One of Miles’s strongest stories in both plot and craft is “Three Roads and a River.” She again develops a marriage and family theme, but the dominant factor experienced here is galling poverty. The proud and previously independent Hutson family suffers the loss of their livelihood when a new government bridge across the river eliminates the need for ferry service and road maintenance. Both Shell Hutson and his father, old Zion the patriarch, feel a pressing responsibility to provide for their loved ones. Each engages in actions he would never consider under normal circumstances, resulting in dire consequences. Though Miles cannot resist exercising her “happy-ending” penchant, the tension and climactic outcome of this story place her squarely in the camp of naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane.
. . .
Before the cabin ran the wild mountain stream, its dark-green water, wonderfully clear, sliding under steep banks overhung with thickets of laurel. Just here, after fretting for miles against the bluff, its current swung wide over the shallows and rippled quietly up the shore; up to where the rude raft that was Hutson’s Ferry lay idle under a leaning service-tree tasselled now with silvery bloom. The warm sweet tide of spring was rising in the valley, its line of advance visible far up the mountainside in the shapely gold-green tops of tulip trees. But for the first time in fifty springs no quickening of travel was perceptible at this centre of the fan-like network of trails that threaded the ravines and ridges. The government had last year flung a bridge across at the Narrows, where four pines stood black against the tender opalescent mists of the April sunset. And the government’s new highway, unmindful of the fate of Hutson’s log house and its inmates as of an unfortunately placed ant-hill, cut diagonally across the old road which Hutson’s grandfather had built before the war. It shortened the distance between town and settlement by several miles; and even if it had not, what countryman laden with game or produce but would ride out of his way if need be to escape the payment of ferriage and toll?
So, instead of hailing his acquaintance from the toll-shack—which had latterly been put to use as a chicken-shed—old Zion Hutson brooded in his doorway and smoked all through the long spring mornings. The road which his son Shell had been wont for a livelihood to keep in tolerable order was rapidly becoming impassable. Thus seated, the old man could pretend to forget the woful ruin, since it was out of sight; but from the field spring it showed for a long way up the mountain, a mangy scar, worn more rutty and sidling by every rain. And farther up, he knew, the “corduroys” were rotting, and overhanging stones were being let down one by one in frost and thaw.
The winter had been a hard one for a valley in this latitude. Grandmother Hutson, unable to endure it, died of “winter fever” and lack of proper nourishment, and the old man, lost without his mate, was daily becoming feebler. “Every change o’ the moon takes something out o’ him,” said Ona. He muttered to himself continually as he smoked and drowsed in the sunshine; sometimes he broke into curious fragmentary prayers. He was being shredded of his wits by the dragging days.
There was little to eat in the house. To old Zion, who used to kill from five to ten hogs every Thanksgiving, the fact of being without meat was incomprehensible. His mind reverted again and again to the subject, trying to account for the omission of killing-day from the winter’s calendar. He seemed to believe that it was in some way Shell’s or Ona’s fault.
“I don’t see what ever could a-went with that big barrer,” he would begin, fretfully. “Last time I seed that hog was—” and he would recount time and place with circumstantial detail.
“Why, pap, I’m satisfied the pigs all died up in that bad spell in Jiniwary, same as the bees did,” Shell would explain.
“Ef there’d a-been any mast last fall, they’d a-lived through.” The old man always accepted Shell’s view until next time.
“Yes, ef there’d a-been any mast.”
“Anyhow y’uns missed hit by sellin’ ol’ Piedy.”
Here Ona, who on her children’s account needed the cow sorely, turned consoler: “We couldn’t a-kep’ her through, pap.”
“Well,” he grumbled, “ye might a-made hit th’oo Jiniwary with her on what crab-grass ye’ve got stuffed in them two straw-ticks. We-uns could a-slep’on saidge-grass or leaves.”
They forbore to argue, and old Zion relapsed into silence.
The orchard came out bravely in its spring array, and Ona helped her husband dig up a truck-patch and plant it with the seed saved from last year’s garden—beans, beets, and okra, pumpkins and cucumbers, and a larger patch of cow-peas and field corn; but seed potatoes or onion sets were not to be thought of. The meal was low in the barrel; the coffee was out. There was only a little sorghum, a little lard—salt in the piggin, and vinegar in the keg. Ona felt more frightened at this state of affairs than either of the men.
The two children alone remained outside the shadow that rested on the house. Behind the kitchen was an old Limbertwig whose branches swept the new grass in a circle round the body of the tree; and within this flowery screen they made a playhouse with piled stones and broken crockery, and moss from the spring branch, and early flowers—Sunday-shirts, fish-blossoms, rooster-fights, and wild honeysuckles, stuck into a rusty baking-powder tin. Here they frolicked as though the crumbling smokehouse contained all the plenty of former years. One rainy day they fretted at being housed, till their mother threatened to shut them in the toll-house with the chickens. She put them to bed an hour early, and sat with folded hands before the fire. The darkness was turbulent with rushes of rain, alternating with whooping gusts. Early in the evening had been far-away gleams of lightning and half-heard thunder; but now it was turning cold.
Presently Shell entered, and drawing the loose brands and the forestick forward, threw a thick log on behind.
“Now, Shell, you haul them chunks out,” remonstrated old Zion from the shadows of his corner. “You know the sayin’, ‘A house built over stumps never stands, and a faar built over chunks never burns.’”
“Turned a right smart colder, ain’t it?” asked the woman, anxiously.
Shell nodded. “Gwine to be a freeze, I’m afeared.”
“Blackberry winter!” muttered old Zion.
“That frost last week only peenched the peaches some. But this here—” Shell’s gaze went out the little storm-beaten window, and returned to the bed where his children lay. The danger was too grave for many words. So much depended on the orchard’s yield.
Ona, in the firelight, crouching, looked up at her husband. Woman-like she took little count of her own plight; but the sight of her man ragged and hunger-bitten filled her with pity and dismay.
“I wrote to Nettie a-Tuesday,” she said, abruptly, breaking a silence. “I ’lowed she’d maybe holp us out some—till the gyarden truck begins to come in.”
“Well, shorely ’n’ ondoubtedly she will,” put in the old man. “Did ye tell her I ain’t got no tobacker?”
“Why, she’ll know in reason you ain’t,” said Ona, smiling.
“Ne’er a chaw!” said old Zion, plaintively.
“A-Tuesday—then she ort to git the letter afore this time, I reckon,” said the younger man, kicking the forestick and sending up a crackle of sparks. He was ashamed to show the relief he felt at this slender hope.
“She may holp us out till the gyarden comes in.”
“Yes, till the gyarden truck comes in.”
“I heard Steve Miller was a-doin’ well.”
“Lord! thirty dollars a month, and nobody to keep but them two.”
“Well, he does send some home to his mother,” said Ona. “But I hope he can make out to spar’ us a little.”
She got up and went into the dark inner room to get a drink. Something crackled ever so faintly under the gourd as she dipped it. Was it a leaf? A dry leaf that had fallen into the bucket on its way from the spring? Forgetting to drink, she felt over the surface of the water with trembling fingers. Even then she refused to be convinced; she
obtained a sliver of fat pine and lit it at the hearth.
“What you lookin’ for?” asked her husband.
“I—dropped the gourd,” she replied. By her miniature torch she examined the thin crystals fast forming round the sides of the bucket. There was no mistake.
“Hit’s a-freezin’,” she whispered, through dry lips. “Hits’s a-freezin’.” Extinguishing the little flame, she stood staring into the darkness. Their only hope lay now in Nettie’s generosity.
“But she cain’t, she couldn’t keep us that long. We’ll have obleeged to—move. Shell can maybe git work in town, where her man is . . .”
A knock, sounding above the drumming rain, brought her hastily into the main room. Shell flung the door wide; and, pushed by the storm, a woman staggered across their threshold. She reached the fire and crouched over its red warmth with a little moaning cry before throwing back the shawl from her haggard young face and dripping hair.
“Nettie! Lord, if hit ain’t Nettie!” cried Ona.
“Why, we-uns was jist a-talkin’ about ye!” quavered Nettie’s father.
“You sick?” inquired Shell, briefly.
“Well, up-on my soul! what you out in this rain fur? Ain’t ye might’ near dead?” Ona advanced toward the newcomer, trembling, incredulous.
“I rode as fur as the nigh cut in a huckster’s wagon,” answered Nettie, spreading her shaking hands almost in the flame, avoiding the gaze of all. “But I got wet walkin’ the rest of the way. Hit’s a-sleetin’ now—freezin’ up everything.” She folded her arms on her knees and bowed her head upon them. “I don’t know what y’uns ’ll think o’ me comin’ home like this, pap; but I didn’t have no place else to go.”
“Why, Nettie! what’s the matter?” Ona crouched beside the shivering form and touched her sister-in-law gently. “Come, honey, git up and set in a chair.”
“Steve he’s gone,” explained Nettie, without raising her face. “Nobody don’t seem to know where. He couldn’t make nothin’ after the mill shet down, and he got out o’ heart. I reckon he may have went to look for work som’er’s. But people there got to makin’ a mock o’ me, and I couldn’t let on no longer to know where he was at, so I come home for a while, till I hear from him. Oh, my Lord, how I suffer!. . . . I didn’t have no other way to turn.”
“There now! there now!” Ona patted the heaving shoulders, but her own heart sank. The wind, as always before a cold wave, made nightmare sounds over the chimney, hooting like the great ghost-owl of Cherokee myth; the sleet in a fiercer gust leaped and clawed beast-like at roof and door.
“You better fix her a bed, Ona, and a hot drink,” said Shell.
“There ain’t no coffee,” his wife reminded him, going to her store of quilts.
There was a new sound in the cabin before the close of another day—a pinpoint wail stabbing the vast mountain silence, a cry of unnameable desolation, a protest, bitter and piteously thin, against the untried task of living. Ona alone tended on the helpless two. Ere the lean years had gnawed away their substance, the Hutsons had fronted their world with a gay independence, a cheery arrogance which neither asked nor gave; they would not now cry for help. And since latterly Zion had relinquished his post as autocrat of affairs religious, the three or four neighbors, a few miles up river and down, had more than ever got into the way of letting them alone. So Ona and Nettie won through the terrible hour unaided.
The sun on the evening of the birth set golden fair, but it was on a blighted garden. The orchard was a spectacle of marvellous beauty—bough after bough sheathed in clear ice ere a bud could shrivel or a petal fade; fairy gold, sure to melt with dawn. Shell broke a glittering spray and fetched it in for the women to look at.
That week saw the last of Ona’s chickens, each of which tided the family over another day and furnished Nettie a bowl of broth. Old Zion almost forgot his longing for tobacco in his joy at seeing his daughter at home; but Shell and his woman, needing every bite for their own little ones, could give scant welcome to another mouth. The situation was managed, however, with the adroitness usual to the mountaineers, and it was not until she was up and about again that, in helping with the housework, Nettie discovered their extreme necessity.
She felt bound to speak of it. The two women were sewing, having found some old things that could be cut into little garments. The light from the doorway fell upon their glinting needles; the air came in softly, as if no blade of frost had mowed the land.
“Yes—two days more, and there won’t be even pones and white gravy,” Ona confessed.
Nettie swayed gently the little bundle in her lap beneath the sewing. “Nor no more white beans like we had yesterday?”
“I borrowed that mess from Mis’ Nicklin; I’ve done borrowed of her till I’m pine-blank ’shamed to show my face there any more. Howsomever, I got obleeged to go som’er’s to borrow some for seed.”
“You got nothin’ to plant again?”
“Little okra, and some beet seed, that’s all. Shell, why’n’t ye kill some rabbits?”
The man addressed lifted his head and stared sombrely out upon the barren field next the river. “I ain’t got more’n three charges o’ powder.”
“Well, ketch a mess o’ them little bony pyerch, then. Lord! we cain’t give up.”
“Used to be,” piped old Zion, suddenly, “that a man here could go out and kill him a deer or a turkey afore breakfast.”
Shell took down his gun from the rack over the fireboard and fared forth. All that day he was gone. When he returned, after dark, he flung down something heavy, slamming it on the kitchen table without a word. It was a shoat he had killed. It looked to Zion much like one of the Nicklins’; but the head, which might or might not have borne the Nicklins’ earmark, was missing.
“Shot all to pieces,” the hunter explained to the womenfolk.
There were pots full of pork and strong gravy now; but this was not the food needed by the young ones, who soon began to look puny and downcast. So Nettie, leaving her baby in Ona’s care, went far and wide, foraging in all fence corners and under sunny banks for frost-nipped shoots which the sun had coaxed out afresh. These salads, deliciously contrived with salt, vinegar, and dripping, eked out their fare for many days; and meantime, as Nettie was fond of pointing out, the bean vines came apace. Only in the young mother’s sea-colored eyes was a radiance of hope; her spirit was as bright against the others’ moping as her hair against the smoky interior of the cabin.
Ona was frying the last of the meat (they had traded a quarter to some camping hunters for meal), when the little boy ran to her crying, “Mammy, I’m find somep’n.” He showed a handful of crumpled green tips. “In gyarden.”
His mother could not restrain a cry of delight. “Them white multipliers o’ ma’s—and pa’snips! Oh, I do hope there’s enough for a mess—”
The child, elated at having produced a sensation, went to point out his trove among the dry stalks and kecksies of the unploughed field; and that day Ona surprised the family with vegetables for dinner. “Hit ain’t a mess—jist a bite around,” said she. But Nettie slipped her portion on to the children’s plates.
It was two or three days after this that her own baby began the continuous moaning fret of hunger. She looked upon him in despair.
“I’d take ’nd wash that baby in the deeshwater if he was mine,” said Ona. “That was my mammy’s rimidy. I couldn’t count ye the peakid babies she fattened that way. Hit’s greasy, you know, and they git the stren’th of hit.”
“There cain’t be a great deal o’ stren’th in our deeshwater,” said Nettie, walking the floor with her child. She had maintained that same unavailing pace for hours.
“Eh-law!” said the other mother, watching her. “Children never pays for their raisin’.”
“They do!” flashed Nettie, lifting the downy head to her cheek. “Mine evens up hits little account with me every day of hits innocent life.”
That same evening Shell returned from a thre
e days’ quest for work.
“Nobody wouldn’t talk to me about hit,” he said. “Where I wasn’t knowed at sight they taken me for a tramp. I heared the’s men now a-walkin’ the streets in the Settlemint, so I never went there. But a feller told me of a womern furder on that lived by herself and wanted a man to take charge of her place. Well, I went plumb on out there, and she—she—sicked the dawg on me.”
He fell silent, but the two children burst into sobbing.
“Pappy—never—brought us nothin’!” cried the little girl, burying her head in her mother’s lap.
Shell Hutson stood up. His face became terrible. Ona shrank away from him affrighted for a moment; but all he said was: “Oh, baby! Honey!”
Then he went out. The children cried themselves into a restless sleep. Though the two women sat beside the hearth till daybreak, Shell did not come in again.
There was meal gruel for breakfast, and in the cloudy dawn old Zion set forth with knife and basket, having bethought himself of a burnt cabin down the river where might be found yet another mess of poke salad. It was a dark morning, the sheet of cloud drawn smoothly over from the west; for all daylight a low pale illumination streamed from beneath its fringes that swept the eastward forest. Sounds came far through the heavy atmosphere; he delayed his plodding more than once to hear, with a deep despondency, the wheels of laden wagons crossing the government’s bridge, like the very car of progress leaving him and his in its desolate wake.
He was not disappointed; round the cinder-strewn area stood plant after lusty plant, fresh and succulent as anything ever forced under frames for a city market. As he sat resting on the doorsill of an outhouse which the flames had spared, the glint of a bottle, thrust in a high chink and forgotten, caught his eye. Old Zion reached for it in hope of finding whiskey; but the contents turned out to be a dark fluid of sinister strength, some unknown chemical, at which he sniffed gingerly, till the skull and crossbones on the label apprised him of its dangerous nature.
“Wow! Hit’s a good thing I didn’t take a swaller ’thout lookin’,” he exclaimed. But after he had gathered his basket full of greens he tucked the bottle carefully under the broad, glossy leaves. He had no idea what use he could ever make of it; he acted only from the ancient, half-superstitious reverence for virtues and drugs, and from an inborn reluctance to throw away anything.
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 16