Relieved that he had not passed the Gap in the dark, he began to climb heavily, this way and that, over the rocks. Almost impossible, he knew, was the ascent as he had attempted it. There was only one pass here, and how was he to find it in this black-diamond night? Still he climbed. It was his intent to burst open the door and cover the hut’s interior with his gun.
But he was not destined to enter so. Quite near the cabin a young tree, loosely rooted in a crevice overhead, heavy now with the storm’s burden of icy despair, let go and crashed down upon him, breaking what bones he could not tell, and burying his gun. Because his knife still remained to him he ground the suffering between his teeth. Slowly he freed himself, and dragged his broken and nearly exhausted body to the cabin door. Here, lying in the withering cold, he raised himself at cost of torture to a chink from which the firelight issued; and he could see.
Roma, thinner and yet more lovely than he remembered her, sat by the fire with something in her lap. The heart of the watcher leapt at sight of the tenderness in her face, and leapt again, as she bent to the little bundled thing she held.
For the first time he wished that he had not come.
He could not see Atlas Cleaverage from where he lay; the bit of warm, smoky brightness held only mother and child, like a madonna in a niche; but the man’s voice came out to him shaken with strong feeling.
“I can’t stand this no longer,” Atlas was saying, evidently in continuance of a conversation. “I tried to leave you oncet before, honey—the time I was out huntin’ for so long you ’lowed I was killed. I said to myself hit was nothing but a torment to live with you this way; but I found hit was a worse torment to think you might be sufferin’ an’ me not here to do my part. I had to come back. I can’t leave ye; I can’t live on with ye this way. I don’t know what to do. If there was any neighbors, or if I was fixed to provide ahead for you and the little feller until such time as Boaz Guthrie could git here, I’d go back and give myself up. I’ve studied a heap about it an’ that seems to me the only way.”
“I don’t want to go back,” said Roma gently, glancing across the fire to some point out of Guthrie’s view.
“I don’t believe,” the man continued, in a voice that shivered with feeling, “that people ever get what they want in this world.”
“I believe that if they be patient and do the best they know, they’re liable to get something better in place of it,” she answered half musingly.
“I never wanted anything on earth but you, Roma,” burst out the man’s deep tones; “you know that; and you’re not mine—you never have been. I see now you never will be. And nothing could ever take your place.”
The listener outside sank down unconscious. When he came to himself he was lying in the hut on a bed of pine boughs and blankets, and Roma was chafing his hands while the baby miaowed faintly from another couch.
“Let me see hit,” were the preacher’s first feeble words. “Mine,” he whispered to the top of the downy head. “Pore little soul—mine!”
They gave him whisky and an atrocious liquor of boiled pork rinds as the best they had. All the next four days, while the pass was chained with sleet, he lay with eyes closed or watching Roma and his child. Atlas was out of ammunition; but coming on Guthrie’s gun tangled in the branches of the fallen tree, he dug it out and with it killed some rabbits, that the injured man might have broth. Yet as he lay, tended upon faithfully by these two whom he had come to destroy, tasting the nature of their life and beliefs as would never have been otherwise possible, Boaz Guthrie felt his end draw near on steady foot.
“Sing something,” he whispered once; and Roma sang a favorite of his, “One Day Nearer Home;” but at its close he only said, “No—some o’ yore kind o’ songs—somethin’ you like.”
So she sang to him of the “Ladye Bright” and of “Wearie’s Well,” and the ballad of “Roma” for which she was named. When he lay quietly listening, she ventured on love-songs quaint and foolish with wild minors of refrain. Whether they carried aught of meaning to the dying man she could not tell. Tears gathered in her eyes as she sang.
Near the end Atlas, in answer to the reflection of a wish on the graying face, put out his hand. Guthrie took it and held it.
“Yo’ fo’give me?” asked Cleaverage, choking.
Guthrie’s quiet eyes went from one vivid young face to the other; they traveled about the smoke blackened interior of the rude nest Atlas had built for her.
“I wont say I forgive you two,” he whispered at length, “beca’se I see some things different now. I don’t consider that you done far wrong; an’ I’m a goin’ whar a man travels lighter if he casts out hate. Send for a preacher whenever the ice melts, and have me buried right; and if you will, best have him say yo’ ceremony after mine.”
He spoke no more.
By and by a puff of wind shook open the rude door and sent the smoke and white ashes whirling about the hut. It was turning warmer; and the new day shone in upon them.
six
The Dulcimore
From Harper’s Monthly Magazine 119 (November 1909): 949–56; illustrated by W. Herbert Dunton
A mother-daughter struggle occurs in this story, the title of which highlights a mountain musical instrument more commonly spelled “dulcimer.” Selina Carden has high aspirations for her beloved Georgia; she wants her to leave the community, study music, and find a life away from the harsh mountain environment. Georgia, however, has become enamored of Return, the young blacksmith with whom she has played since childhood. When he whittles a dulcimore for her, her fate is sealed despite her mother’s protestations and heart-wrenching revelations about her own courtship and marriage. As genesis for this story, Miles may well have been recalling the struggle she engaged in with her own mother when she was contemplating marriage to Frank Miles.
. . .
The mounting summer had at last escaped the grasp of the April chill, and the season’s growth came on with a headlong rush. The forest was one rustling loom of life-stuff, everywhere thrilling to million-tinted glories of summer beauty and abundance. Between twin hills that lay against the sky, dark and softly rounded as the breasts of a slave-mother, the old smithy nestled. It was a log structure, low and windowless, and lighted like a grotto with blue and greenish reflections from the hot sunshine outside.
The young giant in the leather apron was clanking steadily on with his task, albeit he had a visitor. Straight from trysting with the wind among the blossoming laurel on the hill, she came into this place of grime and toil, with perfume yet on her garments, and her dreams in her eyes. Georgia Carden, daughter of old Jared Carden and his wife Selina, who lived on a good farm under which coal had been found in fairly profitable quantities, was a noted figure in her environment.
“She sha’n’t go with the young folks around here,” her mother said, half fiercely. “Let her roam as she will; the woods’ll be all lumber and tan-bark soon enough; let her enjoy them while she can.”
In the twenty years of her wifehood, which began with galling poverty, Selina Carden’s pride had never faltered, yet she had not been so foolish as to prefer utter failure to makeshift. She adapted herself in order not to die, and she had so managed that all her children were actually rich. For each babe that came were the clean changes, constantly forthcoming on demand, that she could not afford for herself. For the new babe’s sake she forbore cruel toil a while. Later, she furbished her early knowledge to set them in the way of permanent riches, by teaching them what she knew of their immediate world, supplementing the crude schooling which was all they could have, to fit them to enjoy a life which had never been hers. But the Carden lads, as they grew, would have none of such impalpable possessions. Georgia alone, on the opening of the coal veins beneath the farm, asked the reason for the dainty fern-prints in the shale. Her brothers echoed only chance-caught information about freight rates and comparative values. Was it strange that the girl, her youngest, seemed of all Selina’s children peculiarly her ow
n—that the usual mother-dream of a relation to endure indefinitely was here intensified?
“Howdy, Return,” the girl spoke from the doorway, her light lawn dress blowing about her, the sun at her back, facing the shadows. Her mother’s indulgence had given her years of faerie wanderings and dreaming to remember; and now any day that dawned might hold ere sunset the hour of the Prince’s coming, the morning of love, with music and white light. The consciousness of this imminence was aglow in her face as she flitted across the earthen floor and perched moth-like on the work-bench, where scraps and broken tools were piled in rusty confusion.
By way of welcome the young smith fetched her a drink of cool spring water in a dripping gourd. There was something about him that seemed near akin to the silent, incomprehensible, tireless earth itself. Toward her freshness and sweetness all his being drew with a yearning like that of the tides heaving moonward from unsounded depths; though one looking on would never have guessed it.
“I’ll fix you a better place to sit,” he said, and his voice had the sweetness of bees droning in honey-drunken meadows. It was an odd, murmuring speech, coming and lapsing like natural sounds, but very pleasant to hear.
“I can see better from here,” Georgia argued, tucking one foot under her. “What’s that you’re making? I want to watch you work.”
“Jist a cow-bell,” replied Return Ritchie. “Man up the valley’s got two heifers might’ near alike, and it’s his notion to bell ’em as near the same as he can; so I’m aimin’ to match this here.” He showed his model, and sounded it so that the clear tone filled the cavern of liquid-cool shadow. They smiled at each other, and he turned to blow the forge fire. A red flare shot up and illumined the smoky walls.
With the big pincers he drew out of the coals a thin sheet of iron cut into the required shape. She watched him bend it round the anvil’s beak and deftly seam the sides before the metal darkened. Afterward he riveted the seams, fixed a staple rivet in the top to hold the clapper, and added a bar through which to run the collar strap.
“Now it’s ready for brazing?” she inquired, with interest.
“Now it’s ready; only brass has got so high that they mostly have to be brazed with copper; and copper’s copper these days, let me tell ye. You never see one made afore, Georgie?”
“I never did. You’re always making things; that’s why I stopped in—that and to see Aunt Lucy.” She looked on while he laid the bits of copper over the outer surface, wrapped them in place with a wet rag, and packed the whole bell inside and out with clay. Then he fired the mass, pulling regularly on the bellows.
“Now, when I take it out the fire,” he told her, “the copper’ll be run in a thin coat clean over hit—all ready to put a clapper into and hang on the cow. This one here’s been coppered—see?—and the copper’s all wore and knocked off.” He leaned that she might take the old bell from his hand.
“I expect it’s travelled many a hundred miles through these woods, along of the cow, into wilder places than ever I’ve been,” said the girl, holding it up. “Listen! Don’t it ring sweet?—Do-re-me-faaaa! Return, can you read music?”
“Any Jack can read them songs they’ve been learning at the Blue Springs church,” he allowed. “But without shaped notes I’m liable to git lost. I can’t read the words any too well yit.”
“I told poppa I was sure I could pick out tunes if he’d only buy me an organ; I’d love to have all-day singing at our house, and so would mother. But you know he calls all instruments ‘inventions of idleness.’” She laughed deprecatingly. “If I even had a fiddle, like yours—Could I play that, Return, you reckon?”
“You could learn. I’ll learn you.” If the words sounded gruff and ungracious, it was because he was taken unawares by the sudden opportunity. Here abruptly was the opening for which, all through the spring months, he had planned with such quiverings of hope and trepidation. Now the way was easy for presentation of his gift. Yet he found it necessary to make his approach obliquely, mountaineer fashion.
“D’you ever see a dulcimore?” he began, after a silence.
“One or two.”
“How would one do, instead of a organ?”
“It would be music.”
“I’ve—I’ve got one.”
“You—What say, Return?”
“I’ve made ye one—a dulcimore.” The new bell was imperilled while he groped into the recesses of his tool-box. Presently he held toward her a queerly shaped instrument of three strings, a little larger than a mandolin. It was whittled with innumerable patient touches out of dark-brown oak, unvarnished, the head resembling a fiddle’s, but curiously carved in an attempt at ornamentation—a thing fitted only for the wild minors of native airs.
She took it and jumped to the ground; silent with surprise, she stood holding the dulcimore in both hands.
“I sent back where Aunt Lucy was raised, in the other valley, for the pattern,” he said, uneasily. “They’ve got lots of ’em there. . . .”
“Did you make this for me, Return?”
He pulled at the bellows, and made believe not to hear.
“You did make this for me?” she asked again, slowly; and at her tone a tremor of joy went over his averted face.
“I knowed you liked music,” he muttered, as though offering an apology.
Still wondering and admiring her gift, she seated herself in the main doorway, on the sill white with road dust, and began to draw the strings into the weird and plaintive harmony of which they were capable.
Without letting go the bellows, he tossed into her lap a triangular plectrum of smoothed bone.
“You pick hit with that,” said he; and, meeting the girl’s eyes, was suddenly mastered by the laugh of utter delight that he had been trying to restrain.
A gray little figure appeared in the opposite doorway, which connected with his home cabin and truck-patch.
“I ’lowed I heared some music,” quavered Return’s only relative, the old aunt who had raised him. “Oh, hit’s you, Georgie. Howdy, honey?” She came into the smithy, and the young man brought her a broken wagon-seat. She settled herself to look over a lapful of wild greens she had gathered.
“Eh, law!” she commented, when the dulcimore had been explained to her, “and that’s what he’s been a whittlin’ on all winter. Whar I come from the young gals used to sing to them things.” She sat nodding and smiling, tapping the floor with her foot while Georgia coaxed a shadowy melody between false starts and fumbled fingerings. It was but a little time before impatience got the better of the air, and Barney McCoy fell away into faint monotonous chords.
“Well, I must be going,” the girl said finally, rising. She cherished the little brown dulcimore in tender fingers, slipping her hands softly over its rough whittled sides as though she smoothed a child’s tousled head. “Return,” she said as she turned away, “if it’s clear to-night, you come up to the house and bring your fiddle. We’ll tune it with my dulcimore then. Maybe against that time I’ll have learned how to play a little. If the moon shines, you and me and mother and the boys can all go down to the waterfall and sing there like we used to. Good-by, Aunt Lucy.”
But the moon did not shine. That same evening a terrific storm, the tail of a hurricane beating up from the Gulf, swept over the valley. Throughout the half-hour of the storm’s endurance the play of lightning was almost continuous. Between the twin hills, where it was caught and concentrated as if in the nose of the smithy’s bellows, it went roaring like a battle. Day broke nearly cloudless over the wreckage that strewed the fields. Wherever a twist of the wind’s erratic course had driven hardest, there was ruin. Return’s chimney had crashed through his roof; and the old aunt’s life had passed with the passing of the storm.
For weeks thereafter Return was a man lost in his own walls. He tried to go on as usual, but every hour of the day had its peculiar strangeness, upsetting all the habits of his life. The effort to eat in solitude a dish of his own contriving choked him. He had reta
ined from his healthy childhood a sound, simple delight in the mere round of the day; but now, from the time of rising, when the early sunbeams shone on no little gray figure by the kitchen window, with deft hands moulding the morning’s biscuit, to the sunset hour of rest on the deserted porch, nothing was as it should be.
“Poor Aunt Lucy! Jist looks like I cain’t get over it,” he muttered again and again. The presence of death seemed ever with him in its unsupportable majesty. “I reckon that’s what sets people to thinkin’ about ha’nts in houses,” he reflected, forlornly. The unlighted lamp, the empty rooms, were terrible to him. The silence oppressed like a weight of dark waters. He mended the broken roof and rebuilt the chimney; then he resumed regular work in the blacksmith shop, and frequently prolonged his labors far into the night for sheer dread of the gaping doors.
In these days Georgia made the discovery that she had, while awaiting the Prince, unwittingly become bound to Return. She had a period of bewildered astonishment. How could this be her lover, this man of the stony soil?
One twilight, between mocking-bird and whippoorwill, sitting by the spring near her home, she told him, utterly trusting herself and him. In their great moment the habit of proud reserve cheapened suddenly to insignificance, and the shyness of youth fell from their hearts as the clay had shattered from around the perfected bell.
“I can’t leave you, never, no more than if I was your mother,” she said, with quaint frankness.
The dulcimore and the fiddle lay forgotten at their feet. But the gladness she looked for did not come at once into his face.
“I used to wonder sometimes, when we was little folks singin’ by the falls, if you wouldn’t come to me some day,” he answered, gravely, with a deep tenderness. “I’ve always wanted you, but I had about give up. Have you thought, girl? . . . You must talk to your folks first.”
“Whatever they say can’t make any difference to me, Return,” she promised. “I don’t mind about the others; but mother—I’m afraid she’s going to take it hard.”
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 11