from "The Quick and the Dead" | 1931

film still of Little Family in Boston | c1926

My boys, after Christmas, had driven back East in an old Chev that they had rebuilt. This is in a barn in the neighborhood, and, though it is midwinter by the calendar, the weather is springlike, and we bring out the car and start sixty miles to the north to make a call. Twenty-five years ago in a northern mission field, I married a doctor and a school teacher. Boston people, they stayed at the mission after we left, but lately came home. Their boys and ours were born there. He died five years ago [Spring 1926]. Two years later the youngest died and I went East to bury him. So, my boy and I drive up to the border of New Hampshire to have supper with the oldest boy of the doctor's household and his mother. (Only a week later this same fine lad of twenty is hit by an automobile and I come again from the West to bury him. There is a text that brings me help at times like that. It is a question asked upon the cross by our Lord, but never answered, "My god, why?").
 --Rev. Jesse Halsey