Lamb in His Bosom
Page 19
But however high Lias held his head, he was oftener drunk than sober now, and Bliss cried for him now as much as Margot ever had, for it was a woman at the Coast now. Three trips Lias made in one year just to see that woman. Never had any of them ever heard tell of the like! It must be like Ma said—a man that will not cleave to one woman will not cleave to any other one.
Cean liked to work out in the field, for here she could think, while at the house the air was a babbling of children’s voices. Lias’s child, Fairby, came often to her Aunt Cean’s house to stay, and she was welcome, too. Fairby was never ready to go home, and Cean could not much blame her, for Ma’s house must be a dismal place with Ma half crazy, Lonzo said, and babbling out to Pa everything that went wrong. Like as though Pa could do anything about it now! Oh, Ma was so pitiful now that Cean could hardly bear to see her, nor to hear Lonzo bring word of how she had said, “Tell Cean her Pa says everything will be all right.” Things were not as they used to be. Ma sat in a chair now and knitted. Margot ran things, and it was a God’s mercy they had Margot to depend on. Even Margot was changed so that nobody would ever know that this was Lias’s fine wife that he had brought home with him from the Coast; her hair was streaked all through with white, and she didn’t seem to mind. Once last year she had minded; Lias had found her combing sage-tea through her hair to bring the color back, and he had picked up the little pipkin that held the tea and threw it aside, and it hit her in the face and knocked out one of her fine white front teeth and left a thin red scar across her chin till now. Margot was plain as any backwoods woman now with her snaggled tooth and her streaked hair and sunburnt, pied-ed cheeks, liver-spotted like any other woman’s.
She was little older than Cean—born in ‘seventeen she said, 44 take away 17 eq’als 27. Margot was seven-and-twenty, then. Cean was six-and-twenty.
Jasper and Jake worked the crops over at Pa’s place. Jasper was away past being a full-grown man now, but there was no sign of him a-courtin’ or a-wantin’ a wife. True, last year he had told Ma to get the elder to let Lias put Margot away, and he would marry her—or some such words as that. But Ma had blabbed the whole thing out, without a thought of being secret about it so that Jasper could work things out underhand-like, for the good of everybody. Margot told Cean that Jasper and Lias fought like dogs. You’d ’a’ thought that Lias had loved Margot all along, the way he was insulted when Jasper went about to fix the mess up, aiming to take Margot for his and let Lias take Bliss and live with her as a decent man should.
Yonder at the house Maggie would keep the fire going under the pot and would bake the hoecake and fry the meat when it was dinner-time. Sometimes Cean was glad that four of her five were girls, for girls can cook and sweep and rest their mas’ backs from aching. Men always want boy-babies, but sometimes Cean was glad that she had aplenty of girls. But girls could not help make rations as boys could. Maggie and Kissie could look after Cal and Lovedy and Caty, and have dinner done when Lonzo and Cean went up to the house at noon, but Lonzo still had to do all the plowing unless Cean holped him. And that was a pity, for he had plowed since he could reach the crossbar of the plow. Time he was a-restin’ a little. He’d be ready for a little help by the time Cal was big enough to learn to lay off a row straight as a crow flight across a field.
At the thought of Cal’s learning to plow, Cean’s heart weakened a little. He was so little, just three this year. Before she could catch her breath, he’d be out yonder in the bleaking sun a-geeing and a-hawing, a half-grown boy. Hadn’t she seen Maggie shoot up like a dog-fennel in wet weather? Before Cean could turn around, her baby was keeping house for her, and minding the other babies out of the fire. Oh, time goes in a hurry. She must learn Maggie and Kissie their letters before they were so big that they’d be ashamed to learn from their Ma. Pa had learned her.…A is for apple.…Still, Cean could hear Pa tell what an apple looked like, round, red, shiny, sweet. You could grow apples up in the Carolina hills. Never had Cean tasted an apple. Fruit trees wouldn’t grow down here. She had a clear-seed peach tree, a seedling from her Ma’s tree, but nearabout ever peach would be as wormy as the wild plums in the woods. A is for apple.…Cean always liked the lessons Pa made up better than the ones he got out of the books, such as
In Adam’s fall
We sinned all.
or
The cat dothe play
And after slay.
or
Xerxes did die
And so must I.
“A is for apple” was better—a ripe apple that will fall. Once Pa had told her how he had shaken down ripe apples into Ma’s lap one time. They were not near grown-up then; one apple, falling, had struck Ma on her forehead and raised a knot nearly as big as her fist. Pa always laughed there and said, truth to tell, her fist weren’t very big then. That was the first time ever Pa kissed Ma, when the apple hit her on her head and raised a whelp for him to kiss. A is for apple. B is for ball.…The world is a ball.…But never would Cean believe that fool thing as long as these flat woods stretched yonder straight and flat as leatherbread, through the pine boles.… C is for cat….
The children had their mother’s chairs turned down, making them serve as wagons on their journey to the Coast in Cean’s house that was filled now with persuading magic. Lines were passed around the knobs and came back to the hands of the children, who sat on the back rungs of the chairs, riding in majesty to the Coast. It was two more months before their father would go to the Coast; and five of them were girl-children and so would never smell a Coast journey. But now they journeyed to the Coast, shrieking at the passage of fords where their ragdolls were prone to fall into perilous deep water; the hounds, lying stretched on the floor in Cean’s absence, waked and howled as the children’s shrieks and cries mounted. Painters! Tigers! Rattlesnakes!…and worse, perhaps, a Raw-head-and-bloody-bones to ha’nt the trail and scare their livers out of them!
Kissie and Lovedy rode in one cart, for Lovedy was not quite big enough to sit safely on the rungs of a chair alone. Maggie carried the baby, Caty, in her arms. She was ever having to say, “Wait! I ain’t a-playin’ now….” She would dismount, and go across what was a raging river out of its banks, or a swamp trail infested with all manner of terrors, and poke up the fire under the dinner, or stir the pots with a ladle half as long as herself. Cal had a cart to himself, being fully a man. Fairby rode to herself, too, for nothing ailed her at all save her poor stumped feet; she banged them against the hide bottom of the chair that was a horse’s hard, smooth belly. Never had they seen a horse, but they had heard tell that there were horses at the Coast for fine, rich bullies to ride on, and Fairby chose to ride ahorseback, since one could ride any way at all for the wishing.
Fairby made more noise than all the others. Cal tried to hush her big mouth, for her horse’s prancing in its gold fixings was like to scare his oxen. So they went the long way to the Coast. They left this wild Indian bank of the Alatamaha, crossed over at Stafford’s Ferry, and took a safe trail down the White Man’s Bank across hot sand, alongside the Alatamaha, down far slopes of the curious, bewitching Coast country of Macintosh County; out past Macintosh County the water of the strange thing called the ocean rips and fulges like suds a-b’ilin’, all the way out to, and beyond, the Middle Passage that is beautiful with terror. Uncle Jake had told them so. They would bring back many wondrous things.
Maggie would fetch back a monkey like Aint Margot told about, for little Caty, to hush her crying so much. She kissed her little sister on the top of her fuzzy brown head where hair the color of Uncle Lias’s was beginning to grow. Fairby would bring a cartload of breastpins and finger-rings to dress in. Here Kissie spoke up sharply, as matter-of-fact as her grandmother Seen Carver:
“I thought ye was a-ridin’ a horse, s’ fine.”
Contempt was strong in her words.
Fairby’s fine manner was dashed by those chill words of truth, but not for long. In a trice, like the sight of a shooting-star, like the passage of the wind,
her horse was changed to a cart behind an ox, but larger by far than the small puny carts of the other children—large aplenty for all the gold of the Coast.
Cal studied when it came his time to declare his lading of fantasy.
Then out of a sturdiness that came from the heavy set of Lonzo’s shoulders and the still strength of Cean’s face that hated weeping, he said:
“I’ll fotch back a hundred niggers fer Ma to beat on.”
And all the others were cast down; his man’s wit had outdone them all.
August sunshine beat iron-hot on Cean’s bent shoulders. She would need more quilts; the feel of the cotton in her fingers reminded her of it. This fall she must learn Maggie and Kissie to spin; they were not a mite too young. With seven mouths to keep filled, everybody must help. Five little mouths—and how many more? She sighed because there could never be any fine, lazy ways for any of her girl-children. They would have to work. She must learn Maggie and Kissie their letters. Cal and Lovedy could wait yet awhile. Caty, bless its bones, was not yet big enough to know nothin’—nothin’ but how to suck its mammy’s milk. Hit were an angel-child, and hit’s mammy loved hit nigh onto death.
She’d quit at the end of this row and go up to the house to see after the children. She couldn’t be easy in her mind to stay long away from them. And the baby mought be a-hungry.
Lonzo was ever shy of his children.
He answered their questions short and quick, abashed at his strong feeling for them. Once Kissie, sharp-witted as she was, stood shyly at his knee and asked him:
“Pa, Ma told us they was peacocks and parrot-birds at the Coast. They hain’t, air they?”
He answered that in short order:
“They air, if yore Ma says they air. But I hain’t never seen none.“
Cean turned her face away when she heard his answer. No!… Lonzo wouldn’t see peacocks if they were to strut in gold and silver feathers before him, nor yet parrot-birds if they had ruby claws and beaks! He couldn’t see nothing but corn on a stalk, or cotton in a row, or a hog fitten for nothin’ but butchering. Then she felt ashamed of herself. Pore old Lonzo! working till his tongue hung out to feed her and her’n.
Lonzo sometimes wondered meekly why Cean should not be like Margot; Margot seemed to be barren save for a son. His own mother had only three children; Seen Carver had only four living. No use to count the dead. They do not eat, nor disturb sleep. How many times, when he was tired enough to die, had Cean waked him in the night by stirring up the fire to warm a little youngun’s feet, or to change its wet clothes, or to rock it on her shoulder to get the colicky pains out of its stomach!
But Cean was a good wife. His mother, Dicie Smith, had only kind words for his wife, and a mother-in-law’s praise says more in a woman’s favor than anything else in the world.
Dicie and Rowan were left alone now, for Epsie and Ossie had married off and had households of their own. The old Smith place was not what it used to be; the fields had shrunk back toward the house since Lonzo was not there to plant them. Rowan had let the hired boy go back across the river where he belonged, for the old couple did not need much. Lonzo did his father’s trading for him now; for none but strong men can sleep out nights on the way to the Coast and back, and Rowan no longer claimed to be strong. Milk and butter, a little syrup and a garden patch will suffice two old folks who are never very hungry any more. And Lonzo traded his Pa’s honey and hides when Rowan had them to trade.
Lonzo worried over his pa and ma; they ought not to be away off yonder ever so far from nowhere. Pa had lain a week sick of hard ague last year before Lonzo happened over there; and there was nobody but Ma to tend him and tote slops to the pigs and do all the work all that time. He wished that he and Cean lived nearer by, but a man can’t build a new house as a bird builds a nest. Ma and Pa wouldn’t live always; mought as well show some favors while the two old folks were alive. Pa was sixty; that was plenty old for a man to move in close to somebody that could listen out for a call in a cold night. Old folks drop off, dead as a wedge, sometimes. Pretty sight that would be, for Ma to wake up some morning and find Pa cold under the cover by her, staring up into the ceiling with the dead whites of his eyes shining like new money.
Oh, many times Lonzo was worried up with such thoughts. Like as though he didn’t have enough to worry over with Cean here, a baby in her arms, a little un in the cradle by the bed in reach of her hand, and three more older uns in a bed together in the loft! This was a purty pore arrangement where a man had to worry over two families.
Yet Lonzo could laugh sometimes like a bull a-bellerin’. Cean did love to hear him laugh. Sometimes men would drop by from here or yonder and stand till the sun was low, one brogan wedged in a fence crack, squirting tobacco juice to drench one certain weed’s stalk, swapping accounts, telling news of this or the other settlement. One joke she heard—a joke that Lonzo laughed over for a long time afterward—it took Cean the longest time to figure out. It was a tale about katydids. One night Bub Allnoch was listening to some neighbor gals that were a-singing inside his house; his brother, Zeb Allnoch, on the porch with him, was a-listening to katydids a-singing out past the house. Bub said, “Weren’t that purty?” Zeb, thinking that Bub meant the katydids, answered, “Yeah. They make that noise by rubbin’ their hind legs together.” The men roared at that joke, and slapped their thighs, and hawked and spat, and roared again, each taking on new merriment at the sight of other laughing faces. Cean finally pondered that joke out, and she thought it a vulgar, brazen thing to joke about women’s legs. Lonzo would raise Cain if she were to tell a joke like that.
Lonzo was of the opinion that the way to take whatever came was like the cat et the grubbin’-hoe. There weren’t no other way. If Cean had forty-’leven younguns, and they turned out to be all gals, there weren’t nothing to do about it. If the crops failed, or ran the cribs over, there was nothing to do about it but do his hard-down best through it all, and leave things be. Some gaumed up their whole lives by a-hasteing in this or that thing, taking out their impatience on this or the other body. No, Lonzo would never blame Cean if she had a hundred for him to feed. He’d make her something for her house this winter, when the long, cold days would hang heavy on his hands—a new-made bed, maybe, with a fine criss-cross bottom of new rope for the mattress to rest on. He would carve out the headboard and footboard like those of a bed that a journeyman woodworker had made for Ma. Cean should have as fine a bed as any woman hereabouts, for God knew she was as fine a wife as they was.…And the years would bobble along, bobble along…and they would be old and well-off, with their sons and daughters married off through these pinywoods. Dang his lights, but Cean would people these backwoods in no time at all! He laughed a little to himself, but there was pity in his laughter. Cean had been a sweet little thing when he married her; reckon she didn’t expect all this hard work and all this great passel of younguns when she came here with him. Never would he forget the words she had spoken to him when he had told her, long ago, that Lias had brought a fine Coast wife home with him. Cean had said, “Wonder if she’d adone hit if she’d a-knowed how hit feels t’ tote a youngun every step y’ take….” It was pitiful, sort o’, to Lonzo to remember that, for that had been when she was going with her first one, and there had been four since then, as heavy and as cumbersome. No, Cean would hardly have stepped off with him if she had known then all that she knew now. Through long, pleasant ways of thought his mind traversed old years. For no reason at all, his thoughts clung to a day when he was eight or ten years old; somehow now that day was related to his thought of Cean. Ossie and Epsie were older than himself by several years. The three children were sitting on the floor close by the back door. A heavy summer rain was falling on the earth outside, and splattered inside the door from the doorstep. Cool spray sprinkled their faces. They were chanting an old, silly child’s verse:
rain, rain, go away:
Come again another day;
Lit-tul Lonzo wants to play!
The rain plunged from off the eaves and splattered high on the hard ground; the million drops crashed to the earth and were shattered into white mist low on the ground. Wind swept the yard in gusts; the high, thin chant of the children’s voices went out upon the wind and was lost. Behind them in the room their mother turned a hoecake on the fireplace; far through the blowing rain they could see their father in the crib door, waiting for the rain to slack up so that he could run across the steaming, puddled yard to eat dinner.
The little verse stuck in Lonzo’s mind now. The children up at the house sang it every now and then. Lovedy’s name, or Caty’s or Cal’s would come in the last line to please the baby to a shy smile, if they sang it now as they used to do when he was a boy.…A-ah, law! That was a time gone.
He raised his head from the cotton stalks and wiped away the sweat from his face. Yonder was Cean, plugging away, her sack as heavy as his own. She was one wife that earned her keep! He would put her a lane of pink crepe myrtle down the slope in front of the house. She would like that. He could nighabout see her driving home from her ma’s some day, years from now, with the pink blossoms a-fluttering down on her and her cartload of younguns. First thing anybody knew, she’d be a-having twin boys for him! Then everybody would sit up and take notice. Boys choose a strong-minded woman for their mother, and Cean was having all girls. Truth to tell, he would not like her to be strong-minded like some women that had to rule the roost. He’d wear the breeches at his house! He eased his hand down across his back where a pain kept gnawing into his kidney. Then he stooped again and went on picking cotton.