The Sculptor's Funeral by Willa Cather

First published: 1905

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Locale: Sand City, a small Kansas town

Principal Characters:

• Harvey Merrick, a sculptor
• Jim Laird, a local lawyer
• Philip Phelps, a local banker
• Henry Steavens, one of the sculptor's pupils
• Annie Merrick, the sculptor's mother

The Story

Harvey Merrick, a distinguished sculptor, has died of tuberculosis at the age of forty. As the story opens, a group of townsfolk waits for the arrival of the night train that is bringing Merrick's body back from the East for burial in the small Kansas town where he grew up. The conversation among those waiting reveals the small-mindedness of their assessment of Merrick. When the train pulls in, Jim Laird, a local lawyer, drunk as usual but seemingly the only person who has a real purpose in being at the station, leads the group of waiting men to the express car. There they find Henry Steavens, a young apprentice of Merrick, who has traveled from the East with the coffin. Steavens, who worshiped his master, is stunned by the apparent lack of any connection or similarity between Merrick and the men who have come to collect the body. He watches them gaze with curiosity but without comprehension at the palm that lies across the coffin lid, a symbol of Merrick's distinction as an artist.

When the coffin reaches Merrick's home, his mother rushes out into the yard, screaming for her dead son. Steavens tries to see some evidence of kinship between her and his idol, but he is appalled by her look of violence and fierce passion, as well as by the power she wields over everyone around her. Steavens is equally appalled by the cheap vulgarity of taste that is everywhere apparent in the decor of the house and can scarcely believe that Merrick could ever have had any connection with this place. Despite her show of pious grief and decorous behavior, Mrs. Merrick stages a horrifying tantrum when her servant makes a small mistake, and it is evident that only this same servant, along with Mrs. Merrick's weak, worn-out husband, actually feels any sorrow for the dead man. Steavens's distress at the abysmal family situation finds an echo in the expression he sees on the dead sculptor's face, which looks "as though he were still guarding something precious and holy, which might even yet be wrested from him."

Steavens begins for the first time to see the full significance of Merrick's achievement. The sculptor's accomplishments now take on a near-miraculous aspect, especially when seen against the background of his dreadful family and the physically difficult and culturally impoverished life of this small frontier town. Steavens also begins to understand the connection between the tragedy of Merrick's personal life (that is, the sculptor's deep introversion and reluctance to be involved in personal relationships), and his past life as a boy in Sand City.

Steavens joins the group of watchers in the dining room, who are as dreadful a collection of small-town types as can ever have been gathered together into one room. Everything they say reveals their pettiness and sordid materialism. The banker Phelps, representative of the mean-spirited callousness of all the watchers, discusses usury law with another banker. To these men, Merrick was a failure, and they dismiss him contemptuously for his lack of material success, his straining of the family resources for the purpose of financing his education, his inability to deal with the practical aspects of farm life, and his effeminacy.

Just as Steavens is wondering how much more he can take, Jim Laird bursts into the room. Despite the fact that he is a drunkard, Laird is a strong and intelligent man, as well as a shrewd lawyer, and Steavens has already recognized the fact that he is the only person in Sand City who has any understanding or appreciation for Harvey Merrick. Laird launches into a bitter tirade against those assembled in the dining room and everything for which they stand. In this climactic moment of the story, Laird reveals his own stature as a human being as well as the vision of greatness that he and Merrick shared as young men. Merrick was able to achieve his vision, it is implied, only because he never returned to Sand City. Laird, on the other hand, who did return, found that the town did not want great men but only "successful rascals," which is what he became. Laird confesses that he had felt shamed at times by Merrick's success, but at other times proud that Merrick, at least, had escaped. The next day, Laird is too drunk to attend the funeral, and, in a final moment of irony, Willa Cather relates that he died the following year of a cold he caught in the Colorado mountains. One of Phelps's sons had been involved in criminal activity, and Laird had gone out to defend him, thereby upholding to the end his image of himself as a successful rascal. In what has clearly been his finest hour, Laird defends his old friend Harvey Merrick from the vicious attacks of Phelps and the others, but it is too late for him to salvage any kind of meaningful life for himself. Merrick's death, on the other hand, although it has tragically cut short a life of great achievement and promise, affirms the values for which that life stood, despite the failure of the people of Sand City to understand or cherish those values.

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