The people had now begun to move away and to walk back slowly towards their cars. The Joyners, however, kept their seats until the last spadeful of earth was heaped and patted into place. Then they arose, their duty done. Some of them just stood there now, talking quietly in their drawling voices, while others sauntered among the tombstones, bending over to read the inscriptions and straightening up to recall and tell each other some forgotten incident in the life of some forgotten Joyner. At last they, too, began to drift away.
George did not want to go back with them and be forced to hear the shreds of Aunt Maw’s life torn apart and pieced together again, so he linked his arm through Margaret’s and led her over the brow of the hill to the other side. For a little while they stood in the slanting light, silent, their faces to the west, and watched the great ball of the sun sink down behind the rim of distant mountains. And the majestic beauty of the spectacle, together with the woman’s quiet presence there beside him, brought calm and peace to the young man’s troubled spirit.
When they came back, the cemetery appeared to be deserted. But as they approached the Joyner plot they saw that Mrs. Delia Flood was still waiting for them. They had forgotten her, and realised now that she could not go without them, for there was only one car on the gravelled roadway below and the hired chauffeur was slumped behind his wheel, asleep. In the fast-failing light Mrs. Flood was wandering among the graves, stopping now and then to stoop and peer closely at an inscription on a stone. Then she would stand there meditatively and look out across the town, where the first lights were already beginning to wink on. She turned to them casually when they came up, as though she had taken no notice of their absence, and spoke to them in her curious fragmentary way, plucking the words right out of the middle of her thoughts.
“Why, to think,” she said reflectively, “that he would go and move her! To think that any man could be so hard-hearted! Oh!” she shuddered with a brief convulsive pucker of revulsion. “It makes my blood run cold to think of it — and everybody told him so! — they told him so at the time — to think he would have no more mercy in him than to go and move her from the place where she lay buried!”
“Who was that, Mrs. Flood?” George said absently. “Move who?”
“Why, Amelia, of course — your mother, child!” she said impatiently, and gestured briefly towards the weather-rusted stone.
He bent forward and read again the familiar inscription:
Amelia Webber, née Joyner
and below her dates the carved verse:
Still is the voice we knew so well, Vanished the face we love, Flown her spirit pure to dwell With angels up above. Ours is the sorrow, ours the pain, And ours the joy alone To clasp her in our arms again In Heaven, by God’s throne.
“That’s the thing that started all this movin’!” Mrs. Flood was saying. “Nobody’d ever have thought of comin’ here if it hadn’t been for Amelia! And here,” she cried fretfully, “the woman had been dead and in her grave more than a year when he gets this notion in his head he’s got to move her — and you couldn’t reason with him! Why, your uncle, Mark Joyner — that’s who it was! You couldn’t argue with him!” she cried with vehement surprise. “Why, yes, of course! It was back there at the time they were havin’ all that trouble with your father, child. He’d left Amelia and gone to live with that other woman — but I will say this for him!” and she nodded her head with determination. “When Amelia died, John Webber did the decent thing and buried her himself — claimed her as his wife and buried her! He’d bought a plot in the old cemetery, and that’s where he put her. But then, more than a year afterwards —you know, child — when Mark Joyner had that trouble with your father about who was to bring you up — yes, and took it to the courts and won! — why, that’s when it was that Mark took it in his head to move Amelia. Said he wouldn’t let a sister of his lie in Webber earth! He already had this plot, of course, way over here on this hill where nobody’d ever thought of goin’. It was just a little private buryin’ ground, then — a few families used it, that was all.”
She paused and looked out thoughtfully over the town, then after a moment she went on:
“Your Aunt Maw, she tried to talk to Mark about it, but it was like talkin’ to a stone wall. She told me all about it at the time. But no, sir!” she shook her head with a movement of strong decision. “He’d made up his mind and he wouldn’t budge from it an inch! ‘But see here, Mark,’ she said. ‘The thing’s not right! Amelia ought to stay where she’s buried!’ She didn’t like the looks of it, you know. ‘Even the dead have got their rights,’ she said. ‘Where the tree falls, there let it lie!’— that’s what she told him. But no! He wouldn’t listen — you couldn’t talk to him. He says: ‘I’ll move her if it’s the last thing I ever live to do! I’ll move her if I have to dig her up myself and carry the coffin on my back all the way to the top of that hill across the river! That’s where she’s goin’,’ he says, ‘and you needn’t argue any more!’ Well, your Aunt Maw saw then that he had his mind made up and that it wouldn’t do any good to talk to him about it. But oh! an awful mistake! an awful mistake!” she muttered, shaking her head slowly. “All that movin’ and expense for nothin’! If he felt that way, he should’ve brought her over here in the first place, when she died! But I guess it was the lawsuit and all the bad blood it stirred up that made him feel that way,” she now said tranquilly . . . “And that’s the reason all these other people are buried here”— she made a sweeping gesture with her arm —“that’s what started it, all right! Why, of course! When the old cemetery got filled up and they had to look round for a new site — why, one of those fellows in Parson Flack’s gang at City Hall, he remembered the rumpus about Amelia and thought of all these empty acres way out here beside the old buryin’ ground. He found he could buy ’em cheap, and that’s what he did. That’s exactly how it was,” she said. “But I’ve always regretted it. I was against it from the start.”
She fell silent again, and stood looking with solemn-eyed memory at the weather-rusted stone.
“Well, as I say, then,” she went on calmly, “when your Aunt Maw saw he had his mind made up and that there was no use to try to change him — well, she went out to the old cemetery the day they moved her, and she asked me to go with her, you know. Oh, it was one of those raw, windy days you get in March! The very kind of day Amelia died on. And old Mrs. Wrenn and Amy Williamson — they had both been good friends of Amelia’s — of course they went along, too. And, of course, when we got there, they were curious — they wanted to have a look, you know,” she said calmly, mentioning this grisly desire with no surprise whatever. “And they tried to get me to look at it, too. Your Aunt Maw got so sick that Mark had to take her home in the carriage, but I stood my ground. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you go on and satisfy your curiosity if that’s what you want to do, but I won’t look at it!’ I said, ‘I’d rather remember her the way she was.’ Well, sir, they went ahead and did it then. They got old Prove — you know, he was that old nigger man that worked for Mark — they got him to open up the coffin, and I turned my back and walked away a little piece until they got through lookin’,” she said tranquilly. “And pretty soon I heard ’em comin’. Well, I turned round and looked at ’em, and let me tell you somethin’,” she said gravely, “their faces were a study! Oh, they turned pale and they trembled! ‘Well, are you satisfied?’ I said. ‘Did you find what you were lookin’ for?’ ‘Oh-h! says old Mrs. Wrenn, pale as a ghost, shakin’ and wringin’ her hands, you know. ‘Oh, Delia!’ she says, ‘it was awful! I’m sorry that I looked!’