|A MAN driving a country buggy was approaching. He was a tall, spare
man, in a suit of black ready-made clothes that seemed not to fit him in
any place, and to be a cheap imitation of a clergyman's frock suit.
He wore cotton gloves. At his feet was a shiny handbag made of some
inexpensive material to imitate alligator skin. His hair and his heavy,
drooping mustache were black. His face was narrow, the cheek bones high,
the mouth straight. One of the man's eyes was partly grown over with
a cataract, and his effort to see equally with that eye gave him a
curious, squinting expression. He pulled up on the roadside, got out,
tied his horse to a fence rail with one of the lines, took out his
handbag, and came over to the little group waiting by the bars.
“Good evening, brethren,” he said. “The doctor told me that Nicholas
Parks had been called to his account, so I came up to give him Christian
burial.”
“He died sudden, I guess,” replied one of the men.
“It's God's way,” said the preacher. “The sinner is taken in the
twinkling of an eye.”
He drew off his cotton gloves and put them into his pocket.
“Have any preparations been made for the burial?” he inquired.
“The grave's dug,” said one of the men.
“How about the coffin?”
“We don't know about the coffin, we haven't been to the house.”
“Is any one up at the house?”
“We think the new School-teacher's up there. Little David went up to
see, but he ain't come back.”
“I didn't know the new School-teacher had come.”
“He got here last night,” said the miller.
“What kind of a man is he?”
“He's a man that the children will like,” replied the woman.
“Children,” said the preacher, “are not competent judges of men. Let us
go up to the house. Is he elderly?”
“I thought he was mighty young,” said the woman.
“The young,” replied the preacher, “are rarely impressed with the awful
solemnity of God's commandments.”
“I think he's a good man,” said the woman. “Martha loved him right away,
an' I'd trust him with anything I've got.”
“Our Mother Eve trusted the serpent,” replied the preacher.
And he extended his right arm, the fingers stiffly together, the thumb
up.
“The youth of the community ought to be brought up in the fear of God.”
During the conversation, the miller's little daughter had gone on to the
house.
Something vague, intangible, undefined had stopped the men in the road
below the house, and made them await the arrival of the preacher. But
that thing had not affected the children. The little boy David and this
child had gone on without the least hesitation.
The preacher threw down one of the pole bars and went through into the
meadow. The others followed him along the path to the house. As they
drew near they heard the voices of the children. At the threshold the
preacher stopped, and those behind him crowded up to look into the
house.
The door was open. The sun entering, filled the room with light.
On chairs in the middle of this room stood a coffin made of the odds
and ends of rough hoards, but marvelously joined. Beside it stood the
School-teacher, and at either end was one of the children; the three of
them were fitting a board on the coffin for a and, and they were talking
together.
When the minister entered, the Schoolteacher removed the board and laid
it down on the floor, and the two children, as by some instinct, drew
near to the man, on either side, and took hold of his hands.
They became instantly silent.
The minister went up to the chair, looked a moment into the coffin and
took his place at the head of it. The others followed.
The dead man lay in the rough box like one asleep. There was in his face
a peace so profound that the hard, mean, ugly features of this old man
seemed to have been remodeled under some marvelous fingers.
The minister, with his bad eye, seemed not to observe this
transfiguration, but the others marked it and crowded around the coffin.
The minister took out his watch, looked at it, and snapped the case.
“If you will find seats, we'll begin the service,” he said. “The
stranger here seems to have made all necessary preparations for the
burial.”
The crowd drew back from the coffin, the School-teacher went and sat
in the doorway in the sun; the little boy standing up by his knees, the
little girl beside him on the doorstep.
The minister began a discourse on the horrors of an eternal hell.
But the attention of the audience moved past him to the man seated in
the door. The harmony, grouping the man and these two children, seemed
to enter and fill the room. A certain common sympathy uniting them, as
though it were the purity of childhood.
The man sitting in the door did not move.
He looked out toward the south over a sea of sun washing a shore of tree
tops. A vagrant breath of the afternoon moved his brown hair. He seemed
not to hear the minister, not to regard the service, but to wait like
one infinitely patient with the order of events.
When the preacher had finished, the miller, sitting in a chair by the
window, rose.
“Just before ole Nicholas died,” she said, “he made the doctor promise
to git up here at his funeral an' tell everybody that he left all his
things to the Schoolteacher. The doctor couldn't come back, so he asked
me to git up an' tell it for him.”
The minister turned toward the woman.
“Left his property to this stranger?”
“Yes,” said the woman, “he tried all night to tell the doctor, an' he
was mortally afeard that he would die before he could tell it.”
The School-teacher was now standing in the door. Beside him, and framing
in his body, dust danced in the sun, making a haze of gold.
The minister addressed him.
“Why did Nicholas Parks leave his possessions to you?”
The School-teacher did not reply.
He went over to the coffin, lifted the lid and began to fit it on the
box. The men standing around the room came forward and took the coffin
up. They carried it out of the house, their hands under the bottom of
it. The preacher picked up his satchel and followed. Outside he stopped,
pointed to the grave in the meadow, and spoke to the School-teacher.
“You didn't put that grave where old Nicholas wanted it. He wanted to be
buried on the top of the ridge between those two trees. It was a place
he had picked out. He told me so at the last quarterly meeting.”
The School-teacher lifted his face and looked at the two great hickories
marking the spot on the summit of the little meadow. His eyes filled
with melancholy shadows, the smile deepened and saddened about his
mouth. But he did not reply.
Then he walked away to where the two children stood, some distance from
the path.
The minister followed the coffin to the grave, but the School-teacher
went with the two children through the meadow to the spot of green
between the two hickories. He sat down there in the deep clover, the
children beside him. Below came the sound of the earth on the coffin,
and the high-pitched nervous voice of the minister. The School-teacher
talked with the children.
After a while a shadow fell across the grass.
The minister was standing beside them. He had come up from the filled
grave and the carpet of the meadow had hidden the sound of his approach.
He spoke to the School-teacher.
“Do you think that you are old enough to teach the children the fear of
God?”
“I shall not teach them the fear of God.”
“Then I don't see how you are going to give them any Christian
instruction.”
The man sitting among the deep clover blossoms, looked up at the
minister's face.
“Isn't there something growing over your eye?” he said.