Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  Chapter 15

  Within little more time than a year Cean was in bed, and flat on her back, too, with another child that they named Wealthy Tennessee, not because anybody cared what its name was, but because Margot thought that would be a likely name. Lonzo had to go for Margot before this child was born, for Cean gave plum out, the only time he ever knew her to do that except with her first one. Margot left Seen Carver babbling that Pa said that Cean was going to be all right, and came to Cean and helped her to give up her child.

  Cean was the master-weak now. Lonzo knew it wasn’t put on, for Cean would go as long as she could put one foot ‘fore another. Margot stayed on for a few days, toting her son about on her hip half the time, for, being the only child of his mother, he was mighty spoiled. He was a big, fat-cheeked boy with shiny blue eyes like Lias’s, with a primped-up mouth like Lias’s, with a biggity, bossy way like Lias’s. Margot was always saying, where Lias couldn’t hear her, that Vince was even spoiled to death like Lias!

  Cean’s children were sprangling out now; the biggest of them could pick cotton and dig potatoes; they roamed through the fields like so many happy pigs rooting chufas, while Cean lay in bed with her youngest. To save her life, she could not get her strength back. When the baby was three days old she had tried to walk from the bed to the fireplace, and fell flat on the floor in a swound; never did she come to till Lonzo dashed a piggin of water in her face, half-strangling her. Never had she been this sorry and porely. Lonzo had brewed her a crock of physic that never failed in female weakness—three gills of bamboo-brier root,one gill of dogwood bark, two gills of cherry-tree bark, thirty-six roots of star grass, sixteen roots of buttonsnake, two gills of red-oak bark, the same of sassafras root, two jugs of water boiled down to one, two gills of rum, the same of syrup; let the mixture stand one day and night. Cean took a doset morning, noon, and night; if it did her one grain of good, she could not tell it.

  She lay huddled in the pillows, wishing for her ma, who was too feeble to come, and too witless to remember any treatment if she did come.

  Margot made the children go and play in the shade around the wash-trough by the spring so that their noise and rambunctious play would not be a worriation to Cean. She had brought Fairby along with her, and with Vincent and Cean’s five that were big enough to run and scream bloody murder and bounce across the floor, they could make a heap of noise. The children were as well satisfied away from the house, anyhow. They were playing under the swamp maples that leaned over the wash-trough; the leaves were touched a little, for it was the middle of October. But the weather was warm as summer-time. The children were playing school, and it was a school like they had in the Coast country, too, as fine as any that a Yankee schoolmistress might set up in any white house on the Ridge at Dari-an. Maggie, being the eldest, was the swallow-tailed tutor from up North who lived in the Big House, paid guest of the rich planter, deigning to teach the little planters their letters.

  Maggie was tall and skinny, and wiser than her nighonto nine years would warrant, had they not been overly full of responsibility and knowledge of grown folks’ ways. Hadn’t she stayed with her mother all the time while her father was gone for Aint Margot, while this last youngun was a-comin’? Hadn’t her mother told her all about it, and what to do if she should get too sick to be in her right mind?

  The other children sat on the ground before Maggie, each in a rough square drawn on the earth about his bottom that did not know but that the hard, warm earth was a boughten school-seat from Angland. Margot’s Vincent, three years old, wore fine, sewn linsey breeches, but the other two younger children, Lovedy and Caty, wore nothing between the smooth, unblemished skin of their soft little bottoms and the tolerant earth. For Mammy was sick, and Maggie was plum tired of changing their didies. Hit weren’t no use, time she got one dry, t’other un was wet. Anyway, it saved washing. And Aint Margot wouldn’t tell Ma, and Ma would not notice, lying yonder in bed with a new baby.

  Maggie minded the children out of fire and water and such dangers the best way she could. Her face was still the nighlike Lonzo’s, with beady black eyes and straight black hair that was parted in the middle and hung down her back in a plait to her waist. The plait was blowsy now, for nobody had combed it in three days, and she could not manage it in the back, because the plait started at the back of her head wrong-side to her fingers. She combed the hair of the other children when they got up in the mornings, but her own would have to go till Ma was well. She had a big, quiet mouth like Lonzo’s; she didn’t screech and make up loud songs as little Fairby did, but she would slap one of the little ones down for taking another’s play-pretty or saying a bad word. She was like Lonzo in that, too; they never ran over Maggie; she would pretty quick put them in their place.

  Kissie quarreled with Maggie more than any of the others. She had yellow hair that curled and blowsed over her head; her mother let it fall loose about her neck because she liked it so. She would toss her head when Cal called her Miss Blowsey-head. Didn’t Coast ladies crimp and tangle their locks?

  Cal was four and a worriation to them all if they would not let him lead every marching of the Redcoats, every war on the Indians, every storming of a Spanish fort in Fluridy. He was nighabout as old as Kissie, he thought, and forty’leven years older than Lovedy, who was only three—and he was his pa’s only boy. Oh, he could look down on them all when Pa took him up on his knees and told him how to catch a rattlesnake with a fork-ed stick and sling it by the tail and pop its head off. Ma said that Pa loved him the best of all of them, but Pa always denied it. Cal looked more like Cean now; his eyes were mild and brown, not beady-black like Lonzo’s; his forehead had Cean’s own little inquiring frown stamped upon it.

  Lovedy was a fat-legged, mischievous little trick, staggering and chattering and pointing. Now she sat on the ground with her pudgy legs outspread, with her frank, undisciplined little bottom flat on the warm old earth.

  Fairby, five years old, was not yet old enough to care whether her feet were straight or crooked, and played as happily as any perfect-limbed child.

  Maggie was telling the story about A for apple. Apples were bright, shiny, red things sweeter than persimmons after frost; apples were fruit that you could gather in your apron if somebody would climb up and shake the tree. Cal interrupted, butting in to be first in everything, as he always was:

  “I’m agonna be the one to shake the tree! I said it first!”

  Up at the house, Margot tried to soothe Cean’s baby with a little tit of sugar tied into a clean rag. She gave it warm catnip tea till its stomach stuck out, but still it cried, expending its little anguish on each short-drawn breath.

  Cean was crying, too, with her face turned away to the wall. Margot would have taken the baby out so that its crying would not worry its mother, but it was just eight days old. Truth, it was fine October weather, warm as June, but she didn’t want the little thing to catch cold and die on her hands.

  Cean asked for the baby so that she could feed it and hush its crying for a little while. Feeding the child would cause her pangs nigh onto as bad as the pain of bearing it. Always her breasts had given her trouble, grease and poultice them howsomever she might. Now they were hard as rocks, and fevered; sharp pains darted down the blue, distended milk veins that spread from the white pit of her breast-bone like a curious blue vein growing inside her body.

  She set her teeth and gripped her hands and suckled the child. Get it full and maybe it would sleep. Sweat gathered on her temples, and Margot wiped it off with a wet rag wrung out of witch-hazel water.

  Lonzo was gone to the Coast with as fine a cyart-load of cyored t’baccer and cyarded cotton, pressed bees-wax, tallow candles, bearhides, and hen eggs as ever you seed in yore life....

  Jasper kept house for his ma while Jake and Lias were gone to the Coast, and Margot was yonder, taking care of Cean. He liked being here with just Ma. She was a pitiful, puny thing now. Every night he had to rub her with witch-hazel oint-ment to keep the be
d sores from eating her up alive. Margot did the rubbing when she was here; but Jasper didn’t mind doing it for his ma. Hadn’t she done enough for him?

  He slept in the room with Ma now, for somebody had to.

  She would get up if she weren’t noticed, and bumble around and hurt herself. In the night he would have to keep saying:

  “Lie still, Ma. They hain’t nothin’ the matter. Go to sleep.”

  But she wouldn’t sleep. She’d lie and talk half the night, till sometimes in the dark the hair would rise on Jasper’s head—and he was a grown man not a-feared of most things. It was the way she would talk:

  “Set there in that chair by Jasper’s bed, Vince. My back’s a-painin’ me so’s I caint think.…No, don’t bother Jasper. He’s got to work tomorrow. Anything ye want him to know, tell me, and I’ll tell him.” She would talk on until Jasper could swear that his father sat there, silent, within reach of his hand, wishing to speak with him.

  It was a horrible fancy, for Jasper could not see his father now save with the stamp of death set hard on his face, with sickly glaze filling the eyes that had once looked on him familiarly. In the chair—if it were there, and Ma had second sight now that she was old and sickly—that figure stank of grave-horror, frightened him with mystery too deep and solemn to think on. He wished his mother could get her sense back; many times in the night he would get up with his legs quaking under him, and light candles all about the room and sit up with her till day came straggling in through thin chinks in the wall. Ma was a trial now to him and Margot; her joints drew with rheumatism; her knees and ankles were swollen into big knots for Jasper and Margot to rub and poultice, turn by turn. Jasper had to bear her about in his arms wherever she would go, like she had been a baby. But hadn’t she born him amany and amany a time? He reckoned so.

  Always Seen would have family prayer night and morning, if there was a hayfield nigh onto being soaked by a rain coming up, if a cow was dying of the colic. She would sing one psalm, and read one chapter from Pa’s bible, and pray one prayer for each of them. Many times Ma sang the psalm that she liked best now—“How firm a foundation,” lining it out for them. Nobody but Margot ever sang with her; they knew the words of the old psalm as they knew the name of Godalmighty, but, being men, they were too proud to join in women’s weak devotions.

  Ma was the pitifulest thing when she sang; her voice was so weak and cracked that you could hardly follow the tune, but she would clear her throat at the end of each line and go on:

  “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,

  Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word.

  What more can He say than to you He hath said?—

  You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled.”

  Ma always pitched the hymns too high, so that her old voice could scarcely reach the upper notes but by a thin little screech. Hardly could her children a-bear to hear her sing the last verses of the old psalm that she loved:

  “E’en down to old age all my people shall prove,

  My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;

  And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn

  Like lambs in My bosom they still shall be born.

  “The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,

  I will not, I will not desert to his foes;

  That soul though all hell should endeavor to shake,

  I’ll never, no, never, no, never forsake!”

  Seen would throw that promise back into God’s eternal face in the weak song of her lips. He had promised, and repromised to bear her like a lamb in His bosom, never, no, never, no, never to forsake her.

  She was just so pitiful, old and witless and with one foot in the grave, talking to God or Vince Carver like they were Margot or Jake. They knew that their ma was a saint as good as Abraham ever hoped to be off yonder in the Old Country. Hoary hairs had come on her temples from work and worry and grief; now she looked to Godalmighty to bear her in His arms as Jasper carried her from her bed to her chair, where Margot set pillows to protect her poor old backbone, on which sores clustered like it was a sick cat’s. Ma’s head with its hoary hairs was pitiful, bald as your hand in patches, lean and bony, with her hair screwed into a little wad in the back hardly big enough to pin up. The old knobbed cedar pin that was stuck through her hairball was used for the first time on the day that she married Vince Carver. Then the cedar pin had been clean as a reed whistle and bright colored as honey; now it was black and greasy-looking, though Margot washed it every whip-stitch.

  Seen couldn’t do enough to make one of her children turn against her. They would as soon talk back to God as they would answer short to any of Ma’s whims. They would keep on humoring her, no matter what she did. Pa would turn over in his grave if one of them were to talk short to her; for she was their mother now the same as she was before ever they were breeched, when she was strong and young-bodied and could cuff them about as a bear does her troublesome cubs. She would be their mother till she died, and afterward, they reckoned, if earthly kin know each other in the Glory-World. Like Ma said, heaven wouldn’t be heaven ’lessen she could kiss Eliza-beth and sit down and talk with Vince in the flesh; never could she figure out how twice-married widows would come out with two husbands to please. But why should she trouble herself over that, since there would be only Vince to claim her?

  Jasper missed Margot from the place. He felt closer to Margot than to anyone else. She came inside his thoughts, a familiar of his intimacies. There was no concern of his life that she did not know about, and understand as he understood it. No sister could do that. Compared with Margot, Cean was a stranger to him. His mother had never come so close to him, nor his father, nor his brothers. So it must be that he loved Margot with the love that Ma sometimes spoke of: it comes not to every sorry soul of earth, and when it comes it goes not away again, but to attend life out of the body. Ever a man is like to join lust with love in his mind, but Jasper did not so. He did not lust after his brother’s wife; truth to tell, he had foolishly let Ma know that he would marry Margot if Lias would put her away by the elder’s lief. Until yet, Jasper’s face would burn, fire-red, when he thought of that blunder he had made. He had meant only to straighten out a big mess.…Ever when he came to this little dark lane of thought, a timorous question scuttled by his reason—did he really want his brother’s wife for his own, and cloaked his desire in other, high-sounding motives? But always he went on past such argument, pushing down the blunder into the past.

  Jasper had not licked Lias nor had Lias licked Jasper, they had only wearied each other, bruising, pounding, drawing blood. They fell to the floor and rolled about with their teeth set in brother’s flesh, with their arms and thighs strained hard as iron. Neither licked the other; remembering this, it would keep them from fighting again. It had bred a mighty respect in each of them for the other one. Always since, Jasper had felt differently toward Lias concerning his evil ways. Lias was as good a man as himself. What right had he to judge? And Margot was still Lias’s wife.

  She minded Jasper of a woman he had seen once when he was a little boy. A cart had come through, going to the Coast, in the middle of winter. That was an unheard-of thing, for there was no call for journeying in winter. The people had stayed overnight at Vince Carver’s house; they were going back to the Coast out of this infernal country, the man, his wife, and their children, no matter if it were winter, no matter that they had left a clearing and a house yonder to the west. They brought a wild story along with them—a story bound up in Jasper’s memory with the woman’s sunken eyes and slick, scarred forehead, and the healing gashes on her face and neck; she showed Seen Carver that the gashes were so all over her body. The man had told the story, but the woman interrupted shrilly, making the horror seem real as though the Carvers had seen it with their own eyes….

  The woman was off in a field to the west of her house, setting traps for bob-whites. She had a notion to tame the little wild chickens and have them breed and nest and run about h
er door, for the batch of hen-eggs that she had brought with her across the mountains from Tinnysee were broken on the journey; and the hen that she had brought with her all the way down to Georgy would lay, but the eggs would not hatch down here, because there was not a fine, red-combed, loud-crowing rooster to be with her. By the time that the man told the story to the Carvers the hen was wild in the woods, or eaten by some wild thing, for they were six days from home. The woman had wanted chickens about her door. The place where she had set her traps was a fur piece from her house. And she went alone. And wild Indians swarmed out from a pine thicket and came upon her; they caught her and tied her wrists and ankles with buckskin thongs; they whooped up their lean, hungry hounds and set them on the woman. The dogs fell upon her and had a big time of it, while the red savages laughed, shut-mouthed, till their sides shook, standing in a still row, watching the dogs hound a white woman as though she were a hare. When the savages had taken their fill of silent laughter, they went back to the west, calling their hounds after them. At dark, the man came to look for the woman; he found her still grubbing her way back toward her home, blind with blood and dazed like a loon. The buckskin thongs had eaten through the flesh of her wrists and ankles, but they still held tight where the gristles lay close to the bone. And the bites of the dogs’ teeth festered and ran and were a long time healing. When they were healed, the man and woman set their faces toward the east, sick of that place.

  Always Margot reminded Jasper of that woman, but he could not say why. Mayhap it was the look in her eyes, or the way, when they were milking, that she would turn suddenly about on the little three-legged stool to tell him of some new thing that had hurt her. She would draw back her lips so that the little gap in her teeth showed, and she would say, as though she shouted it with only a meager breath:

  “I’d ruther be dead….”