Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  And for Kissie’s wedding she would poultice her face in meal and buttermilk so that she would not look like Kissie’s granny; that O’Connor had said that she looked like Maggie’s sister. She turned her head and sought through the pleasant, heaving haze that enwrapped her, and found the preacher’s face and laughed into it. He answered her laugh:

  “Ye’re that handsome and sensible-hearted, Cean Smith, that I could nighabout forget me mission in these backwoods….” She laughed again: “And ye’re close onto bein’ a black sinner fer sayin’ any such a thing….”

  She turned her head to rest it on the wall behind her, and closed her eyes, curling her lips at his lying.

  The next she knew, Margot was shaking her shoulder and laughing at her for falling asleep at a bridal party. Soon the sky in the east would be gray with day. The merriment was dying down; everybody was tired and sleepy.

  Cean went out to the well to draw water for breakfast.

  She found Dermid O’Connor there in the half-light, dousing his face in freezing well water. For the first time she saw him clearly, though there was only half light to see him by. He was tall as Lias; he favored Lias with his sandy hair and eyes that were blue as plumbago blossoms. A new thing in his face held her eyes, and she knew that she had never seen him as a man before: his brown beard was cut away from his cheeks and mouth and only fringed his jaws; his face was clean-shaven all about his mouth; his lips were free to come and go over his teeth that were big and clean and bone-yellow; gaiety came shameless to his lips and stayed there, unforbidden.

  He smiled at her now with bright drops of well water clinging like trembling dew to his hair, to the clean flesh of his mouth. She closed her mouth that had fallen open as she stared at him, since she had never seen him before. She said:

  “Good mornin’, Brother O’Connor. I hope ye rested well….”

  He laughed at that foolish slip; and she had to laugh, too. He bade her good morning, calling her Cean Smith, and surprised her by asking her what her maiden name had been. She said:

  “Since ye ask, it was ‘Tillitha Cean Carver.’”

  He nodded his head and said m-h-mm. She saw his teeth catch his lower lip and gnaw it, as though he were thinking of something. She was a little disturbed over her meeting with this stranger. She had taken him to be an ordinary preacher, and he had turned out to be a man, forty or fifty year old (old enough to know his mind), who paid her compliments of words.

  She went back to the house with her mind full of the sound of her maiden name and the sight of his nagging teeth on his naked lip.

  But she forgot all about it when she climbed to the loft to wake the children and to change little Zilfey’s hippin.

  Cean and her children and Dicie stayed on for a day or two at Margot’s house, after Maggie and Will had ridden away to their home at Dicie and Rowan Smith’s place. Dicie had stood on the steps, calling advice after them: such-and-such a field would never grow potatoes—“all vine and no ‘taters; Rowan, nor Lonzo after him, could never make it bear.”

  After the younger children were asleep at night, Margot and Jasper and Jake, Cean and Dicie and the older children, sat before the fire while Dermid talked and told of this or that great thing. Cean longed for Cal to be here and hear all these things, but he was staying at home to look after the stock and fowls. O’Connor could tell of Ireland’s Big Wind of ’thirty-nine, till you could nighabout feel the houses rock on their sleepers with the force of the blowing. All Limerick and Galway and Athlone suffered in the Big Wind; houses fell in and hearth fires were scattered; the wind blew destruction everywhere like a raging beast loosed upon helpless little people whose little houses were frail as fool’s-cap in the grip of the wind.

  Cean’s thoughts followed the sound of the soft, clean-spoken words that came from Dermid O’Connor’s naked lips, and midnight would find her with her chin in her hands, her eyes set on the lean, clean face of that preacher who had eyes like a child’s, though he must be older than herself.

  Jasper might tell a tale for their ears, but Cean had heard all those tales before, from her father’s lips. There was a hurricane in Carolina in the year ’four that lifted cattle off the earth and set them down a field’s wedth distant; chimneys cracked away from the houses, and scattered fire had to be put out then, or not at all. Where there was not water enough ready-drawn to hand, by grace of Godalmighty, houses flamed sky-high in less time than it takes to tell it. Pa had told that the night was made light as day with whistling, beating flames of homes afire yonder in Carolina. And many houses were laid low like so many stacks of split pine-fat kindling.

  Down here in the pinywoods, there was a harri-can, in ’twenty-four. Cean was but just six year old then, and could just remember her ma running out of the house with Cean in her arms; Jake was born in the night of that day, and Ma said that was why Jake was puny and gal-like when he was little—the life was near-about scared out of him before he was ever born. They had heard Pa tell about it a many a time; a steady blow came hard against the house, and went away, and came again harder than ever. There was scarce half a piggin of water on the table by the fireplace; if the chimney had gone down, there would have been nothing to do but let the house burn. Only God’s mercy had saved this house in which they all sat now, recounting exciting tales of another time.

  Dermid O’Connor had helped to drive out the Cherokees from the up-country of Georgy in ’thirty-eight; they started with up’ards of fourteen thousand reds—male, female, and their young—but four thousand died before they got to Tuscumbia. They wouldn’t eat, and died like flies along the way, grieving for the red-gullied hills where they were born. Little copper-skinned papooses sickened at the breasts of the squaws, and died, and were borne on, on the backs of their mammies, till they stunk; for the red-women would not lay them down on this foreign ground, nor bury them away from their fathers. Dermid O’Connor had learned to shoot an arrow like any Indian, and in those days he could hamstring a deer as easy as he could hawk and spit on a weed. And in Ross Landing, Tennessee, there had been a prisoner by name of John Payne that could make a fiddle wail like a child a-cryin’, his music-makin’ was that sad.

  Now O’Connor was ashamed of all his wild and woolly younger days. That was all when he was foolish and adventuresome, he would say; now he was old and settled. His eyes went across the fireplace and met the eyes of the little widow-woman, Cean Smith. He reached down his banjo from the mantelpiece, stooped and threw on another light’ood knot, and beat the taut wires of the banjo in thrumming tunes that he had danced to when he was young and foolish. He kept time with his foot on the floor, and before they knew it all their feet were beating the floor and all their faces were set in smiles as they heard of the frog that went a-courtin’, um-hum.…O’Connor could throw the banjo into the air, and catch it again, and go on, with never a beat in the music gone awry.

  Cean’s face would be as sour as vinegar when he sang “Ever of thee I’m fondly dreaming.” He would nearlybout pull the breath from amongst her heartstrings, with that song, but she would give no sign. What woman could he be such a fool about, as to dream about her like that forever? Some Tinnysee lady in Ross Landing, doubtless. Nothing so fine in a Tinnysee lady! Cean might have been born in Carolina her own self, if her mother had so decided….

  Or maybe he bore in mind a rich coffee-planter’s daughter in South Ameriky—or a half-black signorita…!

  O’Connor had traveled all through the Brazils where there are noddy-birds and boobies that have no more sense than to lay their eggs on the bare rocks; where butterflies grow big as a man’s hand; where people sleep on straw mats for mattresses, and eat breadfruit and baked cassada, and call beans feijao; where common swamp ferns grow tall as trees and vampire bats suck horses’ blood; where ants build nests twelve foot high and roads are marked with wooden crosses where murder has been done; where winter is summer, and summer is winter, and cloves and peppers grow on trees like mayhaws or acorns, and cinnamon may be found
in the bark of a tree. Oh, Dermid O’Connor would tell of South Ameriky until Cean could nigh see the thorny acacia trees grown to ugly, wry-armed shapes that bend away from the sound of the sea and the steady blowing of the trade-winds.

  Why, Dermid O’Connor had even fit in the Mexican War, ten or twelve year gone, when Cean and her people had only heard that war was going on to the west of them!

  He could tell about Sam Houston, barricaded in the Alamo, till Cean’s blood ran cold for pity.

  Was there anything that Dermid O’Connor had not done? she would think. He had fought, caroused, chased Indians, gone from one land to another like it was from one settlement to another; and now he was preaching. He called himself a missionary to the pinywoods, as the Wesleys had come to the wild Indians away back yonder a century gone, and more. O’Connor knew all manner of matters. And he could sing “Blow ye the trumpet, blow!” till you could nighabout hear Old Gabriel cut loose on the Last Day….

  Here it was that he would set up a brush-arbor church; here he would set up a school presently for all the children round about who would come. Margot would have her big long-legged Vince taught free, for the use of her big front room as a school-room, and O’Connor would work in the fields with Jasper for his victuals. On every Sabbath Day that was fair, O’Connor would preach in the arbor, and the women would spread dinner on the grounds. Cean thought it not nearly so lonesome a land as it used to be.

  She was proud of the schooling that her children would get from this O’Connor. It was to be a first-class school, with everything from a fescue to point out the letters to the beginners, to a dunce-stool for the laggards. Cean told the preacher that he must surely set up two dunce-stools for her twin sons, but he said that he much doubted it if they anyways took after their mother; there would be ciphering and penmanship and spelling. Cean used to be a good speller herself, with Pa hearing her the words; she could reel off her abiselfas and anpersants as fast as Pa could give out the words. She had no doubt that Dermid O‘Connor would learn her children well; he could read the hardest words and the longest periods of a late gazette from Charlestown—or even Boston.

  After Cean and Dicie had gone back home, Cean would catch herself humming “Ever of thee I’m fondly dreaming” over her quilting or sewing, till she felt like slapping her own mouth to make it behave. Never had she been a light-mouthed woman; she was too old to begin now. Once Dicie looked sideways at her daughter-in-law from the other side of the quilting-frame; her face was sour as though she had stuck teeth into a green persimmon when she said as how the preacher would be a fine catch for some woman without a husband. Cean stormed an answer at the old woman as though Dicie had insulted her. That was the first time that Cean could remember talking so to one of her betters; she could not think what had possessed her. Dicie seemed not to mind; she dropped her face lower over the quilt, and said nothing, drawing her lips inward upon her thoughts.

  Early in the next spring O’Connor’s school opened up. On that first morning, Cean and all her children were up long before day, frying meat and baking hoecakes and potatoes for dinner for the children. Cean sent all of them this first day—all that were old enough to take anything in; the crops must wait on schooling for her children’s heads; she must spare the ox from the planting and plowing. The older children all rode away in the cart—Kissie, Cal, Lovedy, Wealthy, Vince, and the twins. She would pay for their schooling with cotton or lard or hams, or even a gold piece out of her chest.

  She minded the littlest children in the house—Aryadne and Bethany and Zilfey. All day long, the house seemed strangely still; there was only the sound of the voices of the little girls who played on the floor, and the steady ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. Now and then Cean could hear the grit of Dicie’s needle on her thimble through the cotton of the quilt. This quiet minded her of long since when she watched after her first babies in the house while Lonzo was yonder in the fields making his crops; here were the same sounds, the same work to do, the same peace in her heart and head; nighabout she believed that she could go to the back door and whoop Lonzo up from the far cotton-patch. The long time that had passed seemed not to have left any mark, but the mark was there; she felt it when her back ached with her old weakness, and when Dicie complained overmuch, and when Lonzo never came in from the far cotton-patch.

  This country was not as lonesome a place as it used to be, and that made a big difference; cartloads of children went by her home morning and evening, going to and from the school. Some children, whose parents were hardest up, came walking, or caught rides on other folks’ carts. The trail came through the lane of crepe myrtles and went away yonder to other houses. Hardly a day passed that there were not comers and goers. It was a pleasanter place to live in now.

  There was more to see, more to do.

  In June, Jake had corn tall as his head on his own land, and cotton green as p’ison in rows back of his house that was ready for Kish Acree, not half his age, and hardly big enough, Cean thought, to do her own washing by herself. If ever Cean saw a man that thought a woman was made out of pyore gold, that man was Jake, and that woman was Kish, hardly a woman yet. They two were married on a hot day in June. They were married by Dermid O’Connor over at the old Acree place. The old elder was dead, and the new elder had washed his hands of this settlement that ran after a New Light preacher.

  Kish was a sweet bride in a dress as blue as her eyes; and it was a good sight to see Jake standing there, lean as a bean pole, beside her. He was proud as Lucifer over Kish. He had to look a far ways down his shoulder to find her eyes, for she was little more than half as big as he was. She was fifteen and he was thirty-and-four; it was a matter of merriment among the young folks to think how Jake was nineteen year old before ever Kish was born.

  At this bridal frolic, Cean drank more brier berry wine, and heard Dermid O’Connor say at her shoulder:

  “Would ye ever care to be a bride again, if the right one should come along, Cean Smith?”

  Cean lied like a sinner; her heart thudded:

  “Don’t know as how I’d care to make the same mistake twicet….”

  She turned her back upon him, but not before she saw how angry she had made him by laughing away his offer. Well she knew what his few words had meant. She saw him bite his lip to hold back words that he might have said to her because she was fool enough to make a jest of a tender compliment.

  Her unthinking words spoiled the party for her, and she got no more pleasure out of it all.

  After that, O’Connor came near her no more, and she went early to the loft and lay down to sleep; but she lay awake till dawn.

  They drank the last of Margot’s brier berry wine at Cean’s house in the summer of that year when Kissie stood up to marry Seeb Ingle, Lissie and Martin Ingle’s oldest from yan side o’ the river. Dermid O’Connor was there among many others, but he said the marriage words and little else, most especially to Cean. Cean laughed more than anybody there, and joined in the frolicking until Maggie, sitting in the corner at her sister’s wedding and six months with child, was ashamed of her mother showing her petticoats in a dance. Late in the night when O’Connor went out to the well, Cean saw him leave the room, and taking her foot in her hand, as they say, she went after him and found him as she had seen him that first time, his face dripping water like a dog-fennel dripping dew, his eyes still as blue as the blue flame at the heart of a coal, though he must be a half a hundred year old.

  She said what she had to say in a hurry:

  “Mouths talk without authority sometimes…and tell lies when they shouldn’t, Dermid O’Connor!”

  She meant to tell him:

  “Ye asked me oncet and I lied to ye, for that I was so ill-at-ease.” He shook the beads of well water from his hair, and wiped his face in a white linnen hand kerchief. Then he set his eyes on her face and watched her close as a hawk:

  “Ye’re drunk, Cean Smith.”

  He hoped she would answer:

  “No, I ain�
��t drunk. I’m sober.”

  But she did not know what he wished her to say.

  She caught her breath in her throat; she clutched her hands together and turned and walked to the house as fast as her feet would take her; and shame dyed her face red as a rose. Never had she been so outdone; never had she been so sad over a little matter that was less than nothing to her. For she had offered herself to him, and he had as good as slapped her in the face in return.

  Now she would see him in burning torment before she would marry him, though he should beg her till his tongue dropped out.…But she kept wondering if ever he would ask her again. Oh, this mulling over a man would surely end her vanity over her eyes that yet were bright though she was forty-and-one year old. An end was put to it.

  For a month following Kissie’s wedding, she would not let her children set foot in Dermid O’Connor’s school, claiming that the weather was too bad. But that was no reason; before this she had sent them when they had to spread cowhides over the cart to keep rain off their heads.

  And well O’Connor knew it.

  Chapter 21

  Maggie died in childbed the year that Kissie was a bride. When Maggie began to sicken with fever when her child was three days old, Cean took the baby away from Maggie’s breast and fed it on goat’s milk weakened with rice water. Between the baby’s crying for its mother’s milk, and Maggie’s fever that would not slack, Cean got no sleep for a week.