“My father was a mountain white. Moved here from North Carolina, and dug coal and married a Pennsylvania Dutch lady.”
“It’s your turn,” she said to me. “You are a preacher?”
“That’s a kind of an excuse I make.”
“You can’t be any worse than the preacher we had here,” continued the wife. “He lived down toward Shickshinny. He preached in an old chapel. He wouldn’t start a Sunday school. We needed one bad enough. He just married folks. He hardly ever buried them. They say he was afraid. And,” she continued, with a growing tone of condemnation, “it’s a preacher’s BUSINESS to face death.
“Just about the time two of our children died of diphtheria, was when he came to these parts. He was a Presbyterian, and I was raised a Presbyterian, and he wouldn’t preach the funeral of my two babies. He promised to come, and we waited two hours. So I just read the Bible at the grave.”
This she recounted with a bitter sense of insult.
“And the same day he locked up his mother, too.”
“Locked up his mother?”
“Yes. Some said he wanted to visit a woman he didn’t want her to know about. They said he was afraid she would follow him and spy. He locked up the old lady, and she about yelled the roof off, and the neighbors let her out.
“And then,” continued my hostess, “when he was dying, he sent for a Wilkesbarre priest.”