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Miss Emily’s father died, leaving her a “pauper.” Miss Emily denied that he was dead, however, and would have kept his corpse had town authorities not intervened. The narrative takes a final step back in time, to two years before the bad smell was detected. Instead, four men were dispatched to investigate the smell in secret and to spread an odor-neutralizing agent, lime, on Miss Emily's property. Neighbors complained to the then-mayor of Jefferson, Judge Stevens, that a bad smell was issuing from Miss Emily's place, but Stevens refused to inform Miss Emily of this for fear of humiliating her. The narrator then likens this small victory of Miss Emily's (her continuing avoidance of taxes) to one she secured thirty years earlier, when she was in her thirties. This generation found the arrangement Sartoris had made with Miss Emily dissatisfying but, despite their persistence, they failed in their several attempts to exact taxes from the increasingly reclusive woman. Almost twenty years after Sartoris granted this amnesty to Miss Emily, however, a newer generation of men had assumed power in Jefferson, with “modern ideas” and a more pragmatic approach to governance. However, the narrative quickly shifts back in time, and describes an episode in which Colonel Sartoris, the then-mayor of Jefferson, Mississippi, excused Miss Emily from having to pay taxes in 1894 (he did so because she was both impoverished and unmarried despite being in her forties). Many townspeople were in attendance, not only to pay their respects but also out of curiosity, for no one had seen the interior of the Grierson house in ten years. “A Rose for Emily” opens in the twentieth century on the day Miss Emily Grierson’s funeral, held in the once grand, now decaying Grierson family house.