A Woman Named Smith

by Marie Conway Oemler

I knelt down and plunged my face into the cold spring-water, and drank and drank. How good it was! And how grateful to my lungs was the outside air, so sweet, so fresh, so clean! I loved the friendly trees waving in the good wind, I blessed the friendly stars.

We stopped at Mr. Jelnik's house, and the man Daoud appeared in answer to a low-voiced summons and fetched me a most beautiful shawl, which I found extremely comfortable. A stately and stoical personage was Daoud, unlike shy black Achmet, who hid himself from observation so thoroughly that people in Hyndsville were not aware of his existence. I sat on the steps while for Jessamine Hynds was fetched a length of canvas, a linen sheet, and a gray army blanket. Achmet appeared with spades. And so we set out.

The old cemetery in Hyndsville, unlike the newer one in which folks take a sort of ghastly pride, one lot differing from another lot in glory, is an unpretentious place, enclosed by crumbling walls, the iron gates of which have rusted ajar. It is a grassy, bird-haunted, tree-shaded spot, with some dozen or so old family vaults, some modest monuments that bear stately names, some raised marble slabs supported on carved and slender legs, like Death's own little card-tables, some stones let flat into the earth, with names and dates long since erased by rain and wind and fallen leaf. Nobody comes here any more. Sophronisba Scarlett was the first and last to be interred in the old cemetery within the memory of the present generation.

We went down dismal paths where the night wind sighed a miserere in the cedars, and things of the dark scurried away with furtive noises, or flapped ill-omened black wings overhead. In a corner shaded by cypresses was the Hynds vault, a venerable affair with a slate roof. Outside, in an inclosed space were some marble-covered graves and in a corner the simplest of all, one marked "R.H." Emily slept beside him, and their son beside her. But on the farther side, next the wall, was room for one more sleeper. And here, while Mr. Jelnik laid down his burden, Daoud and Achmet began to dig.

She lay there in the ghostly light and shade, so utterly cast aside and forgotten, so unloved, so unwept, so far removed from every human tie, that terror and pity filled my heart. While Daoud and Achmet were making ready her bed, Nicholas Jelnik and I spread out the length of canvas, and wrapped her securely in the sheet and blanket. We folded her claws upon the empty breast in which had once pulsed the passionate heart of Jessamine Hynds, and spread her hair over what had been her face.

Over in a sheltered spot behind the vault clambered a huge, overgrown, briery rose, and by some sweet impatience of nature one shoot had budded before its time. I broke off the small, pale roses and placed them in her grasp. But Mr. Jelnik took from his breast a pearl and silver crucifix, and this, reverently, he laid upon hers.

"It was my father's grandmother's. She held it when she was dying. She was an old saint. It would please her to know that her crucifix should stay, one holy thing, with Jessamine Hynds."

"'Verily, the gate of repentance is not nor shall be shut upon God's creatures until the sun shall rise in the west,'" The Jinnee quoted his Prophet And he broke off two of his saphies, each with a holy verse written upon it, and dropped them upon her out of pure charity.

Daoud, who was intelligent and orthodox where Achmet was emotional and tender, was evidently not altogether sure of the wisdom of this proceeding; but he was not too orthodox to stand up arrow-straight, face the East, and pray for her.

So we wrapped her, brown silk dress and yellowed laces, and long black hair, in the strip of canvas, and gave her to the earth. The last thing we saw, thank God! before the blanket fell over her for the last time, was the silver crucifix shining out of the roses in her hands.