“_There's another place_,” said Emma Jane, in an orthodox and sepulchral
whisper, as she took her ever-present ball of crochet cotton from her
pocket and began to twine the whiteweed blossoms into a rope.
“Oh, well!” Rebecca replied with the easy theology that belonged to her
temperament. “They simply couldn't send her _down there_ with that
little weeny baby. Who'd take care of it? You know page six of the
catechism says the only companions of the wicked after death are their
father the devil and all the other evil angels; it wouldn't be any place
to bring up a baby.”
“Whenever and wherever she wakes up, I hope she won't know that the big
baby is going to the poor farm. I wonder where he is?”
“Perhaps over to Mrs. Dennett's house. She didn't seem sorry a bit, did
she?”
“No, but I suppose she's tired sitting up and nursing a stranger. Mother
wasn't sorry when Gran'pa Perkins died; she couldn't be, for he was
cross all the time and had to be fed like a child. Why _are_ you crying
again, Rebecca?”
“Oh, I don't know, I can't tell, Emma Jane! Only I don't want to die and
have no funeral or singing and nobody sorry for me! I just couldn't bear
it!”
“Neither could I,” Emma Jane responded sympathetically; “but p'r'aps
if we're real good and die young before we have to be fed, they will
be sorry. I do wish you could write some poetry for her as you did for
Alice Robinson's canary bird, only still better, of course, like that
you read me out of your thought book.”
“I could, easy enough,” exclaimed Rebecca, somewhat consoled by the
idea that her rhyming faculty could be of any use in such an emergency.
“Though I don't know but it would be kind of bold to do it. I'm all
puzzled about how people get to heaven after they're buried. I can't
understand it a bit; but if the poetry is on her, what if that should
go, too? And how could I write anything good enough to be read out loud
in heaven?”
“A little piece of paper couldn't get to heaven; it just couldn't,”
asserted Emma Jane decisively. “It would be all blown to pieces and
dried up. And nobody knows that the angels can read writing, anyway.”
“They must be as educated as we are, and more so, too,” agreed Rebecca.
“They must be more than just dead people, or else why should they have
wings? But I'll go off and write something while you finish the rope;
it's lucky you brought your crochet cotton and I my lead pencil.”
In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written on a
scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma Jane, she said,
preparing to read them aloud: “They're not good; I was afraid your
father'd come back before I finished, and the first verse sounds exactly
like the funeral hymns in the church book. I couldn't call her Sally
Winslow; it didn't seem nice when I didn't know her and she is dead, so
I thought if I said 'friend' it would show she had somebody to be sorry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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