A Rose for Emily

14 Pages 3428 Words

tice. February came, and there was no reply. They
wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience.
A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her,
and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing
calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax
notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the board of aldermen. A deputation waited upon
her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased
giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the
old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It
smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the
parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro
opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and
when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with
slow motes in the single sunray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood
a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain
descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with
a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why
what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked
bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her
eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal
pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the
visitors stated their errand.

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the
spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could ...