Issue No. 1: Matter, Pater Won’t Be Down for Tea
Finchley & Sons, Undertakers & Monumental Masons
Second-floor flat above the viewing parlors. Ochre Flats, Nebraska (Late of Dorking, Surrey).
Dispatched by Miss Hephzibah Finchley, Apprentice.
The yellow pine stairs tacked to the exterior of the diocesan property were an architectural grievance.
The building itself was a massive, weathered saltbox owned entirely by the Archdiocese of Omaha, who had financed Father’s fresh start after the catastrophic box-swapping scandal (things had been done. accusations flew) in Surrey had stripped our pockets to the lining. The bishop owned the basement embalming drains, the mahogany chairs in the first-floor viewing chapel, the showroom caskets, and the roof over our heads. In exchange, Father worked off the debt one burial at a time, while Arthur slept in the rafters alongside three gross of folding funeral chairs.
The only way to convey a customer from the dray wagon to the basement without tracking prairie alkali through the chapel was the exterior stair: eighteen precarious steps from the alley, directly across our dining-room linoleum between the sideboard and the breadbox, and down the back flight.
It was twelve minutes past noon on a Thursday, the Nebraska wind was blowing grit against the glass, and the breadbox was under siege.
“Mind the molding, boys,” Father said around the stem of his briar pipe. He did not look up from the diocesan ledger.
The two draymen grunted in unison as four feet of woven wicker scraped past the sugar bowl. Mother gave a small, musical gasp—the precise gasp she had issued on Tuesday—and smoothly elevated the silver teapot four inches to grant the handles clearance.
“That is the third time this week, Reginald,” Mother murmured, her hand trembling just enough to rattle the saucer. “And the tea is stewing.”
“Old Man Lindqvist never was one for taking the long way around, my dear,” Father replied without blinking. “Have a biscuit.”
“SCONE”…
“Dearest”…
“He might at least have had the breeding to expire after luncheon,” Mother continued, waving aside an imaginary something that blocked her thoughts, and dropped her voice to a scandalized whisper. “And with Hephzibah sitting right there! A girl of seventeen, Reginald! Looking upon unclothed Lutherans!”
Father and I exchanged sidelong glances…
Father paused, his knife hovering over the salt pork. Slowly, with the deliberate gravity of an ox surveying a tollgate, his eyes cut over the rims of his spectacles. He gave a teeny shake of his head in my general direction.
“Mildred, dear,” he said. “he is dead., after all”
At the corner of the table, I dipped my pen into the inkwell with a sharp clack.
“If Mr. Lindqvist were looking back, Mother, we’d have to charge his sons an extra dollar for the restorative wax,” I remarked, not lifting my eyes from Clarke’s Modern Embalmer. “His circulation ceased near the creek at dawn, and his jaw has set crooked. Arthur, pass the lard. We’ll need to steam the neck before Father Bob comes up for the parish counts.”
Near the coal stove, Arthur Vyse-Peverill—my late sister Fannie’s husband, lingering in the family like an unpaid bill in an ink-stained velvet jacket—winced as though struck by a wet towel.
“Must we drag the sacred vessel through the grease-pot, Hephzibah?” Arthur murmured, pressing two fingers to his temple. “If poor dear Fannie were here, she would weep. The Vyse-Peverills have always been patrons of the arts, not purveyors of hog fat. The classical spirit demands a gentleman’s restraint in this dreadful, rectangular territory.”
“The classical spirit didn’t settle with the Surrey magistrates after you buried the Archdeacon of Dorking in Mrs. Throckmorton’s brass-handled walnut box, Arthur,” I said.
Mother went white as the lard. “Hephzibah! The parsonage window is open! Father Bob is in the cabbage patch!”
AND: that oversight must remain in the past!
“Father Bob is from County Cork, Mildred,” Father noted placidly. “He’s heard worse in the confessional, and he doesn’t care about the Surrey incident.”
“That is precisely the trouble!” Mother hissed, clutching her handkerchief. “No dignity. No British reserve. He laughs with the blacksmith, he drinks tea from a tin mug, and he allows Sister John of the Cross to march through our kitchen like Queen Victoria, herself!”
Right on cue, the kitchen door swung wide. Sister John of the Cross swept in, black habit billowing a cloud of prairie dust, her inventory ledger clutched like an executioner’s axe.
“Mr. Finchley! The Lindqvist boy says the wicker basket is dripping on the bottom stair! And why is the front parlor smelling of carbolic before the Angelus?”
Behind her in the entryway stood Father Bob, his cassock dusty at the hem, a twinkle dancing behind his gray Irish eyes as he caught Father’s eye over the nun’s starched wimple.
He leaned slightly toward Father, lowered his voice to a soft, rich brogue, and gave an imperceptible wink: “Ah, we just let the old darlin’ dream, Mr. Finchley. We just let the darlin’ dream.”
Sister John seemed to be forming one of a her verbal combustions, caught it just in time and only said “Father Morrison’! through gritted teeth.
I stood up, shaking out my skirts, and reached for the wooden monstrosity leaning against the wall.
On the rear board, Arthur had lettered in timid, crooked gold leaf:
A. Vyce-Peverill, Monumental Masn. Slabs & Cherubm. Enquire Within.
On the front board, I had laid down my own law in three-inch lampblack:
DIG UP SOME HISTORY.
READ THE MARKER.
“You cannot go out by the lychgate wearing furniture, Hephzibah!” Mother gasped.
“Sister John understands overhead, Mother,” I said, sliding the harness straps over my shoulders. The boards slammed against my hips with a solid, wooden thud. “And the Bishop wants his interest paid on the first.”
Ten minutes later, I was leaning against the iron gate of St. Jude’s churchyard, watching the tall grass ripple under a borderless Nebraska sky.
People think a graveyard is about endings. That is because people are sentimental, lazy, and spend entirely too much time swooning into black handkerchiefs.
To stand at the lychgate is to realize that a cemetery is not an ending at all—it is merely the most expensive piece of vanity the living will ever purchase.
Take the towering marble obelisk sitting three rows in, erected for Alderman Higgins. The gossips swear the four draped urns at the base represent his weeping piety. Arthur would tell you the same thing, because Arthur is a soft-headed romantic who cannot spell Resurrection without leaving out the middle letters.
The truth is on the invoice. Higgins bought draped urns because the Vermont quarry offered a twenty-percent discount on pre-carved drapery shipped by the railcar. The drapery wasn’t a tear-stained shroud for the alderman’s soul; it was quarry surplus.
The marker isn’t there to whisper polite fairy tales about the people underneath the sod. It is there to record the ambitions, the cheapness, the rivalries, and the sheer stubborn pride of the living relatives who paid the freight.
Matter, Pater won’t be down for tea. had to bury him… dead, you know.
Which means there’s still plenty of living left to do in a graveyard. Arthur has the chisels, Father has the ledger, and I have the front gate.
Dig up the history. Read the marker.
🪦 From the Apprentice’s Pocketbook: The Broken Column
A practical guide for the curious.
If you walk through an 1890s churchyard, you will inevitably spot a grand marble pillar severed jaggedly across the top, looking as if the quarrymen simply ran out of stone or suffered a collapse of ambition.
Arthur will tell you it represents the romantic melancholy of the Parthenon in decay. Do not listen to him; Arthur has never carried a plumb line in his life.
In the trade, a Broken Column was the universal Victorian code for a life cut short in its prime—traditionally the head of a family, a young heir, or a breadwinner struck down before his ledger was balanced.
Want to dig further? Look closely at the base of the next broken column you find in an old yard:
Does an open Bible or an anchor sit at the foot?
Is there a climbing rose carved into the fracture?
Drop a comment below with the oddest carving you’ve spotted in your local cemetery, and I’ll tell you what the family was actually paying for.
PRAIRIE NOTICE & CLASSIFIED
Inserted by Order of the Management. Two Free Insertions with Every Paid Annual Subscription to THE MARKER.
PRACTICAL DRAINAGE & PRIVY EXCAVATION:
Hole dug. Box dropped. Dirt returned. What happens between the drop and the return is your business and the Almighty’s, but the pipe won’t back up while I’m above ground. Three dollars within four miles of the water tower; extra twenty cents per rod if your soil is mostly flint and stubbornness. No Sunday calls unless the tank is already floating.
— Orville “Red” Sumpter, Behind the Grain Elevator.
Enjoyed today’s dispatch from above the parlor? Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to keep Arthur supplied with soft limestone and Mildred in smelling salts—or explore the author’s upcoming bookshelf for historical fiction releases.
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