trying to tell her of some boyish act of generosity which was still remembered. These recollections, beginning with a single anecdote related in the cracked voice of the minister, gathered fulness of tone as they multiplied, until the room resounded with a chorus of praise. Was it possible that Nathan had done all these noble things and that she had never heard of them? Was it possible that so many persons had seen the greatness of his nature, and yet the community in which he lived had continued to treat him as more or less of a clown? Over and over, she heard the emphatic refrain, "I always thought there was a heap more in Nathan Pedlar than people made out."

Sitting there in the midst of the belated appreciation, it seemed to Dorinda that the shape of an idea emerged gradually out of the fog of words. All his life Nathan had been misunderstood. Though she was unaware of the exact moment when the apotheosis occurred, she realized presently that she had witnessed the transformation of a human being into a legend. After to-day, it was impossible that she should ever think of Nathan as unromantically as she thought of him while he was alive. Death had not only ennobled, it had superbly exalted him. In this chant of praise, there was no reminder of his insignificance. Could it be that she alone had failed to recognize the beauty of his character beneath his inappropriate surface? Had she alone misunderstood and belittled him in her mind? Her heart swelled until it seemed to her that she was choking. When she remembered her husband now, it was the inward, not the outward, man that she recalled.

"I reckon he warn't mo' than eight years old when he took that whipping for stealing old man Haney's cherries rather than tell on Sandy Moody's little boy Sam," Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was reciting. "I can see the way he stood up and took the lashing without a whimper, and the other boys teasing him and calling him a clown on account of hid broken nose. Yes, ma'am, I always knew thar was a heap mo' in Nathan Pedlar than most folks made out."

The warm room, the firelight, the humming voices, faded into a mist. Beyond the window-panes, which flamed with a reflected glow, Dorinda saw the white fields and against the fields there flickered a vision of the room in which she was sitting. Out of this vision, the prayer of the minister stole over her like some soporific influence. An inescapable power of suggestion, as intense yet as diffused as firelight, was reassembling her thoughts of the past. "Yes, there was more in Nathan than anybody ever suspected," she found herself repeating.

With one of those sudden changes that come in Virginia, the day of Nathan's funeral brought a foretaste of spring. The snow had melted so rapidly that the roads were flowing like brooks, and Whippernock River, with its damaged bridge, was still impassable. But an April languor was in the air, and the sky over the wintry fields was as soft as clouds of blue and white hyacinths. Though a number of farmers who lived beyond Whippernock River had been unable to come to the funeral, people had arrived by train from the city and in every vehicle that could roll on wheels from the near side of the railroad. The little church was crowded to suffocation while the minister read his short text and preached his long sermon on the beauty of self-sacrifice. When the last hymn was sung with gasps of emotional tension, and the congregation flocked out into the churchyard, with Nathan in his flower-banked coffin and Dorinda hidden in her widow's weeds, a wave of grief spread like a contagious affliction over the throng. With her head reverently bowed, Dorinda tried to attend only to the words of the minister, to see only the open grave at her feet, with the piles of red clay surrounding the oblong hole. Yet her senses, according to their deplorable habit in a crisis, became extraordinarily alive, and every trivial detail of the scene glittered within her mind. She saw the blanched and harrowed face of the minister, who prayed with closed eyes and violent gestures as if he were wrestling with God; she saw the nodding black plumes of Miss Texanna Snead, and remembered that Nathan had once called her "a plumed hearse." She saw the gaping mouths of the children, whom their mothers, in the excitement of the occasion, had neglected to wash; she saw even the predatory brood of chickens which had invaded the graveyard and was scratching upon the graves. The ground at her feet was heaped with flowers, and among the floral crosses and wreaths and pillows, she observed the design of a railway engine made of red and white carnations, and tried to recall the names on the card. Long after she had forgotten every word of the prayer, she could still see that preposterous floral engine and smell the strong scent of fading carnations.

Standing there beside the open grave, recollections blew in and out of her mind like chaff in the wind. Her first sermon. The old minister praying with eyes so tightly shut that they looked like slits made by a penknife. The way her feet could not reach the floor. Peppermints in a paper bag to keep her quiet. Her mother smelling of soap and camphor. Missionaries in the front pew. The saving of black babies. The way she had yawned and stretched. Nathan was there then, a big boy who sang, with a voice as shrill as a grasshopper, in the choir. Rose Emily too. How pretty she was. Then Rose Emily as she lay dying with the happy light in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks. Twenty-two years ago! Well, she had done her best by Rose Emily's children.

Afterwards, when she drove home with John Abner, she found that, though they had buried the actual Nathan in the churchyard, the legendary Nathan of prayer and sermon still accompanied them.