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At
dinner grandfather talked to Jelinek more than he usually did to strangers.
`Will
they be much disappointed because we cannot get a priest?' he asked.
Jelinek
looked serious.
`Yes,
sir, that is very bad for them. Their father has done a great sin'--he looked straight at
grandfather. `Our Lord has said that.'
Grandfather
seemed to like his frankness.
`We
believe that, too, Jelinek. But
we believe that Mr. Shimerda's soul will come to its Creator as well off
without a priest. We believe that Christ is our only intercessor.'
The
young man shook his head. `I
know how you think. My teacher at the school has explain.
But I have seen too much. I believe in prayer for the dead.
I have seen too much.'
We
asked him what he meant.
He
glanced around the table. `You
want I shall tell you? When I
was a little boy like this one, I begin to help the priest at the altar. I
make my first communion very young; what the Church teach seem plain to me.
By 'n' by war-times come, when the Prussians fight us. We have very
many soldiers in camp near my village, and the cholera break out in that
camp, and the men die like flies. All
day long our priest go about there to give the Sacrament to dying men, and I
go with him to carry the vessels with the Holy Sacrament. Everybody that go
near that camp catch the sickness but me and the priest. But we have no
sickness, we have no fear, because we carry that blood and that body of
Christ, and it preserve us.' He paused, looking at grandfather. `That I know, Mr. Burden, for it happened to myself. All the
soldiers know, too. When we
walk along the road, the old priest and me, we meet all the time soldiers
marching and officers on horse. All those officers, when they see what I
carry under the cloth, pull up their horses and kneel down on the ground in
the road until we pass. So I feel very bad for my kawntree-man to die
without the Sacrament, and to die in a bad way for his soul, and I feel sad
for his family.'
We
had listened attentively. It
was impossible not to admire his frank, manly faith.
`I
am always glad to meet a young man who thinks seriously about these things,'
said grandfather, land I would never be the one to say you were not in God's
care when you were among the soldiers.' After dinner it was
decided that
young Jelinek should
hook our two strong black farm-horses to the scraper and break a road
through to the Shimerdas', so that a wagon could go when it was necessary.
Fuchs, who was the only cabinetmaker in the neighbourhood was set to work on
a coffin.
Jelinek
put on his long wolfskin coat, and when we admired it, he told us that he
had shot and skinned the coyotes, and the young man who `batched' with him,
Jan Bouska, who had been a fur-worker in Vienna, made the coat.
From the windmill I watched Jelinek come out of the barn with the
blacks, and work his way up the hillside toward the cornfield. Sometimes he
was completely hidden by the clouds of snow that rose about him; then he and
the horses would emerge black and shining.
Our
heavy carpenter's bench had to be brought from the barn and carried down
into the kitchen. Fuchs
selected boards from a pile of planks grandfather had hauled out from town
in the fall to make a new floor for the oats-bin. When at last the lumber
and tools were assembled, and the doors were closed again and the cold
draughts shut out, grandfather rode away to meet the coroner at the
Shimerdas', and Fuchs took off his coat and settled down to work. I sat on his worktable and watched him. He did not touch his
tools at first, but figured for a long while on a piece of paper, and
measured the planks and made marks on them. While he was thus engaged, he
whistled softly to himself, or teasingly pulled at his half-ear. Grandmother
moved about quietly, so as not to disturb him. At last he folded his ruler
and turned a cheerful face to us.
`The
hardest part of my job's done,' he announced. `It's the head end of it that
comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice.
The last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden,' he continued, as he
sorted and tried his chisels, `was for a fellow in the Black Tiger Mine, up
above Silverton, Colorado. The mouth of that mine goes right into the face
of the cliff, and they used to put us in a bucket and run us over on a
trolley and shoot us into the shaft. The
bucket travelled across a box canon three hundred feet deep, and about a
third full of water. Two Swedes had fell out of that bucket once, and hit
the water, feet down. If you'll
believe it, they went to work the next day. You can't kill a Swede.
But in my time a little Eyetalian tried the high dive, and it turned
out different with him. We was snowed in then, like we are now, and I
happened to be the only man in camp that could make a coffin for him. It's a
handy thing to know, when you knock about like I've done.'
`We'd
be hard put to it now, if you didn't know, Otto,' grandmother said.
`Yes,
'm,' Fuchs admitted with modest pride.
`So few folks does know how to make a good tight box that'll turn
water. I sometimes wonder if there'll be anybody about to do it for me.
However, I'm not at all particular that way.'
All
afternoon, wherever one went in the house, one could hear the panting wheeze
of the saw or the pleasant purring of the plane. They were such cheerful
noises, seeming to promise new things for living people:
it was a pity that those freshly planed pine boards were to be put
underground so soon. The lumber was hard to work because it was full of
frost, and the boards gave off a sweet smell of pine woods, as the heap of
yellow shavings grew higher and higher. I wondered why Fuchs had not stuck
to cabinet-work, he settled down to it with such ease and content. He
handled the tools as if he liked the feel of them; and when he planed, his
hands went back and forth over the boards in an eager, beneficent way as if
he were blessing them. He broke out now and then into German hymns, as if
this occupation brought back old times to him.
At
four o'clock Mr. Bushy, the postmaster, with another neighbour who lived
east of us, stopped in to get warm. They
were on their way to the Shimerdas'. The news of what had happened over
there had somehow got abroad through the snow-blocked country. Grandmother
gave the visitors sugar-cakes and hot coffee. Before these callers were
gone, the brother of the Widow Steavens, who lived on the Black Hawk road,
drew up at our door, and after him came the father of the German family, our
nearest neighbours on the south. They dismounted and joined us in the dining-room. They were
all eager for any details about the suicide, and they were greatly concerned
as to where Mr. Shimerda would be buried.
The nearest Catholic cemetery was at Black Hawk, and it might be
weeks before a wagon could get so far. Besides, Mr. Bushy and grandmother
were sure that a man who had killed himself could not be buried in a
Catholic graveyard. There was a burying-ground over by the Norwegian church,
west of Squaw Creek; perhaps the Norwegians would take Mr. Shimerda in.
After
our visitors rode away in single file over the hill, we returned to the
kitchen. Grandmother began to
make the icing for a chocolate cake, and Otto again filled the house with
the exciting, expectant song of the plane. One pleasant thing about this
time was that everybody talked more than usual. I had never heard the postmaster say anything but `Only
papers, to-day,' or, `I've got a sackful of mail for ye,' until this
afternoon. Grandmother always
talked, dear woman: to herself or to the Lord, if there was no one else to
listen; but grandfather was naturally taciturn, and Jake and Otto were often
so tired after supper that I used to feel as if I were surrounded by a wall
of silence. Now everyone seemed
eager to talk. That afternoon
Fuchs told me story after story: about the Black Tiger Mine, and about
violent deaths and casual buryings, and the queer fancies of dying men. You
never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die. Most men were game,
and went without a grudge.
The
postmaster, going home, stopped to say that grandfather would bring the
coroner back with him to spend the night. The officers of the Norwegian
church, he told us, had held a meeting and decided that the Norwegian
graveyard could not extend its hospitality to Mr. Shimerda.
Grandmother
was indignant. `If these
foreigners are so clannish, Mr. Bushy, we'll have to have an American
graveyard that will be more liberal-minded. I'll get right after Josiah to
start one in the spring. If anything was to happen to me, I don't want the
Norwegians holding inquisitions over me to see whether I'm good enough to be
laid amongst 'em.'
Soon
grandfather returned, bringing with him Anton Jelinek, and that important
person, the coroner. He was a
mild, flurried old man, a Civil War veteran, with one sleeve hanging empty.
He seemed to find this case very perplexing, and said if it had not been for
grandfather he would have sworn out a warrant against Krajiek. `The way he
acted, and the way his axe fit the wound, was enough to convict any man.'
Although
it was perfectly clear that Mr. Shimerda had killed himself, Jake and the
coroner thought something ought to be done to Krajiek because he behaved
like a guilty man. He was badly frightened, certainly, and perhaps he even
felt some stirrings of remorse for his indifference to the old man's misery
and loneliness.
At
supper the men ate like vikings, and the chocolate cake, which I had hoped
would linger on until tomorrow in a mutilated condition, disappeared on the
second round. They talked excitedly about where they should bury Mr.
Shimerda; I gathered that the neighbours were all disturbed and shocked
about something. It developed
that Mrs. Shimerda and Ambrosch wanted the old man buried on the southwest
corner of their own land; indeed, under the very stake that marked the
corner. Grandfather had explained to Ambrosch that some day, when the
country was put under fence and the roads were confined to section lines,
two roads would cross exactly on that corner. But Ambrosch only said, `It
makes no matter.'
Grandfather
asked Jelinek whether in the old country there was some superstition to the
effect that a suicide must be buried at the cross-roads.
Jelinek
said he didn't know; he seemed to remember hearing there had once been such
a custom in Bohemia. `Mrs.
Shimerda is made up her mind,' he added. `I try to persuade her, and say it looks bad for her to all
the neighbours; but she say so it must be. "There I will bury him, if I
dig the grave myself," she say. I have to promise her I help Ambrosch
make the grave tomorrow.'
Grandfather
smoothed his beard and looked judicial. `I don't know whose wish should
decide the matter, if not hers. But if she thinks she will live to see the
people of this country ride over that old man's head, she is mistaken.'
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