It was after midnight by her clock when she heard her new baby’s first cry, and she comforted its wailing with her own hands, There was no hot water, for she had allowed the fire to die, having forgotten everything but the black pain that blinded her and set her teeth to chattering in her head and caused the muscles to coil in her arms and legs like monstrous-strong snakes.
She piled wood in the fireplace and struck fire to it. But before the fire could burn to heat the water, she wrapped the child, unwashed, and crept to bed and pulled quilts over herself and the child. She was cold, cold, though the room was yet hot from yesterday’s sun, and sweat beaded her children’s bodies.
The doors and shutters stood open to the night. She was not afraid, because the hounds were outside to let her know of any intruder, and never had she been afraid of the kindly, harmless dark save when she was not herself.
She lay, spent and half-asleep, cold under the piled cover, with her first man-child on her arm. He would have no name until Lonzo should come and name him.
Outside in the dark, locusts chirred with long, beating shrillness that deafened the ears; that sound had always made her feel the heat more when she noticed it; now she did not notice it.
Suddenly the hounds growled, and the hair on their backs bristled high down the ridge of each lean spine. So close that she could swear that it was just outside the door, Cean heard a painter scream, and another painter’s hoarser scream answered the first. It sounded like women’s high, agonized crying. The hounds bayed in dismay, and beat the earth to thundery dust going in pursuit of the painters’ crying. Cean’s blood seemed to freeze with fear, so that she could not move. The painters were after her new-born child and her. Hadn’t she heard her mother tell how the painters could smell childbirth blood for any number of miles? And here were her other two children naked on the bed, and her only man-child still lying as he had lain yesterday and the day before, his chin and folded fists crowded on his breast, his little red legs crossed at the feet and drawn high on his body.
She found the back door and closed it against those jaws out yonder somewhere that slobbered for her children’s meat. The dark outside was torn by the baying of the hounds and the screaming of the wild things. She closed the shutters, shoving home their wooden latchets’so that no pawing claw from without might loose them. She turned back to the bed, fit to faint from weakness….
Her eyes scarcely knew what they saw. She swayed a step forward, thinking that what she saw was a vision of her weakness or a trick of the firelight that blazed high and yellow in the chimney. A thing like a great house cat lay stretched along the floor between her back door and her high bed. The belly twitched a little on the rough floor, the haunches moved noiselessly, the great tail lashed through the air and back to the floor with never a whisper of sound; the eyes, close above the paws, were set on the bed where the children lay, brown and naked—where the little boy hunched himself in his mother’s bed, thinking naught but that it was her body.
Cean could not ever afterward tell what she did when she saw the yellow beast crouched not three strides away from her bed. Godalmighty had helped her to find the musket, ready loaded over the mantel, had driven strength down her arms; for she had gone blindly, not knowing what she did. She could scarcely have believed that she had killed the pesky thing, if there had not been the lank body on the floor, dead beyond any doubt.
Cean fell asleep on the bed, too tired to pull the cover over her body. The child whimpered and she gave him her swollen, hurting breast. In a nightmare she felt again the beast’s hot breath in her face and the hot fur of his breast against her hand, the ripping tear of his claws on her shoulder. She rose up in bed, screaming out for Lonzo, and saw the limp body stretched there on the floor, its head shot half away, its great lolling tongue lying on her sheepskin rug; the thick, wild blood had poured out there, ruining her marriage present from Lonzo. She lay back again then, knowing this second fear to be only senseless dreaming; she slept, her breath mingling with the breaths of her children. Two of the steady-coming breaths were light girls’ breathing; one of them was short and irregular—a little flutter of breath—and it differed intangibly from the other three, for it was the new, uncertain breathing of a man, safe in his father’s house, safer yet on his mother’s arm.
Cean waked when Maggie and Kissie waked, shouting over the dead painter, talking to their baby brother, eyeing with awe Cean’s marred, bloody shoulder.
She washed the gashes that tapered to scratches down her arm, and caked the open places with tallow melted with clear turpentine. The hot liquid seared with its heat and sting, but she must do this or have blood-poison or proud flesh, and high fevers, and be dead, maybe, before ever Lonzo found her.
Lonzo did not come until three days later. Then Jake drove him home in Vince Carver’s cart, for Lonzo’s ox had swollen and died on the way home from the Coast, and Lonzo had left it to the buzzards, for there was no time to bury a dead ox. Cean thought it must be a time for dying.…The ox that had hauled her and her’n so many miles by the strength of his back was yonder. The bleary eyes would be staring sightless into the heat, tormented by the blowflies and the buzzards. Dead at the edge of the clearing were two of the hounds that the panthers had ripped to ribbons; their entrails, shining with the shine of the opal in her finger ring, had run out and were soiled in the earth. Outside the door lay the painter, for that was as far as Cean felt like pulling the pesky wild thing that had to come into her very house to die.…Oh, it was a time of dying.…Before finally Lonzo came, blowflies settled on the dead thing so near her house, and a stink of death went up and made her stomach turn over and throw up its victuals.
Lonzo buried the hounds but he would not bury the painter. He had a nasty time skinning the painter, but he would not have let any stink drive him from it. He would make a floor covering of that skin for Cean‘s weak feet, or a throw for her torn shoulder, or a fine, outlandish canopy to be over the bed where she slept.
Oh, he would do anything at all to please her now. For never had she seemed so fine a wife. He could feel, but could not say, nor yet understand, that she was clean as a sycamore’s trunk in spring; brave enough to blow a painter’s tough skull wide open; sweet as the breath of a beehive where the bees swarm all the summer through; and quiet in her ways as that hive in midwinter when you strike the gum and hear only the drowsy stir of a thousand wings that are folded close in warm, honeysweet air, sleeping through all the cold.
It was Jake who named the child.
His eyes had narrowed when he had come with Lonzo into Cean’s house and saw the man-child and heard the wild tale of Cean’s fight with the painter. Almost he could love Cean again now; but she was changed beyond his recognition. She was hollow-eyed and dark in the face, and said a little of nothing about it all. She was near to crying, though, he could tell that, for he had seen his mother look so, many times, her lips closed, one tight over the other, her brow set in stern wrinkles, her eyes turning away from other eyes. Ma would raise sand when she knew about Cean. He must hurry home with his great news.
Lonzo looked at Cean’s shoulder where the tallow held the wound tight till it could heal. He felt a little out of place, for he was forever behind-time with this woman; he would never catch up with her. But he was not put out; he was proud. All her shortcomings were less than naught to him. Had she ever been anything but a little less than perfect?…. For she had borned him a son, and killed the painter that would have eaten it, all in the same night. His arms went around her and held her as close as he dared with thought of her hurt arm, but never did he tell her how he felt; that would have been like saying “Howdy” to God.
Cean asked him to name his son, when she was no longer so nigh to tears. Lonzo blustered and joked, but in his heart he felt unworthy to name this young creature that he had made in his own image. He didn’t have sense enough to name him. What did he have to do with it, anyhow? Nothing—less than nothing.
Cean was shy of this new n
ature in Lonzo. To cover her shyness she turned to Jake, who was watching her where she sat with the baby on her good arm:
“Kain’t nobody think up a man’s name for ‘im?…. Kain’t you give ‘im a name, Jake? Hit’s a pity t’ be a nobody without ary a name….”
She smiled softly at her joke at the little fellow on her arm.
Jake’s eyes went to the fire and back to Cean’s face. Pride moved him to think up a fine name for this child. Not everybody was asked to furnish a name. He thought of tales he had heard at the Coast.…This year he and Jasper and Lias had gone without Vince, who had been ailing since last year. He spoke suddenly:
“Name ‘im Cal-houn! I hyeard tell of a man named that from up where Ma come frum....”
Cean repeated the syllables twice over:
“Cal-houn.… Cal-houn….”
She felt Lonzo standing there close, too proud to speak and name his child for himself. She said:
“I reckon Lonzo Calhoun would suit me all right.” She smiled a little secret smile, understanding how Lonzo felt.
Lonzo hummed and hawed; that were too much name for a little tyke such as him!
Cean laughed a little, and the sound reminded Jake of her old-time, boisterous laughter:
“Oh, we kin call ‘im Cal!”
Lonzo agreed, relieved that the child would not be called by his own name, for that would seem too brazen a pride, unbecoming a plain man from out in the sticks.
So now Jake could carry home news of the baby, and the painter, and a name for the baby that he himself had given it.
And to cap the climax for Cean, Lonzo had traded only the gold pieces for food and stores, and had brought her spoons and ring safe home again to her.
Chapter 12
Cean’s strength came back so slowly that she thought never would she be well again. Some force of being, some core of courage, had gone out from her on that night when she had born a child, and killed a painter, too. She felt weak as water inside now, and cried for nothing. She was always crying, so that her face, homely enough with puffy eyelids and liver-spots on the thick skin, was homelier still now from crying. Tears slipped down her cheeks from a bank that always stood high in her throat and behind her eyes. She thought that never again would she feel like straddling the ox to ride home from the cotton-field, never again would she sing “Jump t’ m’, Susie,” of mornings because she was too merry-hearted, for no reason at all, to stay still. She thought that if she could not get better she would surely die, and the little baby with her; for she could hardly drag up from the bed to tend to him, and she had no milk for him. The little un cried day and night, except when he was too tired to cry, and lay asleep, a little bag of skin and bones. Cean warmed cow’s milk, and goat’s milk, and rice water, for the baby, but nothing seemed to suit him. He would scream with the colic so that sometimes Lonzo would walk him in his arms till cock-crow.
A change of the season had always before, since she was a little thing, moved Cean to a sort of season’s change within herself. She could tell so easily when a new season blew in on a north or south wind, or crept in, unawares, on the dark of one certain night. Another winter came in when Cean’s baby was eight weeks old in November. Cold rain drove down from the northeast and hushed all the staccato chattering and winged singing and shrill peeping of wild things in the woods about Cean’s house. Later, squirrels would bark off in the cold, woodpeckers and sapsuckers would call harshly, but such sounds would be but melancholy echoes of summertime. Cean had known the time when she would have loved to traipse off to the woods on the first winter day, to peel away the crusty flakes of bark from the pine trunks, to kick fallen cones ahead of her feet as she walked looking into the far distance, not knowing what it was she would like to see there. But now, that time was obscured by many things, so that she minded not when winter caused her to close her shutters and doors and bundle up her children in warmer clothes.
She had hoped to get to her mother’s house once before cold weather, but she had not felt able. Her mother had come to see her, bringing bundles of newly-woven jean and homespun. Seen had stayed a week, doing the housework and sewing up winter clothes for them all. She did this in spite of the fact that Vince was lying sick at home. She felt her heart pull back toward home where Vince was complaining after her, and she felt it pull toward this little house where Cean had to carry a burden too big for her, and she wished that she had a dozen feet, and many hands, and tribble her natural strength, for only so could she go and do and bear for her loved ones as she wished to do.
She went home, comforting herself with the thought that at least Cean and her children would not go cold this winter. She must get back to Vince, for she was a-feared that he would never last the winter through. For he had grieved himself nigh to death over Lias and Bliss Corwin.
Now Margot carried Bliss Corwin’s child about on her hip as though it were her own. The Corwins were willing enough to give up the child to the Carvers—all but its mother, Bliss. But Bliss’s tears had not moved Vince, nor hardly Seen; for did not Bliss know that she had no right to this child, born out of wedlock, for all the neighbors to make fun of? Vince carried it home, and dared any mortal soul ever to taunt it with its sinful birth. As for Bliss Corwin, let her look to her sin! He’d have no traffic with her; he was only concerned with his son’s child, blood of his own blood. He would see to this child, though a thousand times he had prayed that it would die before ever it lived, though every time he laid his eyes on it the sight shamed him. But let Bliss look to her sins! Margot Kimbrough was eating bitter bread now, after too much sweet! It did Vince good to see Margot have to nurse another woman’s child; it was meet…meet.…But, oh! the pain that never left him in peace because his son had done this evil. Mayhap Seen was right when she said that he would never over this sickness ‘lessen he stopped his worrying over Lias—and stop he could not. When ye’re old and have got sense enough to know that the sands be trickling low, ‘tis not so easy to throw a grief from your heart. A-a-ah, law! Toil and trouble, and nobody but God to relieve matters, and He don’t seem to mind much. But mayhap that’s howcome He built Glory yan side o’ Eternity.
Vince would have been all right, he thought, if his nasty sores would only heal. Months ago he had stumped his toe like a youngun, and a sore had come on his foot, and would not heal with any kind of poulticing. Instead, that sore spread until both his feet lay always on pillows, smeared with Seen’s salves and oint-ments, and wropped in clean rags. He was all right, he would say— had been all right all this past year and a half, except for those pesky sores and a sort of weakness that made him hardly care if seeds went into the ground and food came out of it or not. He lost all his fat, till Seen could feel the hard ridges of his backbone when she rubbed his back with lard and powdered copperas to ease it of its aching from lying so long. His jaws had shrunken down into his broad cheek-bones, and the skin on his forehead seemed bloodless and thin. All his ruddy color and broad-shouldered brawn were gone, and Seen never let him look into a looking-glass when she could help herself. But one good thing, Vince would eat anything she brought him, and she was glad of that. She fixed good things to please his taste. When the first hogs were killed late in November, she kept the lids jumping on the pots and spiders, stewing and frying and fixing all manner of good sweet pork for Vince. How he did love the taste of it! He ate till his hands and beard were greasy.
And that was the last meal that ever he did eat.
Seen was glad for all the rest of her life that she had taken special pains with those rations.
Late that night she waked and noted a change in the breathing that she had slept beside each night for these many years. He did not answer when she called his name. She lit candles and saw that he was nigh onto dying; from his body there came a dull, unaccountable smell like that of a physic, but not of alum or copperas or any physic she knew. It was Death in the room! He might disguise his scent, but he could not do away with it.
She climbed t
he ladder to the loft, and did not notice that her bare feet cramped on the hard cold rungs of the ladder. Jasper waked as she came to his bed. Seen spoke in her natural, slow voice, but the sound of it startled Jake in the other bed so that he could not move, and lay with his muscles jerking. Seen said:
“Jasper, yore pa’s a-dyin’….”
She went back down the ladder. Jasper got up and dragged on his breeches. He came and took Jake by the shoulder and shook him, but then he saw that Jake was already awake and he said nothing. Jasper went down the ladder, and Jake was left alone for fear to catch him by the throat and shake him till his teeth chattered. He got up and pulled on his breeches, and went down the ladder, his steps lagging, his heart yearning toward yan room where his pa, once strong and tall, was now a ghastly, feeble stranger. Bedclothes covered Vince to the chin; his white beard was streaked with grease from the food he had eaten yesterday; his lips were purple, parted over snoring breath; his eyes were closed in their deep, dark sockets. Lias and Margot and Jasper stood around the bed, and there, too, was Seen, still in her shimmy. Jasper built up the fire and brought his mother’s clothes and helped her to put them on. She would not put on her stockings, dressing as though she were in a mighty haste to do something; so Jasper pulled the heavy woolen stockings on her feet, that were, and would ever be, rough and drawn and scarred from the old burns.
Lamb in His Bosom Page 15
