Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  “So it’s Californy fer ye. Then it’s Ann Street, Boston ye want. I’ll pen ye word to the right place, and my Rory can give ye victuals whilst yere there. Ye kin tell her that Jack sent ye, but mind out ye don’t kiss her fer me….”

  Before Lias saw Boston, he learned to sleep in spite of horses’ hooves and rattling coaches; and ever there was new land for him to see, like as though he was sailing a discovery-ship to unknown parts.

  All the way as he went thick dust settled behind him, or mud closed in on the furrowing wheels, so that before an hour was gone, sign of his passing was effaced in late dust, or mud over a swift furrow.

  Jack’s Rory filled Lias well, and before he was through with eating with her he tried to kiss her because Jack had told him not to do it; she slapped him back’ards nearbout acrost the room for the trouble he took.

  “Looky hyere,” she says, with a Northern twang as hard as ice, “see’t ye mind yere own business!”

  Lias roared at that; he had not wanted to kiss her any old how. Never yet had he failed to kiss any woman that he wanted to kiss. This Rory was beef-colored and coarse as the sole of yere foot, and no more than a callet at long last.

  Eighty days from Boston to Callao was a short shuffle—better than Lias could hope for. It would take him forever to get to Californy, but the overland route would be nighabout as bad, and anyhow Lias purposed to sail in a ship.

  In Ann Street he found a shipping-office and a shipping-master and shipping-articles that were open; he signed the articles with his new name, Vincent Trent, received his advance, and was so bound to the northwest coast-ship Maidenhead, Joseph Tyler, master, for Callao and California, by Gorton, Dancie & Co., for a two or three years’ voyage. What mattered it how long! He was but thirty and two over.

  Rory outfitted him with go-ashore trousers and jackets, pumps, stockings, neckerchiefs, a blue jacket, and a straw hat; he stowed them away in his sea chest along with Bowditch’s Navigator and Bulwer’s Paul Clifford and a jest-book. Rory gave him the books and a big silk hand kerchief for a bad cold or a greasy mouth or any such thing.

  He learned a thing from Jack’s Rory. As he left her, she said:

  “Now that yere leaving and no harm done, I’ll kiss ye good-by to say good-speed to ye. But don’t go along kissing lightly. A kiss oughta be a tedious thing to come by.” Lias never forgot her saying.

  They made sail late in the afternoon when the sky was the color of a dove and the sea was as gray as cold iron. They dropped slowly down with the tide and a light wind. The ship stood still and the land went away from it, sinking into the water. Gray sky, gray water, gray sails curved down into night; yonder were a few lights that the eyes must strain to see, and then there were no lights.

  Wind sang past Lias’s ears; the ship settled into a gallant pitch. A sense of desolation came upon Lias’s heart—If I could go back now, I would do it. —

  She had a good breeze on her quarter, and every stitch of canvas spread. I left Margot with a man-child to raise and she will be hard put to it, for he is much like me. And now Fairby has neither mother nor father. We will put in at Saint Mary’s for water, and that will be close home, but I will not go home, now that I have set my head.

  —She’s steppin’ down to Cape Horn. Watch her toss her head and strain her flanks! But never shall I set eyes on my old mother again. She’s steppin’ down to Cape Horn. Hear her snort and paw the foam!—

  When the empty kids were sent back to the galley, Lias looked up the scuttle and saw certain stars swing out of his sight and back again. A qualm seized him like a hand that wrenched his stomach. The first night out is apt to be the lonesomest, so the men set up their voices and sang, and the sound of their singing was worse on Lias than his sick stomach:

  “Perhaps like me he struggles with each feeling of regret;

  But if he loved as I have loved, he never can forget…”

  Lias fell into his hammock and covered his face, although no one could have seen him for the dark. The men roared their songs, but the green hand did not join in:

  “oh no, we never mention him….”

  Hove to, with bare poles shrouded in sleet, she took The Horn.

  With ears laid back, she plunged and kicked and reared and leaped. The steep, icy waves all but killed her, the gales punished her, so that she was like to lay herself down dead in the water that was as black and wild as torment. The ocean froze in Lias’s hair and eyelashes, and the flesh of his face and hands cracked and bled.

  Then she shook from her wet flanks the water that was thick with ice and cantered up to Callao. Soon she scented Californy on the warm wind and went galloping chock up to windward.

  But now Lias was so sick of lung fever, or some other thing, that he did not know when the shipmaster anchored off Santa Barbara and set him inshore in a dinghy.

  There was a low sandy tongue of land and little boats were a-fishing beyond the point.

  An old woman nursed him; the shipmaster knew her from other voyages. Lias had spat blood until the shipmaster thought it scarce needful for him to put in for this man, Vincent Trent, on the return voyage; Trent would be dead in a week.

  But Lias Carver lived nighonto seven years.

  Sometimes in a bad spell he bled until his hiccups shook the bed, so near was he to death. But after these mouthbleeds he would feel stronger and his fever would assuage. Sometimes for weeks he was able to be up and to walk slowly about in the hard sunshine and to watch the bright sea that bore ships dipping upon it like gulls.

  He had clothes and money aplenty. Anyhow, these Californy people were thriftless and extravagant and kind; he would have eaten if he had not possessed a real to his name.

  The old woman grew a liking for le Inglis mariner. His sunken eyes were like those of a child who is too frightened to complain; the long white bones of his hands all but showed through the pale skin. He learned the old woman’s heathen speech from her and came to feel dependence upon her. When half his blood had gushed away as she held his head that went limp in her hands, he would lie at peace, shuddering, and was thankful for her as he had never been for any other woman.

  He came to like the taste of the baked meats, and the frijoles stewed with peppers and onions, and Californy flour baked into macaroni; but much he would have liked to taste a cornpone again, and a pot of Ma’s greens seasoned with green pork middlin’.

  An old monk made friends with Lias. His head was shaven and a long silver chain swung from his neck. When Lias was abed for weakness, not a day passed that the old friar did not come softly in on his sandals and talk with Lias of this or that matter. When Lias was able, he visited the friar in his plain room that was furnished with a chair and a table and a hard bed and pictures of the saints.

  When Lias’s enfeeble body could not much longer support the weight of his soul, the old friar made the soul ready for its passing.

  Then it was that Lias wrote his letter home.

  He thought deeply into the matter.

  “I want ’em always expectin’ me,” he said. “Till they die, they will be sayin’, ‘Lias may come tomorrow.’…”

  The monk counseled him against dying with a lie between himself and other souls, but Lias would have his way:

  “I want Ma and Margot and my children to know that I would come if I could. If they knew that I was dead, they would not look for me to come any more….” Suddenly his eyes brightened: “It may chance that I can go, after all.… My fevers have run as high as this a many a time….”

  The gray friar shook his head and shuffled his sandals on the earthen floor. Beyond the stone threshold the old woman drowsed, her hands folded in her lap. In the hot sunshine at her feet, an old brindled cat gave suck to three new-born kittens.

  As he wrote the letter, Lias had to lay his quill aside time after time, for weakness made his blood as water. He would back his letter to Lonzo, since never had Lonzo been hard against him for his misdoings.

  Tell Ma that I have got her a vermil
ion-dyed merino dress picked out and linnen cloaths aplenty to dike herself out in….

  That was all he could write now. The quill fell from his fingers and his head sank into the pillow. Cold sweat wet all his body, and weeping wet his face. His fine teeth showed in his bright beard; they were bared in anguish; his mouth seemed as though it might be laughing at some strange and cruel jest. After a time, he took the quill again:

  Tell Fairby that her pa has got boughten for her a silk dress. Tell my wife if she be willing I should wish to take up where I left off and give her such a bridal party as she will not be ashamed of. —Godalmighty knows that I meant well by ye, Margot, when I got ye to marry me!…—

  ’Scarce a week after he had written the letter, Lias fought through a day and night for his lessening breath. With each short, expiring breath he adjured his Maker: “Have mercy! Have mercy! Have mercy!”

  He could not put full faith in the prayers of the old friar, how-somever kind he might be. He turned back to his mother’s God: “Have mercy!…Have mercy! … Have mercy! ...”

  Sundown was not far off; in the smooth, bulging distance, the sun eased himself into the ocean to quench the boiling flame that studs his breast. Shaking water crumpled the gold pavement of the sunset. Lias ceased his praying, for suddenly the compelling hunger in his breast no longer tortured him. Above his head he heard the sound of a woman’s soft weeping, and the sound was like the sound of an outgoing tide’s little waves that caress the sand monotonously, sibilant, and as precious as tears.

  Little boats were a-fishing beyond the point.

  Cean had said:

  “Aah, la! In this time he is an old man with a white head and a troubled heart….”

  It might have comforted Cean to know that Lias’s heart was untroubled as he slept whilst she was here with Dermid. And upon his head where it lay encased in peace there had been not one thread of white; all his hair was the color of topazes and autumn-flowering saffron and gold leaf made of beaten gold—the like pleasing color of Fairby’s hair.

  The End

  Afterword

  As the first novel by a Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize, Lamb in His Bosom enjoyed enthusiastic national and regional attention during the mid-1930s. Indeed, its success has been credited with prompting Harold Latham of Macmillan to make the trip in search of “southern” material that ultimately resulted in publication of the next Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by a Georgian, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Although Margaret Mitchell’s novel rapidly overshadowed Caroline Miller’s in the popular imagination, Lamb in His Bosom retained the devotion of readers and the admiration of critics. In 1934, the year when Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer and the French prize, Prix Femina, it ranked first on the best seller list, and during the first fifty-three years after its publication in 1933, there were at least thirty-seven editions. The first edition alone went through more than thirty printings, followed by numerous reprintings as well as translations into French and Dutch. Yet, in the interim, by the time Caroline Miller died at age eighty-eight, in the Haywood County Hospital in Waynesville, North Carolina, copies of Lamb in His Bosom had become virtually unobtainable.

  When Lamb in His Bosom appeared, Caroline Miller was, to her chagrin, a few days beyond her thirtieth birthday. She would have preferred to have made a mark while she was still twenty-nine. This concern to accomplish something noteworthy before the age of thirty contrasts sharply with the apparent circumstances of her life at the time: wife of a school superintendent in the south Georgia town of Baxley and mother of three sons under seven. She had been born in Waycross, Georgia, seventh and youngest child of a school teacher, Elias Pafford, and his wife, Levy Zan Pafford. Both sides of the family were well rooted in Waycross and featured a long line of preachers and teachers. Her maternal great-grandfather, a New Light minister, had settled there during the frontier period, and her paternal grandfather had built the country church at which all of the family was buried.

  Throughout childhood, Caroline Pafford had demonstrated a variety of artistic and literary talents and, while in high school, had written a play, “Red Callico,” which won first prize in a contest held by the Little Theater in Savanna as well as a prize in another competition in NewYork.1 Two months after graduation from high school, when she was just seventeen, Caroline Pafford married William D. Miller, her English teacher, and settled down to raise a family. In 1936, after the publication and success of her novel, Caroline Miller divorced her husband and, in 1937, after a year in Biloxi, Mississippi, met and married Clyde H. Ray, Jr., a florist and antique dealer from Waynesville, North Carolina. They had two children, a boy and a girl. In 1944, she published a second novel, Lebanon, also set in south Georgia, which proved much less successful than Lamb in His Bosom. Thereafter, she published some short stories, but never another novel. She nonetheless continued to write throughout her life, although she seems to have written at a slower pace as domestic affairs consumed more and more of her time. At her death, she left a number of unpublished manuscripts.

  According to one story, Caroline Miller had begun to write when her children were young and she wanted to supplement the family income. As a young mother, she spent what time she could collecting stories of frontier life from her family and people in the countryside around Baxley. She would go on excursions with her children, keeping her eyes peeled for old people in old houses who might have stories to tell. Frequently, she would introduce herself to them under the pretext of wanting to buy butter and eggs.

  The evidence suggests that, from an early age, she was ambitious and viewed writing as a serious craft. Various accounts of her success in the Georgia newspapers of the 1930s emphasize her devotion as a wife and mother, insisting that, for her, womanly responsibilities always came first. She herself once noted that housekeeping and homemaking were not exactly the same thing and that although she cared deeply about making a home, she did not worry compulsively about the finer points of domestic neatness and order. Like many nineteenth-century women novelists, she seems to have written comfortably amidst her children’s comings and goings, stopping in the middle of a sentence to answer a question and then returning to her work. Even if one discounts for some retrospective sentimentality, those stories conform to her portrait of Cean Smith as a young mother in Lamb in His Bosom. But it would be rash to take them as evidence that she did not take her own craft seriously.

  Caroline Miller’s correspondence with Frank Daniel, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal who had reviewed Lamb in His Bosom enthusiastically (10 September 1933), reveals a lively, sophisticated intelligence and considerable cultural breadth. She may not have had a college education, but she seems to have read widely and paid close attention to the ways in which other writers accomplished their purposes. She acknowledged, apparently in response to a query from Daniel, that she had read some of “Chapman’s and the other woman’s (Roberts) stuff, but I always confuse the two writers; perhaps they did influence me, I don’t know, but certainly not consciously.” She liked Sigrid Undset “better than a dozen others all rolled together.” She claimed to know none of Erskine Caldwell’s work and to remember almost nothing of Frances Newman’s. She read and liked Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, but only after the publication of Lamb in His Bosom, so it cannot have influenced her.2 In subsequent letters, she referred to Victor Hugo and D. H. Lawrence, as well as to some of the better-known southern writers of her day—Stark Young, William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, and Thomas Wolfe, whom she judged by far the best of the group.3

  Early reviewers, almost without exception, praised Lamb in His Bosom, normally emphasizing Miller’s uncanny ability to make the plain folk of south Georgia come alive. And since then, the novel has been recognized as one of the best existing examples of Georgia dialect during the period before the Civil War.4 Frank Daniel associated the novel with those of Gladys Hasty Carroll, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Maristan Chapman. He praised Miller’s insight in finding “the poetry a
nd dignity and beauty which were obscured by the apparent drab monotony and bleak hardship of pioneer life in south Georgia,” and for giving it “glowing reality and a rich, lasting appeal in a superb novel.” 5 Louis Kronenberger, reviewing the novel for the New York Times, offered more qualified approval than most other reviewers, but, like Daniel, began by comparing it to the work of Elizabeth Madox Roberts. In his judgment, Lamb in His Bosom is less notable as a novel than it is as a picture. But notwithstanding the novel’s “blemishes,” “it remains in the mind a wonderfully large and vital picture” of life before the Civil War in a “small, isolated, backwoods community of men and women bred to pioneer hardship.” 6

  Although to reduce Lamb in His Bosom to yet another example of regional historical realism would be to slight important aspects of its power and appeal, the reviewers who emphasized its historical realism were not wrong. If anything, even the most enthusiastic may have underestimated Miller’s accomplishment. The yeoman farmers of the antebellum South left very few first-hand accounts of their experience, the poorer whites virtually none. In the absence of such personal testimonies, historians have been forced to reconstruct the everyday lives and beliefs of this most numerous portion of antebellum southern whites from impersonal statistics on population, size of holdings, crop production, church membership, or political participation. Here and there references to non-slaveholding whites in the papers of the slaveholders and the recollections of former slaves help to flesh out the story. But the nonslaveholding whites were, overwhelmingly, a people who lacked the time—and frequently the education—to keep the diaries or write the letters that make the thoughts and feelings of the wealthier slaveholders come alive.

  In Lamb in His Bosom, Miller makes that most elusive group of antebellum southerners, the poor whites, come as alive as if they had been keeping running accounts of their lives and feelings. Perhaps most important, she does so in a way that, so far as we can judge today, remains remarkably faithful to what their experience must have been. First, as many of her reviewers noted, she demonstrated an extraordinary fidelity to the language of those she was writing about. Doubtless her accomplishment in this regard was facilitated by the comparative isolation of Appling County, where she lived, from the social and economic changes that were creating the New South. When she drove into the countryside around Baxley, she was likely to have met people who still spoke and thought much as their antebellum forebears would have spoken and thought. And, like Elizabeth Madox Roberts, with whom she resisted comparison, she had a gift—I am tempted to say a genius—for capturing the voices of plain folks in a literary language that never descended to condescension or reduced them to curiosities.