The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

								

Work in the fields was stopped, that messengers might be sent, one
on horseback to notify distant-dwelling kin, another with a wagon
to buy the coffin down in Hepzibah, a third afoot to arrange with
the strong young men of the family connection about helping to dig
the grave. All the flowers in the dooryard were gathered and laid
round the corpse. The withered old face was covered with a damp
cloth, and then a borrowed sheet was drawn smoothly over the whole
mound. The Widow Griever was so deeply versed in the etiquette of
such occasions, and so satisfyingly exacting on all points, as to
make an undertaker even more highly superfluous than he would
usually have been among those simple folk. What with garments and
accessories she had brought from her own scant widow's wardrobe,
and articles hastily borrowed from the nearer neighbors, she
managed inside of two hours to have Little Liza and her two
sisters--the mother of the family was dead some years ago--clad
in black and seated in state inferior only to that of the dead.
More flowers were brought by girls and small boys from the
neighbors' yards--yellow and purple and red were the colors
mostly in bloom now, and those which would have been favored for
this occasion. Roxy gravely arranged them and set them in place.
She had veiled the looking-glass and stopped the clock as soon
as she came into the house. [21]
"A body cain't be too careful about all these here things," she
said with a solemn sniff. "Hit's easy at a time like this for
something to be did that crosses the luck."
Women came and went through the open doors, silent almost as
the little breeze that played between. Everybody wore the same
expression of mournful acquiescence in the natural order of things.
Greetings were exchanged in low tones. Callista, carrying a basket
of garden asters, came up the front walk, looking openly for her
mother, guarding a little warily against Flenton Hands's approach.
Some girls hurrying out to seek ferns in the low places of the wood
met her, and she turned back with them, joining her activities to
theirs and making a wreath of the flowers she had brought.
Flenton Hands was thirty years old. To have arrived at this age
unmarried is, in the mountains, in some measure a reproach.
True, he aligned himself sharply with the religious element of
the community, and this, when youthful masculinity is ever apt
to choose the broad way where there is more company, bespoke for
him a certain indulgence or toleration that would have been
denied a typical old bachelor.
He was cantankerous old Preacher Drumright's right hand at all
times, and Drumright was safe always to approve him. He was the
kind of man who seeks the acquaintance and company of those [22]
well-to-do and older than himself, paying a sober court to
respectability and money, and thus coming eventually to be rated
as one of the elders, while he yet held the dubious position of