A Rose for Emily

Four men cross a lawn at midnight with a bag of lime, sprinkling it along the foundations and into the cellar of the old Grierson house on what had once been the most select street in Jefferson, because not one of them can bring himself to tell a lady to her face that her property smells of something dead. Faulkner gives the whole story to the town, a 'we' that pities her and watches through the shutters for decades, and hands the events over out of order, so that a purchase of arsenic sits next to a funeral, and a wedding that never happened.