Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  Cean did what she could with the housework, but that wasn’t much because she had to lie down or sit in a chair most of the time. But she pieced two quilt-tops for Margot during the time that she stayed at her Ma’s, with Maggie scattering her little squares of cloth and mixing the colors every whichaway. One day Maggie lost Seen’s precious little gold thimble that Cean was using in quilting; they looked the house over, up and down and around and about. Everybody looked until they were plum tuckered out. Jake even searched through the cow-lot—anywhere and everywhere that anybody at all could ever have been with that thimble; and still no thimble.…Cean cried because her child was to blame and because Seen blamed her carelessness; and Seen cried because her thimble that Vince had bought for her in Dublin thirty year back was gone, and because she had blamed pore little Cean who had enough to worry over without being quarreled at.

  Margot tried to talk Cean out of her tears; but Lias stormed out:

  “Oh, Margot, behave yoreself. Hain’t the world full o’ thimbles?”

  But then he hushed, for he knew that it is not. Margot cast down her eyes as she cooked supper, and SHE cried TOO, thinking: “No! No! No!—the world is not full of gold thimbles; once you lose it, there is nary another one.…”

  After supper, Jasper helped her clean up the pot-things. He kept silent, for he could see that hot tears were running off her cheeks into the dish-water; best leave alone a woman when she is crying.

  Margot gulped back the fullness that pained her throat; but tears pushed past the fullness and wet her face. She was ashamed of herself because she could not keep from weeping any time when Lias raised his voice louder than it commonly sounded; she ought to be used to his ways in this time; she ought to learn, if she had any gumption at all, that his tongue was meaner than his heart. I ought to know—she thought—that Lias loves me or he would cart me back to the Coast before I could say scat…. He loves me…he loves me…but why can’t he use patience to fight a thing?…Am I to blame because he was born a hothead?… He wouldn’t do me any suchaway if I hadn’t given him strong reason to think less of me before ever I married him.… A woman has but herself to blame for the treatment a man puts on her.… But I can do for myself any old day.… I won’t take and take and keep on taking.… Any old mangy, starved bitch will bite you if you torment her long enough.… I’ll not take Lias’s meanness from him one more time!…. He can treat me right or I will manage to get along without him…. I lived nineteen years without him.… I reckon I can get along without him again…if it kills me…if it kills me—

  Jasper was saying:

  “…and when she heard the horses’ hooves and ran out in the dark to the front gate to meet him, there she found him tied to his horse’s saddle, with the bloody white skull of his head showing.… He was hanging from his saddle, dead as a door nail, and bleeding on her hands.… There’s trouble fer ye….”

  Margot sighed. Jasper went on:

  “They say neighbors miles off heard her a-screamin’.”

  Margot dipped another greasy plate into the pot of hot suds. She thought—What was I a-thinkin’ of?—

  Jasper said:

  “I reckon some people was made to make trouble…and some t’ stand hit….”

  –I could walk off and leave him…if I could ever get mad enough.…But I can’t hate him long enough at the time.…I forgive him…and he knows it.…I forgive him if he as much as looks at me once, or but lays his hand on my shoulder.…But I ought to leave him and let him see how it feels.…It would wake him up… maybe.—

  She raked the greasy scum from around the sides of the pot of dishwater.

  “Jasper….” she said.…She thought—I’ll ask him if he won’t carry me back to Papa.—

  Jasper carefully passed his soggy dishrag over a wet plate.

  “Yes’m, lady!”

  She knew that he was trying to make her laugh. She reached a soapy plate toward him:

  “Jasper, they’s not one man in ten thousand like you. I’m just tellin’ ye in case ye don’t already know it…in case nobody else ever told ye….”

  Because the plate was slick as grease with soap suds, it slipped to the floor and broke into a dozen pieces.

  The crash of the plate annoyed Seen where she spun up in the big-house across the passage; she was peevish, anyhow; she quarreled at Jasper like he was six-year-old!

  “Do, Jasper! Don’t break every last crock on the place. They don’t grow on trees, y’ know….”

  Jasper fumbled around over the broken pieces on the floor, trying to piece the plate together again. Margot called out:

  “It wasn’t Jasper, Ma. I dropped it….”

  Jasper was a sight squatting there on his big haunches, like a worried honey-bear. Here he was a grown man, still afraid of his mother’s tongue. Margot laughed soundlessly at Jasper; the two of them laughed like two younguns over that broken plate.

  Lias had lit a candle and was up yonder in the house on the side of Margot’s bed, mending the torn lappet of his coat. He was too biggity to ask Margot to sew it for him. He came into the kitchen and found Margot and Jasper laughing fit to kill; then he was madder than ever and told her that she need not patch his coat, he had fixed it already; then he flounced out the door.

  Still Jasper and Margot could not stop their laughing. Margot said:

  “Let him fix it. Tomorrow I’ll steal it off and take out his sorry sewing with stitches long as basting threads, and mend it right. Let him pout tonight, and fix it his own self….”

  The next day Cean discovered that Maggie had swallowed the gold thimble that they all had such trouble about. The whole household rejoiced. Even Lias laughed, fit to kill; his blue eyes blazed under his sandy brows, and his big white teeth showed in his silky beard. Margot, seeing him laugh so, flung her arms about his neck and leaned on him and kissed him. Cean thought her a brazen huzzy! But Lias looked down into Margot’s eyes and suddenly caught her up till she was as tall as he was, and he kissed her hard on her mouth. Then he set her down and strode out of the room, still laughing; and part of the laughter that she had kissed stayed on Margot’s mouth. She comforted herself by knowing that Lias would not be satisfied if you were to pick him up and set him down on the broad turnpike of heaven….

  Cean pined for Lonzo. Never had she been able to decide if he were fine-looking or if she only thought he was, because he was her old man. Now Lias left no room for doubt, not with that set of his head, and his roughed hair the color of broom straw in the fall, and his hard blue eyes that looked straight at you when he talked to you. Now she thought Lonzo was fine-looking, though he was not so tall as Lias, nor so straight nor so long in the legs. Lias had legs like the pretty stilted legs of a young buck. Lonzo’s shoulders stooped a little, and his face seemed to stoop when he was listening to you, as though he wanted to hear every word you said. His eyes were black as swamp water where a big mud-cat can come to within two-fingers’ width of the top, and still be safely hidden. Lonzo’s eyes were like that—you never knew what things were hiding behind them except that with her they were always kind things. He had cried when he knew for certain of this second young un; but there wasn’t no use for Cean to cry over it. The worst part of it was being away from Lonzo and not seeing him but every two or three weeks, whenever he could spare time from the planting. Last time he was here he told her that he had something nearly done for this baby. It wouldn’t be a cradle, nor a fine boughten present. Often Cean’s face would set in sweet wonder—what could it be?

  She would go back home in time for her second child to be born in its own house, as soon as this trouble inside her stopped. She wished it would be soon, for Pa’s house seemed crowded; the work seemed heavy and there was too much talk and argument. She liked her own house, still as death except for Maggie’s cooing and crying, and the light sound of the clock’s swinging pendulum. Oh, she was proud of that clock Lonzo had brought her from the Coast to tell the time almost as surely as the sun and stars did. It was a pret
ty clock, with a little brown grapevine carved all around the tall wooden frame of it; at the top there was a cluster of grapes carved in the wood, and there were two brass leaves inside the glass on the round brass pendulum. The brass was as bright as gold. Inside, through the glass that she polished each morning with a rag, the long black hand went round and round on the white face, so slowly that you could never see it move, yet it was nighabout as true as the North Star. It hardly ever lied; you could test it any hour, morning, evening, or night, and the clock would tell about what the shadows or the stars would tell: two hours by sun, an hour before day, whatever time it was. The clock was set in the middle of her mantel, high above her fire that was rarely out when she was home, because of food to be cooked, or smoothing-irons to be heated, or light to see by at night; winter or summer, the fire burned on. And there in the midst of her house was the clock—tick-tock–tick-tock—like a heart in the midst of a body—beat, beat, beat, beat—only faster. She had timed her heart and it was slower than the golden swing of the clock’s bright pendulum. When she noted the hurry of the clock it always stirred her to hurry with what she was doing, weaving, or sewing, or peeling potatoes with the butcher knife which she was always careful to keep out of reach of Maggie’s eager fingers.…What if the baby should stumble and fall upon it, and the blood should gush out from her neck as it spouted from the stuck throat of a suckling pig…? But the clock would swing on then, just as it did now, undismayed. No, not the same! Yes, just the same….

  Lonzo was alone back there at home, out in the fields or in the house with the clock. She had laughed to herself when he told her how he had scrubbed the floor. He admitted that he had fed the hounds on the floor by his chair, glad for their company as he ate his victuals. She could imagine him pushing the scrub back and forth over the rough floor after supper—for he worked in the fields all day; the cornshucks, fastened through the round holes of the heavy block of wood with the long handle to it, would brush-brush-brush the soapy water across the soft, shreddy grain of the logs, the water swishing a little at each broad swipe of the scrub. Did Lonzo know to scatter white sand over the floor to loosen the dirt and grease? How could a man get along without a woman to do for him? She smiled, glad that she would do for Lonzo till she died—for Lonzo and his children.

  She was tired of lying flat of her back, or sitting carefully in a chair; she was impatient to be up and about, doing around her house, patching clothes, washing, planting seeds. She couldn’t drop the corn for Lonzo this year, any more than she could last year. A little youngun can’t drag along after its Ma, up and down the rows, with the hot sun bleaking down on its head. Sometimes in summer the sun cooked a man’s brains just like they were raw eggs on a hot spider, and he fell down and died. A little child couldn’t stand no such as that.…No, a woman must bide at home with the little fellers, to keep them out of the fire and the wash-trough and the snake-holes. How long would it be before she could follow Lonzo again, dropping the slick, yellow grains from her hand—like that!—one for the cutworm, one for the crow, one to rot, and one to grow, to make the tall tasseled corn for roas’in’-ears, for meal and grits? And when the corn was done with growing, the long blades would hang, heavy and stiff and drying day by day, waiting for Lonzo to sweep down every other row, like a house afire, stripping the stalks blade by blade from top to bottom, first on the left row, then on the right, pulling the fodder with quick sure movements of his hard sun-burnt hands. Lonzo’s hands were never bothered by the sharp blades of corn that cut a thousand small bleeding slits in the hands of greenhorns and young boys. No, his hands were used to hard work. She loved to feel his rough hands on her cheeks, pinching them to color.… How long since she had been pink in the face?…and light on her feet?…and small in the waist?…Aah… law... .

  Even Lias felt sorry for Cean, now—and he never pitied any mortal thing ‘lessen hit were a sheep when some wild thing got its lamb. Once he had shot a great-antlered buck, breaking its back, and when he had come up to it it had dragged itself off a little piece, pulling its weight by its forefeet, and lay there panting and watching him, its sad, amber eyes swimming with fear. Lias did feel sorry for that thing—a brave, fine he-thing with its back shot through, that would no more lope across the clear, thin distance cut by innumerable columns that were dark pine boles overlapping one another until the far horizon was a black wall of living columns shutting in the flat woods.

  He did feel sorry for Cean.… No use running the thing into the ground.… Before she was through with one, here was another one coming. He was glad Margot was still straight and slim; he would hate her if she was like Cean every year.… But Lonzo didn’t hate Cean; he was as gentle with her as her Ma would be; he looked at her like he could eat her up—no, like he could stay there forever without touching her, and love her till he died. Why didn’t Lias feel that way about Margot? She was fine-looking; he couldn’t find a fault with her ’lessen he made it up. It was all his fault; he oughta had better sense than to jump up and marry like a shot out of a gun. Hadn’t he always known that women were no more than heifers? But Godalmighty could hardly have kept him from marrying Margot. Pa tried to keep him from marrying her, but Lias wouldn’t listen. If she was brown and lean-legged and human like Cean—like anybody else—he could stand it. But she was hardly human; she was too pretty in the face, too goody-goody. And all the time she went around with her meek sheep’s-eyes; she waited on Ma and Pa, spoke softly to Cean, chewed Maggie’s food for her, like an angel out of heaven to see her at it! Ma loved her; Jake would pretty nigh cut off both his hands for her; even Jasper thought she was “a fine woman”; Lias knew that Cean hated him for the way he treated Margot—her eyes would burn at him, bright and unblinking as a coach-whip’s.

  They just didn’t know, that was all—they just didn’t know and he didn’t know. He could kill her, he believed, and feel good about it, and she was his lawful wedded wife. Oftentimes he remembered the way he once felt toward her, and tried to bend his heart toward her again, and cursed himself because his heart would not bend, nor go, nor stay, nor feel the way a man’s heart should feel. What was this devil in him that kept him from being a right-minded man like Pa and Lonzo and Jasper?

  When they were married they had slipped up to the preacher’s away in the night, because Vince would start for home at daylight. Lias hammered on the door with his fist, his left arm about Margot, shivering in her cloak. They stood there on the narrow sloping piazza of the little house, and Lias warmed her in his arms because she was cold, while somebody inside the house bumped around and mumbled. And they were married by candle-light, and he kept his arms about her. Margot stood there in the half-light with her eyes black and shiny in her white face, like beetles on a Cape jessamine bloom. Her eyes were blue, but ever when she was worried or excited they would be dark as thunder. They had got away at dawn for the long journey home; and all through the time he couldn’t stay away from her any more than a steer can stay away when you pull him to you with a rope. There was some pull in her breast, and in his, that you couldn’t keep apart. And when Ma gave them the cherrywood bedstead in the spare room when they got home, where were all his fine plans for rafting lumber down the Alatamaha, and hacking the big pines and gathering the gum for trade at the Coast, as some men were beginning to do? Hoh! they were all buried in this white woman!

  But he’d make his mark yet, as soon as he could get away from Pa’s apron-strings. He noticed that Pa hadn’t settled under his own Pa’s nose up in the Carolina country. No. He got as far off as he could. That’s what Lias would do as soon as he could, and use some of his own plans. There were a million pines waitin’ for him to hack ‘em, to let the gum run out.

  Cean’s staying off her feet helped her, for she was able to walk within a month. Next time Lonzo came, she would go home with him, where the clock ticked stealthily on her mantel, counting the hours.

  She went one day, but long would that day linger as a hurting in her mind.

  Magg
ie was in the yard, dressed in her best bib and tucker, running in and out among the Cape jessamine bushes. The menfolks were out in the lot, bragging on twin calves that one of Jasper’s milkers dropped last week.

  Cean stood by the open shutter while her mother, who was folding clean rags on the bed, talked:

  “You must make Lonzo tote the water, and chop the wood, and do the heavy work. Take cyare of yoreself, or the next thing ye know ye’ll be sickly and whiney and no‘count, and Lonzo’ll be sorry ever he married ye….” She went on in a long meek recital of women’s woes.