“Y’ain’t seed Shell yit?” he inquired, as soon as he reached home.
No one had.
“Have ye got ary bit o’ meat-grease left? Poke’s liable to make people sick if hit ain’t cooked up good and greasy. Now, Ona, don’t you go and th’ow out them stalks. You’ns have got lots o’ vinegar. I’m a-gwine to make us some pickles; they’ll be good again’ supper-time.”
The greens were bubbling in the pot, and the sun lay some hours beyond the noon-mark, when Shell came in. Then from every one of the little assemblage broke a cry of astonishment and joy; for he carried a bag of meal and a salt-pork middling.
“Bought ’em,” he informed the company, shortly. His face had not relaxed since last night. Into the hand of his woman he poured a jingle of silver coins; then he dropped heavily across the foot of the bed as though he had been drinking.
“Now, by Jackson!” exulted the old man, “I want you gals to cook like ye was feedin’ a rigimint. I wonder—how do you reckon Shell got—” He broke off, and his face changed slowly as he looked at the figure prone there, defeat, in this moment of seeming victory, showing in its every line. In the eager preparation for a supper feast no one heeded old Zion’s staring at his son, sinking lower and lower in his chair. Finally he rose unnoticed and hobbled out-of-doors.
Nettie meantime came to the voicing of a matter which had occupied her thoughts all day.
“Ona, you think if you’ns had a cow ye could feed my baby, without me, so he’d thrive?”
“On a bottle? Why, I reckon so. Why, yes. You ain’t studyin’—”
“I’m a-studyin’ about goin’ back to the Settlemint. I can git work there, and holp to keep us all.”
“Why! you said ye tried and couldn’t!”
“Oh, that was before the baby was born. I can, though, now. . . . I cain’t bide here with you’ns; this little bit o’grub won’t do us no time.” Nettie knew that there was work in town at which a woman could always earn enough to feed several mouths. It seemed now the only way.
“Well,” cried her sister-in-law, an edge put on her tone by her insistent misery, “I wisht ye’d a-said so a good while back!”
Nettie laughed and went to put the baby’s small belongings in order. She must send Shell to bargain for Nicklin’s fresh cow to-night, and go before the child should awake in the morning; there was no time to be lost. “Pore little man-boy! I’ll come home every week, to see that they take good care of ye,” she whispered to the wee shirts and frocks. All at once she lifted the blue silk cap that the baby’s father had bought only a few days before his disappearance. Something else was folded inside, as being, like the cap, too dainty for actual service—the lace handkerchief Steve had given her on Christmas morning. Heart-wrung, she laid her head on the window-sill and cried her slender strength away.
It was near sundown when she again looked out of the narrow panes; and as she gazed her face brightened unaccountably, as if by some spiritual dawn invisible to the other woman at the hearth.
“I reckon I won’t go yit awhile—not to-morrow,” she said. “Wait a day or two . . .”
On the bank of the river old Hutson walked up and down, wringing his thin hands, swaying his head, and muttering, muttering, muttering. He was praying for a sign. He had in mind the starved wife he had buried; his daughter deserted and helpless through poverty; his son, he suspected, driven to crime. The vision of destruction clutched his failing heart like the talons of those fiends that abounded in his theology. He could not endure the thoughts that came to him. But there must be some way out, if he could but find it; and he prayed, prayed desperately, that his God would show him the way.
Overhead the clouds were breaking with the close of day. Under their flying lights and shadows the river changed, and changed again, with indescribable pale hues, colors of strange metals molten, alloys of copper and silver; now sheeted gray as aluminum without a gleam, again taking lights as of dusty gems, amethyst and emerald and beryl, with riffles of blinding silver spreading below the shoals. With eyes closed, still crying out with all his soul, he turned round and round slowly, in the midst of his unsown field, seven times. . . . Now for the sign.
He looked upon the cold rain-swollen stream. Here beside him met the crooked ways of all the world. Behind him his mother-mountain had cloaked herself in the majesty and mystery of Sinai. To him those smooth-worn phrases, names, and metaphors coined in the vanished fervors of a people’s lyric passion were glorious with deathless values. The meanings he read into them, however different these might be from the intention of originators in the ports of the Levant, had through a lifetime’s brooding worn, not grooves, but sunless gorges in the fabric of his mind. To one who habitually sought the imagery of the Apocalypse everywhere, cherishing even homely plants by such fantastic names as Balm of Gilead or Tree of Heaven, it was inevitable that the mountain stream should long have symbolized the River of Death. And across there, as he looked, the sudden glory of a sunset clearing after rain turned the spring-empurpled hills to rose and gold. The water flamed into glass mingled with fire; for a few moments his world lay steeped in a jewel-light. It seemed a covenant and a promise.
“Jist over, jist over Jordan,” he muttered. “Hit must be so. Death ’ud be better for all of us. The Good Master never intended for anybody to live sech a life, anyhow. . . . Hit’s onchristian. Hit makes women like pore Nettie and her mother; and thar’s Shell’s boy—ef he don’t learn to rob and steal, he’ll end up jist like—me. Provideth not fur his own—too old.” He joined his hands and shut his eyes once more; and shaking his white hair in the soft damp wind, he concluded very softly:
“Lord, I thank Thee for the Sign; send me now the grace and stren’th to do Thy will, and receive us all in the kingdom. Amen.”
The water faded swiftly to a pallid jacinth in the gray matrix of twilight.
He went slowly back into the house, and forthwith prepared his poke-stalk pickles, secretly adding to the vinegar the contents of the bottle he had brought from the burnt cabin shed. They were presently set on the table with a great steaming bowl of white gravy, and the greens, and the pones and fried meat. How delicious it all looked and smelled! The two children wriggled on their chairs while the old man asked an unusually long blessing on the food he believed to have been stolen; but he would not eat anything except the relish he knew to be poisoned, partaking with the air of one receiving sacrament. Then all ate of it but Nettie.
“I’m afeared to resk givin’ the baby a colic by the sour,” she objected, when urged.
Her father turned upon her, his face working. “You’re a fool not to eat ’em, gal,” he cried, in an uneven, febrile voice; then, as she shrank, he muttered, “God’s will—God’s will be done,” and said no more, evidently deeming that the matter might be safest left in the hands of his Lord. But Nettie wondered, not for the first time, if her father were mad.
Shell and his family presently staggered away to bed, curiously drowsy, leaving the dishes unwashed, the hearth unswept, and no wood brought for the breakfast fire.
“A heavy supper does make a body so-o sleepy!” smiled Ona. “What air you a-singin’ for, Nettie? You ac’ like ye had all the money in the bank to draw on.”
“I have,” answered Nettie, with the mountaineer’s inconsequent defiance. It was truer than she knew. Had she not from the first drawn upon the living strength whose source is inexhaustible?
Ona lay down without removing her clothes, and drew the coverlet up to her chin. It was Nettie who straightened the house for the night, brought chips in her apron, and went to the spring for water, singing still, with that strange mingling of content and hope imperishable in her sea-gray eyes. Night had fallen, with the blind clouds again riding swift and low; now and then one swooped to blot out every vestige of the landscape; she could not see her way, but her feet found their path a step at a time—and she could sing.
Afterward she sat before the few embers that remained of the cooking-fire, nursing he
r babe. The rain again set in, and she closed the door lest the damp blow on the little head. Old Zion was still nodding; his voice quavered faintly from the corner shadows, and she made out that he was trying to repeat a hymn—“Will the waters be chilly?” But the rhythm faltered and sank into muttering. “Death in the pot,” she caught; and then, “The will o’ God, the will o’ God.”
They were his last words. She laid the baby to sleep, and turned to persuade her father to go to bed. It was close upon midnight now. Something in the huddled posture of the figure in the chair struck cold to her heart. She was suddenly aware that she no longer heard the breathing of the sleepers, which had been loud when they first lay down.
On trembling knees she halted forward, her hand outstretched. “Pappy?” she whispered. “Pappy! Pappy!”
Her fingers touched the withered cheek. It was already cold. With a scream, she crouched back, staring; then turned and ran to the bed where Shell and Ona lay side by side, their children at their feet.
Still crying out, she grasped and shook them. “They cain’t be dead! Oh, pappy—Shell—Ona—cain’t you hear me callin’ ye!” she sobbed, over and over. “Why, hit’s only a little while sence we was all settin’ at supper!”
She turned once more to the hearth, only to find the old man’s body slipped sideways from the chair. The blades of Fate’s shears had swung together, dividing Nettie and her child from that doomed family. As she clamored, beside herself with the sudden horror, the little creature waked and added its shrill wail to her outcry—and the others were all still and mute as stone. Catching up the babe, she started, with an unformulated intention of going for help; she did not know that she had already twice shrieked her husband’s name.
As if in answer to that cry, the door burst open; fragments of its rude latch flew spinning across the room, and a man halted a moment on the threshold, bewildered by the firelight, unable at first to see what lay before him.
“Oh, Steve! Oh, Steve!” she cried, running to him, clutching the arm he put out, clinging to it, the child between them, and dragging him so into the room. In the terror of that moment she found nothing strange in his presence there.
“Nettie!” his deep voice reassured her; his big arm went around her with a sturdy support which brought comfort, even facing the stark tragedy to which they now turned.
The next day, while Mother Nicklin and the neighbors who had been summoned put everything in order for the dignity of death, Nettie lay on her bed as one half stunned. After all was over and the poor bodies laid to rest in the burying-ground on the hill, she rose and went with Steve and their child down to the river, to sit, pale and weak, on the old raft in the quiet sunshine. She had passed worthily through her great trial, and gained the peace that lies on the other side. Little waves lisped and patted upon the black half-sodden timbers; small perch leaped now and again with a happy flash; overhead the ripening service-berries hung against the new-rinsed sky. The hills were wonderfully blue, swept with a besom of rain; and up and down stream was a miracle of purple rhododendron.
She smiled at her husband over the baby’s rosy sleep. He softly stroked her shoulder, though he wondered at her smiling.
“Hit was pore pappy—caused—what happened back yon,” she answered his look. “I’ve seed for some time his mind was failin’.”
The young husband agreed soberly. “Some o’ the folks found a bottle,” he told her. “Aconite, they called it. Your pappy must have been out of his mind.”
“Yes,” Nettie murmured. “Nobody would want to die. We seed a awful hard time, Steve,” she added, simply. “But look like where the’ was little ’uns—nobody would aim to die.”
The man’s brown cheek crimsoned. “Oh, Nettie,” he cried, “I was comin’! I come as soon as I had anything to fetch ye. I’ve been seekin’ for ye, up and down and all about, for two-three days, honey. I’d never been here, you know, and look like nobody couldn’t tell me so I could locate the place. I was right nigh here a-yesterday, with money in my hand for ye—and them that’s gone, pore souls—when a quare thing happened; some scoun’l set on me—knocked me down from behind, and robbed me of several dollars in silver before I come to.”
Nettie caught her breath and looked at him stealthily. But Steve had not recognized in the shrouded and shaven Shell his assailant of yesterday, and his wife did not tell him of her suspicions.
“I never heard of a robbery in these parts before,” Steve said. “But the feller didn’t take my roll o’ bills! Never found it, I reckon, as it chanced.” He showed her the precious little hoard lying in his hand. “Now, Nettie,” he glanced toward the house, then to that one of the three ill-mended roads that wound away toward the burying-ground, bent his head a moment with the air of one who makes his devoir to the dead, and went on, “you ’n’ me ’ll go back to Pyriton, where I’ve been. I can have steady work there; and we’ll send this chap to school when he’s older.”
The wife nodded above her child’s head, the wisdom of the mother-creature alight in her sea-blue eyes. “I knowed you was a-comin’ back to us, Steve. I just knowed that,” she murmured. “I said so to myself when I was a-singin’ the baby to sleep last night.”
“Last night.” The awe and wonder of it grew upon the man’s face. “Why, girl, do ye know, I’d ’a’ turned back last night, I was that tired and discouraged, but I heard you singin’—and then you called me.”
“Yes,” she answered, with simple confidence, “I jist expected ye, from the time I looked out yestidy and seed the sun shinin’ on the hills across the river.”
ten
Flower of Noon
From The Craftsman 21 (January 1912): 386–94
Fan Walton, the protagonist in “Flower of Noon,” proves to be a resourceful young woman who must withstand suspicion, distrust, and false accusation in the aftermath of the sudden death of Harmon Ridge, for whom she has been housekeeper and bookkeeper. Family members and neighbors of the unmarried Ridge crowd in for the wake and for information about the dispensation of his property, left, they all assume, without an heir. His sanctimonious brothers and their grasping wives believe they will inherit, only to be gravely disappointed by a most unexpected revelation. Additional layers of the plot include a love interest for Fan and a glimpse into her compassion for others. In all of Miles’s fiction Fan Walton is the one woman whose promise of fulfillment in love is not compromised by self-effacement.
. . .
Although there had been for years a continual sly threading of the trails that led to his place of business in the woods, Harmon Ridge had never during his lifetime had so many guests as today. Most of the folks now gathered in the best room of the log house were voluntary strangers to its door. Women were coming and going clad in garments of hastily donned and ill-matched colors, with here and there a black waist, hat or skirt. Susan, the wife of Clifford Ridge, and old Mrs. Bivins were distinguished by whole costumes of the appropriate hue; the latter not through any peculiar depth of feeling, but because, having no kin of her own, she made a point of attending all the burials of the countryside, and for expediency had long since cast all her outer garments into the same pot of funereal logwood.
In the tidy kitchen Harmon’s young housekeeper had not changed the steel-gray gingham she had worn the day before. She was occupied with straightening the dead man’s accounts, which she had kept for two years. Fan Walton was a strongly built, energetic girl, standing firm in her broad shoes and breathing deeply as she worked. She always experienced a faint shock of surprise on the rare occasions when she faced a mirror, at not finding herself beautiful.
From under eyelids swollen with loss of sleep she looked up as a tall, sunbrowned young mountaineer stooped through the doorway.
“I’ve cut you a quantity of wood and killed them chickens for dinner, Fan,” he said. He came forward and laid one hand on the table at which she was seated; his tone became almost pleading as he went on. “Now you let me start dinner for ye. You’re werried out
. My dad was cook for his company all through the war, and he learnt me how. I bet I can beat you makin’ dodgers.”
“I bet you can’t,” she replied; but putting away her book, she watched him deftly blow up the hearth-fire with a turkey-wing and hang a kettle over the blaze.
“I reckon,” he continued presently, coming up the cellar-way with a pan of potatoes, “that’s why Mr. Ridge always liked me to tend the still for him; I could generally git water to bile without burnin’ it. Well—I got to look out for another job now. I’ll never work for a man I like better. I do wisht I’d a-been there when—when—the rev’s took him, instead of haulin’ corn. Maybe if there’d been two on gyuard it wouldn’t have ended that way.”
She caught her breath with a great sob. “Oh, Byron!” There was something tragic in the cry that freed itself from her strained throat. “He was so good!”
The boy nodded without looking up from his potato-paring; the pathos of her position, or as much of it as was known to him, smote him to the heart. But Fan, impatient with herself for the moment’s weakness, turned quickly, and rolling up her sleeves on her firm shapely arms, mixed a creamy mass of meal and butter-milk and began manipulating it into dodgers. They remained silent and busy until Grandma Bivins’ shrill voice announced her entry: “Looky thar, Bar’n—that colt’s a-gwine to break ever’ one o’ them crocks!”
The pretty, petted sorrel sprang back in a well-simulated panic at the wave of Fan’s dish-towel, and an instant after was stretching an investigative nose toward the window again.
“Truelove’s restless today,” explained Fan as she patted the oval pones into their oven nest. “Take a chair by the door, Mrs. Bivins. I hate to shut the colt up, for I know how she feels.”
The Common Lot and Other Stories Page 17