Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  When she had cried some, she felt better. She wiped her face on the tail of her shimmy. Here she stood in the cold, nighabout as naked as the day she was born. Enough to give her pneumony! A pretty thing she was to cry like a baby! Wasn’t there trouble enough without her a-bellerin’ over it? With daylight she could load the things that she had saved onto the cart with the children; she could hitch the old ox to it—the old feller that was too old for Coast journeys—and call the hounds and go to Margot’s till Lonzo came back. If the cows came up at night to be milked and there was nobody to milk them, she didn’t know what to do about it; if the calves got lost off, she couldn’t help it; she didn’t have but two hands and two feet and one head; she couldn’t be Godalmighty out here in this on-gone place to stave off trouble; she had done the best she could do, so there wasn’t no use to cry….

  And Lonzo had done the best he could, so there! Let him hug a Coast woman if he got the chance! Hadn’t he yearned a little fun here in these God-forsaken backwoods? What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her!

  She went back and lay down alongside the children till day. They were all asleep; but sleep would not come to her, for there was yet a glare spreading all about, there was the sickness that went through her now that there was nothing to do. When the first light came, she raised her head to see her shrubs. The leaves on the side next the house were blackened and limp; ever afterward the shrubs grew onesided, for the limbs on that side were killed, and for years afterward long scars stretched down the trunks of the cedars where the meat had bulged white and healed over the old burns.

  Morning light hard in their faces waked the children. Cean fried bacon and cooked mush on a little fire near the smoking ruins of her house. When they had eaten, she set about loading her provisions and furnishings.

  No one had heard her call for help, for no one came.

  At the Coast Lonzo stirred under his quilts where he lay under the cart. He yawned in a loud, long relaxation, and stretched his body in every sleepy muscle. He must be up and about, for today he would start for home.

  From under the moss that made his bed he raked out his money-pouch and twist of tobacco and the soft doeskin moccasins that he had bought for Cean. He gnawed off a chew of tobacco and laid away the pouch and moccasins in a deep pocket of his cloaths.

  Chapter 19

  Lonzo’s new house was nighonto finished in the next spring; it had taken many days of hard work, from away before day till away after dark, to do it. For spring planting had to be seen to, howsomever other things might go. Neighbor men came from here and yonder to lend a hand in the setting up of Lonzo Smith’s house; Jasper worked like as though it was his own house; Jake strained his back fit to break over logs and beams and j’ists.

  Oxen had dragged in the logs, one at a time, from the woods. Lonzo did most of the felling and stripping and hauling alone. There was not time for the trees to cyore; they must be set up green. For this was no bridal house on which girl-and-boy love was waiting; a roofless family waited on this house. Lonzo knew well that his folks were right welcome at Jasper’s place, but he wanted them under their roof again with him.

  Through the winter, when the weather was not too raw, he slept on the old site, rousing up the old ox long before cock-crow. He cooked his victuals there to himself over a little fire, and hauled logs a second time for a second house–alone as he was alone that first time as a single man when he made ready Cean’s bridal house. It was bitter-hard work, but no fool would blame a spark for falling just so on a dry pine-needle in one certain place on the roof, nor the pine-needle for catching fire and burning on and on until the house was ashes.

  March came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. Lonzo named the day for his log-raising in the last week of the month. He killed two beeves and three shoats. Jake brought in two bucks from the woods, and went back for wild turkeys and a sackful of partridges and a backload of squirrels, and finally a big mess of fish. Margot and Cean and the children came from Jasper’s with three carts loaded with wash-pots, cleaned chickens, flour and meal, sausages and wild rice and lard and seasonings. They set up the pots over fires of oak wood; they dug out a shallow pit, laid a rack across it, and burned down oak limbs for hot, slowcooking coals. The men came from all around and brought their womenfolks and children for a great day.

  It was a Thursday, dry and mild. The wind lay, and sunshine fell in bright reaches across Lonzo’s fields. The leafless swamp lay off to itself, still and harmless now that summer heat did not draw out the malarial miasma from the mud. Lonzo was ever careful not to plow the bogs, even though they would grow corn green as p’ison and high as a house, nearbout. Let that muck be, if it would; turn it over, if you dared, and summer sun would draw out evil vapors, and the wind would blow them all over this land and country.

  The pines stood still on this calm day when Lonzo’s house went up a second time. The air was quiet save for the shouts of the men, heaving and setting in lifting the logs into walls that grew taller with each new log. Axes made the chips fly from notches where each log was made to fit into the side of another log, heart to heart, bracing one another in steadfast fealty, making a wall to turn aside the wind in its blowing, to beat the rain back against itself as it lashed in on hissing tides from the north.

  Yonder the women stirred about the wash-pots that were bubbling, full to the brim of good, rich food over the fires. Yearling-sized boys shoveled hot coals carefully into the roasting-pit to keep the heat slow and even under the quarters of pork and beef and winecolored venison. For the noontime meal there were stewed turkeys with tender flour dumplings in the rich gravy; there were partridges fried crisp and brown in hot grease; there were squirrels boiled tender in a big wash-pot full of rice. Oh, there were rations aplenty—fried fish and hot hoecakes, stewed chicken and rice, fried sausages, preserves, jars of cucumber pickles—and other things more than you could name. Through the afternoon the coals would go on smoking under the roasting meat; that meat was for supper.

  After the men had gorged themselves, they lay about for a while on the dry ground in the sunshine, letting their dinner settle. Then they went back to work while all the mothers filled their children’s hands with food, leaving themselves last to scrape the pots and to eat what was left. Hounds gnawed greasy bones in the grass. The children, thirsty from bellyfuls of rich, salty meat, went often to the spring and drank from cupped bay leaves, disdaining the ordinary gourd dippers which the women had brought for the purpose. The women babbled pleasantly together, exchanging all manner of women’s news. All the younger women bore children in their arms, and older children tugged at their skirts. When a baby cried, his mother brought out her breast for him, in a quick, rounding movement of her hand, and he sucked and drowsed with his head against the soft, white flesh of her breast—drowsed and waked and drowsed again under the gentle sound of her palavering mouth.

  When they sat down at sunset to eat the roasted pig and beef and venison, they could look on the house with satisfaction. It was done, all but what Lonzo could finish up any old time. It was a finer house than the one that had stood there before; this was a double-pen house with a passage down the middle. Lonzo could put on the piazza any old time; he could add shed-rooms to please himself; here was his house ready to live in.

  All the company stayed there and warmed the house that first night. It was too late in the day for journeying; tonight they could rest themselves and swap yarns to their hearts’ content. The boys had gathered wood for the clay chimneys that were still wet where the men had daubed them together. They piled firewood on the fireplace in the big left-hand room, and Lonzo stooped with his tinder-box and struck fire to the dead pine-needles and rotten punk and fat-pine splinters. The sparks flew, a spark caught the punk, a flame climbed, and the fire was made. Voices rose in excitement; it was a good-luck sign.

  As the night deepened, women unrolled quilts and laid pallets on the earth floor where knots of grass-roots were growing—for Lonzo would set the floor
in as he had time. Children, whimpering and sleepy, were laid on the pallets and covered over to sleep in the warmth from the great fire that was heating the room and drying the clay of the chimney hard as flint, er nighabout that hard.

  Then it was that the men began to shift their quids; and out of the mouth of a speaker would come a labored narrative of some happening on Harrican’ Creek ten or twenty or fifty year gone. As the man told the story, all other mouths held silence, save for tobacco spittle that fell, hissing, into the fire, and an anticipatory rumble of mirth before the climax of the story was thrown solemnly into their midst with scarce a twitch of the lips of the narrator. It would be rank self-praise for him to laugh at his own joke. One story brought another, of the War of Indepence in ’seventy-six, or a water-journey down the Alatamaha to Dari-an. The women laughed discreetly as the stories broke; they were but shut-mouthed listeners to the talk of their menfolks. The children snored softly on the pallets. Two women there in the chimney jamb whispered together of Tildia Comstock, who could not come with her husband because her first was expected any day; but she had sent a big pot of chicken and dumplings and a deep huckleberry pie for the log-rolling, and a ham for Cean to start housekeeping on. When that word was told, it was a great joke on Lonzo and Cean, and they both turned as red as a good hen’s comb, and laughed, ashamed. Start housekeepin’, like a young man and his new wife—the la, me!

  True, they were starting housekeeping again, but it was not the same by a long shot as it had been that other time when Lonzo and Cean had come alone to this place in the far woods, burdened with shame because they were alone for the first time and married.

  Cean’s eyes watered a little, where she was listening, back in the dark.…That was a sweet time here alone with Lonzo those first few months. A mortal sweet time it was!…Now eight children slept here on her pallets, and three slept yonder alongside Pa. Now, the space which monotony of time, and sorrow of death, and pain of labor lays between two people, lay between her and Lonzo where they sat tonight, with the width of the room between them in their new house. Their bodies were filled with weariness of labor and heaviness of worry, and slackening years that they had not borne on that other first night in their new house. Soon they would be married seventeen year. “Mayhap”, thought Cean, “my time of bearing children is over. My hair is gray streak-ed-y; my body is heavy. Mayhap I have done my do….”

  But on the eleventh day of April two years later, she bore another daughter whom Lonzo named Epsy Ariadne.

  And on the ninth day of the next February after that she bore yet another daughter whom Margot named Eliza Bethany.

  And in that same year of Bethany’s birth, on a dark night of December, the twenty-and-fifth night, she bore another soul with the hardest travail that she had ever known with any of her children. Lonzo despaired of her life and blew his own breath into her nostrils when her face was purpling with cooling blood, when Margot dropped her head into her hands and wept hard tears for this woman whom she loved more than any sister. The new-born child wailed unnoticed on the bed while Margot grieved for Cean’s dying. Lonzo did not take time to grieve; he ceased not to drive his breath up her nostrils. And finally she took hold of his breath, and took it inside her body, and breathed it—Lonzo’s breath—till the day she died. They knew that this was so, for Cean was certainly dead and her breath was gone from her when he forced his own breath inside her body.

  Hot blood came back to her cheek bones and drove out the ash-gray color of death. When she opened her eyes, there was another body beside her for her to weep over, for her to bury some hard day, or to leave behind her on some harder day, whichever should come to pass. She named it Zilfey Trent for her mother’s dead mother in Carolina; she gave it her breasts to drink from as she had done with all the others; she bore the gripping after-pains in silence as becomes a strong woman who knows that no child can be born without pain to its mother.

  The child throve, and Cean regained some of her strength, though well she knew that each time that she lay down in childbed, a portion of her strength and life-blood and time of living went quickly away as another being wrenched loose its hold upon her.

  So it happened that her first child for Lonzo Smith, and her last for him, had the self-same birthday. For Zilfey Trent, born on a Christmas day, was the last child that ever she bore for Lonzo.

  In deadening a strip of land over on the north side of the place he laid the instep of his left foot clean open with the ax.

  With a growing family, a man must ever be taking in new ground for corn or cotton or peas or potatoes. Lonzo could not say just how it was that he cut his foot; it was a fool thing to do—a grown man letting an ax slip in his hand as a tampering youngun might.

  He was laying the ax into the heart of a great-girthed pine, dead from last fall. The chips flew from the growing notch; breaths went driving from Lonzo’s lungs in soft, regular grunts. The notch ate into the wood until the tree quivered through all its formidable, many-seasoned height, leaned its branches a little way toward the earth, swung in a slow arc through the air, and so thundered down in a mighty cracking of limbs, a cruel tearing of the body from its wounded stump, a frantic lunge upward and back to the ground like a beast in its death-throe. Then, the old stillness fell upon the woods; birds, hushed and flown away at the hacking of the ax and the falling of the tree, flickered back through the quiet. High above in the air was clean, windy space where the crown of the tree had lived, roaring its needles when the wind was high, soughing like a phantom sea when the wind was in the south.

  Lonzo’s hands had nighabout lost their knack with a knife and a piece of creamy poplar wood or sweet-smelling cedar; now he had to lay his weight on the drive of an ax into a tree trunk for rails to fence in new ground. And he had only Cal to help him; out of fourteen that he had fathered, eight were female, and two of the males were too weak to breathe once. Now Cal was sixteen, and gangling up as tall as Lonzo; he could lay as straight a furrow across new ground as Lonzo could, he could keep his pace with Lonzo pulling fodder or cutting hay. Lonzo was forty, come summer. It was hard to believe, for only a little spell back he was a yearling-sized boy, whistling while he shucked corn in the crib of a rainy day, or grumbling at the gristmill as he swung the stone around in the cypress gum, filling a peck measure that Pa had set there for him to fill. Aah, la! Pa was dead since the cold, wet winter of last year.

  Lonzo and Cean had brought Dicie Smith home with them for the rest of her days, another mouth to sit at their table and eat of their victuals. Pore old Ma, so puny and fault-finding that Cean was hard put to it to please her….

  Such thoughts were thick in Lonzo’s head as he laid the trees low in this ground that was to be a new field for him to plow and sow and harvest.…Suddenly, he stood amazed. Deadness spread from his foot through all his body. He looked down and saw the ax buried in his left instep where it had cloven the rawhide boot through—uppers, tongue, and sole, and held his foot to the earth as a man pegs a leathern hinge to a post.

  He pulled the ax out, and in the silence he heard the leather squeak and saw blood well into the breach in the bony flesh of his foot. He called Cal, who was at work yonder on another tree. Cal leaned his ax against a tree and came at his father’s call. He was in no great hurry; for he thought his pa had found a rattler or a curious locust sleeping in the bark of a tree. He came through the clear, sunny air, wiping sweat from his bulging brow that was like Lonzo’s.

  He cut off his father’s boot with swipes of his Barlow knife, and bound up the halves of the severed foot with the shirt jerked off his back. Lonzo hobbled up to the house, leaning on Cal’s shoulder, resting his weight a little on the heel of the cut foot as he walked.

  Cean saw them coming; she came flying out to them like the wind, her face drawn and brown as a cured hide. Cal had never seen his mother’s face as it looked now, for mortal fear darkened and drew down her features.

  Lonzo made light of his hurt, though he was white around the gill
s, though the shirt from off Cal’s back was soaked through and dripped blood like a dead gobbler’s neck chopped with an ax.

  Dicie was standing in the door. Her hands fluttered around. She went to moving chairs, and to quarreling that never could she make Cean keep hot water ready.

  Cal helped his pa to sit down before the fireplace, and Dicie threw pine-fat splinters onto the slow fire and set a pot of fresh water to heat.

  The children crowded around. Cean stormed at them:

  “Git out! Don’t stand there starin’ like lobberheads!”

  She boxed the ears of James and John, who were slow to move away from this spectacle of pain, and Maggie and Kissie herded the children out the door, where they waited in the passage and peeped through the door crack, wide-eyed with curiosity and fear.