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End Of All Living

A Suspenseful Story

By Brianna ManskerPublished 2 years ago 17 min read
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The First Church of Tiverton stands on a hill, whence it overlooks the little
village, with one or two pine-shaded neighborhoods beyond, and, when
the air is clear, a thin blue line of upland delusively like the sea. Set thus
austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day when men used to go
to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout by the door, to
watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not remember.
Conceding not a sigh to the holy and strenuous past, they lament--and
the more as they grow older--the stiff climb up the hill, albeit to rest in so
sweet a sanctuary at the top. For it is sweet indeed. A soft little wind
seems always to be stirring there, on summer Sundays a messenger of
good. It runs whispering about, and wafts in all sorts of odors: honey of
the milkweed and wild rose, and a Christmas tang of the evergreens just
below. It carries away something, too--scents calculated to bewilder the
thrift-hunting bee: sometimes a whiff of peppermint from an old lady's
pew, but oftener the breath of musk and southernwood, gathered in
ancient gardens, and borne up here to embroider the preacher's drowsy
homilies, and remind us, when we faint, of the keen savor of
righteousness.
Here in the church do we congregate from week to week; but behind it,
on a sloping hillside, is the last home of us all, the old burying-ground,
overrun with a briery tangle, and relieved by Nature's sweet and cunning
hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily about the dead. Our very
faithlessness has made it fair. There was a time when we were a little
ashamed of it. We regarded it with affection, indeed, but affection of the
sort accorded some rusty relative who has lain too supine in the rut of
years. Thus, with growing ambition came, in due course, the project of a
new burying-ground. This we dignified, even in common speech; it was
always grandly "the Cemetery." While it lay unrealized in the distance, the
home of our forbears fell into neglect, and Nature marched in, according
to her lavishness, and adorned what we ignored. The white alder crept
farther and farther from its bounds; tansy and wild rose rioted in
profusion, and soft patches of violets smiled to meet the spring. Here
were, indeed, great riches, "a little of everything" that pasture life affords: a hardy bed of checkerberry, crimson strawberries nodding on
long stalks, and in one sequestered corner the beloved Linnaea. It
seemed a consecrated pasture shut off from daily use, and so given up to
pleasantness that you could scarcely walk there without setting foot on
some precious outgrowth of the spring, or pushing aside a summer
loveliness better made for wear.
Ambition had its fulfillment. We bought our Cemetery, a large, green
tract, quite square, and lying open to the sun. But our pendulum had
swung too wide. Like many folk who suffer from one discomfort, we had
gone to the utmost extreme and courted another. We were tired of
climbing hills, and so we pressed too far into the lowland; and the first
grave dug in our Cemetery showed three inches of water at the bottom. It
was in "Prince's new lot," and there his young daughter was to lie. But her
lover had stood by while the men were making the grave; and, looking
into the ooze below, he woke to the thought of her fair young body there.
"God!" they heard him say, "she sha'n't lay so. Leave it as it is, an' come
up into the old buryin'-ground. There's room enough by me."
The men, all mates of his, stopped work without a glance and followed
him; and up there in the dearer shrine her place was made. The father
said but a word at her changed estate. Neighbors had hurried in to bring
him the news; he went first to the unfinished grave in the Cemetery, and
then strode up the hill, where the men had not yet done. After watching
them for a while in silence, he turned aside; but he came back to drop a
trembling hand upon the lover's arm.
"I guess," he said miserably, "she'd full as lieves lay here by you."
And she will be quite beside him, though, in the beaten ways of earth,
others have come between. For years he lived silently and apart; but
when his mother died, and he and his father were left staring at the
dulled embers of life, he married a good woman, who perhaps does not
deify early dreams; yet she is tender of them, and at the death of her
own child it was she who went toiling up to the graveyard, to see that its
little place did not encroach too far. She gave no reason, but we all knew it was because she meant to let her husband lie there by the long-loved
guest.
Naturally enough, after this incident of the forsaken grave, we conceived
a strange horror of the new Cemetery, and it has remained deserted to
this day. It is nothing but a meadow now, with that one little grassy
hollow in it to tell a piteous tale. It is mown by any farmer who chooses to
take it for a price; but we regard it differently from any other plot of
ground. It is "the Cemetery," and always will be. We wonder who has
bought the grass. "Eli's got the Cemetery this year," we say. And
sometimes awe-stricken little squads of school children lead one another
there, hand in hand, to look at the grave where Annie Prince was going to
be buried when her beau took her away. They never seem to connect that
heart-broken wraith of a lover with the bent farmer who goes to and fro
driving the cows. He wears patched overalls, and has sciatica in winter;
but I have seen the gleam of youth awakened, though remotely, in his
eyes. I do not believe he ever quite forgets; there are moments, now and
then, at dusk or midnight, all his for poring over those dulled pages of the
past.
After we had elected to abide by our old home, we voted an enlargement
of its bounds; and thereby hangs a tale of outlawed revenge. Long years
ago "old Abe Eaton" quarreled with his twin brother, and vowed, as the
last fiat of an eternal divorce, "I won't be buried in the same yard with
ye!"
The brother died first; and because he lay within a little knoll beside the
fence, Abe willfully set a public seal on that iron oath by purchasing a
strip of land outside, wherein he should himself be buried. Thus they
would rest in a hollow correspondence, the fence between. It all fell out
as he ordained, for we in Tiverton are cheerfully willing to give the dead
their way. Lax enough is the helpless hand in the fictitious stiffness of its
grasp; and we are not the people to deny it holding, by courtesy at least.
Soon enough does the sceptre of mortality crumble and fall. So Abe was
buried according to his wish. But when necessity commanded us to add
unto ourselves another acre, we took in his grave with it, and the fence,
falling into decay, was never renewed. There he lies, in affectionate decorum, beside the brother he hated; and thus does the greater good
wipe out the individual wrong.
So now, as in ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon
his bier; for not often in Tiverton do we depend on that uncouth
monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we do not own one,--a rigid box of
that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and when Sudleigh
came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the
idea of emulating her. But the project fell through after Brad Freeman's
contented remark that he guessed the old one would last us out. He
"never heard no complaint from anybody 't ever rode in it." That placed
our last journey on a homely, humorous basis, and we smiled, and
reflected that we preferred going up the hill borne by friendly hands, with
the light of heaven falling on our coffin-lids.
The antiquary would set much store by our headstones, did he ever find
them out. Certain of them are very ancient, according to our ideas; for
they came over from England, and are now fallen into the grayness of
age. They are woven all over with lichens, and the blackberry binds them
fast. Well, too, for them! They need the grace of some such veiling; for
most of them are alive, even to this day, with warning skulls, and awful
cherubs compounded of bleak, bald faces and sparsely feathered wings.
One discovery, made there on a summer day, has not, I fancy, been
duplicated in another New England town. On six of the larger tombstones
are carved, below the grass level, a row of tiny imps, grinning faces and
humanized animals. Whose was the hand that wrought? The Tivertonians
know nothing about it. They say there was a certain old Veasey who,
some eighty odd years ago, used to steal into the graveyard with his
tools, and there, for love, scrape the mosses from the stones and chip the
letters clear. He liked to draw, "creatur's" especially, and would trace
them for children on their slates. He lived alone in a little house long since
fallen, and he would eat no meat. That is all they know of him. I can
guess but one thing more: that when no looker-on was by, he pushed
away the grass, and wrote his little jokes, safe in the kindly tolerance of
the dead. This was the identical soul who should, in good old days, have
been carving gargoyles and misereres; here his only field was the
obscurity of Tiverton churchyard, his only monument these grotesqueries
so cunningly concealed. We have epitaphs, too,--all our own as yet, for the world has not
discovered them. One couple lies in well-to-do respectability under a tiny
monument not much taller than the conventional gravestone, but shaped
on a pretentious model.
"We'd ruther have it nice," said the builders, "even if there ain't much of
it."
These were Eliza Marden and Peleg her husband, who worked from sun to
sun, with scant reward save that of pride in their own fore-handedness. I
can imagine them as they drove to church in the open wagon, a couple
portentously large and prosperous: their one child, Hannah, sitting
between them, and glancing about her, in a flickering, intermittent way,
at the pleasant holiday world. Hannah was no worker; she liked a long
afternoon in the sun, her thin little hands busied about nothing weightier
than crochet; and her mother regarded her with a horrified patience, as
one who might some time be trusted to sow all her wild oats of idleness.
The well-mated pair died within the same year, and it was Hannah who
composed their epitaph, with an artistic accuracy, but a defective sense of
rhyme:--
"Here lies Eliza
She was a striver
Here lies Peleg
He was a select Man"
We townsfolk found something haunting and bewildering in the lines; they
drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring only to
betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished the
belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their
possibilities. Still, we accepted her one crowning achievement, and never
urged her to further proof. In Tiverton we never look genius in the mouth.
Nor did Hannah herself propose developing her gift. Relieved from the
spur of those two unquiet spirits who had begotten her, she settled down to sit all day in the sun, learning new patterns of crochet; and having
cheerfully let her farm run down, she died at last in a placid poverty.
Then there was Desire Baker, who belonged to the era of colonial
hardship, and who, through a redundant punctuation, is relegated to a
day still more remote. For some stone-cutter, scornful of working by the
card, or born with an inordinate taste for periods, set forth, below her
_obiit_, the astounding statement:--
"The first woman. She made the journey to Boston. By stage."
Here, too, are the ironies whereof departed life is prodigal. This is the tidy
lot of Peter Merrick, who had a desire to stand well with the world, in
leaving it, and whose purple and fine linen were embodied in the pomp of
death. He was a cobbler, and he put his small savings together to erect a
modest monument to his own memory. Every Sunday he visited it, "after
meetin'," and perhaps his day-dreams, as he sat leather-aproned on his
bench, were still of that white marble idealism. The inscription upon it was
full of significant blanks; they seemed an interrogation of the destiny
which governs man.
"Here lies Peter Merrick----" ran the unfinished scroll, "and his wife who
died----"
But ambitious Peter never lay there at all; for in his later prime, with one
flash of sharp desire to see the world, he went on a voyage to the Banks,
and was drowned. And his wife? The story grows somewhat threadbare.
She summoned his step-brother to settle the estate, and he, a marble-
cutter by trade, filled in the date of Peter's death with letters English and
illegible. In the process of their carving, the widow stood by, hands folded
under her apron from the midsummer sun. The two got excellent well
acquainted, and the stone-cutter prolonged his stay. He came again in a
little over a year, at Thanksgiving time, and they were married. Which
shows that nothing is certain in life,--no, not the proprieties of our leaving
it,--and that even there we must walk softly, writing no boastful legend
for time to annul. At one period a certain quatrain had a great run in Tiverton; it was the
epitaph of the day. Noting how it overspread that stony soil, you picture
to yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless, indeed, it had been
copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and transplanted
through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts were ever
flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:--
"Dear husband, now my life is passed,
You have dearly loved me to the last.
Grieve not for me, but pity take
On my dear children for my sake."
But one sorrowing widower amended it, according to his wife's direction,
so that it bore a new and significant meaning. He was charged to
"pity take
On my dear parent for my sake."
The lesson was patent. His mother-in-law had always lived with him, and
she was "difficult." Who knows how keenly the sick woman's mind ran on
the possibilities of reef and quicksand for the alien two left alone without
her guiding hand? So she set the warning of her love and fear to be no
more forgotten while she herself should be remembered.
The husband was a silent man. He said very little about his intentions;
performance was enough for him. Therefore it happened that his
"parent," adopted perforce, knew nothing about this public charge until
she came upon it, on her first Sunday visit, surveying the new glory of the
stone. The story goes that she stood before it, a square, portentous figure
in black alpaca and warlike mitts, and that she uttered these irrevocable
words:--
"Pity on _me_! Well, I guess he won't! I'll go to the poor-farm fust!" And Monday morning, spite of his loyal dissuasions, she packed her "blue
chist," and drove off to a far-away cousin, who got her "nussin'" to do.
Another lesson from the warning finger of Death: let what was life not
dream that it can sway the life that is, after the two part company.
Not always were mothers-in-law such breakers of the peace. There is a
story in Tiverton of one man who went remorsefully mad after his wife's
death, and whose mind dwelt unceasingly on the things he had denied
her. These were not many, yet the sum seemed to him colossal. It piled
the Ossa of his grief. Especially did he writhe under the remembrance of
certain blue dishes she had desired the week before her sudden death;
and one night, driven by an insane impulse to expiate his blindness, he
walked to town, bought them, and placed them in a foolish order about
her grave. It was a puerile, crazy deed, but no one smiled, not even the
little children who heard of it next day, on the way home from school, and
went trudging up there to see. To their stirring minds it seemed a strange
departure from the comfortable order of things, chiefly because their
elders stood about with furtive glances at one another and murmurs of
"Poor creatur'!" But one man, wiser than the rest, "harnessed up," and
went to tell the dead woman's mother, a mile away. Jonas was
"shackled;" he might "do himself a mischief." In the late afternoon, the
guest so summoned walked quietly into the silent house, where Jonas sat
by the window, beating one hand incessantly upon the sill, and staring at
the air. His sister, also, had come; she was frightened, however, and had
betaken herself to the bedroom, to sob. But in walked this little plump,
soft-footed woman, with her banded hair, her benevolent spectacles, and
her atmosphere of calm.
"I guess I'll blaze a fire, Jonas," said she. "You step out an' git me a mite
o' kindlin'."
The air of homely living enwrapped him once again, and mechanically,
with the inertia of old habit, he obeyed. They had a "cup o' tea" together;
and then, when the dishes were washed, and the peaceful twilight began
to settle down upon them like a sifting mist, she drew a little rocking chair
to the window where he sat opposite, and spoke. "Jonas," said she, in that still voice which had been harmonized by the
experiences of life, "arter dark, you jest go up an' bring home them blue
dishes. Mary's got an awful lot o' fun in her, an' if she ain't laughin' over
that, I'm beat. Now, Jonas, you do it! Do you s'pose she wants them nice
blue pieces out there through wind an' weather? She'd ruther by half see
'em on the parlor cluzzet shelves; an' if you'll fetch 'em home, I'll scallop
some white paper, jest as she liked, an' we'll set 'em up there."
Jonas wakened a little from his mental swoon. Life seemed warmer, more
tangible, again.
"Law, do go," said the mother soothingly. "She don't want the whole
township tramplin' up there to eye over her chiny. Make her as nervous
as a witch. Here's the ha'-bushel basket, an' some paper to put between
'em. You go, Jonas, an' I'll clear off the shelves."
So Jonas, whether he was tired of guiding the impulses of his own unquiet
mind, or whether he had become a child again, glad to yield to the
maternal, as we all do in our grief, took the basket and went. He stood
by, still like a child, while this comfortable woman put the china on the
shelves, speaking warmly, as she worked, of the pretty curving of the
cups, and her belief that the pitcher was "one you could pour out of." She
stayed on at the house, and Jonas, through his sickness of the mind, lay
back upon her soothing will as a baby lies in its mother's arms. But the
china was never used, even when he had come to his normal estate, and
bought and sold as before. The mother's prescience was too keen for that.
Here in this ground are the ambiguities of life carried over into that other
state, its pathos and its small misunderstandings. This was a much-
married man whose last spouse had been a triple widow. Even to him the
situation proved mathematically complex, and the sumptuous stone to
her memory bears the dizzying legend that "Enoch Nudd who erects this
stone is her fourth husband and his fifth wife." Perhaps it was the
exigencies of space which brought about this amazing elision; but surely,
in its very apparent intention, there is only a modest pride. For
indubitably the much-married may plume themselves upon being also the
widely sought. If it is the crown of sex to be desired, here you have it, under seal of the civil bond. No baseless, windy boasting that "I might an
if I would!" Nay, here be the marriage ties to testify.
In this pleasant, weedy corner is a little white stone, not so long erected.
"I shall arise in thine image," runs the inscription;

Horror
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