Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  When the bread and meat were eaten, and the fires were built up, and the night had settled closer about the fluttering clusters of bright flames here and there under the trees, then Jake had but to listen, lying on his back with his fingers joined under his head, and there were greater tales than ever he had heard. The smoke from the fires went up into the live-oaks hanging with moss, and sleepy birds stirred high in the branches, disturbed by the noise. As the fires died, the men’s faces were hardly discernible. Jake thought that their stories were better when he could not see their faces. Their strange talk stirred his stomach like that far stretch of sudsy river out past the bluff. There was talk of drought up toward Carolina; that was the place Ma was always hankerin’ after. And the Alatamaha had burst out all her banks and flooded all her swamps in the spring.

  There was talk of crops and new ways of doing, of people ‘way up North that were talking war. The heavy, sunburnt faces of the men were all strangely alike with their growths of beard and their deep-set, somber eyes; their words were slow and stealthy like their mouths hidden in their beards. The old men prophesied bloody war, but the younger men laughed. Not ‘way down hyere. Why, it was as far up North as it was Crost the Water! The words surged in Jake’s brain; he stretched his mind to its little limit trying to imagine up North and Crost the Water, and War. The men spoke of Africky, where folks was black like razor-back hogs; they brought them in ships and sold them. But Jake would not buy one when he was a man, not if he had a pocketful of gold pieces. One man said a shipload of them stunk like carr’n, and the stink would come down the wind on still days like a herd of cattle butchered and left to rot. What made ‘em black? What made ‘em stink? The talk rose and fell in the night, reaching tenuous threads of thought past the bounds of experience. Jake slept under the voices that flowed over his slumber as shallow brown branch-water flows over hard ruffles of sandy bottom, disturbing hardly a loose grain of sand.

  Lias strolled away from under the trees soon after they had all helped themselves to meat and bread from the spiders over the coals. All this talk was old talk, and half of the men were more than a little drunk. And besides, it was old men’s talk; the young fellers had to hold their tongues. Ma said he was gittin’ too big fer his britches. Maybe he was. There wasn’t no such thing as bein’ yore own man, and speakin’ yore own mind. Lonzo was his own man. Lias would marry, that’s what he’d do. But the silly gals he knew – who’d have one of ‘em? They simpered at you; they were tongue-tied when you spoke to ‘em, like so many heifers starin’ from a cow-lot. Heifers, that’s what they was.…No more gumption than a heifer.

  He kicked the loose dirt of the street as he lounged along in the thin dark. There were fires in the fireplaces of the houses, flooding their light through doors and shutters set ajar to the early night. In a house on the left there were voices and laughter. That would be Kimbrough’s. There was whisky there for the askin’, for those who had stuff to trade. Lias had never tasted whisky. Pa had it in a jug slung high to a rafter, but it was for rattlesnake bite and fever.

  Lias stood a moment in the dark outside the door, studying the few figures in the long bare room. Several men were sitting on a bench along the wall; others were slouched in chairs, their backs to the heat and glare of the fire. There was the smell of tobacco spittle and whisky in the air of the room—Lias stood undecided near the threshold. Pa never came here; Pa would be mad as thunder.…Lias stepped into the room.

  The men paid him little attention, looking away from their talk for only a moment to size him up. But a girl sitting on a stool in a corner behind a counter spoke gayly to him:

  “Howdy!”

  She smiled, and there was welcome and appraisal in her eyes. She was full-breasted and strong-shouldered; she was almost as tall as Lias when she stood. Lias looked hard into her eyes under their straight, heavy brows. She had gray-blue eyes like a kitten’s and her skin was white, white, white.

  He hardly knew how to ask for a drink. His hands were trembling a little, so he joined them behind him.

  “Got some whisky?”

  She laughed a little, holding to his eyes with hers, taunting him; she knew he was a greenhorn. Lias’s face burned, but he would not let his eyes fall from hers. She asked: “Straight?”

  He nodded, red-faced, not sure of the meaning of her words.

  She set the drink in a mug on the counter before him, and he picked up the drink and threw it down his throat. He coughed violently; his breath exploded in his throat in panic at the hard, hot taste of the liquor. She pushed water toward him with laughter in her eyes. After a minute his breath came easily again and he cleared his throat, but the laughter was still in her eyes. He felt hidden laughter there in her white throat, down her pink, satiny gullet, mocking him; there came upon him a hard desire to slap her mouth, to choke her throat, to squeeze her pink gullet closed. She had no business to laugh at him just because he was a greenhorn; he’d kill a body for laughing at him. He laid his hands flat on the counter and glared at her. Her eyes and mouth sobered. She glanced at the men engrossed in their talk, and looked back to Lias. Then she reached her hand across the counter and laid it, light and cool, over his fingers. But it burned him like a touch of fire, and the burn ran through his blood, to his head, to his feet, searing his senses. He knew a queer sensation of feeling her inside himself—there inside his skin, breathing his breath, crowding his eyesight and his senses more than he could bear. He saw her hand, white as milk against his hand that was burned mahogany-colored in the sun. He thought: my arm is white, too, where the sleeve hides it from the sun; I take after my mother’s folks, blue-eyed, light-complected.

  The girl said:

  “Want to go for a little walk?”

  He was suddenly a man, full-grown and fearless. He nodded quickly, saying nothing. She called to one of the men before the fire:

  “Papa, watch the counter!”

  The man turned and looked at her; then he looked at Lias, grunted, and turned back to his talk.

  They went out into the dark that was thicker and heavier now, so that the light from the moon fell upon it rather than through it; at least it was so under the live-oaks and moss where the dark was heavy and cold in wind blowing strong from the sea, pushing the tide up the river, and across salty, seeping marshes where marsh grass, brown and dead, moved only a little on the swell of a tide at its full.

  The next day was the Sabbath. Traders crowded into the meeting-house to hear a preacher in a frock-tailed coat thundering out mighty prayers as he rocked back and forth on his knees, preaching down Godalmighty’s wrath from the tall pulpit upon those who drank rum or cursed or labored on the Sabbath day or denied the tithe of their crops to the Lord’s service and servants. The Word of God wrastled with the phlegmatic, stubborn backwoodsmen, and when the altar-call was made, a few sought the altar built of pine planks, and prayed and repented with bitter tears, and renounced Old Satan and all his works. Vince Carver and his kind, aliens to town ways and prejudiced against any show of feeling, stiffened their necks and hardened their hearts and remained stolidly in their sins, though some of them were uneasy under the press of conscience.

  The next day, Jasper wrastled with a young buck from down near the Fluridy line, and threw him three out of three. The morning was young; the older men were trading about the town, among themselves, and with the storetraders; the younger men strolled down to the waterside where dug-outs and flat-bottomed boats were tied, knocking against big timbers of the docks. There were straining boatraces on the river; there were wrastling-matches, and friendly wagers, from a drink to a shoat, on anything-races, wrastlers, which ox would next switch his tail at a bothersome fly.

  When Big Court convened, trading and sporting broke off, and the men crowded onto the rough plank benches, and the air of the court-room became a warm, smelly breathing. The cases were dispatched leisurely by the tobacco-spitting, slow-voiced judge, and lawyers who wore hats in court to distinguish themselves. The finest lawyer, a fe
llow named Hartshorn, wore a high hat and used a knobbed walking-stick. He laid these under the judge’s pine rostrum, and argued mightily against a cattle-thief who had lit a shuck into Fluridy and had come back only the week before and was slammed into jail to await trial.

  Another case concerned a young man of the county who had been ambushed in the woods by two rowdies who had laid his head open with a turpentine mattock, and had pocketed his gold watch and coins. The argument went back and forth, for in this case Hartshorn was on the side of the rowdies. Solemn jurors spat into the corners that were splattered brown with tobacco spittle of former juries. The men crowded into the court-room shrewdly judged the merits of each side of the case; opinions clashed, and wagers ran high before the jury convened in muttered argument and declared their several verdicts.

  There was something stirring in the battle over a man’s legal rights; young men in the crowd wished that they could be lawyers, to argue brilliantly on a case—instead of following a plow down corn-rows in the heat of summer to make their bread. If you were a lawyer, other folks sweated for your side meat and meal and syrup, and you wore a jim-swinger coat and swung a walking-stick, careless-like, in your hand.

  Arguments over the lawsuits continued long after the verdicts were rendered. Talk went hot and strong around the camp fires. Vince Carver always spoke his mind, and held to his convictions through thick and thin; he could turn the slickest arguments aside like water off a duck’s back. Jake thought that his father should have been a lawyer, for he would surely have topped Hartshorn. Jasper smiled a little at the corner of his mouth when his father made a clean thrust of argument and ripped up another’s fine-spun web of words; he was secretly proud of his father; and he was proud of himself—he could lay any of these young bucks with their backs in the dust and hold them there with his knee in their middles, making them grunt every time he mashed down on them.

  But now Lias hated his father, even when he felt a stir of pride that Vince Carver stood so high among these men. (For Vince could hold his own even with men who were borned and raised here at the Coast.) Lias nearly wished that he hadn’t come this fall. This one certain trip to the Coast made him hate his father because he must go back with him to the burning noons of summer and the freezing daybreaks of winter at home, to the long rows in the fields to be broken with the plow, manure to be scattered down the rows, new ground to be grubbed out, stock to be fed and watered. He was glum and sour when spoken to. Jasper said that a fit had come over Lias.

  And a fit had possessed Lias, a fit of slow torturing fever, of gentle tremors that ruffled his blood deliciously, of farseeing daydreams that brought the girl near to him any time he willed to think of her.

  Ma said he was gittin’ too big fer his britches. He already was too big.…Lias hardly understood his new confidence; he would face his father; he would tell him; he was as tall as his father and as strong; he was a man now.

  He went about each day burdened with rage and rebellion; he went away from the camp fires each night, and found the girl’s eyes waiting for him across the counter; he met her hand slipping across the counter to meet his hand; and she went with him down under the live-oaks that spread their limbs over the bluff. The gray moss swung in the heavy, steady breath of the tide that came in, pressing closer and fuller onto the land, drowning the tidal creeks and the spongy mud-banks for a time in water that came to its full, then washed back, and back, and back, to the sea until tomorrow.

  Her name was Margot—Margot Kimbrough. Her father owned the little tavern where a man could have rum or fried fish or a bed for the askin’, if a man had stuff to trade.

  Lias called his father apart from the men on the fourth night they spent at the Coast. The two men went apart a little way on the road toward home. Now Lias was not afraid of his father; his hands did not tremble. The two stood still in the road where white sand showed light in the blackness of grass and trees and sky that was threaded faintly with moonlight.

  Lias said, “Pa, I wanta marry.”

  The old man grunted. Lias waited a long minute while the sound of his father’s breathing came and went. He’d better get it out before he got scared. He spoke quickly:

  “I’m a-aimin’ t’ marry tomorrer.”

  Still Vince said nothing, but his slow, heavy breathing made his son afraid. Lias said:

  “Her name’s Margot Kimbrough.”

  His father seemed to grow darker and stiller in the night. After a wait, while the clenching of his hands and the swelling of his neck veins were hidden in the darkness, he spoke, in words that were hard and threatening:

  “Lias, she’s a slut.”

  The boy’s jaws hardened:

  “No, she ain’t. She’s done told me how they told that on her. Hit’s a lie.”

  His father cringed, hidden in the dark. Lias said it was a lie.… The old man arranged the words of an answer in his mouth, tasting their rank bitterness, feeling shame go through him out of them. The words waited unsaid behind his lips. He couldn’t say: I ain’t tellin’ ye hearsay.…No, he could not tell Lias that it was truth, not hearsay, that it was truth known to his mind from his own experience. No. But he could lay his rawhide onto Lias and learn him not to gad about and be a fool. He was so angry that his voice cracked in the blackness:

  “You cain’t marry her, Lias!”

  Lias defied his father.

  “I’m agonna marry her, Pa. She’s already said she’d marry me. We done been together.”

  The old man’s chin quivered; he was trembling throughout his body. He’d give Lias such a rawhiding as he would never get again. He’d lay the stripes open on his back. He’d learn him to trail a hussy around. He made a step to go for his rawhide whip that lay yonder in the cart, but he stopped, the thing in his heart heavy upon him, stilling his thoughts, clogging his feet, fumbling his hands into frustration. How could he blame Lias? He was stunned; he felt heavy and solid and immovable as though this dark should always beat upon his face, this cutting wind always blow past his ears, this figure always stand tensely before him, damning him to silence and shame.

  He sighed and turned back toward the fire. The men were rolled up in their quilts, and most of them were asleep. Vince lay down next to Jake and Jasper, and closed his eyes against the fitful light of the dying fire. But sleep would not come to him. Men snored gutturally in the gloom. Vince lay within sound of the ruffled river under the light of the moon, but lately full, that rode high beyond the netted branches of the old oaks. But he did not hear the river, nor see the moon. His eyes, staring up into the night, ached from their long, wide-spread vigil. He feigned heavy slumber when at last his boy came stealthily back a little before day, and laid him down on the other side of Jake to sleep.

  Jasper and Jake and a Coast man rowed down the river to where its waters poured into the Atlantic. A little island with a sandy beach lay in the tide-water. They came down with the tide and would go back with it. Jake worried over how they should ever get back if the tide happened to fail; never could they row such a distance.

  The tide was out.

  Jake lay sprawling on his stomach on the hard white sand, his hands pressing his cheeks, his elbows ground into the sea-sand. As far as you could see there was water—blue-green water with white foam furling lazily yonder like suds boiling in a pot. His eyes turned far to the south and moved slowly up the horizon’s smooth rim to the north; it curved a little like the rim of an iron spider set on edge. And after a while, that same water would be here where he was lying, plunging and rearing like an innumerable herd of strange green cattle on a stampede, pawing lightly across the white sand, climbing the bluffs a little way to fall back into a milling mass of strange snorting voices, slick green backs, and soft shuffling white hooves.

  Out across there was Africky, straight across as the crow flies. He sighted an imaginary musket across the green waste. Or would that be the Spanish Country across there, hidden behind the water? or Angland, maybe, where the ships came from, bringin
g fancy clothes, and all manner of jimcracks formed of glass and tin, and pieces of gold? Jake prayed for a sail to heave up out of the sea and come up the river’s mouth where he could see it. But no white ship came. This was a stormy time on the water, the old men said; no ship would come loaded down with gold, or smelling of the Negroes—black folks with their noses ringed like a bull’s, and having black wool in place of hair. Gentle tremors coursed through his body as he lay there on the sand with his eyes set across the water toward the east. Names stirred his senses as sounds might do, strange, unbelievable names: Africky and the Negroes; Angland with her ships like seabirds; other ships that they called galleons, with red Spanish gold clinking in their dark holds as the tall waves washed them across the deep seas; black men, white men, men colored brown like mahogany wood…Oh, the Coast was a strange place, a place past believing, whence you could take ship for Spain or anywhere, where you could lie on the sand past which the waves would come, after a while, and wash out your tracks. Jake thought pleasantly that if he lay here until dark, unmoving, the waves would come and drown him, washing and pounding over him in the night, beating him down under the sea that was stormy at this time of year. The water would be black in the night, not green—black and cold and churning against the bluffs.

  Jake straightened his body and rose to his feet, brushing the sand from his hands and elbows and clothes. It was pleasant to walk up from the sand where the sea would come, and thus escape being drowned.

  As they rowed back with the tide, sea-sand clung to Jake’s hair, sea-sounds hovered in his ears so that he scarce heard Jasper and the Coast man talking of the easiest means of shucking oysters.

  The ocean was the pleasantest thing that Jake found, but there were other things, too. There were women in frocks that stood far out around them and wearing curious hats on their heads. You saw them only early of mornings, trading for table-salt or worsted goods or physic across the counters. They were the ladies of the town, and kept to home at other times. And there were the stores to loiter about; he would listen at a polite distance to the heavy-handed trading; his eyes would take in the stores on the shelves—cloth goods, firearms, jugs, pewter pitchers, all manner of things.