“YOUR AUNT MAW DIED LAST NIGHT STOP FUNERAL THURSDAY IN LIBYA HILL STOP COME HOME IF YOU CAN.”
That was all. No explanation of what she had died of. Old age, most likely. Nothing else could have killed her. She hadn’t been sick or’ they would have let him know before this.
The news shook him profoundly. But it was not grief he felt so much as a deep sense of loss, almost impersonal in its quality—a sense of loss and unbelief such as one might feel to discover suddenly that some great force ‘in nature had ceased to operate. He couldn’t take it in. Ever since his mother had died when he was only eight years old, Aunt Maw had been the most solid and permanent fixture in his boy’s universe. She was a spinster, the older sister of his mother and of his Uncle Mark, and she had taken charge of him and brought him up with all the inflexible zeal of her puritanical nature. She had done her best to make a Joyner of him and a credit to the narrow, provincial, mountain clan to which she belonged.-In this she had failed, and his defection from the ways of Joyner righteousness had caused her deep pain. He had known this for a long time; but now he realised, too, more clearly than he had, ever done before, that she had never faltered in her duty to him as she saw it. As he thought about her life the felt an inexpressible pity for her, and a surge of tenderness and affection almost choked him.
As far back as he could remember, Aunt Maw had seemed to him an ageless crone, as old as God. He could still hear her voice—that croaking monotone which had gone on and on in endless stories of her past, peopling his childhood world with the whole host of Joyners dead and buried in the hills of Zebulon in ancient days before the Civil War. And almost every tale she had told him was a chronicle of sickness, death, and sorrow. She had known about all the Joyners for the last hundred years, and whether they had died of consumption, typhoid fever, pneumonia, meningitis, or pellagra, and she had relived each incident in their lives with an air of croaking relish. From her he had got a picture of his mountain kinsmen that was constantly dark with the terrors of misery and sudden death, a picture made ghostly at frequent intervals by supernatural revelations. The Joyners, so she thought, had been endowed with occult powers by the Almighty, and weft for ever popping up on country roads and speaking to people as they passed, only to have it turn out later that they had been fifty miles away at the time. They were for ever hearing voices and receiving premonitions. If a neighbour died suddenly, the Joyners would flock from miles around ‘to sit up with the corpse, and in the flickering light of pine logs on the hearth they would talk unceasingly through the night, their droning voices punctuated by the crumbling of the ash as they told how they had received intimations of the impending death a week before it happened.
This was the image of the Joyner world which Aunt Maw’s tireless memories had built up in the mind and spirit of the boy. And he had felt somehow that although other men would live their day and die, the Joyners were a race apart, not subject to this law. They fed on death and were triumphant over it, and the Joyners would go on for ever. But now Aunt Maw the oldest and most death-triumphant Joyner of them all, was dead…
The funeral was to be on Thursday. This was Tuesday. If he took the train to-day, he would arrive to-morrow. He knew that all the Joyners from the hills of Zebulon County in Old Catawba would be gathering even now to hold their tribal rites of death and sorrow, and if he got there so soon he would not be able to escape the horror of their brooding talk. It would be better to wait a day and turn up just before the funeral.