THE WRONG FUNERAL

A Tale of Sogmarsh — being how a whole parish came to bury a man it could not stand, by mistake, and could not for the life of it leave.

The notice had gone to pulp in the wet, as notices do, and only the name was left. The parish read into it the Sneap it loved. It was the other one.

You must understand two customs of the parish before this will make any sense, and both of them are entirely mad, and both of them are the whole of the story.

The first is that in this parish nobody is buried alone. Not the beloved and not the beast; not the one who paid his way and not the one who never did. When the bell goes, you go. It is not about the dead — the dead, as a rule, are past minding — it is about the parish being the sort of place where a person is seen out, whoever they were, because a village that will let one soul go into the ground unattended will, in the end, let anybody.

The second is stranger, and it is this: the words over a grave are spoken not by a friend of the dead but by the last person the dead wronged. The reasoning, if you can call it that, is impeccable in the local manner — the last word on a man should come from someone with no earthly reason to flatter him — and it means that a Sogmarsh eulogy is the only one in the world you can absolutely trust, because it is given through gritted teeth.

Now. There died, one wet week, old Bartholomew Sneap, and I will not pretend to you that he was mourned. Sneap was sharp where a man could be blunt, and tight where he could have been open, and he had a tongue on him that could take the shine off a wedding at forty paces, and had. When word went round that Sneap was gone, the general feeling in the parish, honestly reported, was a kind of guilty lightening, as of a cart taken off a soft road.

But the funeral notice on the chapel door had done what every notice in this realm does, which is turn to grey pulp in the wet, so that by the morning of the service the only thing you could read on it was the one word SNEAP — and the parish, which also contained a beloved Sneap, kind old Gammer Sneap of the green who had been poorly all winter, read the pulp the way you read anything you cannot quite see, which is to say they read what they hoped, and their hearts went out, and they came. All of them. In their good black. In force.

They were most of the way through the door and into the warm before the coffin was near enough to see whose it was, and by then it was, of course, far too late — because there is precisely one thing you cannot do in this parish, one act beyond all forgiveness, and it is to be seen getting up and walking out of a funeral. So they sat. A chapel packed to the rafters with people who had come to bury the wrong Sneap, trapped shoulder to shoulder by their own good manners, burying the right one.

And then, by the custom, the eulogy fell to be given by the last man Sneap had wronged — which was young Nab Cutler, the fiddler, whom Sneap, the week before he died, had informed in front of the entire taproom that his playing was "a noise fit to curdle milk," and sat down to general laughter.

Nab Cutler stood up with every right in the world to bury Sneap a second time, in words, and the parish, if it is honest, rather leaned forward.

And he could not do it.

He stood over the box, and he found — as men do, over a box — that you cannot land a blow on a thing that cannot flinch. So instead, because he had to say something and could not think of anything cutting that did not curdle in his own mouth, he said the one true kind thing he knew, which was that mean old Sneap, the very morning after the taproom, had left a set of new fiddle-strings on his sill, with no note, because a man who would shame you in public and mend your instrument in private is a more complicated article than the parish had troubled to work out.

And that opened it.

Because once one true kind thing is said over a man, the others come, the way water finds a crack. Someone said, low, that it was Sneap who had quietly paid the doctor for the Hoby child, years back, and let the family think it was the parish. Someone else said that the half-blind stray that everyone assumed was nobody's had been fed on Sneap's own step, every night, for eleven — for a great many years, and there it was now, that very dog, sat in the chapel doorway in the rain, waiting, which no one could afterward explain and no one tried. And old Prewitt said, not looking up, that when her man was dying and the whole parish found reasons to be elsewhere, it was Sneap — Sneap, whom her man had feuded with for thirty years — who had sat up the three last nights, so that his enemy would not go into the dark alone.

And the parish sat in its good black, having come to see the back of a man, and understood, all at once and far too late, that it had never once looked at him — that it had decided about Bartholomew Sneap the way you decide about a locked door, from the outside, and had been wrong about the room.

They buried him beautifully. They could not help it; they had the numbers, and the grief was real by the end, though it was a peculiar grief — not for the man exactly, whom most of them still could not have said they liked, but for the man they might have known, and now never would, because he had had to die before anybody thought to ask.

The dog followed the coffin to the hole and would not be led away, and somebody took it home, and it is fat now, and sour-tempered, and universally beloved, which is the joke Sneap would have appreciated most, and the one he is not here for.

Moral: You will decide about people the way you read a notice in the rain — from the little that shows, and mostly from what you already expected — and you will be wrong more often than the weather. Go to the funeral. Say the one kind true thing. And if you must wait for a man to die before you trouble to look at him, at least have the decency to be ashamed of it, standing there in your good black, holding the words you should have said while he could still have heard them.