During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
note was from John Telfer.
"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
dead."
The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
that had slipped from him.
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