WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the
men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the
women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no
one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen
in at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated
with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome
style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street.
But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the
august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and
the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had
gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in
the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves
of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.