Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  With his turkey-yelper that his pa had made for him while the old man lay sick, Jake could lie behind a fallen log, and if he were patient and yelped carefully on the resined strings of the little box he could make a strutting, bronze-green hen come to the other side of the log and peer over at him; he would freeze his muscles and lie so still that she saw nothing amiss in the long, scarce-breathing figure that lay still as the log itself. She would strut away again, searching for that impatient mating call of the yelper. Gobblers were harder to fool and took fear when they came near, noting some unused quality in the scraping of the yelper on the string; but they would call through the still woods, distressed by the yelping they could not understand. At the close of day, when the great birds would beat through the darkening air on their wide wings and would settle on their accustomed roosts in the trees, Jake would creep near and disturb them as they settled to sleep; they would stir and call and ruffle their feathers and drowse, impatient of that fellow yonder who would not come to roost when dark fell, as he should.

  Sometimes Jake would lie against the wind and watch deer feeding yonder like a herd of beautiful, strangely-made kine; many-horned, dainty-footed, they would lope by him if he stirred, hardly afraid of him; he would feel toward them a hopeless yearning. “I would not harm ye if ye would let me lope with ye to yere strange homes and wild bogs; I would crop grass with ye and drink from the same springs; why should not grass and water satisfy my gut if it fills yours? For ye are but blood and flesh and bone like myself—only ye are fleeter and sweeter flesh, brighter blood, whiter bone made from wet grass and clear water and clean wind.” But never could he go with them; they would take fright, if he tried, and outrun him, leaving their tracks thick in the earth, like prints of violet leaves; they seemed to fly low over the earth, all their feet together, lighting on the earth but to brace themselves for skimming flight. Jake tried to run as the deers ran, springing in swift leaps that are like the beat of music.… But his feet were too heavy, his weight was too much. He felt angry disappointment that he was made to walk heavily on broad soles, and not on light pointed feet that are able to fly with only brief and lightsome reaches back to earth.

  It happened one day when Jake was going down the river to look at his fishing-lines that were set on tupelo-gum sticks along the bank, that he heard voices. He crept closer like a wild Indian that looks where he is to set his stealthy foot, and sets it flat so that it may sound like the scurrying of a squirrel or the falling of a dead pine-cone. Jake did not care so much whom he might find; but he would like to steal upon them and steal away again, as wild Indians do….

  And he saw Lias and Bliss.

  And he stole away again.

  Never would he go so far past the river’s bend again. From that day forth Jake could hardly abide Lias in his sight.

  Jake felt sorry for himself. Even Pa, as he lay dying, had forgotten Jake. Ma could never talk with him now; her voice went off in feeble mutterings, her eyes strayed away to places beyond the reach of Jake’s eyes. Jasper was taken up with work and worry over a yeaning ewe, or the well gone nearly dry, or some such thing; Jasper paid Jake no mind; though Jake was more than full-grown and as tall as Jasper, yet the older man with gray in his hair treated Jake like he had been a youngun, and Jake resented it. He hated everybody but Margot, and she could hardly ever tease him out of a smile now.

  Little Fairby loved Jake; if she had been older Jake would have taken up more time with her; but she was a girl-child, not nine years old, and full of questions. She thought Jake was the finest man in the world; Jake liked for her to look upon him as a full-grown man, able to do a man’s work, able to hold a little girl’s worship of a man. Uncle Jake could rob a bee-hive and receive never a sting; he had a way with him; the bees knew him; he would go softly about removing the honey, holding his breath long and hard in his body, troubling the bees as little as might be; and with never a sting he would garner the honey in crocks for the sweetening of a honey-cake, or to fill a finger hole in a cold biscuit when Fairby or Vincent was a-hungry. Jake took down dirt-daubers’ nests from the ceiling to show Fairby how the wise, winged creatures had laid their eggs in dried-dirt cells that were stored full of bugs and worms that were still alive but overcome in some curious paralysis; they were for the little grubs to eat while they grew, as a biddy eats the meat of an egg yolk before it cracks the shell, as baby bees eat bee-bread in the mother-queen’s hive. It was a master-wise arrangement to think up. Wild creatures have more sense than tame ones, Jake always said. He told to Fairby many a tale of queer happenings; he showed her many a nest of twigs lined with down, many a spider waiting craftily under a leaf with his leg set on a spoke of his web until it shook with the struggle of another creature, winged, living, unwary, trying to shake itself free of the sticky web.

  If anyone came close to Jake, it was Fairby.

  After a windy day in hog-killing time, there was not even Fairby….

  Over at Cean’s house Lonzo killed three shoats, laying an ax-head between their too-small, greedy eyes fringed with sparse, stubby lashes. Cean had a hogshead tilted sideways in the earth, ready for hot water for the scalding; the children kept up the fires under the two wash-pots which they had filled with water from the well.

  When the first shoat had ceased his brief death struggle on the earth of the boggy, shuck-strewn pen, Lonzo dragged him to the hogshead and scalded him there where Cean had poured in boiling water till it sloshed over the tilted, iron-bound rim. The children could help to scrape the tough white hide free of bristles; all hands found work to do. Wind whipped the children’s hair into their eyes, and blew Cean’s skirts flat on her lean body. Soon the pink, naked carcasses were hamstrung to a rafter, their scalded hides clean in the cold wind, their ribs hanging lank on the emptiness of their bellies that were rid of the in’ards from a long gash that reached from their throats down the length of their bodies. Purplish-pink bruises discolored each dead forehead, where the ax had been laid with an exact lick of metal on skull so that the brains might not be crushed and ruined with blood. Blood stained each down-hanging mouth open on its discolored teeth.

  Lonzo was proud of his first kill of corn-fed winter meat. The shoats were fat and the moon was fullin’, so the meat would not shrink in its curing. There would be meat aplenty for all the little mouths that looked to him for food, chitterlings, haslet, souse, good green pork to eat these next few days; and for next year there would be cyored hams, sweet and dry to make red gravy, and kags of white lard, links of cyored sausages, and big kags of side meat salted down for next summer’s peas and okra.

  The yard was swept clean by fall wind; fire swirled under the sooty iron sides of the wash-pots.

  Now the scalding water was cold in the hogshead. Lonzo and Cean were cutting up the carcasses in the wash-trough, dividing the ribs from the fat-lined skin, chopping out the backbones down to the pig tails that would go to Wealthy, the baby, when they were bogged down in rice.

  It was a busy day for Cean: there would be the fat to try out for lard, the sausage meat to grind and season and stuff, the heads to clean and boil for souse. When the meat had taken salt, Lonzo would light up his hickory fires in the middle of the dirt floor of the smokehouse where the hams and shoulders and sausages were hung to the dark rafters, and would cure the meat to keep. Lonzo loved to cyore meat, making the smoke just so thick for just so long. Lonzo could cure as fine meat as anybody in the country. Cean thought it was because meat-curing was a slow and patient work, suited to Lonzo. Lias, now, could never cure meat; skippers, and, worse, maggots, would be in his meat before the hickory ashes were dead, because he would go at it like fighting fire and ruin everything.

  Tomorrow Cean would make soap-grease out of the scraps, when her lard was cold in the kags, and her sausages were all strung up in greasy links in the smokehouse. Not every woman knows how to make good strong soap that will not shrink away to nothing when you lay it out in hunks on the smokehouse shelf. But Cean knew how, for her mo
ther had taught her when Cean was not knee-high to a duck. Like meat-curing, there is no quick way to make good soap. Wait till the dark of the moon to cook up your soap-grease and pot-ashes, and while the mixture is boiling stir it from left to right with a sassafras paddle; when it is thick and ready, let the fire die under the pot. Next morning you will find the soap shrunk a little from the sides of the pot, and a little wet like dew will be gathered upon it; then you can slice it in hunks and lay it away, sure of fine, strong soap for another year.

  Cean and Lonzo were yonder, cutting up pork on the wash-block, washing it free of clotted blood in the washtrough. The children brought fresh firewood and heaped it to make tall blazes under the pots. Shouting and laughter flew across the windy yard, for hog-killing time is a merry time. The children—seven of them, with Lias’s Fairby—played at their work of toting water and mending fires.

  And one little hissing flame licked out its tongue and thrust its way into Fairby’s skirt, catching and thrusting and eating its way with its bright, forked tongue. Wind whipped about, blowing the children’s hair, beating the flames on the wood to fine, fair mischief. Caty, next to the baby and five years old this month, was standing close beside Fairby. She saw the sly flame in Fairby’s skirt; the flame seemed strange and lovely there on Fairby’s long frock; she had never in all her life seen a flame in a body’s frock. The older children did not see the flame till it shot upward, feeding on Fairby’s hair, till it leapt like a lively snake to Caty’s sleeve, dartling across her body, flying before the wind. Maggie and Kissie and Cal were yonder, toting meat to the smokehouse. The wind blew cold out of the north, changing to hot breaths on the bodies of those two children who were amazed and frightened, and so young that they knew no better than to run in the wind, with fire eating on their bodies.

  Cean was scraping a dead hog’s skin where the children’s careless knives had left bristles in the hide.

  Screams of the burning children made Cean and Lonzo drop their knives and run. But then the little bodies were flaming like dead pine stumps in a woods fire.

  By the time that water was thrown upon them, Fairby’s fair brows and long, fair hair, yellow as broom sage in the fall, like her father’s, were burned away; her little face,grimaced in death agony, was parched and dry as a fried meat-skin.

  Cean carried Caty in her arms to the house, and where she touched the child’s skin it slipped and came away.

  By nightfall, Cean’s and Lonzo’s hands were risen in solid, clear blisters where they had fought the flames on the children’s bodies, but now they did not notice that they were burned.

  They laid Fairby out on the bed and covered her over with a clean sheet. Cean made poultices and larded Caty’s burned body, and laid cooling cloths on the roasted flesh. Caty screamed and screamed, so that Cean was hardly ever afterward able to remember her child’s voice without remembering the sound of it as it fought its way out of her blistered mouth.

  Lonzo went for Margot, his hands and arms swathed in white rags, and all the way he could think of no way to tell her that Fairby was burned to death at his house while playing with his children, while he was at the wash-trough butchering a hog.

  Caty must have swallowed some of the fire. And that is ever death. On the next day she died. They had believed that she would over it if they watched her faithfully and renewed the healing poultices and brewed cooling body-washes. But she must have drunk some of the flame. And once a flame is inside a body, that body cannot live, though it may linger a right-smart while.

  Oh, it was a dreary way to go down the slope between the bare crepe myrtles, around the swamp, across the cold six miles to Ma’s house to lay away Fairby and Caty.

  The road had never seemed so rough as now. With every jolt Cean cringed for her child’s body lying hard and stiff on the pine planks of the box. Oh, she wanted to bear Caty in her arms, to save her from jolting, to warm her who must be so cold in the pine box, for she was laid out in a little white frock without a coat or a quilt. Cean would have felt better, though it might be foolish to feel so, if Caty were wropped warm against the cold.

  Somewhere behind Lonzo and Cean’s cart, Bliss Corwin rode above her child who was taken from her now in a second, crueler parting. Margot, for very pity, had said, “Let Bliss ride with Fairby.” Bliss was crying like her heart would break. Cean had cried but little; she seemed dull and blind, and her heart was a load of iron. She thought: That Bliss Corwin did not love her child as I loved Caty. No. For there were six of mine, and I loved Caty best of all. So it seemed to her now. She thought that she could have found a reason in her mind why any other one of her children should have been taken, but not Caty, not Caty.…So she thought as she jolted along the road back toward Ma’s.

  There ahead was Margot who had tended Fairby since she was a week old or less. Margot did not weep, but grief made her droop like a frostbitten weed. Margot did not love Fairby as Cean had loved Caty. Oh no.…So Cean thought. Caty was so sweet…she was her mother’s heart-strings.…Cean counted over a hundred ways of Caty’s, a hundred little happenings in the house or about the yard, when Caty had come running to her, or had told her this or that thing in a child’s impetuous words. Caty was the center of Cean’s thoughts. Here was Wealthy with her head on Cean’s lap, asleep; yonder, in other carts, neighbors brought along her other children.…Cean and Lonzo were bearing their youngest two back to Ma’s, the baby with its head warm in Cean’s lap, the next to the baby in a box in the bottom of the cart, with its head as cold as clay. Now Cean understood that verse: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” You know that it is so, once you feel dead flesh with Godalmighty’s breath gone out of it. For you can verily feel the wet earth of any dead brow. Dust of the ground wet with God’s spittle, that is all we be.

  Cean’s heart was well-nigh breaking; she would have given completely away if Lonzo’s heavy, swathed hand had not come down hard on her thigh, if it had not lain there, pressing hard on her flesh, giving her strength, forcing her to courage. She shut her cries in her throat, and watched the trail ahead where trees and bushes on each side came up and passed slowly behind them, giving way to other trees and bushes.

  But when they rounded the bend and saw the old house sunning itself on the slope—when Cean saw the familiar porch that opened now to her, taking her back home, not even Lonzo’s hard hand on her knee could hush her crying. For Lonzo was crying, too, with no sound but a hard shaking of his breath in his chest. To Cean, tears, birthpains, weariness of body, or any varied pain that she had ever known, seemed sunken away into this void where her child had gone, a void that will not echo any cry of sorrow or fright or longing.

  Above the grave they sang a plaintive psalm. Cean could hear her mother’s cracked old voice carrying the high tribble that wound above the air of the song—a weird and beautiful harmony that brought the tune ever back to a sweet, flatted minor:

  “When I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies,

  I’ll bid farewell to every care, and wipe my weeping eyes.

  Should earth against my soul engage, and hellish darts be hurled,

  Then I can smile at Satan’s rage and face a frowning world.

  “Let cares like a wild deluge come, and storms of sorrow fall;

  May I but safely reach my home, my God, my heaven, my all.

  There I shall bathe my weary soul in seas of heavenly rest,

  And not a wave of trouble roll across my peaceful breast.”

  Cean had never seen a sea or a wave, and never would she see one, but she could understand the welling flood of such a sea as the old psalm talked about. Surely there is a better life after this one, she thought, in a place built upon the white roof of the sky where there are mansions for all. Yonder is a city not made with hands where saints throng the streets singing praises, where even little children are crowned with diadems—of stars or flowers or a plain little halo of
earthshine—of whatever thing shall be their desserts. But there would be one there nighabout too small to wear even a little diadem unless it were set carefully on her head, too little to sing any but simple praises, for she was but five years old.…But Pa would be there beyond a doubt; he met little Caty at the gate and led her in. And Fairby was there, familiar to Caty; she would hold the littlest child’s hand and hush its homesick whimpering as she had done many times here on earth. And there, too, would be Eliza-beth, familiar with the beautiful ways. Sister Eliza-beth would welcome Cean’s shy little stranger yonder.

  Cean felt better about her child; she was not here in a cold box; she was yonder, learning to sing to harp music, feeling the big angels brush her with their wings. Caty would never cry again, nor hurt again; ever now she would wear a white robe; ever now her feet would fall lightly on the bright gold of heaven’s floor where there is neither moth nor dust nor corruption. Cean was comforted: this is such a mean, nasty, sorrowful world; she was glad Caty was out of it….

  But ever afterward she did as she had heard her mother say that women do—though her child was dead, still she carried it about in her heart, a dead weight.

  Cean was a little angered at Lias, if a body can feel anger in the midst of grief. He was not here to weep with Margot and Bliss over dead Fairby.…No, Lias was not here for God to strike him with grief over little Fairby’s broken feet and bright hair, and eyes soft as blue water, and gay lips that never spoke a curse nor told an evil lie nor breathed wrong against any soul. Fairby is in the ground –and God have mercy on Lias’s soul, wherever he may be….