Blue Ridge Country. Jean Pichon Thomas
it fell to my lot to attend his funeral. And what a worthy eulogy the Reverend John McNeely, whom Uncle Dyke always referred to as “my son in the Gospel,” preached, taking for his text “My servant, Moses, is dead,” a text that the two had agreed upon long before the Good Shepherd of the Hills passed away.
That day when the sermon was ended the great throng that filled the valley and the hillsides, gathering about the baptismal pool he himself had fashioned, sang Uncle Dyke’s favorite hymn. Their voices blending like the notes of a giant organ swelled and filled the deep valley:
| Like a star in the morning in its beauty, Like the sun is the Bible to my soul, Shining clear on the way of life and beauty, As I hasten on my journey to the goal. ’Tis a lamp in the wilderness of sorrow, ’Tis a light on the weary pilgrim’s way, It will guide to the bright eternal morrow, Shining more and more unto the Perfect Day. ’Tis the voice of a friend forever near me, In the toil and the battle here below, In the gloom of the valley, it shall cheer me, Till the glory of the kingdom I shall know. I shall stand in its glory and its beauty, Till the earth and the heavens pass away, Ever telling the wondrous, blessed story Of the loving Lamb, the only living way. |
Uncle Dyke chose also his own grave site in the family burying ground overlooking the house where he’d lived seventy-one years. Often he had visited the spot and picked out the place beside him where Miss Sallie should be laid to rest. His life had ended almost where it began. The house in which he was born stands only a few miles from that in which he died.
“He built this house his own self,” Aunt Sallie quietly reiterated that evening as some of us lingered to comfort her. “We came here to Big Creek soon as we married. We’ve lived here seventy-one year.” Through brimming eyes she gazed toward the new-made grave. “We traveled a long way together, me and Dyke—” a sob shook the frail little body—“and now, I’m goin’ to be mighty lonesome.”
Big Meeting is still carried on just as Uncle Dyke wished it.
In September, 1940, I went again to mingle with the hundreds who show their reverence for the Good Shepherd of the Hills by keeping fresh in memory his teaching through their prayers and hymns at the Big Meeting each autumn. And here again a worthy follower of Uncle Dyke Garrett eulogized his deeds and mourned his loss. And close by, for all her ninety-two years, his beloved Miss Sallie, with a trembling hand on the arm of a kinsman, listened intently while those who knew and loved him extolled her lost mate.
And now Miss Sallie is gone too. She died on July 28, 1941, at the age of ninety-three and loving hands place mountain flowers on her grave and that of Levicy Hatfield far across the mountain.
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