“The Sculptor’s Funeral” relates the story of a sculptor’s return to his hometown—a town he fled as a young man to pursue his art—to be buried. Jetting through calm meadows blanketed by snow, the night train carrying Harvey Merrick’s body disrupts the “soft, smoke-coloured” stillness, arriving at the station in Sand City, Kansas. Only Harvey’s devoted apprentice, Henry Steavens, accompanies his body home from Boston. Steavens is surprised to see that a company of men from town, not Harvey’s friends or family, await the casket’s arrival. Unwilling to part with his master’s body, Steavens drives up to the Merrick family home in the hearse.
Before the pallbearers can even bring the coffin into the house, Harvey’s mother rushes outside in an exaggerated performance of her grief, “shrieking” about her son’s death. They bring Harvey’s casket into the parlor, decorated with overstuffed furniture and a collection of gaudy knick-knacks, none of which resemble Harvey (or his life’s work) at all. More embarrassed by his wife’s overemotional display, Mr. Merrick can’t bring himself to look in his child’s coffin until she violently totters from the room. Tenderly touching his dead son’s face, Martin Merrick laments to Jim Laird that Harvey was “always a good boy,” but nobody was capable of understanding him.
Jim Laird, resident drunk and cunning lawyer, shares with Steavens that Harvey’s mother made his childhood miserable. Confirming Mrs. Merrick’s propensity for abuse, the two men overhear her violently beating Roxy, the Merrick’s household servant, with exacting cruelty. Growing nauseous as he envisions the horrors his master’s childhood must have contained, Steavens wants to flee from the house with “what was left” of Harvey. Instead, he stares inquiringly at Jim’s features, with the keen attention that only an artist has.
The funeral progresses, and Jim asks Steavens if Harvey was always “an oyster,” because as a boy he was shy and reserved. Discussing Harvey’s general mistrust of others, his apprentice describes him as committed to his sculpting and to believing the best in others, even though he didn’t seem interested in entangling himself with them. More than anything else, to the two men who might have known him best, Harvey is an artist requiring a category all his own. Anything Harvey touched, “he revealed its holiest secret,” “liberat[ing]” the innate beauty of a piece of marble.
After the family goes to bed, Jim leaves the parlor, giving Steavens a chance to experience what the people from Sand City are like. The townspeople crowd into the parlor, chatting amongst themselves about local happenings. Instead of going around telling warmhearted stories about Harvey as a precocious little boy, each of the townspeople shares their version of why Harvey wasn’t such a “great man.” To them, Harvey was bad with money, overeducated, impractical, inattentive, and a rumored alcoholic. Steavens listens to these unkind anecdotes in disbelief, wondering how these people could possibly believe that about his highly regarded master.
In response to this flood of criticism about Harvey, Jim comes back into the parlor beginning his tirade against the townspeople. Jim recounts that at other funerals of Sand City locals, the townsfolk responded with similar scathing stories about the person who died. He and Harvey went to school in the East together—Jim came home to become the lawyer the town intended him to be while Harvey stayed in the East, becoming the artist he intended to be. Wanting Steavens to remember Harvey as truly he was, Jim speaks up against the townspeople’s harsh defamation. Under the weight of his wasted potential, Jim denounces Sand City as a town upon “which may God have mercy.” After this impassioned speech against the town, Jim shakes Steavens’s hand and they depart. Steavens attempts to reach out to Jim and reconnect after the funeral, but never hears anything back from him. Jim catches a cold and dies while helping one of the banker’s sons escape legal trouble after cutting government timber.
