Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his
mother and on a summer afternoon walked again on the
streets of his native town. From the station
he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which
he had lived with his mother but he did not stay there.
For a moment he stood bag in hand listening to the
voices of the miners’ wives in the room above
and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried
away. The voices of women broke the stillness
of the room in which he stood. Their thin sharpness
hurt something within him and he could not bear the
thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would
fall upon the women who were attending his mother’s
body in the room above when he came into the presence
of the dead.
Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and
from there went to the mine office. Then with
a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began to climb
the hill up which he had walked with his father when
he was a lad. On the train homeward bound an
idea had come to him. “I will her among
the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the
fruitful valley,” he told himself. The
details of a religious discussion between two labourers
that had gone on one day during the noon hour at the
warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran
eastward he for the first time found himself speculating
on the possibility of a life after death. Then
he brushed the thoughts aside. “Anyway if
Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will
find him, sitting on the log on the hillside,”
he thought.
With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the
long hillside road, now deep with black dust.
He was going to dig the grave for the burial of Nance
McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed
swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the
old days but looked at the ground and thought of the
dead woman and a little wondered what place a woman
would yet come to occupy in his own life. On
the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy
just emerging into manhood worked vigorously making
the dirt fly. When the hole had grown deep he
stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man
who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on
the porch of a farm house. Two cows that stood
by a fence in a field lifted up their heads and bawled
lustily. “It is the place for the dead to
lie,” whispered McGregor. “When my
own time comes I shall be brought up here.”
An idea came to him. “I will have father’s
body moved,” he told himself. “When
I have made some money I will have that done.
Here we shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors.”
The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him
and he was pleased also with himself for thinking
the thought. The male in him made him throw back
his shoulders. “We are two of a feather,
father and me,” he muttered, “two of a
feather and mother has not understood either of us.
Perhaps no woman was ever intended to understand us.”
