Windy McPherson's Son eBook

CHAPTER VIII

The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son.  He thought that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened—­she looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the morning.  During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house.  They were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour; and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were massed.  When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept.  Sam looked at the floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle.  He wondered if the minister would have talked in the same way—­blatantly and without knowledge—­of the virtues of the dead.  In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly.  The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his trade.

During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor at Sam’s feet.  Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy.  The note was from John Telfer.

“I will not come to your mother’s funeral,” he wrote.  “I respected your mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is dead.  In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart.  If I am in Wildman’s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the moment and to close and lock the door.  If I am at Valmore’s shop, I will go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below.  If he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their friendship.  When I see the carriages going through the street and know that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the dead.”

The note cheered and comforted Sam.  It gave him back a grip of something that had slipped from him.

“It is good sense, after all,” he thought, and realised that even in the days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact that Jane McPherson’s long, hard role was just being played out to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish.  He arose, interrupting the minister’s discourse.  Mary Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street.  Sam crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with breathless curiosity, “It is from John Telfer.  Read it.  Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.”