Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  Willows swooned, head down, in the yellow water of the creek that was muddied by spring rains. In the brown shallows little frogs spoke with the very sound of many silver bells. High water lapped urgently at the foot-logs on its long way to the sea.

  When he went back to get his hog, a week later Lias said nothing of the violets, for they were past their thickest bloom. But on his way home he waited to see if Bliss would come again to see the violets.

  And she came.

  In September Lige Corwin swallowed down his pride and came to Vince Carver’s house, and the two men went off to the ten-acre field and held long converse. When they came back, it was hard to know which face was the darker or which mouth was the grimmer. Vince rode off home with Lige without a word to his womenfolks. Seen and Margot looked after the men, wondering what might be up….

  Bliss’s face was peak-ed, and her eyes were sunken in dark rings; she was outspoken now, no more a child; she had a woman’s courage to tell a child’s lie:

  “Hit hain’t so!….”

  Vince put his hand over his face and shook his head against this trouble, and said nothing. Lige Corwin said little:

  “Tell me his name and I’ll kill himl”

  But Bliss denied her child even until the night it was born. Her own mother could not shake her denial, though the old woman’s face was piteous with shame and grief. Steadfastly Bliss denied her love.

  When he saw that he could not shake her, her father said: “If ye’ll not tell me his name, I’ll find out fer me own self….”

  Vince’s eyes were set on the floor, his hands trembled on his knees, and his face was green with fear or some other thing. His tongue would not speak, though words pushed up against his dumb throat. There was no need to speak. Lige knew there was no need, but he could not hold his mouth shut. He knew what they all knew—that the least said is the easiest mended. Finally Vince offered Lige and Susanna Corwin all the comfort that he could give them:

  “I’ll see to the child…once hit’s borned….”

  When he got home he told Seen of this thing in as few words as he could use. And Seen told Margot. If Margot ever wept over it, they never saw her do it; if she had any hard words for Lias, she never spoke them to him.

  Vince went alone to his room, where he stayed much of his time now; he got down on his knees beside his bed, but he could not pray because his back was heaving with soundless, shut-mouthed sobs that bore the likeness of terrible, bitter mirth. He was drinking Margot’s cup of gall with her.

  No word of Bliss came up at Vince Carver’s eating-table. What Lias might have had to say no man can tell, for no man asked his opinion.

  Because Margot never quarreled at him, Lias followed her about with his eyes looking like a whipped dog’s. He took his father’s word as law—and Vince now was hard on Lias who was his favorite. Lias stayed away from Bliss and made no move to see her. It was she who would come, under pretense of driving off the calves, and turn one certain rail so that its bark lay skyward. That was a sign between them, meaning that he must see her tomorrow when the work was done, where the creek with a slow turn of its black current flowed into the river’s cunning serpent way that would in time seek out the sea. There he would hold Bliss’s pitiful, weeping face close against his breast comforting her with kisses and bold promises; and sometimes she would comfort him as he lay with his head on her lap, his face turned to the sky, whose hard light she shadowed for his eyes with the bend of her face over him. Though she was not a child any more, always she was a child to him, whom he must comfort, who comforted him with the artless seduction of a child.

  Bliss bore her child in a cold night of a hard winter. Her mother, with a bitter face upon her, attended her pains; her father would not come near her. Seen would not go to Bliss, though she had helped every woman of her time to bear her children. This was a shut-mouthed, secret thing. Even Bliss’s own father said that if she died he could not grieve; he thought that she would be better off dead. Vince prayed, though he knew that it was a sin, that the child would never draw the breath of life.

  When the child was born, taking with it the pink out of Bliss’s cheeks and the laugh out of her throat and the lightsomeness out of her feet, Bliss closed her eyes against it and would look at it only when her mother was gone from the room; so she was alone when first she saw her child’s thin-skulled woman’s head and the clutching woman’s fingers. Alone with the woman-child and God, she unwrapped its feet and saw them as they were made, and would ever be, twisted at the ankles and marred in their making so that they would never walk straight in this present world. She hid the feet quickly when her mother came in the door with hot meal gruel.

  When the child was three days old, Vince and Seen came to take it home to its father’s roof. Seen’s heart was touched when Bliss parted from the little crippled thing. Seen said:

  “Come over whenever hit pleases ye, Bliss…and see hit.”… When she was going out the door she turned to say, “We’ll call hit any name ye say….”

  Bliss raised herself on her elbow, for she was still in bed from weakness after three days; her eyes were hollow and dark and deep with tears. She said:

  “Call her Fairby…if hit’s all the same to ye….” And they called her Fairby.

  Bliss had made up the name out of her own head. It minded her of an old song she had sung a many and a many a time when she was little, toting a doll-baby under her arm, ten year back and longer. Till now she liked that song:

  once there was a lady, fair was she,

  Loved a fine gentleman—aah, la me!—

  To him she gave her heart to keep, sweet fool she!

  And o’er and o’er he told to her,“How fair ye be!”

  Then saw she him a-wooin’ go—aah, la me!—

  To court a dame whose lands and gold were fair to see!

  She took his hand, she took his name, poor fool she!

  For never did he tell to her,“How fair ye be!“

  Chapter 11

  For two years after Kissie was born, Cean was free to stoop or run or frolic—to pick cotton or to lift the biggest pumpkin that Lonzo could grow, or to scrub down the walls of her house with hot suds—without fear of injury to another being growing within her own.

  She liked being lean and light on her feet once more. She dared Lonzo to footraces down the cotton-rows, but he ignored her, too proud to take up with such tomfoolery. She tossed Kissie and Magnolia many times into the air, liking to hear their stopped laughter burst in her face as they rushed down into her arms. She helped Lonzo with the spring planting, because Maggie was a big girl now and could look after herself and little Kissie.

  She had felt so hearty that she had wanted to take that little motherless youngun, Fairby Carver, and raise it like it ought to be raised. Margot wouldn’t know how to mother a little thing; no woman could know, ’lessen she had borned one. Now Cean would know—she could feel a little thing’s hands and legs once and know if it had a fever, and how much; she could hush a baby’s crying, no matter what ailed it.

  But Lonzo would not hear to her taking Bliss Corwin’s child to raise. Let Lias see to it!…And Vince stormed out: “No, Cean shain’t do hit. Margot can raise hit!….”

  Margot scarcely ever let the little thing out of her arms. Secretly she greased its little twisted feet with oint-ment, hoping that somehow they might grow straight as the child grew.

  Cean kept wanting that child, but when Fairby was three months old she was glad that Pa and Lonzo would not let her have it. For she came down with bed-sickness again.

  She mulled long in bitterness and disappointment. Just between her and Margot and Godalmighty she never wanted another child. She sulled for a week or two, before she would tell Lonzo or her mother about it; then she cried for a week or two, just to ease her heart of its worry; after that she was all right again. And now, because of this thing, she was one lesson wiser in living, as Ma used to say; now she knew that hit were a sin fer a woman to crave to be free
and easy and unencumbered in this here life. She had sinned in wanting to frolic and joke and find delight in this world. She told Lonzo these things in few words, and made his heart warm and full of satisfaction; to his knowledge he had never sinned after this fashion, and found it easy to forgive Cean for wilfulness and rebellion against nature. But never did she tell him that during those two past years she had planned and managed to have no children for him. That he would never have forgiven her, and well she knew it.

  She confessed her lesser sin—that she had not wanted this coming child—to Lonzo so that he might forgive her and make her feel better; but the blackest sin she would not confess to her own mother. Oh, she had sinned in many ways—laughing and frolicking and thinking that this world was a place to be happy in. Now she knew better; this world was a place where a mortal must do his duty and prove whether he was more than a dumb brute. She must do her duty, bearing a life to its birth every so often, washing, minding the little thing till it could walk, then starting on another. But she could not be quiet-minded about it, though she might keep her mouth shut and do her duty as she should.

  One day Lonzo watched her studying a blade of broom straw, green before the frost and bearing needle-tufts of down as its seeds. She watched it so long that Lonzo wondered what could be the matter with her. Finally she said, “Hit does hit oncet, and then hit quits!” Never did Lonzo know what Cean meant by that.

  Now Cean understood better the words which the old elder had spoken over her and Lonzo when they were married.

  Word had gone around that they would be married in the spring; but long before it was needed, Cean’s homespun was bleached and folded in her mother’s loft; her goose feathers were sunned every week to keep them sweet-smelling; her calfskin shoes, sober new bonnet, black bearskin cloak, and short white shimmies that caused her heart to contract with a delicious withdrawing, waited and waited through the cold, wet days when the grass began to spring green in the black earth, when the bluebirds moved in swift blue clouds close to the earth, when the bob-whites separated, two by two, from the winter coveys and went to build their nests. The elder came late one afternoon when the sky was clear save for tall clouds stacked like piles of pink cotton in the west. Cean felt a new awe of the old man with the snowy beard that reached to his waist, for this man had the power to marry her off to Lonzo tomorrow.

  To his wedding Lonzo brought his jean and homespun, his cowhide boots, and his store-bought hat, and the trinkets that his hands had made for his sweet new wife who was thin and brown and sweet-smelling as a dried poplar chip. He told no one, not even his mother, when he was to be married. Lonzo was shy of a big to-do over anything.

  The elder said the marriage words without a sign of a book, increasing their respect for him: “Do you take this woman, Tillitha Cean Carver, for your lawful, wedded wife, to live with her in holy wedlock? Will you cherish and keep her for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, forsaking all others for her so long as ye both shall live? The answer is, ‘I will do all these things, till death do us part, so help me Godalmighty.’”

  Cean’s vow, taken as became her after Lonzo’s, ran like her husband’s, save that she must cleave unto him through all manner of circumstances, must serve him, and obey him in all things. And Cean took the vow, repeating it fresh from the lips of the silver-bearded prophet of God in this wilderness, and called upon Godalmighty to help her keep her promise.

  Now, nearly five years later, Cean was ashamed that for two years she had not truly kept her vow; she had wanted better without the worse, health without sickness. Lonzo had ever cherished and kept her, but she had not cloven to him as she ought.

  When she came down with early sickness, Cean complained against Lonzo in her heart. She was grieved with everything; she cuffed the children about, she drove the hounds from the door, she beat a cow unmercifully that would not so for her to milk it. Lonzo had never known her to be like this. He could not make her out until, before ever she told him, he guessed what ailed her one night when she would not rock Kissie to sleep and the little thing went crying to bed and snuffled herself to sleep. He knew that Cean was sorry for that later, for she lay half the night with her arms tight about Kissie and cried softly. She was crying because Kissie was asleep then and could not feel her mother’s arms; she cried because another child was pushing this baby out of her arms; and she cried because she could not keep Kissie, nor Maggie, nor any other one, always small enough to lie limp in its mother’s arms in its mother’s bed as it slept….

  Lonzo never scolded Cean. Things will always work out, he said to himself, if you’ll keep yore mouth shut and wait;…. And things did work out to teach Cean a lesson, but not to Lonzo’s notion, for the drought fell.…Never did it rain after Cean’s early sickness, not till the next wintertime. The corn was just in the ground when the last rain fell and the heat came in, hot as dogdays. Never did the crops grow but little after that, so little that in late summer the puny ears of corn would have brought a laugh if they had not brought weeping; they were not much longer than a baby’s hand. And the cotton bore but little, and that little looked worse than any storm cotton. Not even hay would grow, nor grass, and the cows were like to die of dry murren. Hot haze lay thick in the lowlands, and the river ran black and heavy to the sea. The spring on Lonzo’s place was near to drying up, and he dug a well, and when that failed he hauled river water for his stock to drink, over a hot eight mile, each way. In the late summer the pigs sickened, one by one, and died, leaving two old sows that were too tough for next year’s meat even if Lonzo had not needed them to breed more pigs. Last year’s corn ran out, and the hogs were turned out to find grass like any pore man’s razor-backs. Old Betsey, Cean’s first cow, lay down and died without a moan.…Oh, there was dead meat aplenty to enrich the ground around Cean’s boxwood and crepe myrtles and English walnuts. Lonzo tied Old Betsey’s bloating carcass behind the ox and dragged it off to a peach seedling behind the crib. Cean could hardly stand to look at the wide clean swipe that old Betsey left behind her on the ground as she was dragged off to her buryin’. They must live on deer and bear and other wild meat this winter. But Cean and Lonzo, like other folks that were not wild and savage as Indians, did not greatly care for the curious tang of wild meat, since they were used to the natural taste of sweet fat pork and good beef. Cean could kill her fowls, she reckoned, but what would they do for grits and meal and syrup and bacon? Pa had no more corn than any other body; everybody in this land and country was in the same boat! Every crop failed, and no man could build cribs big enough to hold rations for year, after year, as they had done in Egypt once. It was a hard time, as hard as when Ma and Pa had buried Eliza-beth, only now folks lived closer together and knew more about how to get along in hard times.

  Through the late summer Lonzo kept on killing coachwhips and hanging them up to dry, to make it rain, though now the rain would do the crops little good. Cean would have prayed, but she figured that this was her punishment and she must not try to pray it off.

  Lonzo and his Pa, and the Carvers and the Hollises and Vickerses—all the men hereabouts—must go early to the Coast this year, a month before Big Court. They would miss seeing the fine brainy lawyers argue, and the Holy Ghost preachers pray, but they must have something to eat. And there was little to trade. Everything was lean and hungry. Even the bees could hardly fill their hives, Lonzo said, and bees were the smartest, wisest things living.

  There was no way for Lonzo to bring back stuff from the Coast unless he took some of Cean’s gold pieces with him. So, when the time came, Cean robbed her chest and bundled up her gold and her finger ring and her silver spoons, and sent them. For once she had something to trade.

  But after Lonzo had gone off around the bend, she cried until Maggie and Kissie were crying, too, and she had to hush for their sakes—and for the sake of her other child, nearly ready to be born, that was not yet able to cry. For if a mother weeps over much while she is carrying a chil
d that child will mope its long life through. Cean grieved for many things, but most for this saying; for surely this child must weep through all its life. She had cried a river of tears when she had known that it was on its way, before she cared whether it moped or laughed in its lifetime. Now she would have drunk all those tears, boiled down into one salt cup, if she could have; but it was too late, and she knew it.

  Because of her hard weeping in the nights while Lonzo was gone, or because of her worrying by night and day when she would be so distracted that the children would call and call before ever she heard them, or because she must go on with hers and Lonzo’s work when never had she felt so porely, never had a child been so heavy and so wild in its plunging against her breath and her heartbeat—because of some of these reasons or all of them, the child was born ahead of its time while Lonzo was gone. Cean labored with no one to help her but Maggie, who wondered at her mother’s face distracted with pain, and Kissie, who cried to be held in her mother’s arms. Cean tried to stay up for the sake of these children before whose eyes she felt an unaccountable shame that she had never felt before others, not even Lonzo. Mayhap she wished to hide this cruel agony from her girl-children who must soon enough in their time learn it for themselves.

  It was a stifling day. Blazing on into the afternoon, the sun made of the earth a still furnace, parching whatever lay under its blazing light. No little bug might hope to creep under a log to escape the heat of this day in September, for the heat lay over and about everything, like burning wool.

  Cean’s body was clammy as she rubbed down the skin of her arms and legs where goose-bumps stood on every pore as though it were cold weather, where every minute invisible hair reared against the pain that beseiged her body. She paced the floor and hardly heard the whimpering of the children; they were fretful because their mother would pay them no mind and because the heat rash on their bodies stung and itched. Cean made Maggie undress herself and Kissie, and let them run about naked because it was so hot. They raced about the room from one corner to another, content with this novelty for a time, their lithe bodies glistening with sweat, their eyes beady with laughter, oblivious of the passion of their mother’s pain. For supper, Cean gave them bowls of clabber with brown sugar sprinkled over it, for she could not cook for them. A little after dark they fretted themselves to sleep and lay on Cean’s bed, naked as the day they were born, and left Cean alone, free to weep and pray for Lonzo’s coming.