Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/66

56 There was the usual over-supply of churches, and the several garages made over from old blacksmith shops, with red pumps out in front bearing placards announcing in amateurish lettering the price of gasoline. A little out of the town, there was the railroad station called "the depot," built of wood, painted dirty gray, by which express-trains whizzed at a terrific speed with merely a shrill whistle in way of recognition. There was a river, too; so of course there were mills in Ridgefield.

This morning Reba hurried past the mills, across the river, along Main Street, by the last church on Main Street, by the last garage, by the granite post that marked the town-line at last, out into the open country. She had no plan, no destination in mind when she set out. She simply wanted to get away from familiar sights and sounds, from houses, from eyes. She was surprised to discover she had walked so far when she saw in the distance before her the granite posts of the cemetery gate. The cemetery was at least two miles from the town-hall. Not until she saw the posts did it occur to Reba to enter the quiet white city of the dead, where no one stared and no one criticized.

It was here that Reba's grandfather lay buried. Often on Memorial Days she had visited his lot. It had never meant anything more to her than the place where she would lie herself sometime. No one had ever talked to her a great deal about her Grandfather Jerome. The members of the household in which she had grown up were chary of paying tributes of praise to anybody—dead or alive. The monument, which Reba's grandfather himself had erected before