The Common Lot and Other Stories

by Emma Bell Miles

  “Anyhow, I’m glad,” said Anselm, fumbling for hold on his wonted cheerfulness, “that we decided to come out here instead of holin’ up in Free-fight for the winter.”

  The wagon jolted and rattled over the stony road. Anselm was a sunburned, lithe fellow, with a good-humored, three-cornered face that held structurally a hint of mirth in it. His wife resented that look just now. Both the children were whimpering, and she addressed their father with a querulous tremor in her voice.

  “I’m plumb wore out with this ridin’,” she said.

  He could make no headway against her disaffection; he could not warm or cheer her; he began to feel piqued, and became sulky. It was some time before he again spoke, glancing at the sun.

  “Well, I reckon we’ll make hit ag’in dark,” he observed. “The little fellers must be gittin’ tired, too.”

  Again, when the shadows were flung far across the road: “Hit ain’t more’n two mile furder. Our place is right on the p’int o’ this ridge.”

  All drew a deep breath, and shifted position on the creaking, clattering load. Then, without warning, the off forewheel dropped into a chughole. There was a lurch, a strain, a crash of splintering wood; the children shrieked, the team plunged for a moment while their driver shouted and plied his whip. Then the calamity was quietly accepted, and all began to scramble into the road.

  “Haf to take this wheel to the mill blacksmith’s,” said Anselm, tapping the smashed rim and tire with his whip-stock.

  “And us camp here!” exclaimed the woman; but that was the extent of her outcry. Oh, well; it was of a piece with all the rest. Her lips were drawn as she went about unloading the needed bits of furniture, while her man unhitched and fed the mules.

  “I’ll go down into the breaks yonder,” he proposed, surveying the land with an experienced eye, “and see if I can find us some water afore it’s too dark. You know where them matches is at?”

  She set the little ones to gathering brushwood, and presently on wayside bush and weed shone the shaken brightness, as ruddy a blaze as ever graced a hearth. But while the woman sliced the salt pork for their repast she was moaning softly, under the sound of crackling and bubbling, “I want to go back home”; and, though the children raced to her in delight over the find of a quaintly freaked box-terrapin no larger than a coin, and though Anselm appeared next moment with brimming buckets, having had the luck to stumble on a good spring not a hundred yards from the road, her heart lay like a stone.

  All her life Evelina Kell had belonged to that portion of the mountain people who, sometimes through restlessness, sometimes driven by dire poverty, are continually shifting their habitations. Her father, Daniel Beaver, was not poor among his neighbors; he was only a type in which the instincts of the settler are forever conflicting with those of the rover. His way was to choose a piece of wild land, clear and fence a few acres, open a wellspring, build a cabin and a stable or smokehouse, raise his own cow-peas and truck for a season or two—and then, almost before Bess and Piedy were thoroughly assured of the whereabouts of the milk-pap, he would swap the whole for a larger piece of wilderness somewhere farther back, and begin the whole task anew. By this means he had owned, at one time or another, nearly every tract of arable ground on Sourwood Mountain, and, with the help of his strong sons and willing neighbors, built some twenty cabins. There is a tradition in the coves of Sourwood to-day that old man Beaver had a raisin’ every fall and a barn-raisin’ every other fall, his wife having a quiltin’ on the off year. It used to be said that his dog, on seeing the wagon backed against the door, waited no commands, but ran at once to hustle in the chickens—all save one knowing old rooster whom some wag described as meekly holding up his legs to be tied.

  So Beaver grew old in the full content of usefulness. In that land of pioneers he had been of inestimable service to his kind—like the historic Johnnie Appleseed of a more northern region. That the fruits of his husbandry must be plucked by others—that strange footsteps trod the puncheons of his hewing, and the laughter of babes unnamed by him echoed along the timbers he had mortised—this troubled him not at all. He made a good living and, with his five sons, enjoyed the almost nomadic life. But he wore out two wives in the process; and all his eight daughters had married pathetically young, hoping to escape, like Noah’s dove, to the solid ground of a permanent home.

  In Evelina’s case the hope of haven proved a mirage. She had indeed married a man in whom the domestic instinct was dominant, but Anselm was no manager. He tried work in the mines “yon side the mount’n,” and was at one time a hand on the valley railroad; he had tended the gristmill on Caney’s Creek, and there turned occasional pennies by fashioning bread-bowls of maple wood and baskets of oak splints. He had once set up a primitive jug-factory among the creek beds of pale-blue clay; and in season he helped with sorghum-grinding, cotton-picking, and fruit-packing on the valley farms. Shreds and ravellings these of any proper calling; yet Anselm was so hard and willing a worker that he always kept bread in their mouths and a roof over them. Evelina’s sorrow was that the roof should be so frequently changed; for he never attained their common desire of a four-acre plot and cabin of their own. Something always happened just when they seemed about to settle—he lost his job, or learned of a better one elsewhere; the water failed, or they became convinced the place was unhealthy. Whatever the reason, the fact was that every year, sometimes oftener, they “shut the door and called the dog.” To Evelina that proverb was a hateful mockery. Her part in the moving inevitably meant three or four days of hard work and exposure to the weather. The children seemed always fretful and ailing on moving day. Sometimes their scant bedding became damp with mountain mist. Often on the steeps they had to unpack the load and carry it piecemeal over a difficult pass. Once night overtook them stalled in midstream where Anselm had mistaken the ford. If they had a cow she was sure to break loose somewhere along the route and lead them a weary and anxious chase before they could start again. The children were all so nearly of a size that, until the last two or three moves, no one could be trusted to secure another on their precarious perch atop the bedding roll. And upon their heads was the summer sun and dust, or else the cruel frost, or a searching rain that might turn at any time into needles of snow. To-day’s moving, in fine spring weather, was an exception.

  The sun was gone behind the woods. Azalea fragrance floated in great waves from out of the hollow, and the whippoorwills began calling. The road, white as if covered thick in meal, and printed over already with little bare feet, ran straight into the green tangle and was lost; butterfly-peas and centaury roses bloomed beside the way; fireflies sparkled in the shadow. Between the oaks was a glimpse of a blue hill like—well, she could not quite remember what blue vista, far in girlhood, was like to this one. But that blossoming chestnut tree, with its clear, vibrant hum of bees in the honeyed dusk, reminded her of the one at . . . no; again, she could not fix the memory.

  “This place feels like hit used to at home,” she sighed, when the supper was over and the children asleep on a pallet spread under the trees.

  “Which home?” queried her husband, and awaited no reply. The moon glimmered through the boughs, and the camp-fire slowly faded to a skein of pungent smoke in the darkness. “We gotta get up early. I want to have that wheel mended at the mill forge afore breakfast, and git a soon start if we can.”

  So a second pallet was prepared, and on its hard, uneven length they stretched their weary limbs.

  For a time she was wakeful, while the deep stillness and loneliness of the forest night took hold upon her heart. She lay breathing quietly, lapped like a lifeless thing in a sadness too great to be altogether of a personal quality; the weight of the world’s pain was in it. Dark, still and chill with dew, swept by an unknown wind from the unshapen, empty homes of the air, the vast night hung over her—Night, older than Time.

  She waited, not caring ever to rise to a new day, praying only for the passion of tears that should bring relief. Then she s
lept. It may have been about two o’clock when Evelina awoke from a beautiful dream. She tried not to wake; her spirit strove to grasp the golden thread and follow into the enchanted country it had quitted, but roused itself in striving. However, the charm remained like a perfume round her.

  “I was back home,” she whispered to herself in the darkness. “That was it. I was back home.” Overhead the night-wind was swaying the treetops slowly against the stars. She heard the whispered counsel of the leaves. “I was back home.”

  She tried to piece together details of the dream picture. There was a blossoming orchard, of that she was sure. An orchard all light and bloom, aquiver in the sun—the one at the old Dease place, of course. Yet it could not have been springtime, for she was picking blackberries, and a cornfield rustled beyond the fence.

  Also, by the absurdity of dreams, with the rustle was mingled a drumming undertone of rain as she had used to hear it on the dear low roof by Caney’s Creek, and framed by the dark entry-vista above the purple-misted range she remembered from one of her first childhood dwellings. Through the house a shadowy, beloved presence—was it her mother, or sister Lib or Em?—had made itself gently felt; yet surely she glimpsed the sunny head of her little boy that died.

  Where was it, then? Where and when was it, this home, the centre, the very core, of lifelong desire and remembrance?

  Suddenly, with a soft, swift, tingling shock, as of a hand laid on her in the dark, Evelina knew. She became fully awake, and saw the truth as clearly as she saw the stars. This home for which she yearned was no place to be reached by any road of earth. What she seemed to remember was no single definite locality, but the ghost of fair, perished days in many dear places—a lovely composite of all the hours, perfumes, and pictures past,—essence of all she had known of love and youth and the joy of life.

  Over her head a bird broke the deep silence with a brief and delicate nocturne keyed like the falling of drops into a lonely pool. On the instant, as if at a signal, the frogs’ orchestra began. From the marshy little hollow below the spring a few piped severally at first; then followed a chorus of tinklings and flutings and trillings and tintinnabulations. All were bent on achieving rhythm and unison, and all, as usual among the frogs, gave up just when success seemed imminent. And then the awakened treetoads took up the strain, in long cool tones, half a dozen trilling at once in as many different minors. Occasionally a deeper note rang vibrant and heavy—the bass-viol of a bullfrog. Every littlest tinkle was given its full value, held separately afloat on the ocean of silence. Evelina, listening, felt the old bitterness fall from her like a broken chain. So the frogs’ music had rippled, clear and merry, from so many marshes through the summer nights of her life; wherever she had lived—in the ridges, at the foot of Sourwood, or on the Side, by the river, or on the breaks of Caney—she had heard them without fail each year. And so the thrush foretold the dawn; so the chestnuts bloomed ever in the engulfing forest; so the treetops fanned the quiet stars. And all were hers, for she loved and remembered all. These, not one particular lintel, were her home and her children’s home.

  She turned, and drew a deep breath. Over the oaks a rim of gold began to widen toward the zenith; the thrush’s harp-note rang from the creek below. She felt her soul adrift on an infinity of perfect peace and wholesomeness. The great secret had been whispered to her in the night. And though she might not put it into words, she felt that she should put it into life—a larger life than she had ever known. At home everywhere! It was given her to perceive, in a simple way, that this frame of mind was the greater gift, outweighing the ancestral acres, the broad hearths and strong-raftered roof-trees, of women she had envied. Here was her mansion, canopied by God’s blue.

  Day broke through the highland forest; and, with the pacific confidence in herself and trust in the blessed everyday world of men and things which is faith in God, Evelina arose among her sleeping household, for the first time in her life a woman at home.

  five

  Mallard Plumage

  From The Red Book Magazine, August 1909, 670–80; illustrated by F. de Forrest Schook

  “Mallard Plumage” introduces a young wife, Roma, locked into the stifling restrictions of a forced marriage to old Preacher Guthrie. In a daring display of female rebellion, she runs away with Atlas, the young man she loved before her marriage, only to find that she is pregnant with her husband’s child. Though a “fallen woman” in the eyes of the world, Roma is not an unfeeling one. Demonstrating compassion toward old Guthrie, who has pursued the runaways and suffered a serious injury in the process, Roma and Atlas take him in and nurse him. In keeping with the formula of local color fiction, Roma and Atlas display “hearts of gold” in their final actions toward Guthrie, and he reciprocates.

  . . .

  I.

  Waked in the night by the first thunderstorm of the year, Roma sat up, suddenly restless. The rain sounded hollowly, with a noise as of drums on the roof of the big log house, and she could hear how the wind exulted through the tossing forest. Slipping out of bed, she opened the window and leaned across the sill. The drops whipped her sharply in occasional gusts. She stood breathing deeply the lightning-sweetened air, almost ready to yield to the spell of the storm—to run out into the downpour with mad laughter, to shout with the wind.

  To run out into the storm and be part of it! Behind her there was the even breathing of a sleeper on the bed. She was like a thing with a leg chain, she might run but so far, then the clog she dragged would catch in some barrier and throw her on her face in the dust.

  “To fly away, like Atlas,” she murmured.

  She was thinking of one wild as herself, with whom she had once taken shelter from such a storm under the Hanging Rocks. While the lightnings flared pale green and blue and rose, he had piped for her on his hickory whistle; they sang together, “Oh Brother Green;” and once after a tremendous peal he made her laugh out by shouting, “Whoop-ee! Blow again, Gabriel; there’s some of ’em ye’ll have to dig out!”

  And the bitter aftermath of that escapade; how the gossips’ tongues had wagged, and her own people talked and talked till she felt herself a thing disgraced. Atlas Cleaverage went West to escape their petty persecution; and she had been persuaded into marrying the gray haired preacher, Boaz Guthrie. They had no reason to watch her now; she was hedged about with righteousness—and hated it.

  She was not unaware of the comfort and distinction of her position. In a locality where most women, especially those newly married, still prepared their meals on the fireplace, it was something to own a cook-stove, a reading-lamp, a sewing-machine, and any number of ducks and chickens. That these had been the property of a former Mrs. Guthrie did not lessen their value. There was, besides, something newly bought which counted more in Roma’s estimation than all other possessions; her organ, whose twenty stops and square of mirror now gleamed dimly through the dark.

  Yes, the organ would have been worth giving up much for if she could have been left to enjoy it in her own way; but in the preacher’s house no music was permitted except that of the church. Roma was forbidden the dance tunes and ballads learned at home, and provided with a number of books containing the religious rag-time her husband admired. Having learned these, she became passive hostess of a series of “all day singin’s” at which the neighbors spread a basket-dinner on the grass of the big front yard, and sang with fervor till evenfall. On these occasions Guthrie, throned in a rocking-chair and beaming on the guests, had flattered himself that he knew better than most how to treat a wife so as to keep her contented and happy.

  And after such days there were apt to come nights when Roma sat, as now, gazing sometimes at the dim bulk of her organ and sometimes at the world outside. Once, among her Pekins—fat, milk-white creatures who demanded not even swimming water—she had reared a mallard. She loved its dark plumage, the very turn of its alert head, the sweep of its powerful wings. But the wild one joined the first flock of its kind that flew north in the spring, and sh
e never saw it again.

  If a door were open to her like that! If it were only to join a flight of her kind—and away!

  She sat, until the storm blew over, and the pallor of coming dawn outlined the rifted clouds. Then she dressed herself and went to get breakfast.

  It was a Sunday morning. Attired in a new print, with a ribbon at her throat, Roma fared to church on a blanket-square spread on Buckeye’s croup behind Guthrie’s saddle. She sat through the hours of meeting, distrait and rebellious. More than once she caught herself “faulting” the want of sense in her husband’s argument. She knew by heart his round of phrases. References to “the cold-bleak-and-icy mountain of sin!” or “the teeming millions that have out-stripped us,” rang as familiar on her ears as the cracked church bell. This was not the first Sunday that she had preferred to recall memories of unregenerate days rather than give heed to the sermon; there was no real coincidence in the fact that there sounded from the woods, at that moment, Atlas Cleaverage’s own peculiar yodel.

  A patent stir went through the congregation, though the call was faint and musical and far away. Guthrie, recognizing the note, took it evidently as a direct personal challenge from the powers of darkness. He plainly began to gather his forces for he knew-not-what conflict with Apollyon.

  When, after a few minutes, Atlas’ figure filled the doorway and then slipped into the nearest seat, the rambling sermon concentrated its fire upon him. All eyes but Roma’s were turned, more or less openly, for a glance at the prodigal come back so tanned and muscular; and curiosity having prompted a first look, his mallard beauty, with its color of unguessed romance, was sure to draw a second. He sat quietly attentive and very straight in his place, showing no resentment at the preacher’s personalities. The same old neighborhood, he was probably thinking, the same group of inextricably intermarried double-cousins, fenced in with no mental occupation but the gossip which inevitably runs into back-biting; forever brooding trifles and hatching mischief!