Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  In the night there was little sleeping for Margot where she lay couched on a bed of piled leaves or moss or pine-needles, wrapped in a padded woolen quilt from her father’s loft storeroom. Through the thickness of the wrapped quilt between them she could feel the strong length of Lias beside her; his arm lay heavy upon her, his chest was against her shoulders, his breath warmed her ear that would scarcely note a painter’s scream through the heavy haste of his breathing. Hers was a strangely bitter, strangely sweet marrying; her sleepless eyes noted the wind, free and wild in the tree-tops against the late moon; the wind tangled the tree-tops with its black blowing in the night. Now she was Margot Carver, bound to Lias Carver with marriage words, but a secret sense within her taught her reticence; a child will hold its breath against a bubble’s thin beauty though it knows that the breath-spun globe of colored crystal will vanish though it be not breathed upon.

  Lias’s feeling toward Margot was as careful as was her feeling toward him. He was afraid that he could not keep this wonder with him. If his father should drive her away, he would take her in his own two hands and go. But even then there must be moneys to keep her well and happy and content to stay with him. There was sickness to be staved off, and death that loves young flesh as a canker loves a spongy rosebud. And ever Lias was haunted by the fear that this magic creature who said she loved him must surely vanish into thin air, or take back her love from him. For well he knew that it was not right for any mortal to feel toward another mortal as he felt toward her. Some mishap must surely come; he thought that it would be that she would discover that he was not so fine a creature as she thought. Now she vowed that never had she seen another man whom she liked so well, but Lias was a-feared that he could not keep himself up to that opinion. She had told him that she had loved one other man.

  She had told him as much as her woman’s heart thought it wise for him to know—the man’s name, and the account of his fine words.

  But she did not tell him all.

  The first time ever she saw Audley Peacock she was standing beside a ten-rail fence where gourd vines ran; the green gourds on their pretty curved necks were thick through all the cracks of the rails. Margot was gathering a few small ones to serve as salt-gourds, water-dippers, and such like; the others she would leave to grow large and ripen on the vine for meal or grease.

  Audley Peacock came unawares behind her and exclaimed all of a sudden, “By jockey!” loud enough to scare the wits out of her; but when she turned, startled, he was looking the other way and rolling his tongue in his cheek as though he did not know that she was there. Oh, ever would she remember that knave, Peacock, for his fine words. “Hut, lass,” he would say, and pinch her cheeks, and buss her straight on the mouth. Oh, his eyes had clapped onto her like a duck’s on a June-bug. He could sing “Gloomy Winter’s Gone Awa’” till it would make your heart-strings quiver. He had taught her the fine game of egg-pecking on a clear Easter morning when they should have been at the meeting-house a-worshiping Godalmighty; she knew that now, but she did not know it then, for she was but ten-and-five year old, and there was no one to tell her; for Cajy Kimbrough slept till noonday o’ Sabbaths, not caring if his little daughter went to meeting or not.

  Ever in her heart would she curse him for a knave, that Audley Peacock; but ever would she refrain from speaking her opinion of him to any other—and least of all to Lias.

  Audley was a ladies’ beau, wise in the ways of the world. She should have known it when he exclaimed that her waist was so small, when he begged to see if he could not span it twice around with his big hands. He had been to tea-parties and balls in Saint Augustine; he had danced the cotillion in Carolina; he gave her golden gewgaws to pin on the bosom of her dress; and he was ever spanning her waist with his hands, marveling that it was so small. He was ever crying, “Zounds! ye’re mouth is as red as beat vermilion.” He would set his eyes on her lips till she drew them in for maiden modesty. He showed her his moneys that he kept at the bottom of his duffle-bag that he laid under his pillow at night with his dragoon pistols. Later, she had found them there when her hands were fondling his head. He spread his gold moneys for her eyes to see—doubloons, guineas, moidores, johannes pistoles, and dollars enough to blear her eyes. He filled her ears with chit-chat, and her mouth with kisses. He taught her to love him till she could not tend the bar nor bake a hoecake nor boil a fowl nor slice a haunch of venison, nor even mind any other body’s words, for thinking of him. She ached for him as an airless void aches for rushing wind, as parched earth must cry for rain.

  But he rode away one day on his lean sorrel that he called Sally O’Salt. Down the pike toward Savanna he went, duffle-bag, pistol, hanger, shotgun, powder-horn, shot-pouch, whip, leathern bandbox, and all. And even though she saw him pack his last little belonging, she believed that he would come back within a fortnight, because he told her that he would. He swung his hat in farewell to Margot, and spurred his horse to a gallop with the silver spurs on the boots that Margot had greased for him.

  A time later comers and goers brought her word that he died the drunkard’s death in Savanna in a public house. The landlord had stobbed a knife clean into his lights because Audley had tampered with his daughter’s good name. And out of the wound, they told her, frothy blood spurted as his breaths came, till he died. And Margot heard tell of him no more.

  Long she wondered why her father had not stobbed Audley Peacock for tampering with her good name and for his not giving her his own name in place of it; she wondered till the day she found the gold moidores in Cajy Kimbrough’s money-box that was set high on a rafter in the loft.

  Margot felt fear for other things than life or death that might come betwixt her and Lias. Some man would loose his tongue and tell Lias, and she would lose him. And Lias was the only man whom she had ever wanted to keep. Now she was nighabout sorry that she had not gone back to Ireland to live with her mother’s mother in a pigsty. But she would not go. She had liked the rollicking, rough life of her father’s place, till she met Lias. Old men with white beards who held themselves as straight as pines, young men with black beards and strong as oaks, would row in from their ships and would hang over her counter with their jackets smelling of sandalwood and tobacco; they would talk of a big blow off the tip of the Horn, or of the lights along the rocks at Rio; and she would listen with her chin cupped in her long white hands, with her neck and shoulders swathed in her long black hair. Her eyes would join with some sailor’s eyes in exquisite conjecture; her eyes would fall away from his.

  Out yonder lay the wild ocean that rings the earth like a lashing dragon; sometimes he sleeps and sometimes he wakes. And Ireland is far away; hills green as emeralds turn back to misty valleys where little houses cluster, sending their smoky breath into a quiet sky; and a pale road makes its careless way toward the south. But here there was a sailor’s bold kiss, hot and threatening like the monsoon in hot waters that he told about. Here were long gold earrings dangling on gold chains below her ears; and the swing of the gold against her cheek beguiled her heart.

  She was glad she had not gone to Ireland, after all, for even before Lias had come she had known much pleasure. Margot’s mother, when she lay dying, had commanded the child’s father to send Margot back to Ireland on a sailing vessel. Then Margot had liked the thought of going with the wind across the wallowing waves to the Old Country. But her father was a slow sort of person; there was always tomorrow. And before the right ship came up from the Cape, curtsying to every inshore wave, Margot had a silk pouch about her neck on a silver chain from the Brazils. In the pouch she kept the big gold earrings, and a carved piece of jade as big as your thumb, a handful of moon crystals, and an opal finger ring that meant bad luck; many curious things caressed one another, polishing their surfaces with each movement of her slow body that she had scented from a vial of ottar-o’-roses that a young Irish red-beard had given her, saying, “Ye mind me o’ someun….”

  On the fourth day from the Coast, the oxen quickened
their plodding. The air grew familiar to them, somehow; the woods leaned friendlier over the trail. While the sun was yet high in the west the carts lumbered up to Vince Carver’s place.

  Seen Carver was waiting on the steps for her menfolks. Her eyes had seen the blur on the seat of the cart beside Vince; that must be a stranger to be fed and slept for the night—a stranger in a cloak.

  Jake jumped over the side of Lonzo’s cart. Lonzo called out, “Well, y’ all be a-comin’ over…” and chucked his ox toward home where Cean waited for him.

  Lias helped Margot down from the cart. Jasper shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to another. Vince cleared his throat.

  “Well, Ma, yore boy got him a wife at the Coast. See how ye like ‘er.”

  Vince laughed over-loudly and Jake and Jasper felt better about the marriage. Lias’s jaw softened. His mother’s porely eyesight found his flushed face and proud dare-devil air; it found his wife, pale, shut-mouthed, looking like you had done her wrong. Seen wet her lips and bestirred herself to make her son’s wife feel at home.

  “Why, Lias!…Y’all come right in.…There’s supper enough fer all, I reckon … ‘n’ beds, too.”

  Lias wanted to run to his mother and throw his arms about her skirts and cry into its thick folds as he had done once when he was a little boy, when a chicken hawk had butchered a mourning-dove that he had tamed. Though he was much taller now, a man at last, he knew that she was saying now, as she had said then: “Now… now...no use to take on....”

  They went into the house, Vince talking loudly about the lean ribs of the hounds. Seems like Seen needed another woman about, to help her keep house; a lean dog speaks bad for a woman’s table.

  And Lias’s heart was nigh onto bursting for love of his father.

  Margot had to repeat her name twice over for her mother-in-law’s ears; no such name as that ever came out of Carolina.…But hit were a purty-sounding name.

  Vince roared when she said that:

  “Shore hit is! Lias had me and Jasper and Jake there to help ‘im pick out the one with the right name. Betwixt us all, we oughta brung a good un.”

  But when Seen showed Margot the spare room, and Margot went in and laid her cloak across the foot of the bed, his heart was nigh to breaking. For that was the glossy cherry-wood bedstead that he had carved and polished years back for Seen’s new spare room. But Vince laughed fit to split his throat, and thumped Lias’s big shoulders, and bragged on him for getting him a wife.

  When the ox-cart had rounded the swamp, old Major ran down the rise, barking welcome to Lonzo.

  Cean walked heavily down the slope to meet her husband come home. Her face was full and bright and laden with joy. Oh, the days had been long, and the nights burdened with discomfort and unnamed fears. But now Lonzo was back, first time ever he had left her! Her throat was tight, but she would be a pretty thing to cry with him just home. But when he laid his arms about her burdened shoulders, and smoothed her hair with his hands laid on her head where she stood a little distance from him with his child between them, she wept into her hands. He went on smoothing her hair, saying: “Don’t cry, little un….”

  He brought his presents from where they lay in the bottom of the cart, along with the gunpowder and the salt. There was the gold piece she had wished for; there were six thin, hand-wrought silver spoons to set on her eating-table; there was a length of store-bought cloth, and spice from Chiny and the Indees; and there was a white rat in a cage of wooden slats, that Lonzo said would climb up her arm and hide against her neck, nibbling in play at her ear.

  “Lias has got him a wife … pretty as you ever seed.”

  Cean’s mouth dropped open; here were too many things to take in all at once. Lonzo said:

  “Skin as white as that rat….”

  She said nothing, for the soft nuzzling on her neck distracted her. Her skin seemed browner yet against the white fur; the liver-spots showed black against the mouse’s soft pink nose.

  Finally she said:

  “I wonder if she’d ’a’ done hit if she knowed how hit feels t’ carry a young un every step y’ take....”

  But she was not complaining; she was just wondering.

  Chapter 7

  Lonzo put the winter oats into the ground on a clear, cold day in December. November had been bleak and drizzly; the firewood was soggy, and Cean quarreled quietly to herself, trying to cook the victuals over it. December brightened up. It was very cold for pinywoods weather, but it was dry and healthy. The cold took the feel out of Lonzo’s hands when he went out to feed up and milk, a little after daylight; but when the sun came up things warmed up. Cean would have breakfast done a little before day, and they would eat by firelight. Lonzo enjoyed his breakfast the best of any meal—fried bacon that swam in its own grease, grits cooked to a thick, smooth mush, hoecake, and syrup. Sometimes lately Cean stole a little flour from her barrel and made leather-bread and baked it on a greased spider.

  She liked to cook Lonzo’s rations before it was light. He always raked out the coals and built up the fire from the stack of chopped light’ood beside the fireplace. (On the wood-shelf below the closed shutter outside there was plenty more wood within easy reach. Lonzo was a mighty good provider.) She would lie in bed until the room warmed a little; but hit weren’t laziness; Lonzo told her to take cyare of herself. By the time the rooster crowed the first time she would have breakfast about done. They would eat as the pigs began to stir in the pen off to the side of the house and Betsey lowed away down in the cold. The fowls flew down with the first light and sidled against the wind across the yard to the sheltered side of the house, where they huddled against the logs; every now and then the rooster stretched his neck like a trumpet to sound his urgent, brassy call:

  The sky paled in the east while Lonzo milked for Cean; but the dark did not go completely out of the air until the sun slipped into place and began its slow climb; then the skies cleared and thinned; the dark went quite away, even from among the bushes around the wash-trough and under the deep north eaves of the house. There might be wind laying itself against the cheek like a slow-biting lash, but it seemed much less cold now than when it whistled in against the house away in the night. That sound would make Cean push closer to Lonzo and be thankful that she was there in a feather bed under good warm quilts, and not a dumb critter out in the cold with its hind end to the wind.

  Now in the cold months sleek snakes had found their holes, and rough-hided toads their burrows of mud. Somewhere deep in the earth the snakes might lie dozing, coiling ever so slowly, now and then, a vicious head laid across the head of its mate. The frogs that had shrilled their brittle, metallic singsongs through the wet summer months were blinking sleepily in the dark somewhere, squatted on their ugly haunches, multiple thousands of them in a thousand burrows. Birds sought through the dead grasses for their meals of dried seeds. In Cean’s pea-patch partridges found the dried pods that had split open, leaving dried peas free for the small wild beaks.

  All through the flat-woods, pines heaved on their deep moorings in the earth; they rocked to the south when the north wind blew, they rocked to the west when the east wind blew; but when the winds were gone back into the east and north, and there fell a quiet, balmy day, the pines were straight as ever, moored fast to the black, deep-coiled roots of the old earth herself. The myriad swarming insects were gone; they had burdened the air with their cries; the heavy jarring songs of the crickets, the minute peep-peep-peep of other insects that rose from the grass in a swarm of compelling sound, caused the summer heat to seem the more oppressive. In summer nights the katydids cried, clinging to one long, steely-harsh note in the midst of a din of the notes of a thousand other insect creatures. The locust’s golden stir-r-r-r-r-r-r would break out in the night, beating on the hot air. Where were those sounds hushed now? The little creatures were snuggled along a maze of earthy tunnelings; many were dead, leaving their unborn young swinging in warm furry cocoons in the trees where the wind would rock them
, or clinging to the underside of a dead leaf, or hugging the low stem of a dried weed; nature was careless, but it did not matter; if a thousand perished, a thousand thousand remained.

  In summer the sound of the many little breathing calls and cries paneled the dark as one listened, as thin covering hides a rough wall. But the winter dark was a different thing from summer dark. In winter, the night was a bare, bleak thing without the unobtrusive clickings and peepings of little winged creatures. One could not hear the dark now; there was only silence with the wind howling through it. Sometimes against the black silence there would come the cry of a painter, or the yowling of a wildcat in the edge of the woods near the clearing. Sometimes there would be a racing of the feet of the hounds that went after some timid creature that ventured too near the house.

  Cean did not sleep well now, for her breath came hard no matter how she turned. But this was not the fevered worry of the nights when her child was growing; her child was grown now, and her body could rest while it waited. Now she could listen in the night and not be a-feared. Now the light from a log that burned on into the morning might make curious shapes on the walls and in the corners, but she was no longer a-feared.

  Now, in this latter state, she was attuned to the same sensitiveness as in former months, but restlessness and foreboding no longer made her sick at heart; now she could wonder, without any great grief, how wild things protected their young from all manner of things, and if they did not grieve when harm befell—the painter burying his claws in a fawn’s tender haunches, a hawk filling its maw from a squirrel’s nest, an eagle swooping upon a rabbit running back to her young that are not yet dry in the nest, a field mouse that must flee from every shadow that passes on the ground.…Oh, the wild mothers must have a hard time, she would think, breeding and bearing and losing their young, breeding and bearing, over and over. They were often heavy in the body like herself, yet in sudden danger they must gather their four feet and flee for their lives. Yet withal they were honest, loving mothers; a partridge is a fear-stricken thing, yet she will stay on her nest and fight your foot if you try to push her off; the ’possum, with a face like a young un, will, when she is caught, play dead, to save her little black-eyed baby that cowers in its pouch on her belly.…