W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

In his later accounts of this funeral, which shifted from year to year, Fields supplied a wealth of detail. There are, however, grounds for the belief that his final version was a composite, for which he had drawn on all the funerals he had seen. When the procession entered a small, populated section (he said) Snavely snapped his fingers several times to summon the howlers. He briefed them quickly, with that easy, prostrated finesse for which he was noted in the area, and they returned to their stations. Then, as the carriages, the hayrick, and the buckboard loaded with limestone blocks wheeled solemnly toward the rows of gratified onlookers, the friends and relatives, vigorously exhorted by the howlers, got their teeth into the occasion and raised some lamentations that hadn't been matched in those parts for years. Even Snavely himself, afterward, said he couldn't recall a more heart-warming exhibition of spot woe in his entire career as a mortician. It was one of those moments of response, a pure distillate of excitement, that knits up the raveled sleeve of the true artist. So all-around satisfactory was the racket that, according to Fields, Snavely circled the block and had another whack at it, and he wasn't disappointed, either — they buckled down just as hard the second time. In a way, the cemetery was an anticlimax. At the start there was a delay while Snavely and two of his helpers put the pit down another foot, since the gravediggers had apparently thrown up the job in the middle, for some reason. In this interim the Wiggins family, having made themselves known to the farmer (who by now was deep in the spirit of the affair and was referring to the corpse as "Ernie" and "Good old Potts"), unloaded their bottle and passed it around surreptitiously. By the time the Reverend Sumpter was ready to begin, the farmer had worked himself up to the point where he was taking on worse than anybody, and several members of the family complained to Snavely that he J37