IT was a still, dewy summer night when we buried Father. In our time
there was still a custom round about Sarn to bury people at night. In
our family it had been done for hundreds of years. I was busy all day
decking the waggon with yew and the white flowering laurel, that has
such a heavy, sweet smell. I pulled all the white roses and a tuthree
pinks that were in blow, and made up with daisies out of the hay grass.
While I pulled them, I thought how angered Father would have been to see
me there, trampling it, and I could scarcely help looking round now and
again to see if he was coming.
After we’d milked, Gideon went for the beasts, and I put black streamers
round their necks, and tied yew boughs to their horns. It had to be done
carefully, for they were the Longhorn breed, and if you angered them,
they’d hike you to death in a minute.
The miller was one bearer, and Mister Callard, of Callard’s Dingle, who
farmed all the land between Sarn and Plash, was another. Then there were
our two uncles from beyond the mountains.
Gideon, being chief mourner, had a tall hat with black streamers and
black gloves and a twisted black stick with streamers on it. They took a
long while getting the coffin out, for the doors were very narrow and it
was a big, heavy coffin. It had always been the same at all the Sarn
funerals, yet nobody ever seemed to think of making the doors bigger.
Sexton went first with his hat off and a great torch in his hand. Then
came the cart, with Miller’s lad and another to lead the beasts. The
waggon was mounded up with leaves and branches, and they all said it was
a credit to me. But I could only mind how poor Father was used to tell
me to take away all those nasty weeds out of the house. And now we were
taking him away, jolting over the stones, from the place where he was
maister. I was all of a puzzle with it. It did seem so unkind, and
disrespectful as well, leaving the poor soul all by his lonesome at the
other end of the mere. I was glad it was sweet June weather, and not
dark.
We were bound to go the long way round, the other being only a foot
road. When we were come out of the fold-yard, past the mixen, and were
in the road, we took our places—Gideon behind the coffin by himself,
then Mother and me in our black poke bonnets and shawls, with Prayer
Books and branches of rosemary in our hands. Uncles and Miller and
Mister Callard came next, all with torches and boughs of rosemary.
It was a good road, and smoother than most—the road to Lullingford.
Parson used to say it was made by folk who lived in the days when the
Redeemer lived. Romans, the name was. They could make roads right well,
whatever their name was. It went along above the water, close by the
lake; and as we walked solemnly onwards, I looked into the water and saw
us there. It was a dim picture, for the only light there was came from
the waning, clouded moon, and from the torches. But you could see, in
the dark water, something stirring, and gleams and flashes, and when the
moon came clear we had our shapes, like the shadows of fish gliding in
the deep. There was a great heap of black, that was the waggon, and the
oxen were like clouds moving far down, and the torches were flung into
the water as if we wanted to dout them.
All the time, as we went, we could hear the bells ringing the corpse
home. They sounded very strange over the water in the waste of night,
and the echoes sounded yet stranger. Once a white owl came by, like a
blown feather for lightness and softness. Mother said it was Father’s
spirit looking for its body. There was no sound but the bells and the
creaking of the wheels, till Parson’s pony, grazing in the glebe, saw
the dim shapes of the oxen a long way off, and whinnied, not knowing, I
suppose, but what they were ponies too, and being glad to think, in the
lonesomeness of the night, of others like herself near by.
At last the creaking stopped at the lych-gate. They took out the coffin,
resting it on trestles, and in the midst of the heavy breathing of the
bearers came the promising words—
“_I am the resurrection and the life._”
They were like quiet rain after drought. Only I began to wonder, how
should we come again in the resurrection? Should we come clear, or dim,
like in the water? Would Father come in a fit of anger, as he’d died, or
as a little boy running to Grandma with a bunch of primmyroses? Would
Mother smile the same smile, or would she have found a light in the dark
passage? Should I still be fast in a body I’d no mind for, or would they
give us leave to weave ourselves bodies to our own liking out of the
spinnings of our souls?
The coffin was moved to another trestle, by the graveside, and a white
cloth put over it. Our best tablecloth, it was. On the cloth stood the
big pewter tankard full of elderberry wine. It was the only thing Mother
could provide, and it was by good fortune that she had plenty of it,
enough for the funeral feast and all, since there had been such a power
of elderberries the year afore. It looked strange in the doubtful
moonlight, standing there on the coffin, when we were used to see it on
the table, with the colour of the Christmas Brand reflected in it.