Uncle Joel's Funeral: A Tuttleville Paper

SHE that, was Miranda Tuttle, descended from Tuttleville’s founders, contributes some old-time memories to these Papers by request from Mary Greenfield, her friend and contemporary.

It was the morning of Uncle Joel’s funeral. My face, neck, and hands had been scrubbed, and a stiff, starched white dress put upon me by Eunice, our help.

You remember Eunice? She was one of five daughters of a quaint old Englishman, who came to Tuttleville and squatted in a deserted house in a little hollow near the creek about a mile from Tuttleville. He called the girls ’his maids,’ and was very proud of them. Their mother was dead. Your grandmother Greenfield had Cynthia; other sisters of Eunice were parceled out with our ‘ best families.’ They were good and loyal ‘help.’ In Tuttleville we did not talk of servants.

My hair was braided very tight, making short pig-tails down my back. At their diminishing ends they were tied with narrow white ribbons. It was a last year’s dross and the sleeves were short and the length of skirt, not what it should have been, but it was thought more appropriate to a funeral occasion than my best pink with its little lace spencer drawn up with narrow pink ribbon. To make up for the short skirt my pantalettes were let down to a proper funeral length and I had black silk mitts on my hands.

I was dressed early, because I was a child who had a pronounced affinity with things distracting to a ceremonial toilet, such as wanderings in the dew after flowers, stains contracted in feeding Tray and Tabby, and almost involuntary and unaccounted-for accretions of butter and jam. If left to myself till nearly the time of a public appearance I was sure to be in such a state of disarray as took from Eunice all the scant patience she possessed.

Her snatchings, hustlings and reproaches only ended with my tears and general unpresentableness. For these reasons it was thought best, upon occasions, to dress me early and put me in the pillory of a high arm-chair in the entry, if in summer with the catechism in hand and an injunction to study next Sunday’s lesson.

Eunice was always in favor of having the front door closed for fear of the half-pint of dust — there never could have been more in all leafy Tuttleville — that might be stirring. But at my look of appeal the front door would be compromised on a crack, which I would gradually widen satisfactorily.

The day of Uncle Joel’s funeral, the door was of course closed. My heart was oppressed by the length and breadth of black crape that was fastened below the knocker.

I was really very sad. Some one had said in my hearing that Joel was the black sheep of the family, and that no one but my ‘soft-hearted’ mother would have taken him in, when he returned from his prodigal wanderings, three months before. They wondered at her as she was only a sister-in-law when you had said all.

He was an old and broken man, sick unto death, but the grasshopper life stirred in him warm and merry till the end. Such stories as he would tell, when he could get breath for them! Such merry cackling ended by a halfhour’s cough! I was his chosen nurse and companion. He had gone to sea and seen strange shores and walked on silver beaches with a haze of green palms inland simmering in the vibrant sunlight, and distant violet peaks lifting up to snows. O wonderful! For witness were pink-tipped shells. One of these became a treasure that still lies upon my desk and whispers of the sea, the sea, confessor and friend of many such men as Uncle Joel in the time of old sailing vessels from our northern ports.

This morning of Uncle Joel’s funeral, I begged that since the front door could not be open, even by a crack,

I might sit in the downstairs bedroom, which had a little handy door leading into the kitchen, as well as a larger entrance into the family livingroom. There was a sense of awe upon me that made friendly nearness welcome.

The little door was partly open. I did not call attention to the fact. I am afraid that I was not as good a child as so much catechism study in dressedup intervals should have made me. Grandma’s low rocking-chair with its patchwork cushion was very easy. Imperceptibly I rocked it toward the little door. My mother and an aunt from Bassett’s Corners, Uncle Joel’s sister, were very busy in the kitchen with Eunice, making ready funeral baked-meats. For, though Uncle Joel had been no credit to the family, all the Tuttles were expected to be at the funeral and the Truefitts as well.

The Truefitts were my mother’s family. I came to know in after years that their star was reckoned pale and ineffectual in lustre beside the astral splendors of the Tuttles, who were the founders of Tuttleville.

The bed was spread with black dresses. On the bed were three black bonnets, with long time-worn veils.

My aunt from Bassett’s Corners said that it would hardly pay to have new mourning for Uncle Joel just for the funeral. My mother said that she should wear black, at least for a time. Eunice, whom much scrubbing and the desertion of a fickle beau had shadowed with temporary melancholy, remarked that ‘the truest mourning was wore inside.’

Eunice was about twenty-three, — with snapping black eyes, black hair combed severely back, and rosy-apple cheeks. To me she seemed beautiful in her warm, plenteous coloring, though too intimately associated with untimely ablutions, tight braids, and stiffly starched dresses and pantalettes, to be considered lovable.

My aunt wondered if Primrose Barley would dare show her face at the funeral.

‘Not in this house, never!’ my mother said.

‘That was so many years ago,’ said my aunt, ‘everybody had forgotten and the boy was grown up and gone to sea, a disgrace just like his father.’

Eunice said that Primrose was a good woman. She had always been good. She was a mere child then, brought up in the notion that you must always mind great folks. Her black eyes snapped as she said, ‘It was bob a curt’sy and “ Please, sir, if you ask me,” and give ’em your life.’ Eunice said, ‘See how she works to support her mother in that little house on the North Road and how folks treat her worse’n dogs, punishin’ her for other folks’ sin; but they’ll find out—’

‘Eunice, you go straight upstairs and bring down the chairs out of the front chamber, and don’t be clacking about what don’t belong to your sort of folks to talk about,’ said my mother sternly.

Such an address to a maid of the present time would surely be followed by ‘warning’; but Eunice went on her errand obediently.

‘Well, we must allow Primrose has had a pretty hard time,’said my aunt.

‘“The wages of sin is death,’” said my mother; ‘Primrose is livin’ yet.'

I kept repeating to myself, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ It seemed almost equivalent to studying my catechism, which was what I was supposed to be doing.

‘But she has never held up her head since, Sally.’

‘Her mother never has. Primrose has a curious kind of gentle calmness, like a person come back from the grave and doing sewing for a living, if that could be,’

‘Old Dominie Beecham was pretty hard on her, I expect,’ said my aunt. ‘He always seemed to be a kind of path-master, making the way of the transgressor hard.’

‘He was as kind as his conscience would let him be,’ my mother replied. ‘He baptized her baby, though he would not let her call him Joel; the face she had to think of it!’

‘I have heard,’ said my aunt, ‘that she always expected brother Joel to come back and marry her, and very likely he would. It would have been just like him. He never was a real, through-and-trough Tuttle.’

‘Dominie Beecham gave the boy some kind of pagan name, — Curtius, if I remember, —and he gave Primmy some money, or she and her mother would have starved that winter I have heard them say. As it was they had a pretty hard time living in that old barn on the Peters’s place. The neighbors would have routed them out of that if it had n’t been for the Dominie, hard as you call him. They had got all ready to go one night, a crowd of them, mostly young fellows, and lo! the Dominie lighted into the midst of them and turned it into a prayer-meeting. They said he laid an awful stress on “forgiving trespasses” and other things in the New Testament, which, really, seems to me, does go pretty far—’

‘Why, Sally!’ said my aunt; but she laughed a little.

‘After that they did n’t have such a dreadful hard time,’ my mother went on, ‘and after a while strangers in town gave her sewing that she asked for. It was done so neatly, and she was so quick and handy with her needle —’

‘That they’d consent to her getting a starvin’ living’ for their own selfish hides’ sake,’ said my aunt, sniffing fiercely.

‘Well, I’ll allow she was a pretty little thing,’ continued my mother. ‘The day she went up the aisle with that, baby on her arm — I was there and saw it all. The Tuttles all stayed away ’count, of Joel, I suppose, who was off, the good Lord only knows where; but I went and faced the music. I’d stuck to meetin’ and all meetin’ doin’s since I came to Tuttleville and I was n’t goin’ to stay away for anything short of sickness or death. The Dominie and the deacons had cut both of them off from the Lord’s Supper till she should make public confession; and her mother, who had never been away from meetin’ a Sabbath in her life, could n’t stand it. I heard that Primmy never would have given in, only for her mother’s sake.’

‘Just how was it?’ said my aunt.

‘She came up the middle aisle in a poor, patched dress, but clean as you ever saw.’

‘All alone?’

‘All alone. Her curly hair was all in damp rings about her forehead and neck. “That hair,” Deacon Tanner used to say, “ was a snare for souls and had ought to be shaved close to her head.” Her eyes were full of a sad kind of light, but her mouth was all curves, like rose-leaves, and that child was crowin’ on her shoulder, as full of dimples as it was of sin.'

‘The child had n’t done any harm,’ said my Aunt Martha.

‘Well! the Dominie called it a child of sin,’ said my mother.

‘Did he talk hard to her?’

‘No; she was made to confess and say that she repented. I thought she would fall when she first turned round, so I looked the other way.’

‘Well, she has n’t heard from that son for many a year.’

‘No. She tried sending him to school, and the children plagued him so it could not be. The big boys would follow him from school calling things after him; and once, after they moved into that little house on the North Road, a boy threw a stone into his mother’s lap as she sat sewing by the open window. So she taught, him at home as well as she could, and her mother used to bring him to meetin’. But as soon as he got old enough to see how folks looked at him, and how nobody noticed them, not even women who had their sewin’ done by his mother, he ran away and never came back. Some folks said he went to look up his fat her. I guess that was talk. She pined after that quite a spell. ’T was then she began to come to meetin’. I tell you, Martha, a child is more to a woman than the best man that ever lived, let alone such a prodigal as your brother Joel. Some folks said what, a merciful Providence it would be if she should die; that it, seemed ’most as if she’d ought to die then.’

My aunt laughed, not agreeably. ‘Oh, no; who’d do the fine sewing? Did Joel never speak about her this last time?’

‘I think he kept meanin’ to and lookin’ for a good chance, but Miranda was with him most of the time that he was fit to talk. I could see he had things on his mind, but— Good gracious me!’ my mother cried, and shut the little door with a bang.

I sat trembling in my chair. A sea of thought, conjecture, and feeling surged round me. My ears burned and roared within like the hearts of the pink-lipped shells. My Uncle Joel who lay so still in the darkened parlor! The two quiet women in shabby black who sat under the gallery stairs at meeting and always went out before any one else. The hardness of it, summer and winter, and summer and winter, no one caring, not even such tender women as my mother and aunt. I thought I should like to die that moment, as they had thought Primrose Barley ought to have done long ago.

And I was a Tuttle, too; but I was not made like this. There was a lump in my throat. Hateful Dominie Beecham to make her walk up the aisle like that! Well, he was in the graveyard with a marble stone over him all covered with lies. I would have walked up that aisle just as proud and showed them all. In my anger I tore a leaf out of my catechism. It was a little relief. A half hour after, mother came round to the sitting-room door.

Grandma’s rocker had made a soft journey over the new hit-or-miss rag carpet, and a very prim little girl was studying a catechism that never got learned.

My mother looked relieved and went away quietly. I am afraid it was very deceitful and wicked, perhaps ‘desperately wicked.’ Soon I heard the undertaker come in.

He said, ‘Good morning, Mis’ Tuttle,’ in a strange voice.

In ordinary life he was Joe Spedding, our neighbor, a cabinet-maker, who included in his trade coffins and undertaking, as far as required. As the families of deceased people tenderly prepared them for burial at home, undertaking, at that time, was in a primitive state. Even the shroud was made by some seamstress, or experienced needlewoman. I shivered a little, thinking what if Primmy Barley had made Uncle Joel’s. Usually we called the undertaker Joe, and we children went to his shop to play in the shavings, but in case of a ‘visitation,’ he was Mr. Spedding, and talked in an alien bass voice, with relapses into his natural falsetto.

“This is a peculiar dispensation, Mis’ Tuttle,’ he said, ‘but we must all be prepared to go when our time comes.’

I tried to leave the bedroom, but Eunice was promptly on hand and said that I must not come out till I was come for.

It seemed ages before she came back with a little cottage bonnet trimmed with black ribbon on her head and a black mantilla around her shoulders. The mantilla was much too large for her, and it had been pinned over in the back of the neck with such funny effect that I laughed. Eunice shook me. I should have minded if I had not seen that her eyes were very sad. She said that people did not mind how things set at a funeral if they were only black. She jammed a ‘jocky ’ down on my straight braids and inspected my face for possible cake crumbs, looked reprovingly at my nails, and putting on an intensely solemn air, led me into the front room, where there were about fifteen people, the women all in black and the men with black ‘weepers’ on their arms.

I hardly knew my mother with her veil over her face, till I was seated beside her; and my brother, who had been allowed the larger liberty that the masculine creature somehow secures from babyhood, came in, evidently having just been scrubbed into his Sunday suit by Eunice. Catching my eye, he made one of those distracting faces wherewith he used to distract my Sabbath peace. Sometimes they made me cry, but now, in this sombre stillness, with Uncle Joel’s coffin so near me, the Dominie in his sepulchral black, and the neighbors more or less disguised in their borrowed weeds, and Mr. Spedding (‘Joe’ were now a myth and a profanation)—Mr. Spedding moving softly with a great show of being useful and an air of profound melancholy,—in these surroundings I fell a strange, agonized desire to laugh, followed by an immediate revulsion into tears.

The exercises were very long. Fortunately I did not then recognize Uncle Joel in the sort of prodigal son described in the new Dominie’s long prayer. I fell asleep in the sermon of very weariness of the long-drawn sadness, and was nipped awake by Eunice in time to hear the preacher conclude with the promise to ‘preach farther and more at length on the ensuing Sabbath on the text, “ The wages of Sin is Death.” ’

My father had a nice double carriage, and my mother, brother, and myself rode with him and the minister the short distance to the burying-ground on the North Road hill. The meetinghouse bell tolled as we rode slowly along. Other carriages of relatives followed ours, but there were no hired vehicles. They would have been thought as much out of place as hired mourners. We sat in the carriage while the coffin, which had been brought near and placed upon a black bier, was lowered by ropes into the grave. Some one started the hymn, —

It was sung very slowly, only Deacon Tanner being, as usual, a little in advance of the rest. Perhaps it was fancy, but I thought, that I saw, behind the briar-bushes, behind the rough fence that protected the rear of the cemetery, the face of Primrose Barley.

I did not point it out, and if it was there and seen, no one in my knowledge ever spoke of it. When we got home all the mourners came in. The borrowed mourning was removed and carefully folded. Eunice was instructed to return it the next day and she with us sat down to a table which two of our neighbors had spread in our absence.

‘Time would fail’ to tell of the meats, vegetables, cakes, pies, preserves, and pickles. My brother fed largely, but I resented the general cheerfulness that began to prevail. My heart was heavy for the kind invalid who had always had a pleasant word for me in the midst of pain. My thoughts were full of the things that I had heard. It had been a great convenience to the family that I was willing to sit at his call and give him his medicine and the cold water which he almost momentarily craved.

In return he had widened my narrow horizon. New and strange worlds had risen above its rim, evoked by him, and after what had drifted in through the little door, I had taken one long slide into life, my mother all undreaming of any change or enlargement of my experience. She saw my weariness at the table, however, and she whispered to me to go, put on my green check, and run for a little walk. I slipped away gladly. I went after Hetty Kenney, the Doctor’s daughter, but she was not in her house and I did not want any one else. I seemed drawn toward the North Road, which was hilly and less pleasant than other Tuttleville roads. Perhaps that was the reason why the burying-ground had been placed beside it.

It was growing late. The shadows of the wayside elms were lengthening. As I walked I thought over all that I had heard, not understanding it all, but getting the ideas of catastrophe, shame, and trouble. A profound pity filled me for that poor sewing-woman whose name had always before fallen indifferently upon my ears.

As I walked I gathered the roadside flowers as I always did. I went by the cemetery and came to the little sunken lot where the Barleys lived. You went down to the house by a short grassy path and three steps. I went down and stood on the doorstone before I thought where I was.

The door was partly open and I heard a complaining voice say, ‘I have n’t any friends along of you, Primmy; you’ve got a good deal to make up to me.’

I realized that such talk was not for children to hear, and backed softly up the steps and went along the slope by the western side of the house. Primrose sat by her window with her sewing as usual. The sun, which was getting low, lighted as with a glory that hair which had been a snare and was still so soft and pretty. And Uncle Joel was in his grave, and the boy I had heard of — where?

Something seemed to fill my throat to choking. I threw my flowers through the open window into her lap where the stone had fallen so long ago, and, turning, ran for home, never stopping till I burst into our sitting-room.

Eunice seized and shook me and said, ‘What ails the child? She looks as if she had seen a ghost! ’

‘Eunice,’ my mother said, ‘there are no such things as ghosts.’

My Aunt Martha was getting on her things to go back to Bassett’s Corners. The hired man was there to drive her home, but she stopped and looked carefully at me and, sitting down, took me on her lap. ‘Such a great girl,’ she said, and laughed; but she felt my heart-beats and exchanged glances with my mother.

‘ Let her go back to the Corners with me for a week,’ she said.

In a minute I was running, this time delightedly, to gather the possessions I always bestowed, when going to the Corners, in a little pig-skin trunk trimmed with many brass nails and with a big ‘T’ in brass nails upon its dome-shaped top.

Eunice called out, ‘ Don’t forget your patchwork, Miranda.'

I fear that I was forgetting my patchwork, that is temporarily, but I selected seven of the most attractive blocks and put them in the bottom of my trunk. I rode alone on the back seat of the wagon, Aunt Martha sitting in front to talk with the hired man about what had been done in her absence.

Mr. Bassett, my great-uncle Azrael, had given his farm into the hands of the widow of his oldest child and only son, and she was manager of the richest farm in the valley among the hills of Tuttleville. I had been told that her success bespoke her a true Tuttle.

I sat in the back seat, going to the place I loved, in a child’s dream of pleasant melancholy, the dew-fragrant gloom of a summer’s evening gathering around me. Aunt Martha and the hired man and the horse seemed miles away and I alone in the dream. We passed one or two farmhouses where neighbors, leaning over their front gates in the decline of the day and the end of labor, called out, ‘So Joel Tuttle was buried to-day ’; and in one place a cow grazing by the roadside made little tinkles with her bell; but for the most part there was little sound except for our passing over the gravelly road. It seemed that we might ride on forever through gateways in the hills into pale yellow skies dotted with little flocks of purple sheep; or so the clouds were shaped. In these days when we speed over the lovely monotony of our country roads, I can scarcely recall the happy sort of peace and rest that went with such drives. It must have formed us to different lives and fortunes from those that await our children.

The stars began to come out before we came down the last steep slope to the large white house, sitting in such dignity, with just a curved lawny space between it and the road.

Like one passing into a place of enchantments I descended into welcoming arms. The dear old house was in gloom to us coming in from the evening sky-glow.

It was midsummer, when country people prolong the frugal use of twilight. Great-Uncle Azrael came out of his own sitting room into the square hall that opened on the side porch. He was tall, a little bowed, the lean, bright, alert type of man with gray hair, slight side-whiskers, and a mouth meant for good words, lovable in shape. His daughter, who was married and allowed no one to forget that she lived in Boston, had sent him a new dressinggown, which he wore constantly in the house. It was very gay and magnificent, with cord and tassel. He drew me into his room. He sat down in his accustomed corner and held out his hands to me. I climbed up on his lap, he wrapped the dressing gown about me and I hoped that Aunt Bassett would not notice that my bed-time grew near.

The drowsy half hour was not, however, the usual lotus dream. It was punctured with the stings of my awaking conscience. Finally I could not endure it any longer. In the snug confessional of Great-Uncle Azrael’s arms, I murmured, ‘Great-uncle, I was naughty to-day.’

‘Wh—what’s this!’ said greatuncle, who stammered, to my mind becomingly. I knew his sharpness was assumed, but I knew also that his ‘honor bright’ would condemn.

‘This morning, I listened in the little bedroom and overheard mother telling Aunt Bassett all about Uncle Joel,’I sobbed.

There was silence.

‘E-e-eavesdropping,’ said GreatUncle Azrael, in a tone to bring tears. ‘We-well you must be punished. So so-some day, when it rains ha-hard would you think it best to be put in the corner of the back piazza? There is a leak there and the water comes down ha-hard from the eaves. Should you think that would cure you of eavesdropping?’

‘Yes, great-uncle,’ I said meekly.

No more was said, but I privately resolved to inflict the punishment on myself at the first opportunity, for I knew, from of old, that Great-Uncle Azrael would forget, — ‘ be slack,’ Aunt Martha called it. I did not then know that great-uncle thought me sufficiently punished by the pain of confession, and that the poetic justice of fitting penalty to offense was never intended to be carried out.

I hoped it would rain such a rain as never fell since Noah’s Ark on the very next day, and something ran through my head about ‘Wash my sins away.’

‘Come, Miranda,’ Aunt Martha called, ‘bed-time now, a whole week of to-morrows coming. Come.’

Great-uncle gave me a forgiving kiss and his usual good-night ‘Say your prayers,’ and I followed the gleam of the bedroom candle with a sort of chastened happiness, the good-night attitude of the penitent and forgiven.

So ended the day of Uncle Joel’s funeral.