“Well, old Parson Ranson’s going to tell ’em about it to-day,” and he shifted his toothpick with a certain effect of humor.

Old Mr. Tomwit asked if his companions had ever heard how Newt Bodler, a wit famous in Wayne County, once broke up a negro funeral with a hornets’ nest.  The idlers nodded a smiling affirmative as they watched the cortege go past.  They had all heard it.  But Mr. Tomwit would not be denied.  He sallied forth into humorous reminiscence.  Another loafer contributed an anecdote of how he had tied ropes to a dead negro so as to make the corpse sit up in bed and frighten the mourners.

All their tales were of the vintage of the years immediately succeeding the Civil War,—­pioneer humor, such as convulsed the readers of Peck’s Bad Boy, Mr. Bowser, Sut Lovingood.  The favorite dramatic properties of such writers were the hornets’ nest, the falling ladder, the banana peel.  They cultivated the humor of contusions, the wit of impact.  This style still holds the stage of Hooker’s Bend.

In telling these tales the white villagers meant no special disrespect to the negro funeral.  It simply reminded them of humorous things; so they told their jokes, like the naive children of the soil that they were.

At last the poor procession passed beyond the white church, around a bend in the road, and so vanished.  Presently the bell in Niggertown ceased tolling.

* * * * *

Peter always remembered his mother’s funeral in fragments of intolerable pathos,—­the lifting of old Parson Ranson’s hands toward heaven, the songs of the black folk, the murmur of the first shovelful of dirt as it was lowered to the coffin, and the final raw mound of earth littered with a few dying flowers.  With that his mother—­who had been so near to, and so disappointed in, her son—­was blotted from his life.  The other events of the funeral flowed by in a sort of dream:  he moved about; the negroes were speaking to him in the queer overtones one uses to the bereaved; he was being driven back to Niggertown; he reentered the Siner cabin.  One or two of his friends stayed in the room with him for a while and said vague things, but there was nothing to say.

Later in the afternoon Cissie Dildine and her mother brought his dinner to him.  Vannie Dildine, a thin yellow woman, uttered a few disjointed words about Sister Ca’line being a good woman, and stopped amid sentence.  There was nothing to say.  Death had cut a wound across Peter Siner’s life.  Not for days, nor weeks, nor months, would his existence knit solidly back together.  The poison of his ingratitude to his faithful old black mother would for a long, long day prevent the healing.

CHAPTER VII

During a period following his mother’s death Peter Siner’s life drifted emptily and without purpose.  He had the feeling of one convalescing in a hospital.  His days passed unconnected by any thread of purpose; they were like cards scattered on a table, meaning nothing.