The constraint born of their mutual shyness had vanished. Wagon tracks leading off to the right from the main road appeared and Maeve reached across Jamie and tugged at the reins, guiding the team along them and into the woods. Jamie, now thoroughly enjoying himself, gave no heed to where the horses were taking them.
“Sure now I know why it was me you took,” he crowed. “’Twas the fine tenor voice of me raised in song. At home they said I sang that sweetly, sure the cows gave more milk.”
The camp site was well shielded in the timber, a hundred yards or so off the main road. A small brook furnished fresh, cool water. Jamie unhitched the horses, fed and watered them. While they were eating, he and Maeve unfolded the new tent and set it up by lantern light. There was no more laughing and talking. Each was busy with the multitude of chores: Unloading the wagon; unpacking tent furnishings; storing food and supplies—all gifts from Shiel Harrigan and the other horse traders.
As he handled the items, Jamie felt the first breath of pride that the possession of things gives a man. From nobody he had become somebody; from having nothing he suddenly had emerged as a man of means.
“Your father was against me because he thought I was more for dreaming than for business,” Jamie told Maeve. “Well … I’m going to show him, and all the others, too. At home they were ever flinging the word ‘money’ at me. Now I’ll be showing them. Sure, if it’s money they want, then I’ll make it by the tentful … like King Midas. We’ll be rich—so that when we’re old and eaten by the tooth of time, we can love each other for the money.”
Maeve laughed indulgently. “Be as rich as you like, my darling,” she teased. “Only don’t change. I fell in love with a boy who had nothing.…”
“Nothing, is it?” Jamie exclaimed, pretending to be incensed. “Would you be calling three wishes nothing … and the first two of them granted already, with the third …” he checked himself abruptly, and was glad of the darkness, for he felt himself blushing.
If Maeve noticed the reference to the third wish, she gave no indication. The tent was up and she went inside to change her wedding dress.
“’Tis plain,” Jamie told himself with boyish arrogance, “whatever I want out of this life I shall get. Everything the Fairy Queen said has come true! The woman of my choice is mine; there’s travel enough ahead and behind me for two lifetimes.”
Mentally, he thanked the Fairy Queen and discharged her from further duty. “For the wonderful son I’ll be getting—sure I can do that for myself. There’s but to flash my antlers in the air.…”
As Jamie worked, he could see Maeve’s form moving about the tent and it added to his sense of well-being. When he had finished and a fire was roaring in the fire pit, he called to her, saying that they should have some supper. There was no answer from within the tent and her shadow had ceased to flit to and fro.
Jamie crossed to the opening, but before he drew the flap aside, a sudden sharp tightening inside his chest made him hesitate. “Maeve?” he called softly.
There was still no answer. Pulling back the flap, Jamie entered. The bed was already in place, its lace spread gleaming the color of ivory in the yellow light of the lantern. Other furnishings had been distributed in their proper places. Small throw rugs were spread upon the pine-needle-strewn ground.
Maeve stood beside the center pole of the tent, where she had hung the tiny crucifix given her by Aunt Bid. Her hair was tied loosely with a strip of ribbon, and fell below her shoulders. It caught the warm rays from the lantern until it glowed in spots like heated copper. She had changed into her wedding nightgown.
The garment was of soft white silk and reached to the rug upon which she stood. The neck and shoulders were of finest lace, with tiny, exquisite ribbons of different colors escaloped about the throat. The picture created was one of such absolute perfection that Jamie stood speechless, afraid to breathe.
Maeve waited for him to say something, but a great lump had risen in his throat, rendering him incapable of uttering a sound. “Aunt Bid made it for me. Do you like it?” she asked simply.
Jamie nodded numbly. Maeve flashed him a little smile, turned to the lantern and blew it out, “Come to bed.”
As she lay listening to Jamie undressing in the darkness, her thoughts turned to the torrent of events that had brought her as a bride to the bed of a man she had known but a few brief days. “I’m not afraid any more,” she told herself. “The man drawing near me in this warm, pine-scented darkness is no longer a stranger. It’s as if I had known him since he was a little boy and have always wanted to mother him.”
A deep sense of security stole over her. When she had stood out against her father and all the relatives, including Father Kerrigan, a strange prescience had guided and given her strength. She knew with a certainty deeper than any born of logic that Jamie was her mate. He was the poet and warrior of ancient days. He would be, with her help, a child to children and a man to men. Whatever he made of his life would largely be her doing, for a wild and open nature such as his could be blown by every wind.
Jamie’s hand reached out and fumbled with the bed covers. She turned them back for him and a trembling seized her that was not from the night air. Jamie’s body burned against hers through the nightgown. His fingers touched her cheek, and with a cry that was almost a sob, he buried his face against her bosom.
The trembling left Maeve’s body and she held him in her arms soothingly. An exultation swept through her that was almost savage. For the first time she knew the overwhelming sense of possession which complete and abject surrender can give a woman.
Outside the tent the fire fought its losing battle with surrounding darkness. The flames flickered and sank. The horses munched contentedly on the hay Jamie had spread for them, while the smaller night sounds were lost in the gentle moaning of the pines. And over all the full and ancient moon sailed in silent silver splendor.
XIII
Jesse Proddy sat on his lean, hard haunches, his back braced against the gray, warped planks of the barn. It sheltered him from the sharp March wind whistling through the cracks and around the bleak edges of the building. His faded gray-blue eyes were fixed upon a circus of buzzards spiraling slowly earthward near the scrub pines at the edge of his property. Glumly he chewed on a piece of oat straw.
“My mule,” he mourned, “my last and only dad-gummed mule … dead … buzzard bait … and right at plowing time. I reckon God’s a-punishing me, but I don’t rightly know why. I loved that mule.”
He rose stiffly and ambled toward the house. The seventh and youngest child whipped around a corner, his uncombed blond hair flying in the gusty wind and his great blue eyes fastened upon some imaginary quarry he was pursuing. Jesse caught him with one hand as he sped past.
“Whoa, little Number Seven,” he said. “Where’s your ma?”
Images deep in the boy’s eyes shifted from dream figures to the shabby, unshaven reality of his father. He pointed toward the hen house where Hester was emerging with a few eggs gathered in the folds of her apron.
“Wife,” Jesse called to her plaintively, “Old Luke is dead.”
Hester stopped in her tracks. “Oh, no,” she said despairingly.
“Yep,” Proddy continued bitterly, “lay down not ten minutes ago, with his four feet pointin’ toward Heaven and leavin’ me in a hell of a fix. If you don’t believe me, just cast your eye over toward them pines. There ain’t no better proof that somethin’s dead than buzzards. And that somethin’s Old Luke.”
The little boy had been listening with mounting excitement. At seven, “death” was only a word, but its vibrant sound sent ripples of meaning into every corner of his being—like a heavy stone dropped into the placid waters of a well, wrinkling the surface with mysterious portent. Death, the wild, dark shadow that lay in wait for every living creature, had struck Old Luke. Old Luke, upon whose back he had ridden so many times. Death, that invisible chasm separating “to be” and “not to be”—its opening, narrower than a razo
r’s edge yet deep enough to engulf every living thing, had swallowed their plodding, gentle old mule.
Drawn by a mixture of fear and fascination, the child started toward the spot where the first of the circling buzzards were settling about the dead animal. “Number Seven,” his father shouted, “git back here.”
He emphasized his shout with a shrill, ear-splitting whistle. Regretfully the boy turned back. “When the other kids git home from school we’ll go down and bury him. You can come along and watch,” Jesse comforted him.
“What are we gonna do?” Hester said, miserably. “It’s time the crops were in the ground. And now no mule for the plowing.”
“The Lord’s done turned his face against me,” Jesse cried angrily. He shook his fist skyward. “From now we’re quits. I’m a infidel. You hear that, Lord? Me and You is finished.”
Hester listened to her husband in shocked amazement. The past year had wrought a remarkable change in the poor, slatternly creature who had listened so humbly to Father Kerrigan’s tales. Physically she was wasting away, but a new fire burned within her. It showed in her eyes and in her speech. “Do you know what’s happened to you, Hester Proddy?” the priest had said to her a few days before. “You’ve found your immortal soul. And it’s made a new woman of you.”
Now she flew at her husband with a violence that staggered him. “For shame, Jesse Proddy,” she cried, “blasphemin’ before your own child. You can burn in Hell if you like, but not my children. They’re gonna have Christian raising.”
The abruptness of his wife’s attack left Jesse speechless. What’s come over her? he thought, watching perplexed as she hustled the child into the house.
Muttering, he retreated to the shelter of the barn. “Sass … that’s what I git around here … sass. I wasn’t even talkin’ to her. I was talkin’ to the Lord … and she flew at me like a nestin’ she-eagle. Ever since that fiend o’ Rome’s been snoopin’ about, things has been goin’ from bad to worse. First he sent the county policeman out to make sure the younguns went to school; and now he’s turned my own wife agin me. That settles it. If he comes on the place agin I’ll set the dog on him.”
“Shucks,” he amended after a moment’s consideration, “I ain’t got no dog. Old Blue’s been dead a couple of years. No mule … no dog. Things around here is sure goin’ to Hell in a handbasket.”
With his original determination blunted by the lack of means to execute it, Jesse surrendered with a grunt and fell to brooding upon the harsh uses to which fate had put him. When the other children came trudging from school, he took Trace, the oldest boy, and Tolbert and Todd, the next two, with him to bury the mule. The two girls, Beth and Bella, who were twelve and nine, he left behind despite their clamor to come along.
“Buryin’ mules ain’t fit work for girls,” he told them.
The youngest boy was waiting outside with his brothers. When Jesse saw the look of eagerness on his face, an impulse to be cruel came over him. “Ain’t no use you waitin’ around, Number Seven. You can’t come with us,” he said, covering his feeling of guilt with a show of anger.
The child’s blue eyes were swimming in great, unshed tears as he watched his brothers grab up a battered assortment of shovels and spades and follow Jesse toward the pine grove. This was a double injustice. Old Luke had been his friend and he had been promised he might watch. Besides, he had never seen a burying. It sounded mysterious and exciting.
From below he could hear his brothers’ laughter and the dull “chuck” of their shovels biting into the soil. What was there to laugh about in Old Luke’s being dead? he wondered. The mule had been a member of the family as long as he could remember.
Creeping along the back fence, the boy made his way toward the grove of jack pines. Overhead the disturbed buzzards floated in protesting spirals. When he was close enough to observe everything, he hid. Trace was standing waist-deep in the hole, shoveling out the soil. The boys took turns digging, while Jesse sat staring moodily at the dead mule.
“Dig that hole deep, boys,” he ordered. “Old Luke was a tall mule.”
From the protection of a tangle of weeds, Number Seven watched the grave sink lower and lower. Tolbert was digging now, and his tow head bobbed in and out of the hole like a cork. By the time enough dirt had been removed, long shadows from the pine grove were creeping across the land and darkening the pile of raw red earth beside the open grave.
The boy watched with combined horror and excitement as his father approached the dead mule. Jesse and Trace seized the two hind legs, while Tolbert and Todd took hold of the front. Straining and tugging, they dragged the inert body to the edge of the freshly dug hole and tumbled it in without ceremony.
From his place of concealment, the child felt the jolt at the pit of his stomach as the mule’s torn carcass thudded into the grave. So this was what burying meant. With a mounting sense of suffocation, he watched the loose dirt being shoveled into the hole. When nothing was visible but the mound of red earth, the three boys leapt upon it with whoops of laughter and began to trample it flat.
Watching his brothers stomping upon Old Luke’s grave, the boy’s sensation of suffocating became so intense it seemed impossible to breathe. He wanted to cry out in protest; to ask his father how Old Luke was going to get out of the hole, with all that dirt packed on top of him? For the first time the full tragedy of his inability to speak came home to him. Like Old Luke, he, too, was entombed. For the mule, the walls were Georgia’s soft red soil; for himself, the crystal and more intransigeant barriers of silence.
The job finished, Jesse and the three boys picked up their tools and trudged jokingly back to the house. Neither poverty, deprivation, nor death could check the natural buoyance of their youth. They jabbed at each other, laughing and cavorting like colts in a pasture. When they were out of sight, Number Seven crept quietly to where the flattened grave lay like a dull red scar upon the green and silent earth. This was another aspect of death: The returning of the body to the ground. The March wind, no longer warmed by the sun, sighed downward through the pine branches and struck a chill through the boy’s thin clothing. Faced with one of life’s great imponderables, he drew his own child’s conclusion. The earth was an Indian giver. She gave life to all creatures at birth … and took all creatures back to her bosom at death.
With a feeling of loneliness made doubly intolerable because he had no words with which to express it, and no person with whom to share it if he had, the boy turned away from the new-made grave and walked drearily homeward.
XIV
Mrs. Fluker showed Maeve into Father Kerrigan’s small, plainly furnished reception room. The walls were dullish gray and needful of a coat of brightening paint. A few holy ornaments were spaced about, while in the stray beams of trespassing sunlight the dust of many yesterdays danced in bright irreverence.
Maeve seated herself quietly on a hard, straight-backed bench and folded her hands in her lap. It was restful and soothing to be sitting quietly, without the jolting movement of a wagon beneath her and the smell of sweating mules in her nostrils. To think a whole year has passed, she mused, so quickly. It seems like only a few days. Last year at this time Jamie had come to me in the night with his hands bashed and torn from smashing them against the trunks of trees—as if the breaking of his knuckles would mend the breaking of his heart. So much has happened since then … and yet so little.
She fingered the heavy gold bracelet weighing on her slender wrist. Jamie had given it to her a few days before, on the anniversary of the day they had met. One small, perfect diamond was mounted in the bracelet.
“That’s for our first year,” Jamie had told her. “And there will be another like it, or maybe bigger, on this same day every year, until the acid of time has eaten us away, and only the love we had for each other is left.”
“How long do you think that will endure?” she had teased.
Jamie had pretended to calculate seriously. “’Tis not easy to figure,” he had demurred, �
��for it runs into numbers not yet invented. Let me see: Of the days I loved you before either of us were born—count the stars of the heavens, the sands of the sea; then add to that total the flakes of the winter snow! For the days I will continue to love you—until time runs out and the King of Sunday calls us all home—add the dewdrops on the lawn, the hailstones after a summer storm, the grass under the feet of herds, and Manannan mac Lir’s horses, with their white manes tossing as they ride the sea waves in a storm!”
He had kissed her then and said seriously: “The day a year ago when I saw you by the rivereen, I called and crossed you to myself before God and all the saints. As long as there’s sight in the eyes of me, you’ll be that young girl with the buckets heavy enough for a man, and the eyes that laughed deep down inside herself.”
The memory of his words sent a glow through Maeve and a warm flush rose in her cheeks.
From outside the church came the squeal of high, childish voices. The children were coming from confession. A few minutes later she heard Father Kerrigan’s footsteps entering the back door and coming toward the waiting room.
“Maeve!” he greeted her cordially. “Mrs. McRuin … you’re back before the others. Where’s Jamie? Sit down—tell me about yourself.”
“Jamie stopped to see someone on business, Father. We came early because we’re burying Aunt Bid this year.”
“I know that,” the priest said sympathetically. “Mr. Yates, the undertaker, told me. What happened?”
“We were wintering in Alabama. Auntie Bid took with a bad cold and it went into pneumonia. She was gone almost before we knew how sick she was,” Maeve stated simply.
“She was a fine woman. God will give her rest,” the priest said.
Maeve crossed herself and was silent. Something in her manner drew and held Father Kerrigan’s attention. “Is everything else all right?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Was it a good year with the horses?”
“Yes, Father, a very good year.”
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