3. More About Papa

Mama put on her heavy coat, tied a shawl over her head, and went to pay our family’s respects to the Carpenters; and, after awhile, Papa followed her. In a couple of days, the funeral service was held in the Hopeful Church, Papa conducting it. There was a long procession of carriages and buggies from the house to the church. Lou and I flattened our noses against a front window to see it pass. We were particularly impressed by one feature of this slow and solemn cavalcade. Several men friends of the family had been stationed with guns at half-mile distances along the way, and when the procession left the house, the sentinels fired signals from one to another down the road to the church where the sexton began to toll the bell. It must have taken the procession all of an hour to make the trip. I have known of some very strange happenings at funerals, but this was the only time that I know of when guns were fired to notify the sexton waiting with bell rope in hand. However, it was common practice in many little villages where we lived later for the church bell to toll the age of the deceased when word had come of the death. If it was an elderly person, the community was pretty deep in gloom by the time this rite had ended. Everybody put down his tools and counted. When the bell had tolled forty-six times, there was a breathless moment. If it didn’t toll once more, that would be Ezra McIntosh, who was very sick with lung fever. If there was one more sad bong of the bell, it would probably continue into the eighties, which would mean that Grampaw Ruggles was dead.

(Bertha Kraft tells me that when she was a little girl in North Dakota it was considered bad luck to count the strokes.)

Country people, in those days, did what they could to honor the dead. Many a man, of such total insignificance that he hardly cast a shadow as he trudged about, took on dignity when he died. He who had slept uncomfortably for many years on a lumpy corn-husk mattress or a hard straw tick now luxuriated on a new white bed of tufted satin. He who had been nothing more worthy of respect than a patronizing “Hi, Zeke” had become Brother Ezekiel Waterman; and if the preacher was hard-pressed for something nice to say about stubble-chinned old Zeke, he could dip into a warmed-over sermon on the Prophet Ezekiel, for whom obviously our good neighbor had been named.

Nor am I just trying to be funny at the expense of dim-witted old Zeke Waterman who had amounted to so little while he lived. His death gave him his first chance to perform a public service. The people put on their Sunday blacks and shined their shoes. Mister shaved and the Missus crimped her hair. They came from near and far to attend Zeke’s obsequies. Zeke had given the entire countryside a day off. They renewed acquaintance with old friends and patched up old quarrels.

After the last clod had been patted on the grave, the people stopped at the village stores for a bit of shopping. Farmers gathered in groups to discuss the low price offered for hogs by the Chicago packing houses, the more thrifty advising their neighbors to hang on to their livestock until the figures improved. The youngsters teased their pop for a half-dollar and had themselves an ice cream soda. If some shy girl said she didn’t care what flavor she had, the owner of the drugstore pushed a sirup-button labeled “Don’t Care.” It was anybody’s guess whether Ezekiel was going to be a credit to the land he had set out for; but, in dying, he had done very well by the country he had left behind.

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