New Chronicles of Rebecca | Page 7

me shiver, but, of course, we
COULD do it if we were the only friends she had. Let's look into the
cabin first and be perfectly sure that there aren't any. Are you afraid?"
"N-no; I guess not. I looked at Gran'pa Perkins, and he was just the
same as ever."
At the door of the hut Emma Jane's courage suddenly departed. She
held back shuddering and refused either to enter or look in. Rebecca
shuddered too, but kept on, drawn by an insatiable curiosity about life
and death, an overmastering desire to know and feel and understand the
mysteries of existence, a hunger for knowledge and experience at all
hazards and at any cost.
Emma Jane hurried softly away from the felt terrors of the cabin, and
after two or three minutes of utter silence Rebecca issued from the open
door, her sensitive face pale and woe-begone, the ever-ready tears
raining down her cheeks. She ran toward the edge of the wood, sinking
down by Emma Jane's side, and covering her eyes, sobbed with
excitement:
"Oh, Emma Jane, she hasn't got a flower, and she's so tired and
sad-looking, as if she'd been hurt and hurt and never had any good
times, and there's a weeny, weeny baby side of her. Oh, I wish I hadn't
gone in!"
Emma Jane blenched for an instant. "Mrs. Dennett never said THERE
WAS TWO DEAD ONES! ISN'T THAT DREADFUL? But," she
continued, her practical common sense coming to the rescue, "you've

been in once and it's all over; it won't be so bad when you take in the
flowers because you'll be used to it. The goldenrod hasn't begun to bud,
so there's nothing to pick but daisies. Shall I make a long rope of them,
as I did for the schoolroom?"
"Yes," said Rebecca, wiping her eyes and still sobbing. "Yes, that's the
prettiest, and if we put it all round her like a frame, the undertaker
couldn't be so cruel as to throw it away, even if she is a pauper, because
it will look so beautiful. From what the Sunday school lessons say,
she's only asleep now, and when she wakes up she'll be in heaven."
"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;