The Common Lot and Other Stories

by Emma Bell Miles

  The night grew darker, till their road was almost invisible. They rode silently except for a low-spoken word to the team, for they thought “Mammy” slept. Over the mountain was a lighter space, which became more definite till the last slope was outlined by a golden halo. Then the road plunged into utter darkness between high wooded banks, climbing by a tedious ascent to emerge, suddenly, beyond the last long ridge of the foothills, into brilliant moonlight. The harness glittered; long shadows steamed westward through field and forest; distances became luminous. And there in the soughing pines, only a little way from their wagon, hung the moon.

  “Them trees might be cut out of black velvet and pasted on silver paper,” said the woman at last. “Look, Carson!” The boy climbed back and curled up in the hay beside her.

  “I wish’t I could a-made pictures that would sell, Carson,” she went on. “Pears like I ain’t no use at all. I ain’t strong enough to work and I can’t make no money.”

  “But pap’s got that mine,” the boy reminded her. “Jist wait till hit’s makin’ money, and you can take it easy.”

  “I can’t wait,” she told them. “I’ve seen beautiful things in my mind all my life, but this here—” she referred to the Madonna print—“is as nigh as ever I come to havin’ anything like hit for my own. I wisht I could have done something beautiful to stay up in the mountain and show you’ns, show the neighbors too, what I thought about, what I felt in my soul. Hit seems like the mountain would a-been a better place ef what I think of could be set up to look at and see—like—like I feel hit! But—I can’t do nothing—and I can’t wait.”

  Carson kissed her. They rode on in silence, Kilgore humped over.

  The moon rose higher and higher in the quiet splendor of the night, the lines urging the team a little where the grade was easy. They had nearly reached the Gap when the woman asked, “Are we mighty near home? I want a drink. I want to get home.”

  “Air you worse, Mammy?” asked Kilgore.

  “No,” she reassured him. She lay looking at the picture. The moonlight pointed each blade of hay in her bed until all around her seemed to shiver and glimmer in pale flames.

  “Hit’s so beautiful,” she said faintly. “Git along as fast as you can, pappy.”

  After her death, the cabin at Wolf Pen Gap was deserted for years, used only for a night’s shelter by wanderers. One day Abel and Carson came up the mountain to pick berries. All around their old home stood the fragrant forest, dark with summer, in the golden silence of afternoon. Over its clearing, where during the mother’s lifetime had been a patch of potatoes and garden-truck, lay now a jungle of matted briers, all bowed, some lying flat, weighted down winy fruit, shining darkly like clusters of faceted rubies and garnets amid the green. The house itself listed to one side like a wrongly ballasted ship; the door sagged on its hinges and swung at the wind’s will to and fro. Three or four old apple-trees leaning to the shadowy eaves bore faithfully, the last of the untended orchard.

  Carson, now a stripling half grown, walked to the front of the house and set down his heaped up berry bucket. He looked at the sunshafts that fell aslant between the glittering leaves, and deciding that it was too late to attempt another pailful before building a supper-fire, seated himself on the smooth doorstone where his mother had nursed him.

  “How soon you aimin’ to quit, pap?” he called to some one invisible among the tangle, and was answered “Pretty soon now, Buddy.”

  He curled himself down for the wait, looking out between the trees with dreamy eyes. His mother’s presence had seemed to come and go all through the long silent day; the place was peopled with perfumes and memories. The sweet low sounds of summer—gurgle of water in a run, notes from warbler and wood-pewee, and a soft purring monotone of deep melancholy fell athwart his face; he sank lower, and pillowed his head against his arm. “Mammy, mammy!” he murmured.

  “Asleep, son?” inquired the man’s voice by and by, and he sat up to find Kilgore beside him.

  “Nuck,” he answered. “I was jist a-studying’.”

  The elder man did not ask what he was “studying” about; perhaps he had no need to do so. He placed his burden of berries carefully beside the first bucket, and seated himself also on the stone.

  “I can’t hardly abide to come back to this place,” he said. “We must put the house in shape afore we go tomorrow anyway. Look at hit!”

  He pushed open the door with a great brown hand. The sun was low now, and a broad ray, passing beneath the oak and apple boughs, lit the dusk within. In that dim coolness briers and vines went groping, blanched ghost-white and seeking the ruddying sunbeams. Part of the floor had been torn up by hunters; there was a litter of camping over the rest. The fireplace was wide and deep and high; its jambs were smooth with many knives that had been sharpened there, and with the clinging of Carson’s baby fingers; but the hearth in whose red heart she had seen so many pictures to tell about was chocked with a heap of trash, old rags, and ashes.

  “Hit must not be left this way. I’d dream about hit,” said Kilgore. “Seems like every time I come back here—She wants something—She wanted enough things all her life; and I couldn’t—” He broke off, and turned from that blighted interior to stare into the shadows of the woods.

  His old fields at the foot of the mountain, which once could scarcely be given away, were now priceless because of the mine.

  “I been a good fighter for a pore man,” said he. “I stuck to ’em like a cuckle-burr, and got my dues at last. This money’ll put you through school, son, and fix us as good a home as we know how to live in. We’ll do well. But—hit won’t never buy your mammy a silver spoon nor a chaney cup; nary a lace collar, nor a organ, nor a lamp and lookin’-glass nor white window-curtains. Dead now, and can’t hear no music nor see none o’ the pictures she thought so much of and craved so. Nary thing could I get for her. I never will be satisfied in my own mind whether she even knowed that she died in her pretty new home, like she’d wanted to.”

  In the spring hollow the dew began to slip from leaf to leaf, and keenly cool as something drawn up dripping from the bottom of the spring. The man’s voice, as it came and lapsed, blended perfectly with the thrush’s evening song. [Through all] rang the hum of double-winged night-beetles in and out of the oaks overhead.

  “All I could do was to promise that I’d bury her in the one place she was set on. She talked so much about it. Time and again, days when I might’ near swultered, she’d ’low that the heat didn’t make her suffer whilst she kep’ her mind on that cold cave and spring; and thar would she be buried.”

  The sun sank as he talked out his heart, and from behind the massed foliage of the forest a plangent tide of roses and golden light came washingly from eastward to break against the silent coast of twilight-land. Abel stood up, lifting a face convulsed with grief to the fading light.

  “Mammy, mammy!” he cried, as the boy had cried, but with an intense immediate longing and bitter pain to which youth is stranger. “Oh, if I could only give ye what you craved for one hour.”

  The lad glanced up with a compassionate look, and turned his eyes to the woods as one who has seen that which he dares hardly look upon. There was a long silence. Neither had a thought of the evening meal of bread and berries they had intended to prepare; and the moonless night closed round them ere either spoke again. At last the boy offered his mite: “I know one thing ye could buy her, pap—even now.” He made the suggestion timidly, for his mind played with an idea of fantastic strangeness. “Do you ricollect that there white starch-statue, that marble figger she seed in Knoxville, and that she ’lowed was the sightliest thing she ever laid eyes on?”

  “She talked a heap about it,” replied the man. “She sure liked that figger.”

  “I’ve seed the like on tombstones, ain’t you?” pursued the boy. “Don’t you reckon she’d c-cared—she’d like hit if you was to git her that?”

  “I could—and set hit up right thar in the rock where she is,” sai
d Abel, evidently struck by this proposition. “I do wisht—I wonder if hit would mean anything to her now! . . . She did so love pretty things—pictures and sech that she never had . . . I vow! I’ll do hit. Set it right in the rock.”

  “I meant that,” said Carson. “I’ve heared them things costes a power o’ money; account of there bein jist a few that ever learns to make ’em, I reckon. But ye take my sheer, all what ye was aimin’ to put by for me. I can make my own way,” said the boy.

  “Oh, I don’t reckon there’s any necessity for that. She wouldn’t want me to; she thought a heap of you, Carson—more than you’ve got any idy of. You’re the only one she left me, out of seven; and she’d fur ruther I give ye a good chancet, if hit comes to choose, than to have a sightly gravestone. But I know in reason there’s a plenty to do both, and if it takes all we got, we can still make a livin’ off the land here and down yonder. Let’s you and me go—where was hit, anyhow, that we seed that marble figger?”

  “Hit was in a store of some kind. There was more stone figgers. I’d know the place again.”

  The stars throbbed out in the violet sky, and flamed and quivered like big drops of liquid fire ready to fall. From the trees swung out the quiver and lash, quiver and lash, quiver and lash of a whippoorwill’s thong-like note, so near that they caught the clucking, gasping after-breath of his passion of song.

  “I reckon everybody in these parts ’d call me a fool if they knowed what I paid for hit,” said Abel, sitting contentedly amid the confusion of a widower’s house, worse confused just now by the litter of the statue’s unpacking. He and Carson had just lifted it out of the box, very gently, holding their breath as though the Madonna were a young maid sleeping whom they feared to awaken.

  “But there ain’t nothing like it in these mountains—never has been I don’t reckon,” said the boy. “I never seed anything so pretty in my life.” He shook his head slowly, “I never seed nothing at all like her.”

  “No more did I. I don’t doubt she’s wuth all I paid,” said Abel.

  He need not; for the sculptor, hearing from Abel’s own mouth the story of longing and regret that could not be otherwise assuaged, had given the work of his hands for half what he refused from a wealthy connoisseur some months before. “He parted with hit like as if hit had been one of his children,” said Abel wonderingly. “Must be powerful hard to make them things.”

  In the bare, cobwebbed room the marble shone like a spirit, the whiter by reason of the dingy walls.

  Carson caught his breath a little. “Will hit be safe, set out thar in the woods, pap?”

  “Safe—why, yes. Who’d steal a tombstone? But you know the way the rockhouse lays, with the grave in the fur opening, we can easy fill up the passage behind, and then hit’ll be all sealed up in a room to itself, where nobody can reach to. And hit can be seen as well as ever from the ground below.”

  It was done as Abel had said. In the threshold of the “rockhouse” they placed a block of stone, carefully squared and fitted to the cloven floor; and on this pedestal—in appearance diminished and made fairylike by the surrounding massiveness, although it is at least half life size—they set the Madonna.

  High in the Gap the marble grows grayer every year. Yellow stains and threaded fungi have discolored the carven draperies, and across the feet set so daintily firm a red rust of dripping chalybeate water has spread. Moondawn perhaps restores the Madonna by its magic, arraying her in her pristine whiteness; but even under merciless sunbeams there is yet upon her the deathless seal of the master-touch—and like a living aura, a desire and an ideal befitting the mystery and sweetness of a womanhood half divine.

  fifteen

  Love o’ Man

  CAROLINE WOOD MORRISON AND EMMA BELL MILES

  From Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 93 (March 1914): 354–61

  The only coauthored story in the collection, “Love o’ Man” treats a subject area that Emma Bell Miles has not previously explored. Today we might apply to the central event a contemporary term that neither Miles nor her coauthor Caroline Wood Morrison would have known: magical realism. Terms of explanation more common in their time would have been “the sight,” “second sight,” or even “witchcraft,” coupled with superstition or belief in supernatural beings. Terminology notwithstanding, Morrison and Miles introduce a “sylvaine” into a mundane boy-girl relationship. The consequences are immediate and heartbreaking for one of the party. Though the situation is ultimately resolved without tragedy to Isodene and Peter, the young woman’s extrasensory perception is squelched and her submission to societal expectations complete.

  . . .

  The slopes of the majestic knob that shut the high-hung valley where Isodene and Peter lived were astir with tiny lives innumerable; the tide of spring washed over everything in deep waves of beauty and life. The very fields seemed unreal in the haze of spring bush-burning; the dead branches tossed like gray foam against a smoke-faded horizon. Here and there a single tree grew dark against the sky as it thickened with countless little leaves, and its shadow, falling, outlined contours of boulder and ravine.

  Dimly on the face of the brown fields, a youth appeared with a mule and a plow, advancing, turning, and retreating along the dew-darkened rows.

  On the lonely road that meandered between two farms a girl walked slowly, swinging at her side a stout basket woven of white-oak splints. Here, among the fence-row weeds and brambles, fine green films of spring were stealing over all that was stiff or colorless. In the same way the girl’s presence, homely though it was, and tiny in space and time, seemed to nullify for a moment the stark and desolate facts of a sordid, lonely existence. For in her homespun garments blossomed some old pagan fancy; her shawl was saffron-dyed, her dress was the mellow old-gold hue of peach-leaves, and her neckerchief, which she had bought at the store, a deep, opulent yellow.

  The plowboy halted his mule at her approach. “Howdy, Isodene! Where you goin’?” he greeted her with the heavy courtesy of a good-natured man dulled with toil.

  For answer, she showed him the basket that contained her father’s midday meal. “There’s too much for one, Peter,” she commented, looking straight at him with blue eyes that held always behind them a cloud of dreaminess, of other-worldiness. “Have a piece of pie.”

  “Ef it won’t disfurnish your pap,” he answered, accepting the proffered refreshment.

  She leaned on the top rail and silently watched him eat, sitting on the plow.

  “Seems like I can hear a noise under the ground,” he remarked, looking curiously at the earth beneath his bare feet.

  She also bent downward and appeared to brood or to listen in a sweet melancholy.

  “Like water a-runnin’, or like somebody talkin’ and movin’ around,” he continued, gesticulating vaguely with the half-eaten section of pie.

  “I know what it is,” she said, after a pause. “It’s the Sylvaines!”

  Peter scratched his head under his wide straw hat. “You mean one o’ them ha’nts you’re always a-seein’?”

  “No—no ha’nts nor boogars.” Folding both arms on the weather-blackened rail, she fixed her lack-lustre, indwelling eyes upon him. “The Sylvaines are—well, roots: the roots of plants and trees,” she told him earnestly. “They have shapes somethin’ like people. Ain’t you heard tell of mandrakes and potatoes with faces? They move round and creep, soft and slow, in the earth when it’s warm with the sun. This time o’ year the sap runs in streams—they’re all awake and reachin’ deep in the ground. They have their own rules and laws; they can see; they can move back and forth; they can talk! I know! I know a heap they say—or that they think, anyhow.”

  “You know a heap!” he gibed good-humoredly.

  “Yes, I do,” she assured him. “My mother is Scotch-Irish. She’s a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, just like me. She can visit with fairy folk in the evenin’. I used to wake up and listen at her when I was a little chap. But Father ’lowed it might be resky in some wa
y, and he made her stop. And I used to listen at the Sylvaines with her, but I don’t any more now. Brother Lominack said for us not to—that it might be dangerous.”

  Peter laughed sheepishly and slapped the lines on the back of the drowsing mule, as though to move on.

  “Let your plow stand still a minute, and I’ll tell you what they’re a-sayin’ right now, if you don’t believe I can,” she challenged.

  “Let’s see you—ef you ain’t a-feared,” he answered, half daring, half hesitating.

  She crossed the fence and flung herself on the newly turned earth, her ear close to the warm, dark loam.

  “They must be havin’ a meetin’,” she murmured in a tone that caught Peter’s interest and touched his imagination. “They’re all talkin’ at once. I can’t understand when they mutter away so fast. . . . Oh, I can tell you! It’s a new plant they’re fixin’ to set out right here. A young one—a Sylvaine has to hold it until the flower opens. They’re makin’ out to tell her somethin’ particular—oh, somethin’ wonderful! This is the seventh seed of a seventh bloom, and so it’s got a blessing on it—”

  “Huh!” grunted the listener, incredulous. How could there be a blessing on mere natural objects—on anything outside the church?

  “I can hear them now,” the interpreter continued, “sayin’ that if two mortals, two that love each other, try to pick the flower at the same time, the Sylvaine will come to life and be like us”—she seemed far away—“so long as she can hold to the flower, so long as she can keep it in her hands. It will give her a chanst, they say, to find a soul of her own; but it’ll have to be before the flower fades. . . . They’re all talkin’ again,” she lamented plaintively. “I can’t catch a word.” She rose to her feet and shook the clinging fragments of soil from the dull gold of her gown as she seemed to shake herself free from a spell.