Her mother’s restless hands on the cover worried Cean. They kept reaching and reaching over the cover, caressing and smoothing, and would not stay still even when Cean tried to hold them in her hands.
(The pretty blue-barred frock fitted close about Seen’s neck, the narrow belt was tight about her waist, little bone buttons went down the back of it where her mother’s hands had buttoned it closed. Her oldest sister, Mirandy, was helping Ma with the candles; when they were all molded and cold and set aside, Seen would be allowed to count them out and lay them away in the candle-box—four hundred and eighty of them, a year’s supply. It was tedious labor; sixty times must the mold be filled and cooled, and the eight candles loosened from it and laid out. Seen would like to help, but her mother would not let her because she was too little, and besides didn’t she have her new dress on her back? Ma minded Seen away from the hot tallow; the candle grease bubbled…bubbled…bubbled…yellow and heavy and hot. Ma and Mirandy lifted the pot from the coals. And the pot turned on its side and the yellow candle grease streamed over Seen’s feet.… Then strange to say, there was Dicie Smith wiping the candle grease from her feet; and it was not candle grease at all, but syrup-candy bubbling between her toes. And there was little Cean having birth pains with a little youngun on its way into the world….)
Cean bent over her mother and tried to hush her thin, piteous screaming, to quiet her weak plunging under the cover. Seen shrieked and went on shrieking: “Oh, hit’s a-burnin’ m’ feet....”
They did not know that her mind had gone back, gathering up a horror of another time, and living it again. Their mother must have viewed the flaming brimstone pit; and the flames had lapped over and licked at her feet that were so near the brink of another world.
If the fires scorched her feet where now they lingered, slow in leaving life, what chance did any of the rest of them have to taste eternal joys? If Satan pulled Ma down to hell for the sins of her soul in this world, then must they all burn in the deepest, darkest torment where shrieks ride the blistering winds of hell forever and forever. And, oh, the thirst for one drop of water. Have mercy on me…and cool my tongue…for I am tormented in this flame…!
But yonder saints sing praises in God’s face and droop their bright crowns low before His throne. Day by day new souls lumber up through infinite space to the shining gate of heaven and beg admittance, and they are wearied from their flight, for they are heavy on their wings like birth-wet butterflies. But their weariness vanishes away when they see the face of Mary as she leans her cheek against each new face and whispers, “Hush, child! Thy little grief is past….” And there they see John, his hand clasping the hand of God’s Son, and Peter is healed of his lying tongue, and Stephen bears no more the wounds of stones. And eternal light blossoms suddenly into bright halos about their foreheads, and the sight is more beautiful than the rising or the setting of earth’s sun, or even the greenish-silver of a glow-worm’s light in earth’s dark. And the wonder of that place is that a new soul is so changed that never does he note the lack of mortal breath (the breathing of a mortal is foul so that he must be forever washing his mouth with table salt and fire coals) ; he does not miss his earthly flesh that weighted him down and caused him to sin (and was so loathsome a substance that it must be washed day by day with strong soap) and was so jealous an evil that it persuaded the soul to fear and rail against dissolution. Ah, when all is said and done, the body of even a newborn babe is but decadent flesh that will grow for a few little years, deceived by the beauty of its growth, then age in subtle corruption.
The hearts of Seen’s children quaked. Well they knew that when she died Ma would go as straight to heaven as a bee-martin to his gourd. If God were faithful to His promises, she would!
But even Ma had seen the fiery pit, had felt the touch of the flames upon her helpless feet before she died. Seen’s children fell silent about her bed. Voices of the children came in from around the lot where they were playing hide-and-seek and roly-poly.
Cean sat beside her mother, not comforted by Margot’s telling her that Seen had many nightmares and fancies to worry her.
When the others went out, Lonzo stayed with Cean in the room, propping his chair against the wall. Deep in thought, his tongue went over and over a hollow in one of his jaw teeth; he’d have that tooth pulled, first chancet he got….
Jasper went into a shed-room where he slept when he was not looking after Ma at night. He sat in a chair, and his hands drooped limply between his knees; his head fell on his breast.…Oh, his ma was a dead woman, a dead woman!…He could see it for himself; her vision of fire was a sign; she would not be here many more days.…It is a hard thing for a man to watch his mother’s last breath leave her, a hard thing.…A father is a father, but a man has lived by his mother’s milk, has gone a thousand miles in her arms before ever his own legs will carry him a step.
Margot came softly to the door; he was not ashamed for her to see tears for his mother wet on his face. She went close to him; she put her arms about his shoulders and laid her face against his face. His arms reached and held her as though he had been waiting for her to come and fill them.
For a moment he forgot his grief, and she forgot it, too. There was nothing to remind them of it. In the shed-room there was only silence filled with the diverse smitings of their hearts. Tenderness stirred in Margot like a slow quickening, as spring sap stirs low in a tree that is dead since last year, as a river’s current stirs to gather all its little currents into one long flow when it sights the sea beyond the headlands. Jasper would not let her hands go from his shoulders; the touch of her fed a hunger that possessed him; now he knew that she was a sweet-water spring, and he was athirst.
Margot pulled herself away from him. She was the first to remember that Seen Carver lay dying yonder in the next room. She was ashamed later to remember how she had fondled Jasper’s head when Seen Carver’s breath was like a brittle thread running down her throat, a thread that might break if one but blew upon it. They went back to the room, where Seen lay, now asleep. They saw Cean holding her mother’s hand as a mother holds a child’s hand so that it may go to sleep without fear of the dark or an uncertain tomorrow.
Cean held her mother’s hand so until Maggie brought Vincent in to her for her to suckle him to sleep.
Four nights later, in the blackest hour that comes just before day, Seen Carver’s soul went lightly away from her body on the last of her sighing breaths—breaths thinner than a spider’s weaving. When the quivering cord of her breath broke, her face changed subtly and settled into the secretive serenity of the dead; no least stir of restless breath broke her consummate peace; heart-worn, her flesh had accomplished its repose. She had left them behind. But they felt no fear for her on her long journey; they believed that her soul would find its way home, as a bird homes over half a world to an old nest, with never a chart nor a mile-post to show it the way to go.
Margot and Cean laid out the wretched, sore-eaten body. Had they not loved it in life, it might have brought a sickness to their in’ards to wash the withered, bald-skulled flesh.
When the body was laid out, washed clean, shrouded and still under a clean sheet, when Margot and Cean had gone out to the kitchen, Jasper went in and kissed his mother’s body on the temple, on the cheek, and wet her shriveled hands with his strong tears. For ever he had been his Ma’s boy, as Lias was Pa’s. She was dead, as he had always known she would be on some unbelievable morning. She was dead, and all her mulling and wishing had come to this—a clean sheet to cover a sight that might cause a body to turn away with a sick stomach, if he had not loved her as Jasper had.
Jasper took down the family bible and, when he had looked in the almanac, inscribed his mother’s death date beside the date of her birth:
Cean Loveda Trent Carver 9 Aug. 1790 15 Decembre 1850
By ciphering in his head, Jasper judged Ma to be sixty year old when she died. Often had he heard her tell how she and Vince had settled—in a home on a slope
from which Cean Trent could see her mother’s house on a clear day. She set poplars and boxwood, and a row of peach trees to be a screen for the cow-lot. When the roses were grown and the day was fair she could sit on her piazza with needle work on her lap and look across the roses and the clay hills and see her mother’s house set yonder on the ridge. She carried her first child, and topped her rose bushes, and looked across the hazy hills to her mother’s house, hardly homesick at all because home was so near—and because it is fitting that a woman leave her father’s rooftree and make a home for a man. Her child was born when the brier roses in her front yard put out their first blooms.
But then the State of Georgy had to buy up the Creek Indian land, and have it surveyed like it was something fine, and better earth than Carolina’s stiff clay where they lived. And settlers went south like it was something fine to do….
Vince Carver would sell out his land and move to Georgy in spite of Cean Trent’s tears. But worse, he would not stop in the up-country; he must go on south where grazing was good the year round, where swamp muck was rich as manure. Mealy-mouthed, oily-tongued land agents told Vince that you could plant one crop after another the year round, because the weather was so fine, the earth so rich. Frosts did not kill in South Georgy, they said, and children could go barefoot the winter through. So the palaver went. And most of it was true, and Vince believed it all.
But the crops grew no faster than in Carolina. As dark fell, mosquitoes swarmed through all the land, so that you could listen and hear the air beat in your ears with their high, thin singing. In a long, wet spell, all but two of Cean Trent’s rose bushes died, and never did her cedars and boxwood seem so thrifty and bright-leaved as Ma’s back in Carolina.
And Eliza-beth died and was buried in the wet ground.
The pinywoods were as flat as your hand, and were forever wet with the last rain, for there was no place for the rain water to go. Oh, Seen could never glimpse the Carolina hills from here, no matter how fair the day might be! Ever Carolina was a little like heaven in her mind—distant, set on tall hills, never to be glimpsed with mortal eyes.
But when she was old and afflicted and lonely—old enough to learn some sense—she set her heart in a right relation to God and He revealed to her why her life was lived out here in a land she could not love: four years after Cean and Vince had come off down here, yellow fever broke out in Charlestown and half the people died; those who were able to leave, fled from the pestilence and spread the scourge far and wide, even back into the hills of Carolina, even to Cean’s mother’s house, where they welcomed in a stranger and fed and slept him. He sickened and died in Zilfey Trent’s spare room; they tended him, not knowing till too late that it was the pestilence that gripped him. Anyhow, would you turn a sick man from the door, or leave him alone to die? Zilfey Trent would not, nor John Trent, her husband. So, leaping from one body to another, the fever carried away the Trents, all but Cean, who was safe away down in Georgy.
A neighbor of the Trents wrote a pistareen letter to Cean in Georgy; it told of the people that were carried off by the pestilence. It told of the word from Charleston: hardly a house but had buried its dead; all night long dead-carts had rumbled over the cobblestones, bearing the dead to their burial in one long grave. Those who were sick, and those who were left to watch, could hear the muffled wheels of the carts whose iron tires were bound in cotton bagging so that the sound of the piled bodies traveling over the stones might be stifled a little for those who listened in the dark houses. Cean Trent grieved most that she had not held her mother’s hand, nor washed her fevered face, nor comforted her as she died….
Jasper closed the bible and set away the quill and inkhorn.
He had set the last day of her life down, in the early morning of this new day, as she would wish it done. Her record was there, midway of God’s word, on a thin page that was banked on each side by the solid weight of eternal, immutable Truth.
He went out and closed the door softly, shutting away the still figure that lay under the clean sheet.
Chapter 18
Lonzo was a Democrat, though never did he declare his views. No one ever asked him to state his opinion, for he was not easily drawn into talk. But well he knew which side of the fence he was on; he belonged with the wool hats and copperas breeches and cowhide boots and oxcarts. The Whigs had nothing to do with such. No. They cavorted and pranced on fine, long-tailed mares, naming them such names as Daphne or Ariel, and fondling them as though they were women. There was one mare, Ariadne—Lonzo would have given the shirt offen his back if he could have straddled her once, if he could have felt her sleek body answer a gentle pull of the rein, if he could have seen her toss her head and shake her bridle when he called her name. Aryadny! That was the purtiest name ever he had heard, even though it might be a horse’s name; ever he had another woman-child, he’d name her Aryadny, Cean willing, for Aryadny was a woman’s name, Lonzo never doubted. These Coast bloods gave women’s names to their horses, and said such love words into their ears as Lonzo had never said to Cean; the mares would roll their eyes at the sweet names, would twittle their ears and snort and paw the earth lightly with one fine-shod hoof. Lonzo would give his ’tarnal soul for a mare to ride!
But a pretty thing he’d be a-prancin‘ around a cotton-patch on a mare! Nobody but Coast planters—Old Line Whigs—could own horses. Not all the gold he could ever manage to trade for would be enough to buy one mare. No, he was definitely a Democrat. Not even a fine saddle-horse garbed in an Anglish-make saddle with a silver horn to it could make a Whig out of him; he would still be a gawky hayseed from out in the sticks, in jeans and a homespun shirt, the smile or the grief of his mouth hidden in beard that had never felt a barber’s shears.
Lonzo hated the Whigs, though never did he part his lips against them. They were the hot-heads that itched for a war; they were in correspondence with Copperheads in the North. At the Coast, the mail-coach dashed in twice a week with letters from the North, the driver sounding the horn for all to hear. Letters came for the planters, –but never a one for Lonzo. He would watch the Coast men open their letters that were folded up like thumb papers for a little feller’s horn speller, one end slipped under the other end and sealed with a wafer. He would like to have a letter come to him from somebody somewhere; he would answer it importantly; the fellow at the other end of the line would have to pay the postage, anyhow. Lonzo was nighabout a mind to sharpen up a quill and pen a letter.…But he knew no name that he could set on the front to receive that letter. Oh, since he was wishing, he would like to up and pay his fare and ride off in a mail-coach in a cloud of dust as Lias had done! Tenpence a mile it would cost him; and where would he land up at? But pish-tush! A grown man hain’t no business a-traipsin’ off like a strange dog that will take up here and yonder, and be gone, and first thing ye know, be back again! Lias had no business gone yonder like a jack-rabbit when a shotgun discharges.
Now the Coast bloods came and went as it pleased them; some of them had been across The Water, and could tell of The King a-ridin’ to Parlymint; some had been schooled in Princeton or Philadelphy—or even away in Angland—and could reel off by rote long rhymes of this or that. The rhyme that Lonzo liked best to hear was one that a tall, carousing young squirt would say whenever he was half full of rum:
“My name is Norval;
on the Grampian hills my father feeds his flocks…”
Lonzo would hear it through, wishing the others would hush their noise. The sound of the thunderous words of the young planter satisfied some need of Lonzo’s soul, but he would have been hard put to it to say why he liked the rhyme.
He hated the Whigs, but more than ever he hated them after the young Whig, Aspinwall, killed Aryadny.
Aspinwall dashed down the street on her back and turned in a close quarter where carts of the traders were thick before doors of storekeepers; the slim, sleek beast whirled on her hind legs, showing the whites of her eyes, and came down against a cart; her left fore
leg snapped as though it were a dried reed, and she fell and lay on the earth with her sides blowing. Aspinwall knelt beside her and hugged her shining neck and whispered into her ear as though she were a loved woman in childbed. When he saw that her leg was past saving, he drew a pistol from its hanger, and laid his cheek on Ariadne’s head and told her good-by. Then he shot her in the head. She floundered once, trying to rise, and he laid his hands on her head, caressing her; her eyes, terrified like a human’s, found his face as they glazed.
Young Pope Aspinwall drank heavily that night, and cursed and puked over the table in Kimbrough’s tavern. Lonzo thought that he felt nighabout as bad over the thing as Aspinwall did; but Lonzo did not drink; he had not the liking for the taste of whisky, nor the money to throw away. Never did he forget Ariadne’s eyes as she died. Late in the night, friends carried Pope Aspinwall home, dog drunk; the next day he took passage on a schooner that lay out in the river under sail for Savanna, and Charlestown, and finally New York; he was a-grievin’ for Ariadne as though she was a woman that he had loved, and killed with carelessness. And Lonzo could nighabout understand; Lonza had heard more than one young sport brag that no woman could please him as his horse could, for a horse is dumb-mouthed but understanding, full of spirit, but ever submissive; she will force her gait till she drops dead, if it be her master’s will, and she will not complain at any saddle-gall that he is careless enough to inflict upon her; a horse is a sweet thing, a pretty thing, a long-lovin’ thing—thus thought Lonzo, though he had never bestridden a horse.
He would wish for a horse if he were a rich planter, but that could not be. He would wish for blacks such as Coast planters have, if he were a Coast planter; he would have a head cook and a cook’s helper, a chambermaid—though that seemed a brazen term to him—a sempstress for Cean, a nursegirl for every girl-child and a play-nigger for every boychild, a stableman and a carriage-driver, a gardener, and a dairy-woman; and he would have plenty of young niggers besides to drive up the cows and sweep leaves and scour the pot-things, and come running every time you clap your hands. He would have slaves such as a Coast planter has, if he were a Coast planter. But that could not be.
Lamb in His Bosom Page 24
