The next day Bosworth’s sister Loretta, who kept house for him, asked
him, when he came in for his midday dinner, if he had heard the news.
Bosworth had been sawing wood all the morning, and in spite of the cold
and the driving snow, which had begun again in the night, he was covered
with an icy sweat, like a man getting over a fever.
“What news?”
“Venny Brand’s down sick with pneumonia. The Deacon’s been there. I
guess she’s dying.”
Bosworth looked at her with listless eyes. She seemed far off from him,
miles away. “Venny Brand?” he echoed.
“You never liked her, Orrin.”
“She’s a child. I never knew much about her.”
“Well,” repeated his sister, with the guileless relish of the
unimaginative for bad news, “I guess she’s dying.” After a pause she
added: “It’ll kill Sylvester Brand, all alone up there.”
Bosworth got up and said: “I’ve got to see to poulticing the gray’s
fetlock.” He walked out into the steadily falling snow.
Venny Brand was buried three days later. The Deacon read the service;
Bosworth was one of the pall-bearers. The whole countryside turned out,
for the snow had stopped falling, and at any season a funeral offered an
opportunity for an outing that was not to be missed. Besides, Venny
Brand was young and handsome—at least some people thought her handsome,
though she was so swarthy—and her dying like that, so suddenly, had the
fascination of tragedy.
“They say her lungs filled right up.... Seems she’d had bronchial
troubles before.... I always said both them girls was frail.... Look at
Ora, how she took and wasted away! And it’s colder’n all outdoors up
there to Brand’s.... Their mother, too, _she_ pined away just the same.
They don’t ever make old bones on the mother’s side of the family....
There’s that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to
him.... Oh, Mrs. Rutledge, excuse _me_.... Step right into the pew;
there’s a seat for you alongside of grandma....”
Mrs. Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle
of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental
structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs. Silsee’s
funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its
perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck,
seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed
into a suitable expression of mournful immobility.
“Looks as if the stone-mason had carved her to put atop of Venny’s
grave,” Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at
his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered
lids reminded him again of marble eye-balls; the bony hands clasping the
book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had
seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it
fluttered.
The service was over, the coffin of Venny Brand had been lowered into
her sister’s grave, and the neighbours were slowly dispersing. Bosworth,
as pall-bearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken
father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon
at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of
them spoke. Brand’s face was the closed door of a vault, barred with
wrinkles like bands of iron.
Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: “The Lord gave—”
Brand nodded and turned away toward the shed where the horses were
hitched. Bosworth followed him. “Let me drive along home with you,” he
suggested.
Brand did not so much as turn his head. “Home? What home?” he said; and
the other fell back.
Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men
unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow.
As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs. Rutledge’s tall
bonnet lording it above the group. Andy Pond, the Rutledge farm-hand,
was backing out the sleigh.
“Saul ain’t here today, Mrs. Rutledge, is he?” one of the village elders
piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and
blinking up into Mrs. Rutledge’s marble face.
Bosworth heard her measure out her answer in slow incisive words. “No.
Mr. Rutledge he ain’t here. He would ‘a’ come for certain, but his aunt
Minorca Cummins is being buried down to Stotesbury this very day and he
had to go down there. Don’t it sometimes seem zif we was all walking
right in the Shadow of Death?”
As she walked toward the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated,
the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily
Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: “I’m glad to hear
that Saul is able to be up and around.”
She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of
marble.
“Yes, I guess he’ll sleep quieter now.—And _her_ too, maybe, now she
don’t lay there alone any longer,” she added in a low voice, with a
sudden twist of her chin toward the fresh black stain in the grave-yard
snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond:
“’S long as we’re down here I don’t know but what I’ll just call round
and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle’s.”