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Faithful parishioner, dear friend, servant of Christ, farewell! Earth is better that thou hast lived. Heaven shall gain by thy presence!

Funeral sermon
by Reverend Barzillai Frost
Concord, 1856

On Sunday evenings, George Tarkington usually paid a visit to his brother Bob, who was confined to a nursing home in Norwood, way down Route 128. On this stormy Sunday, George insisted on going to see Bob just as usual, snow or no snow.

“Oh, George, I wish you wouldn’t,” said Hilary. “What if your old car breaks down? Why don’t you call Bob and tell him you’re not coming? He’ll understand.”

“Oh, I’ll be okay,” said George, pulling on his heavy parka. He patted the dog. “Goodbye, Pixie.” He embraced his wife. “Goodbye, Hil, honey.” Then he climbed into his car and took off into the blizzard.

Hilary watched him vanish in the snow. She could hear the bleat and rattle of his engine for a little while after she lost sight of the car altogether.

George never made it to Norwood. At midnight his wife made an anxious call to the nursing home, and learned that George had not been seen there. Frantic with concern, she telephoned Peter Terry at the police station. Pete had received no message on the teletype about a fatal accident on Route 128. “There’s a lot of abandoned cars out there,” he told Hilary. “It’s like the blizzard of ’78. Remember that? You wait. He’ll call you from somebody’s house where he’s taken shelter. You’ll see.”

But George did not call. All night long, Hilary kept starting up out of bed, thinking she had heard the phone, but she hadn’t. She didn’t find out what had happened until next morning.

“It was the end of my run,” said the snowplow driver, an employee of the Sudbury public works department, explaining the whole thing to Pete Terry. He was shouting into the phone, and Pete could picture him calling from some snowy telephone booth, his big yellow plow throbbing at the side of the road. “I was just cleaning up the last side street. You know, I left it till last because it didn’t go anywhere in particular. It was a dead end deep in the woods. And then I saw this buried car. I would have gone right on by, only I noticed it was sort of like shaking, as though the motor was on. Old cars, sometimes they shake when the engine’s running. So I pulled up and got out of the cab and wiped away the snow that was stuck to the car window in front, and there was this shape in there, leaning up against the window as though the guy was fast asleep. I yelled and knocked on the window, but he didn’t wake up.”

“Exhaust fumes,” said Pete Terry sadly. “Leaking up inside the car through all those holes in the floor. I told George that old car would be the death of him. I should have taken away his sticker so he couldn’t drive.” Pete closed his eyes in chagrin. “I blame myself.”

Now he was going to have to pass the bad news on to Mrs. Tarkington. Informing wives that they were widows was not Peter Terry’s idea of a good time. He wouldn’t call her, he would go right to the door. But first he would stop at the house of the Tarkingtons’ minister, Joseph Bold, and persuade him to come along.

Joe was dismayed at the news. He stood on his front porch, galvanized with shock. Then he pulled himself together and got into the chief’s car with Pete. Together they drove to the Tarkingtons’ house and knocked on the door.

When Hilary saw them standing solemnly on her doorstep, she cried, “Oh, no,” and burst into tears.