They waited in silence for her to go on. She was the woman of the village who always officiated at the “laying out” of their dead. The reason for this no one had ever sought. Possibly the right was hers because she so enjoyed the grewsome privilege. At least she clung to it tenaciously.
“Now, Miss ‘Lizbeth, you jest go upstairs and I’ll tend to things,” she said, while the other women awaited her commands, half resenting her cool assumption of control, but with a full consciousness of her capability in “tending” to such “things.”
The bare little church, with its white walls and staring windows, its stiff pine pulpit painted a dingy yellow, with the minister’s green upholstered chair behind it, was well-filled the day of the funeral. A “burying” was not a thing to miss without grave cause. There were old men and old women in the congregation who had not missed a funeral within ten miles of them for fifty years. They sat solemnly waiting for the minister to begin the services, taking close notice of the coffin and calculating its cost. Not a difficult problem for them with their long experience. They also noted closely the appearance of the one mourner who sat directly in front of the pulpit, alone save for the presence in her pew of the woman who had come to her huddled under a shawl. This strange woman always sat with the mourners as though she felt a claim upon the bodies of the dead until their final surrender to mother earth. But the dead man’s daughter sat away from her companion quite at the farthest end of the seat, as if she would be as much apart from them all in her present loneliness as she had been before. It was fifteen years since she had sat with them in the church, and they looked at her now with curiosity. A slight little woman, with tired eyes and dull brown hair streaked with gray!
The minister arose and folded upon the open Bible his lean hands with their great veins and yellow joints. He prayed long and laboriously, his voice rising from a doleful sing-song drawl into a shout and then sinking into a whisper. They wagged their heads knowingly in the pews and whispered to one another that it was a “pow’ful effort.” Toward the close of his prayer many eyes were turned expectantly toward the woman who sat alone. The minister was calling loudly for “the lost sheep who is not with us safe in the shelta’ of Zion’s walls. O Lord!” he wailed, “make yoh wahnin’ plain to her onseein’ eyes that she may seek safety from the wrath to come.” If the woman heard or understood his words no acknowledgment of that fact touched her thin face. She sat with folded hands, her eyes upon the narrow front of the box like pulpit. Then the minister began his sermon. From the earliest dawn of the dead man’s life, through his childhood, youth, and manhood unto the last moment of his old age the speaker journeyed, going unctuously over the dreary details of the meagre, common history. They all knew it well enough, but they listened greedily, jealously fearful that the speaker might overlook a single incident in the man’s dull story. When he had exhausted every period of his subject’s life, the minister began the apotheosis of the man. His goodness, his charity, his uprightness, and, above all, his “tireless labors in the vineyard of the Lord” were dwelt upon. He had in truth been cruel and hard and mean. They all knew this, but he had lived and died “a member in good standing,” and any other treatment of his character by the preacher would have been a scandalous thing, unheard of and not to be forgiven. At the close of his discourse the minister turned his colorless eyes upon the woman who sat apart. “There was,” he said, his voice falling into a slow and solemn drawl, “there was one cross which our Lord and Master seen fit to bind upon the shoulders of the brother who has jest gone befoh us into the glory of the Heavenly Kingdum. A cross hard to bear, a cross whose liftin’ he had wrestled for with the Lord Jesus often and mightily in prayer. But which Divine Providence seen fit to allow to remain upon the shoulders of his faithful son. It was, my brothers and sisters, the refusal of the only one of his kin to accept the Lord, to wash herself in the blood of the Lamb, to join with those who journey onward safe in the arms of Jesus into the glory of everlastin, life.” His voice had risen into a shout. “The night is comin’, the day is almost done. Oh! let us pray for them who falters and will not turn from the wrath of God befoh it is too late.” His voice sank suddenly into a whisper, and the words “too late” went hissing out over the heads of the people who sat with craning necks and knowing faces cruelly turned toward the woman, whose eyes for a single instant had not left the front of the dingy yellow pulpit.
The hearse, with the one closed carriage of which the village boasted, moved slowly away from the church along the muddy road, followed by a straggling line of wagons. The majority of the people lingered about the church door watching the woman who sat stiffly erect in the carriage, the minister facing her, at her side the woman who seemed to have so strange a love for the dead. This woman sat with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes as if she must needs make amends for the other’s stony composure.
The road, after leaving the village in the bottom lands along the river, wound up the side of the bluff upon which the burying ground was situated. It was an autumn day, and the golden haze of that most glorious of seasons in the Missouri valley bathed the wide stretch of country upon which the cemetery looked down. A sky of marvellous blue spread its canopy above them, while the bright glow of the western sun brought out in pitiless detail the dreary little home of the dead with its crude tiptilted monuments and scattered, sunken graves, its rays enfolding with no mellowing touch the group of sallow-faced men and women in rusty and shapeless garb who clustered about the newly made grave. They lifted their voices and sang quaveringly amid the strangely death-like stillness of the declining day. It was a dismal tune in plaintive minors, and as they dragged it out in unmusical and uncertain tones it seemed a fitting symbol of their narrow, unlovely lives. When the last clod of reddish clay had fallen upon the oblong mound, they turned and walked away to leave their dead unnoticed until another of the living should pass from the grimness of life into the—to them—greater grimness of death.
As the procession crawled along the heavy road toward the cluster of houses upon the river’s bank, the minister, his great hands resting upon his knees, his pale eyes blinking solemnly, began:—
“E-eliz’beth, you are left alone now.” She nodded her head in affirmation. “You haven’t much of this world’s goods.”
“I’ve kept two of us from starvin’ for five years. I reckon I can keep myself,” she replied stiffly.
“Yoh father was well-fixed once, but the Lord seen fit to deprive him of his earthly treasures that he might lay more store by them gifts which is above earthly price.”