A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily Summary | Detailed Summary

The whole town went to the funeral of Emily Grierson. It was held in a large house, decorated in a garish, baroque style, in what once was the best of neighborhoods, an area now invaded by cotton gins and garages. She would be buried in the cemetery, beside the remains of distinguished neighbors, whose houses had long surrendered to the perverse progress of the new, commercial neighborhood, along with, of course, some soldiers of the Civil War, from both sides, buried anonymously, but with honor.

Emily was respected by the men of the town. They had gone to her funeral to pay their respects. However, the women had a different perspective. They had been driven by curiosity. After all, no one, except one solitary servant, had been inside her house in ten years.

Emily had the curious distinction of having her taxes paid by the town since 1894, a tradition that was developed through a fiction created by the then mayor, Colonel Sartoris, who claimed this honorarium was in repayment for a loan given to the town by her father. It was a fiction she believed in, for she wouldn't have accepted charity.

However, in a future generation, Colonel Sartoris' invention was disregarded and Miss Emily was billed for her taxes. However, the tax notice received no reply. Later, the aldermen wrote her a letter, charging her to visit the sheriff's office. With still no reply, the Mayor wrote, saying he would drop by or have a car sent for her. She wrote back, stylishly, that she did not go out anymore. In the note, she enclosed the tax notice.

As this was an unusual affront to he heads of the city, the aldermen called a meeting. The decided to visit her en masse in her home. They smelled the dusty signs of neglect and were led to the parlor where they sat on cracked, leather furniture as sunbeams shot through a solitary window, dust particles spinning silently in the heavy air.

Miss Emily was not a pretty sight anymore. Her petite frame was offset by an unnatural obesity. She wore a gold chain around her waist and walked with difficulty on an ebony cane with a golden head. A watch danged down from the gold chain and, in the silence of her entrance, its ticking pervaded the dusty room. The fatness pervaded her countenance. Her eyes are sunk in it. Still, they moved actively from one alderman to the next. They all had risen in unison to salute her as she entered the room, standing besides the door without asking them to sit. .

When they brought the tax notice to her attention, she told them that she did not pay any taxes to Jefferson. Did she see the Sheriff's note? She reminded them of the arrangement with Mayor Sartoris, a gentleman who had been deceased for a decade. She asked them to look at the records and to check with him. However, before they can remind her that the good Colonel is dead, she asked her servant to let them out.

Thirty years ago she had done the same with their fathers after the complaint about the smell. She had dismissed them without consequence and now she dismissed their sons. After her father died and her fiancé had deserted her, she kept to herself. She did not go out and the only trace of life in the old house was a young black man who went back and forth from the market.

Yes, at that time, years ago, a smell developed around her property. The women on the block were not surprised because her only attendant was a man- and how could he be expected to keep the house in order? A complaint to Judge Stevens, the mayor of the time, was followed by another and yet another. Yet, how could they bring such a complaint to the distinguished matron of that fine house? Their solution was unique. The Aldermen came in the dark of night, even breaking a basement window. They sowed lime dust over the property. Within a few weeks the smell disappeared.

Emily's plight now caught the attention of the town. Was she going to share the fate of her great Aunt Wyatt who lost her sanity at the end of her life? Here she was, the sole scion of a distinguished family- living alone, without lover, friend or family.

They remembered when her father had died, how she had denied his death until the final moment before the law was about to intrude. She finally let him be buried. Wasn't her insistence on his still living a sure sign of mental decrepitude? However, the townspeople, at this point, forgave her for that incident. They did not question her sanity.

After that, she was sick for a while, reappearing with severely short hair like a tragic angel in stained glass. The summer following her father's death, she began to see Homer Barron, the foreman of a construction company. Barron was a Yankee and a newcomer and was leading the efforts to pave the sidewalks in Jefferson.

To the townspeople, consorting seriously with a man who worked in construction, a common day laborer, foreman or not, was a serious fall from grace. They hoped her family would help her, but her father, prior to his death, had squabbled with them over her great aunt's estate. Miss Emily was abandoned. The litany of pity now increased.

Then came the time she went to the druggist, demanding arsenic. He obeyed the law. He asked, what was she to use it for? She remained firm in her silence. He relented to her unyielding stare, giving her the poison. When it was delivered to her, the box said, "For rats." Of course, many in the town heard the story. They assumed it was for suicide, and perhaps that would be for the best, many thought.

However, still, her relationship with Barron continued. He seemed to be a man's man, hanging out with his men, drinking. Not the marrying type, it was said. Of course, they hated her for the high style in which she held herself as they rode together in the buggy with yellow wheels and the princely stallions that drew them on their appointed Sunday ride.

The Baptist minister was compelled by his flock to go talk to her, even though she was Episcopalian. He kept the results of the interview to himself. Later the minister's wife wrote to her relatives in Alabama and two of her cousins made the journey.

While the cousins were there, Miss Emily made a few dramatic purchases- a toilet set, for a man, made in silver with Homer Barron's initials engraved on it; then a complete set of man's clothing, including, of all things, a nightshirt! Was the marriage a fait accompli?

However, after the pavements were finished, Barron vanished. The cousins left. Three days later, a neighbor gossiped that Barron was let in by the back door. However,, after that, though, Barron was gone permanently. Miss Emily disappeared from the streets. When she was seen again, she was fat, her hair turning, over the years, to a vigorous iron-gray. She led a quiet, isolated life until she was forty, when she conducted china-painting classes for several years. When that period ended, she resumed her isolation.

She refused to put numbers on her house when free postal service arrived. She never claimed her yearly tax notice. One could sometimes see her at an upper window but could not discern whether she looked out upon the streets or kept her mind and her eyes inside. Eventually she died in her bed on a moldy pillow.

The two cousins came to her funeral. Emily lay beneath a crayon portrait of her father as the old men of Jefferson, some in their ancient Confederate uniforms, talked about her, as if she had been their dancing partner, their friend.

Then, it came the time for opening a room which had been closed for forty years. It took an effort, but they finally managed to break in. A man, much decomposed, lay in the bed. There were the silver toilet articles with the engraved letters, "H. B." upon them. Upon his desecrated and desiccated body lay the nightshirt. And, he himself- it was as though, at one time, he had been locked in an embrace. Beside him on the indented pillow was a strand of iron-gray hair. The dead man had not died without attention or alone.