Mark and Mag and various other Joyners took the front rows, and George and Margaret, with Mrs. Flood still close beside them, found chairs at the back. Other people—friends, distant relatives, and mere acquaintances—stood in groups behind.
The lot looked out across a mile or two of deep, dense green, the wooded slopes and hollows that receded towards the winding river, and straight across beyond the river was the central business part of town. The spires and buildings, the old ones as well as some splendid new ones—hotels, office buildings, garages, churches, and the scaffolding and concrete of new construction which exploded from the familiar design with glittering violence—were plainly visible. It was a fine view.
While the people took their places and waited for the pallbearers to perform their last slow and heavy service up the final ascent of the hill, Mrs. Flood sat with her hands folded in her lap and gazed out over the town. Then she began shaking her head thoughtfully, her lips pursed in deprecation and regret, and in a low voice, as if she were talking to herself, she said:
“Hm! Hm! Hm! Too bad, too bad, too bad!”
“What’s that, Mrs. Flood?” Margaret leaned over and whispered. “What’s too bad?”
“Why, that they should ever have chosen such a place as this for the cemetery,” she said regretfully. She had lowered her voice to a stage whisper, and those round her could hear everything she said. “Why, as I told Frank Candler just the other day, they’ve gone and deliberately given away the two best building sites in town to the niggers and the dead people! That’s just exactly what they’ve done! I’ve always said as much—that the two finest building sites in town for natural beauty are Niggertown and Highview Cemetery. I could’ve told ‘em that long years ago—they should’ve known it themselves if any of ‘em could have seen an inch beyond his nose—that some day the town would grow up and this would be valuable property! Why, why on earth! When they were lookin’ for a cemetery site—why on earth didn’t they think of findin’ one up there on Buxton Hill, say, where you get a beautiful view, and where land is not so valuable? But this!” she whispered loudly. “This, by rights, is building property! People could have fine homes here! And as for the niggers, I’ve always said that they’d have been better off if they’d been put down there on those old flats in the depot section. Now it’s too late, of course—nothin’ can be done—but it was certainly a serious mistake!” she whispered, and shook her head. “I’ve always known it!”
“Well, I guess you’re right,” Margaret whispered in reply. “I never thought of it before, but I guess you’re right.” And she nudged George with her elbow.
The pallbearers had set the coffin in its place, and the minister now began to read the brief and movingly solemn commitment service. Slowly the coffin was lowered in its grave. And as the black lid disappeared from sight George felt such a stab of wordless pain and grief as he had never known. But he knew even as he felt it that it wasn’t sorrow for Aunt Maw. It was an aching pity for himself and for all men living, and in it was the knowledge of the briefness of man’s days, and the smallness of his life, and the certain dark that comes too swiftly and that has no end. And he felt, too, more personally, now with Aunt Maw gone and no one left in all his family who was close to him, that one whole cycle of time had closed for him. He thought of the future opening blankly up before him, and for a moment he had an acute sense of terror and despair like that of a lost child, for he felt now that the last tie that had bound him to, his native earth was severed, and he saw himself as a creature homeless, uprooted, and alone, with no door to enter, no place to call his own, in all the vast desolation of the planet.
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.