The Common Lot and Other Stories

by Emma Bell Miles

  “I know,” he replied in a tone she had never heard him use. His hand came softly down over hers where it lay on the rock between them. “If you git in trouble, send me word, and me and Libby’ll help you.”

  “Dad, he won’t let ye,” she reminded him.

  “You let us know and we-ll sure try. * * * We ain’t got no mother neither.”

  “I wisht,” she murmured, tracing a pattern in the tinted rock-moss with a pink finger-point, “that Libby could stay with me a spell and lesson me some. But he won’t hear to hit; says I won’t never learn with somebody to do for me.”

  An azure shadow crept slowly from the side. At the same time innumerable small replicas of it started from the crest of every hill, the apex of each haystack, and the ridgepole of every cabin in the valley.

  “Come on to the Gap?” he requested, getting up.

  “Hit’s below here, a ways to the right. I’ll stay and watch you down to the trail. See them steps like, on this side the rock; them a steep path—that’s the way.”

  “Don’t forgit—if you need help.” He slid over the sloping surface.

  “I won’t. Tell Libby I wisht she could come.” She tucked her feet under her as she leaned over the edge looking down at him.

  “Next week’s Christmas. I’ve got the box done. Can I bring it to you?”

  His voice became, of a sudden, rich with feeling.

  Seretha was surprised and thrilled. “But—I ain’t got a thing to give you for Christmas,” she softly hesitated, “so I—I reckon you’d best not.”

  “Maybe you’ll find something by then. Anyways, I want you to see my box. I’ll put Aster in hit for a keepsake. Say, can I bring it?”

  His dark eyes were on her; the deepened voice so softly urging her, compelled the breathless answer.

  “All right. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye till next week, Seretha,” he returned, moving on along the path. But he looked back once more, to see her gazing after him with such a new expression on her face that he wheeled about and paused.

  Instantly she hid like a partridge, by simply drawing back from the edge.

  “Seretha! * * Seretha!”

  “What!” she answered from back on the rock.

  “Can I come back up there—now? Seretha—say, can I come? Can I?—If you don’t say, I’m a-comin’.”

  “Don’t Oran—don’t you now,” she protested softly, still in hiding. “If you do I’ll run to the house.”

  “Look over then and say goodbye—just oncet more, Seretha!” he begged winningly, waiting to see again the sweet revelation in her face.

  But the answer shocked him. White and pinched with terror, she peered at him of a sudden, her trembling lips whispering tensely. “Dad! Git on! git on!—he’s a comin’, Oran—he’s here!” And he heard a scramble and a rush, as she fled across the rock and into the woods.

  Oran came up the cliff in great leaps to a sight which filled him with fury. Seretha had tripped and fallen, and her father stood over her stripping a green withe and calling heaven to witness that he would no longer spare the rod and spoil the child.

  The young man flung himself upon Massengale, seized the hickory, and raised it high, meaning to use it with all his raging strength. But Seretha staggered between them, shielding her father. Through her alarm she was conscious of a desire to steal away to the unforgotten quiet doorstep in quest of the Oran she knew—the patient carver, the friend of creatures soft and small.

  But he put her violently aside, and flung the hickory far into the thicket, and stood facing the old man who was standing all atremble.

  “By the Lord, Massengale, you’d ort to be hung! * * * Come on to the house,” he exclaimed, and taking Seretha’s hand, he led the way to the front porch.

  The father shuffled after without a word; and fell into a chair; he appeared to have aged in the past few moments. Oran put the girl into the big rocker, where she remained limply quiet, only turning her head aside against the back cushion while tears coursed down her cheeks.

  Oran’s fists were clenched; but he rammed them into his pockets, and walked up and down before the porch till his hot blood had time to cool.

  “Mr. Massengale, I come here,” he began at last, “to tell you that you hadn’t no call to dare me off your place last night. As you was away, I waited for you to come back. Seretha ast me not to, and then I aimed to meet on the road and tell you my say. I know you was hard on Seretha, and I don’t doubt you had reason, but I did think you was man enough to be a decent father to her. What you done jist now was the way to treat a dawg, not a woman.”

  “Oran—” pleaded the girl, leaning forward. “Oran, Dad was mad. He ain’t never done me so afore, though I’ve needed whuppin’ many’s the time.” She turned, clasping her hands. “Oh, Dad! Dad, what made you do it now? Why’n’t ye take ’n whup me when I was a-growin’ and make me grow right, so sech as this wouldn’t a-come to us? Oh, mother—mother!” Then, at its sharpest, her voice broke; she flung herself forward, hiding her face on her knees, and sobbed unrestrained.

  “Don’t, Seretha; don’t ye, gal,” begged her father, getting stiffly to his feet and coming over to lay his trembling hand on her hair. “I reckon I be crazy sence—she’s gone. Seems to me I been in a bad dream, a-missin’ her all through everything, a-wantin’ her till I was sick body and soul. And I—I got scairt you’d go wrong without her. Then at church to-day the preacher helt you up for a ’zample to all parents, for what come o’ sparin’ the rod; he was givin’ it to ’em about these here play-parties and dances—and I went fair wild, thinkin’ you might be everlastingly lost—you! Mother’s gal she thought so much of, the gal she left me—the one—Seretha!”

  Oran, standing rigid and grim on the step, turned away, for his eyelids stung.

  “Oh, little gal! Tell me—tell me your ownself hit was a bad dream and ain’t nary word true!” Massengale knelt with his arms round his daughter, looking intently into her wondering eyes.

  “Dad,” she demanded, “what did them folks say?”

  “I jist overheard a word in the churchyard a’ter preachin’ was out. They named my gal and—Oran here, and when I thought of how you said you was goin’ to Reedy’s for the night and that I found ye comin’ from a party alone with him, I—sort o’ thought there might be somethin’ to hit.”

  “Is hit anyways true, gal? Air you the same as when your mother left? Seretha, tell me—oh, tell me!” His voice was awful in its intensity.

  “Hit ain’t true! No, Dad, no! No. I ain’t a bad gal except about workin’. I—”

  “Thank God for that—thank God!” And the slow shuddering sobs shook the man as he laid his head on his daughter’s knees.

  “Tell me! Who was hit anyhow—” Oran began. But she motioned him to be silent.

  The girl laid her hand on his arm. “Don’t Oran. Hit’s all my doin’. I’d ought to be whupped, and talked about too; I been too careless, a-wantin’ [to] be happy all the time.”

  He looked down into her sweet pale face, set like a moon in her cloudy hair, and a great yearning swept through him.

  “You’d ought to be happy, Seretha. And if you’ll let me I’ll ask no better than to try to make ye so. Say the word—give me the right, and if anybody turns their tongue to your name I’ll make ’em wish’t they hadn’t.” He laid his hand over hers on his arm.

  A delicate flush overspread her pallor, and [she] put back the curls and smiled with tremulous lips.

  “Seretha—gal—” The father put out his hand.

  “Come—with me.” Oran drew away.

  “Seretha—you ain’t goin’ to leave me this way,” Massengale implored, reaching toward her as he watched Oran crossing the yard.

  “Hit’s all right, Dad. I’ll never blame you for what’s been.” She raised her arms, and her light sleeves fell back from them as she put them round his neck. “I’m jist goin’ to marry Oran.”

  fourteen

  A Dream of the Dust

&
nbsp; From The Lookout 10 (December 28, 1912), n.p.

  In the original publication the last paragraph has garbled sentences that I have rearranged in what I believe is the order intended by the author.

  Different in both content and style from Miles’s other stories, “A Dream of the Dust” depicts the great love a husband and son have for the wife and mother who has left them far too soon. In her lifetime she had the soul of an artist who saw beautiful pictures in her mind; she tried to re-create them without benefit of lessons on the cheap paper that came her way. On a rare visit to an art gallery in town, she spotted a majestic marble sculpture of the Madonna; she declared that image was what she always tried to paint. After her death, the husband and son devise a way to honor her and show her their love. Having now come into money from a mine on their property, they buy the Madonna statue from the artist and erect it on the mountain in front of her cave-tomb. Over the years the marble Madonna on the mountain has become a legend, though few know the real story of this magnificent piece of art. Perhaps as she wrote, Emma Bell Miles had her own artistic vision in mind, as well as her own hardships as a mountain wife and mother—and possibly even her own illness, which was to take her life at age thirty-nine.

  . . .

  No one knows how the marble Madonna came to be in the Gap except some few mountaineers. She was touched only by the winds of heaven; her feet even are scarcely wet in the low-browed rock-house, on days when the woof of the forest is pierced by needles of rain. No one asks about the matter today; the mountain folk are not of an investigative turn of mind, and the mining settlement is busy with its own rapid growth; or perhaps the jewel in its setting is so near holiness that none dare venture, either curiously or rudely, or in too familiar admiration.

  But rugged iron-gray hunters come upon the white wonder standing in the cliff, vivid against its dark niche, a blooming of phantasmal beauty alien to this wild land; cattlemen passing the Gap—men who know nothing of sculpture beyond the rude squaring of sand-stone for a hearth, a landmark, or a grave—ride out of their way to look upon it; women on bare brown feet, coming down to dig ginseng, pause to turn their heavy eyes toward the stranger queen of sorrow; and little sisters wonder with quaint unchildlike gravity of mountain babes concerning this doll that is not a doll. And old mothers whose part it is to keep alive tradition and folklore talk of her over dying coals at night telling how Abel Kilgore and his son set the statue in the rock in memory of the light of their loneliness that went out here.

  Year after year, through wet Southern snows that drift upon her garment in tufts, when the marble is not more white and still and glittering than the woods below; through softer snows of bloom, when flaky masses of rain-weighted laurel let loose their hold and shatter down the rock; through the drowsy quiet of autumn noons when only cowbells and the falling mast are heard in the uplands—year after year she has looked out unchanged, serenely gazing, like the gray bluff itself, across the Gap and down the valley where the distance is blue as the heart of a gem.

  Here is her story.

  The difference between country and town is not so marked at twilight before the streets are strung with cores of sharp electric radiance—washed out as it were in gray seas of the blending evening. Abel Kilgore’s wife, lingering at the door of the great art store felt this, and gained courage. Why, yon towering structure might be the rocky pillar on Wolf-pen Gap. The pictures in the plate-glass window before her, seen in this cloudy light, seemed no more awe-inspiring than the dreams that came to her as she spread clothes to dry on the flowering bushes of her yard or dipped water from a spring in which the sunset burned like a reflection of passing angels armed for God’s vengeance. She drew a deep breath, and disregarding her garb of print and linsey shawl, pushed open the door and entered. Her little boy, clad in a coat of his father’s, came in with her and walked beside her down the aisle. But Abel staid by the door, his weatherbeaten country clothing and labor-stooped shoulders seeming to belong to the gray outside, no more intrusive there than a wisp of its fog blown across the threshold. The woman accosted a salesman.

  “I want to sell some pictures,” she said. Her voice was sweet and hushed, like a nun’s; her bearing so quiet the man addressed did not guess how her heart was thumping.

  “We do not buy second-hand pictures,” he replied.

  “Why—them’s all second hand,” she insisted gently. “You-all didn’t paint ’em—here in the store?” the oddity of the idea made him smile. At that moment the lights were turned on, and out of the gloom on every side started glowing visions of ideal, beautiful beyond her dreams. “O,” she sighed over a forest dark as the rock-rimmed ones she knew, and “Oh!” with a sharp intake of breath, to a Good Shepherd.

  “You mean—” the salesman said tentatively, seeing that she had forgotten him.

  Her gaze had wandered past the attractions of the front and was seeking a glimmer of white in a curtained alcove.

  The boy plucked her sleeve. “Show ’em to him, mammy,” he reminded her.

  Without bringing back her eyes from the white wonder that evidently held her whole being in thrall, she mechanically took a roll of paper from her arm and laid them on the counter, saying in the spirit of one granting a favor, “You can look ’em over.”

  Because he saw no other course open the man opened the paper and revealed a series of sketchy paintings. The little mountain woman with her crude ideas of art—she must have acquired a few in some country school—had chosen to draw one figure only, a woman clothed in white standing now on the brow of a grim cliff, now in a copse of wild apple bloom, again by the cardinal-flowers and orchids on a marsh. The background was varied, but the figure—ill drawn, worse colored, done on paper meant for street and kitchen uses—was always the center of interest. Possibly in the attempted contrasts of dark pines and snowy garment there was a hint of merit that might have come to something with the proper training and environment. He rolled these up and returned them to her with a shake of the head and a kindly excuse: “Sorry, but we do not—we are not in need of anything like this at present.”

  The boy received them in his knobby little brown hand, his face showing keen disappointment; but the mother noticed neither him nor the refusal of her wares.

  “Kin a body go back there and—and look?” she asked hungrily.

  The salesman awakened to the fact that this was an occurrence not usual to the day’s work. It was a dull hour, and he permitted himself to take interest.

  “Certainly,” he consented, and led the way to the department of statuary, touching to life electric bulbs as he came to them. The boy beckoned his father, and the man slouched after.

  The woman caught her breath. All about her were figures of beauty ethereal as those fashioned by white waves of storm. Here was a dancing girl poised like a flower; there the gladiator, muscular, intent; yonder little loves, chubby and sweet, or frost-fine ladies in curls and jewels, or praying angels cold to others’ prayers; statues Greek or Sylvan, or Catholic and saintly, and historical ideals of figures veiled in the mist of time. The salesman noted that the boy and man looked only at the woman. If she coughed they sighed; at her smile their faces brightened. Nothing to them was all this world of strange loveliness like moonlight wrought into story, except as she was pleased.

  She came to a stand before one figure, the one that had first caught her attention. They saw her bosom heave, and the tears come into her eyes.

  The statue was of an unusual type that might well have represented Faith or Memory. The features had not the immobile breadth and grandeur of the classic type; there was a tenderness in their modelling that removed this Virgin from the circle of goddesses. Like the great Venus, however, was the slightly bending, meditative attitude; and the straight simple garment, with its looping band above the hips, could not have been other than the peplos of ancient days. From the pearled smoothness of the shoulders it fell in a cataract of fine swift wrinkles over the grand limbs—over the woman-frame, type of all f
ragility and tenderness, down it flowed, shattering into a crumpled foamy chaos round the perfect feet. In the pose of the head, with its simple arrangement of hair, was an indescribable winning gentleness. One hand was raised, the palm turned inward toward the rounded breast; the other caught and lightly drew the drapery to one side.

  The thin, homely, toil-degraded woman gazed and gazed, till her very soul seemed to feed itself through her eyes. But at her side the mountaineer grew more and more uneasy, and finally spoke hesitatingly.

  “Mammy—we’ll be all night on the way ef we don’t start. Hadn’t you better come now?”

  Silently she let herself be influenced. As she reached the store door she turned for a last look at the Mother of Sorrows.

  “That there,” she said, “is what I’m always tryin’ to paint. I ain’t never seen her before—only in little pictures.”

  The salesman was moved. He had been here long, and he, too, loved the Madonna. To discover a similar admiration in the heart of this mountain waif was inexpressively touching to him. He busied himself behind the counter a moment and returned with a Perry print of the statue. “I should be glad to give this to you,” he said simply.

  The woman thanked him with real dignity and grace, and selecting one of her drawings from the roll in the boy’s hand, offered it in return with a courtesy sincere as his own. He took it, bowing. When he looked up again she was bowed over from coughing, and the other two were supporting her; but she held the Madonna print against her heart.

  They went from the store and up the quiet street—for it was one of the city’s still hours, an indrawn breath in the midst of its busy round. At the sheds Kilgore got out his wagon, softly cushioned with hay, and helped his wife to lie down in comfort. The boy sat on the seat with his father. They drove slowly out among the smaller buildings, across a meaner suburb that twilight filled with its own enthralling charm, and so to the open country.