So, angry at being startled, she spoke to the boy as she felt, somewhat belligerently. “I’m zingin’ zong,” she announced. “You funny at me?” And as the freckled grin flashed broader, “No funny at me,” she cried, and scrambled to her feet for a charge. But she came to a stop a few feet from the enemy, who had himself retreated in haste, snickering.
“I’m ain’t go’n’ kill ’oo,” she reassured him, with more than a touch of magnanimity; “I was des a-p’ayin’.”
“Got a chip on your shoulder, though, ain’t ye?” suggested the boy.
She followed herself round and round in her tracks, like a kitten, in the endeavor to ascertain whether indeed that portion of her anatomy bore such a decoration.
“You sure have; jist look!” he encouraged her, enjoying the manoeuvre. “Well, if you ain’t the funniest young ’un I might’ near ever seed! What’s you’ name? Whar’s you’ paw? Want some May-apples?” he asked, with a motion toward his pocket.
But she shook her head, growing sulky with his increasing merriment, and stood pouting, her hands behind her back.
The spontaneous generosity of boyhood was on him, however; it was positively necessary that he give somebody something. As he went whistling on his way, he decided that it would be a capital joke to drop a mess of fish into his grandmother’s water-bucket when she was not looking.
Alone once more, Flittermouse reseated herself on the sand. The shadows shortened as she played, and began to creep from the opposite side of the road. After a time she heard a patter of hurrying footsteps, and turned to stare at a girl who seemed to glitter as she came through the sunshine, so vivid was her hair, so brilliantly clean her apron.
Here again were approaching the thoughts that had power to divide like blades. “I can’t live with her no longer,” the girl was saying to herself. “It’s her contrary ways, her weecked old tongue—they ain’t to be endyored. I’d do better to run away to the Settlemint; I could make out to git me a new dress there oncet in a while, anyways. The idy of her a-havin’ me pick berries all th’oo the season, and not lettin’ me buy so much as a yard o’ lawn! ‘Be shore ye git the change right, Orphy,’ she says. And now I’ve got to pick some more again’ supper. . . . I can git away, and I jist will.”
Then out of the wayside bushes blossomed a living rose—a child’s face, wide-eyed and wondering, but with lips curved, ready to break into laughter.
For all her haste this girl, too, paused to go through the same sequence of questions as had the other people. It was a colloquy of which Flittermouse was beginning to tire. But this time it terminated charmingly. From her pocket the girl produced a fat cooky, wide as a saucer, and gave it into a ready little hand.
“’Oo nelcome,” said the baby, with such gracious promptness that Orphy was moved to reply merrily, “Well—thank you!” She scurried along the road, tittering still; but she had ceased to scowl, and she went more and more slowly. At last she almost stopped, and counted over a few coins in her palm.
“I could keep this, and git to the Settlemint all right—git a dress, and find me some work,” the girl muttered. “But she worked for hit as hard as I did—and the half I leave won’t be near enough for her. Maybe I can stand to stay with her a while longer. She won’t have nobody if I leave. She is my granny—I mustn’t forgit that. And she was good to take me when my maw died. And the time I had the mumps—an’ then the way she stood up for me to the church folks—” Orphy laughed, and shook her shoulders. “If she’d only make up with Uncle Zeke’s folks, and go visitin’ oncet and again—Well, I vow, I’ll stay with her a while, anyhow.”
The bright future was no bigger than a flower down the green vista now. Flittermouse, having eaten her cooky, sat happy as a lizard in the broad glare of afternoon light. Overhead shone the blue day; the rustle of the woods was all about. She laughed and cooed, patting sand-cakes with her chubby fingers; she rolled over like a puppy, and sat up, shaking the sand from her plaits. Her hands were scratched and stained, her frock dabbled with mud through which she had waded.
What was there to be happy about? Nothing and everything. She might as easily have reflected that she was far from home, and found ample excuse for disturbing the peace with desolate cries. But she had, in baby fashion, the deep sense of reality that comes with joy; she felt the ocean of life beating, soft and warm as summer, strong as fate and salt as blood, all round and through her little being. Life everywhere! In the woods, the sky, the ground, it crept and swarmed, burrowed and flew; life eyeless, helpless, dumb; life of a woodland grace, or elfin-quaint as Chinese carving; life winged and swift like a soul; life, the red gift of the sun! She heard its murmur, a summer sound, as of running water far and sweet. And oh, listen!—her features became rapt; she caught her breath and sat winking in intensity of attention—the Birdy was singing! Singing to Flittermouse as if she were the world and all. He must have known that she listened, there under the rustling trees. She uttered a gurgle of happiness; he sang again. In her heart the tide of feeling swelled; it rose and rose, till it was ready to brim over into tears or ripple out into laughter, she couldn’t quite tell which. She loved things so!
Something seemed to take her by the throat, as if she were about to crow, or else to cry; it just trembled in the balance—
All at once she spied on the ground a short, thick stick or root, with an irregular knob on one end, like a head. It was much the same as any other stick, and it had lain there all the time; but the little girl had had no need of it until now. From “head” to “baby” was made the instant connection of ideas; she scrambled eagerly to catch it up.
“Howdy, doll! What you be dere for?” she inquired. “’Ish is doll. I’m rockin’ little doll; rocky-bye—” and before she knew it, Flittermouse had, like the bird, turned the almost unendurable tension of the moment into song. A queer song, bubbling tuneless but sweet from her plump throat, its words mixed up of two Mother Goose jingles learned from the older children:
“Rocky-bye—wind blow,
We sha’ have ’now,
C’adle rock: p-o-o-oh shing,”
over and over. She wrapped the doll in as much of her short apron as she could well get hold of, and rocked and crooned, her round knees showing like two eggs beneath the hem of the scarlet garment she always spoke of as her peckitoat. She sang to the bit of wood in her arms, but it was her own body that responded to the lullaby. It became increasingly difficult to hold the doll in its cradle. The firm earth bore her up so strongly; the sky watched her with measureless kindliness. It was as though she for once usurped the place claimed of late by little-Man-alive, and lay clasped in her mother’s arms. A good spot for a nap. But this reminded her that she was sleepy, and sleep, she knew, was what ended each one of her beautiful days. She struggled to her feet, resolved to fight, this time with all her strength. She would not tamely submit to see this delicious hour snatched into oblivion!
But it was already drawing to a close. The touch of antagonism, as soon as she said to herself “I won’t,” shattered the whole lovely structure, like the fairy palace of frosted glasses that brother Joe had once brought in and set beside the fire. She found the same old weariness and disillusion that made sleepy-eye time coming upon her, eclipsing her happiness as usual. And she had supposed it would last forever, this beautiful runaway day!
She began to cry, heartily, as she did everything else, with a view to rousing succor from somewhere. Her way in trouble was to appeal vigorously to the cosmos; it had never failed her yet.
It did not now. From a hitherto unperceived by-path came stepping a quaint little old figure carrying a huge pail of blackberries and clad in a sunbonnet, neckerchief, and straight-gathered calico dress. A face with twinkling blue eyes peered out between gray curls—a face like a Limbertwig apple that has hung into November and shrivelled with all its keen flavor retained inside. Flittermouse ceased her wailing, and gave the newcomer a glance of recognition, not of the individual, but of the type. Through tear
s she even smiled, with a little gasping cry of relief, as if at sight of some one she loved. This was a Grandma.
“Why, what’s the matter with a little gal, out here all by herself?” asked the old woman, in a true grandma tone. “Air you lost from home?”
“Want a d’ink!” Flittermouse offered that as the most expressible and instant of her woes.
“All right; we’ll jist go and find one,” comforted the Grandma. “What’s yore name, honey? Whose little poppee-doll air you? Tell Aint Cynthi’ yore name!”
She set down her pail, and the mite, with a confidence born of long petting, instantly attacked its contents.
“Flittermouse,” the red lips replied, juicily, between berries.
“And whar’s your Pappy?”
She gave the same vague answer she had given several times already. It did not, however, deceive Aunt Cynthi’ in the least.
“Well, is that all the name you got? Don’t Mammy call you something different when she scolds ye?”
Now it so happened that this little maid who fared forth so bravely into unknown lands that summer day was afraid of her real name. She wouldn’t for any thing have attempted it. Her tongue had a trick of transposing sounds that sometimes got her into difficulties; and at best this making people understand was the most serious and complicated business she had encountered in her life. So she remained silent, helping herself industriously, contentedly, from the berry bucket.
“And how’d you git here?” marveled old Cynthi’ Macklin, half to herself.
With a momentary return of the morning’s exuberant spirits, Flittermouse threw her arms up and down and laughed out. “Des flyed away!” she said.
“Uh-huh! An’ air you aimin’ to fly back? You ‘des’ better fly along home with me, till I can find out who wants ye the wust,” cooed the old woman, deep in her throat, fond blue eyes on the baby.
But this it appeared the tired child was unable or unwilling to do. They made two or three starts, but each time Flittermouse lagged and came to a whimpering stop.
Cynthi’ was in a quandary. Neither the child nor the berries might safely be deserted, and she could not carry both. “If that triflin’ Orphy was with me,” she thought. “But thar! the gal’s but a gal. I mind when she looked so much like this ’n’ nobody could ’a’ told ’em apart.”
She was on the point of hanging the bucket in a tree, to be out of harm’s way until she could come back for it, when she had an inspiration. At a wet-weather spring that trickled from a bank she dipped a corner of her apron and washed the dusty, berry-stained little face (“Ain’t go’n’ ky,” said Flittermouse, heroically, mindful of past struggles), and, taking advantage of the refreshment temporarily afforded by this process and by a drink from a leaf cup, she mounted the two tired legs astride a good sized stick-horse, which pranced over the remaining distance without a sign of fatigue.
They turned in at a wooden gate half buried under honeysuckles. A house peeped at them through a screen of cherry trees beyond. For all her light-heartedness in wandering, Flittermouse went suddenly limp all over at the thought of getting somewhere at last. There were other houses in the neighborhood, of course, but they sat aloof to the right and left of the road along which she had come, wherever was a sheltered lap of the hills or a spring hollow. The little girl yawned, her mouth opening like a hollowed rose, the tongue curling up as it were a single interior petal; and “I’m zo-o-o zeepy!” she complained, toddling after Cynthi’ up the path.
She was hardly able to make away with the bread and butter she presently found in her hand. Sitting on the porch, she drooped and nodded over it, only half aware that a cheery old voice was recounting a story for her benefit: “And the fire began to burn the stick, the stick began to beat the dog, the dog began to bite the pig, and the pig began to go-o!” After a while, in the big log room, Cynthi’ Macklin stood looking down at a dimpled brown body relaxed in the depths of her feather bed. So heavy with sleep, so rosy and fragrant! She had almost forgotten what a bit of sweetness and tenderness a baby could be. She noticed how the long lashes swept the cheeks, how the under lip pushed the other slightly out of place, like a twisted azalea bud.
“She does favor Orphy when she’s a baby; an’ then agin, she’s jist about the age o’ Sam’s Dythie,” the old lips murmured, as Cynthi’ bent to lay a cloth over the slumber-flushed face. “Jist about her size. Eh-law! I’ll ventur’ Dythie’s forgot me—wouldn’t reco’nize her granny a-tall. I’m e’en-about minded to go over and see Zeke’s folks a-Sunday, me and Orphy. Ef hit wasn’t for that no-’count boy o’ his’n—they ort to put him to hoein’ corn. I seed him go on this morning with a pole and a canful o’ red worms.”
She tiptoed away, turning to dip a gourd of water from the shelf by the kitchen door.
“Well!” she exclaimed, in astonishment. The gourd remained poised as she stared into the bucket. There, in the clear water, swam at some inconvenience a couple of shining perch.
“Well!” she said again. “That boy! . . . I will go over thar, come Sunday.” A smile spread slowly across her features, twinkling from her eyes in a sapphire gleam, seaming her pink cheeks into kindlier wrinkles than Orphy, just coming in with her afternoon harvest of berries, had ever suspected there.
“H’sh, Orphy,” was the grandmother’s greeting. “I got me a baby in here, asleep.”
“I’ll bet hit’s the little gal that was playin’ in the road,” the girl whispered, tiptoeing in to look. “Whose is she?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out, I reckon,” the elder returned. “But see here what some one fetched us for supper! Now, Orphy, you blow up the fire, and I’ll be in therectly to holp ye fix ’em.”
She left the house, to lean over the front gate. Chestnut flowers were falling noiselessly through the dusk beneath the trees; old memories came to her on the perfume of these and the honeysuckles, now heavy with the approach of evening. She heard the deep brass of cow-bells, sounded from winding paths that led up out of the creek; fireflies began to sparkle in the shadowed grass. She might have been a maid harkening for her lover’s footfalls, so youthful a brightness shone in her eyes.
By and by the old man whom Flittermouse had first met was seen returning at the same plodding gait. Cynthi’ hailed him with a question—an inquiry that made both forget the occasion of their last meeting. John Provine responded with grave interest. No, he couldn’t say whose little gal had run away; he had seen one up yon a piece this morning, but had heard no stir of searching. No, he couldn’t come in, he was belated already, settling with a feller that owed him for some lumber—been around and let him have a ixtension of his note, like a old fool. N-no, he’d be late to supper—“and then like as not Sis’ Betty she’d take ’n’ set hit off the table; you know she’s kind o’—No, thank y’. Well, I don’t know jist—”
He found himself edging through the vine-bound gate, setting himself erect, and getting hold of his most stately manner. The gray curls that topped Aunt Cynthi’s alert head quivered as their wearer fluttered to the house; she seated her guest in the place of honor on the porch, and took advantage of a half-audible sigh from the sleeping child to run in and slip on—a bit of youth, of tender sentiment, of wistful remembrance, made visible—the lace collar that she had worn when a girl.
“And, Orphy, honey—if you’ll hurry and make up some o’ your best biscuits, and set on a jar of cherry preserves, I’ll—I’ll git ye a new dress in time for us to go to your Unc’ Zeke’s a-Sunday,” she whispered, through the half-open door.
“Good gal to work, ain’t she?” commented Provine, as the spirited old belle settled herself in the rocker opposite of him. “She’s shore goin’ it lively at that supper gittin’. Her feet sounds like she was a’dancin again.”
“I’m afeared you ’n’ me ’ll git into a argu-mint if we set here too long, so I told her to hurry up a bite for us,” Cynthi’ answered, twinkling. “Do you ricollect, John Awthur, the first quarrel we ever had?�
�� Her cheeks were even pinker as she put the question. “We’ve been quar’lin’ ever sence.”
But there was no answering gleam of fun in his face. He made one or two efforts to speak, failed, and finally brought out: “I been sorry a thousan’ times about that. You was half promised to marry me, Cynthi’—and then you went and took Macklin.”
“Air you sorry you called me a witch?”
“I wish somebody’d a-whupped me right thar when I done it. I do, I do, shore. Might ’a’ learnt me some sense. Cynthi’,” he stole a glance at her half-averted face, “you—you’re the only—”
“Thar—thar’s—I do b’lieve thar’s Clay Sanders a-comin’ home from work,” she cried, jumping up nervously as a girl. “Let’s us ask him about this here baby.”
So it came about that Flittermouse, feeling herself swung into a well-known resting place, was not put to the trouble of opening her eyes. She had followed the beckoning of fate that day, and traversed a wider circuit than she would ever know, carrying, all unconscious, her lamp of love and joy and innocence to light sundry dark places.
Flittermouse snuggled closer on the big shoulder, and murmured drowsily:
“Oh, Pappy, I’m des been a-coming—tell ’oo—dot sz-z-schick’n for zupper.”
And Aunt Cynthi’, hearing the gate close behind the pair, turned to the man beside her and asked coyly, “Do you ricollect ever seein’ me wear this here collar before, John Awthur?”
nine
Three Roads and a River
From Harper’s Monthly Magazine 121 (November 1910): 882–89; illustrated by Howard E. Smith
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 15