Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  Magnolias held out big cupped flowers as white as the moon. Cean broke a bloom from a low bough and took it back to her house, and set it in a jug on her eating-table. The heavy white petals curved upward above the hard, white beginnings of seed that grew out of the bottom of the cup. The outer leaves were faintly green and yet showed the tender impress where the calyx, silky and brown like a dog’s ear, had pressed close in upon the flower, holding it close until its birth-time. There were magnolias all through the woods. Cean pulled blooms from the lower limbs of the magnolia trees and carried them home to scent her house and to droop, heavy and white, over her eating-table. One day she went within the low-growing branches of a tree and climbed the trunk a little way. Her eyes went through the glossy leaves in search of a bloom near enough for her reach. It was hot there inside the house of branches; the limbs ran out as rafters, the heavy green leaves walled about the space inside. Cean mulled over her thought: this was a magnolia house, green and rustling inside, with great white blooms hung about on all the walls. She would pull no more blossoms; she would leave them high and white on the tree. It was a house, finished and trimmed. She would break no more blooms from it to set on her eating-table.

  Cean went to pick huckleberries to stew and sweeten for Lonzo’s supper. She pulled her sunbonnet on her head, and put on Lonzo’s old boots and walked off to the right, past the new ground where the cotton was growing, into the scrubby thickets of palmettos and dwarf oaks growing on the sandy ridge. Briers caught at her skirt. She carried a piggin in her left hand. Her eyes glimpsed clumps of the low-growing berries here and there, but farther on there would be thousands of them, the leaves and berries powdered in gray as though dipped in dust. Farther on she could stoop in one place and cover the bottom of her piggin with a deep layer of the purple berries, each frosted in gray, with a little puckered mouth at its blossom-end, with a little stem no bigger than a sewing-thread.

  She had found a knee-high forest of bushes and had picked her piggin half full. These little slick, hard kernels did not stain her fingers as did the soft, juicy blackberries. It was pleasant to pick them free from the bush, leaving only a few little green fellers to ripen later on. You sweated for corn and cotton; you knocked a pig or a cow in the head to eat meat; but these were free. It didn’t take sweat or blood. The ripe ones fell into your hand as though they were eager to leave the bush and find a waiting hand. This was something like dropping corn behind Lonzo; she felt that same satisfaction.

  The sun was hot down the slope. No little breeze fanned the scrub oaks. Cean was thinking of the churning left undone; she would hurry back and have the buttermilk ready for Lonzo’s dinner. Maybe she ought to have gone on like on other days; Lonzo might not like the fried meat and potatoes and cornbread she would fix up in a hurry for his dinner; he was used to his pot of greens or dried peas.

  There was a sudden shaking of the air all about her. It was a harsh, singing rattle of sound, hard as thunder, soft as cornshucks, and it filled her with deadening terror. Somewhere about her there was a rattlesnake, and he was close because she could not tell in which direction he lay. As she stooped, afraid to go, afraid to stay, her mind was benumbed like her body. Suddenly just above her elbow she felt her right arm stuck as though by blunt twigs, and turning, she saw glittering eyes in a small, ugly head hanging there close to her eyes. She reached and caught the pulsing, gray thing in her left hand and flung it away, and it fell among the scattered berries in moving folds and turns.

  Cean’s hand caught her arm close above the needle-prick wound, and pressed with all her strength where she felt the beat of blood under her thumb. She stood upright and moved a little way back with weak steps, and screams took possession of her body. She heard the screams about her head; they seemed to come through the earth, through her body; they flew about her head, not of her own willing, deafening her ears. Then fear chilled her into silence. Stopping the blood in her arm until the bone ached with the pressure of her thumb, she ran toward her house, down the slope and on under the wind in the pine-tops, the sound of it like the sound of fairy rain starting in steady, delicate drumming, and dying. She ran on across the plowed fields, calling for Lonzo.

  He heard her coming across the fields to him and jumped the furrows running, to meet her, breaking the stalks of young corn heedlessly. When he reached her her face was ugly with weeping. She was shaking her head, talking loose words:

  “Lonzo—Lonzo…a rattler struck me.…I spilled the huckleberries.”

  He caught her arm and laid the flesh open with his knife: with his hands he squeezed bright red blood from the wound. Lifting her in his arms, he ran to the house and set her down on the steps. He found a little flask of spirits of turpentine on the shelf in the house, and drenched her arm; the clear spirits, streaked with blood, ran down her arm and stained her dress. He made her drink whisky from a brown jug from the same shelf.

  Her breath slowed. Her fear eased away as Lonzo tied up the wound with a clean rag.

  Inside the house, she lay down across the bed, leaving the meat and potatoes uncooked, and the milk unchurned. Her breathing came slowly, heavily; her eyelids drooped against her will; thick laziness coiled through her blood and made her sleep while the sun was high; pain stabbed here and there in far places of her consciousness. Lonzo watched a green pallor settle in her face, and saw that her body was bloated in sickly white. He made her drink great swallows of rum, and scolded her when she whined against the mouth of the jug at her lips. She needed her Ma, but he was afraid to leave her, and he believed that she would over it. He had cut plenty deep with his knife, but fear pressed close beside him as he watched her.

  As the afternoon lengthened she roused, and her face brightened. Lonzo figured that the poison had worked itself out. She was still foolish in the head, but that was more rum than poison, and the dead feeling of the poison in her blood was gone.

  It was an hour by sun when Lonzo said:

  “Reckon I’d better go and put ‘im out o’ the way, if ye’ll tell me ‘bout where ye was.”

  Cean was humble before her husband because she had caused all this to-do. Her voice was meek:

  “Straight on past the cotton-patch and on up the rise. Right where they begin to grow thick.…Ye’ll see where I dropped the berries, I reckon.”

  He spoke gruffly over his shoulder as he turned to go:

  “After this ye’d better stay at home where ye belong.”

  When he had gone she lay quietly, pondering his rough words, blaming herself for putting him to so much trouble.

  She laid her left hand lightly on the bound wound. Remembering, she trembled anew, feeling again the nasty, slick crawl of the snake in her hand, cold and hideous, jerking in a long pull against her hand. She was scared…scared.… If he had struck a hand higher, it would have been her face that he found instead of her arm, the horrible head against her head, the beady eyes close by her eyes, the rough mouth stinging her cheek to death with its thick, white spit. And she would have died, tied to the bed, plunging in spasms, and turning cold-blooded and blackish-gray like the snake.

  She thought, “This is the first time ever I was scared.”

  Then she thought on, a little clumsy at reaching her own conclusions:

  “But hit won’t be the last time, most likely.”

  And she was proud, knowing that she was now a woman.

  “Hit all comes with bein’ a woman.”

  Then she stilled herself, her eyes widened, her breath stopped at her parted lips. She laid her hand low on her body where a wing had fluttered deep within her, where a heart had beaten once, soft and weak, trying its little strength, where something of less actuality than a dream had become existent in fact, to be noted surely, unmistakably as reality.

  Lonzo came back a little before dark with two silky, limp rattlers hanging from the hoe-handle over his shoulder. They were mates, most likely. And he brought Cean’s piggin, with her bonnet lying in its bottom. He slit the long, smooth bellies of
the snakes and stripped the scaly gray skins from the flesh that looked like fish-meat. Afterward, he would boil the flesh down and reduce the oil to no more than would fill a little flask. The skins he would spread against the back side of the house and peg them, heads up, to dry. The rattles, fourteen in one string and nine in the other, would hang over the fireplace. Cean could never afterward abide the sound of their shaking, but hung about a baby’s neck they make teething easy. The snake oil and the thin, rustly, pied-ed skins Lonzo would trade off at the Coast.

  When the dark had come down and they were ready for sleep, Cean tried to make amends for her trouble. She said:

  “Hit moved this evenin’, Lonzo.”

  He moved uneasily in the bed, so that the shucks stirred a little, and cleared his throat:

  “Y’ hadn’t oughta be off a-traipsin’ after berries. After this, ‘lessen I’m with ye, you keep home, little un.”

  Cean felt comfort in his words.

  After this, ‘lessen he was with her, she’d keep home.

  Chapter 4

  Neighbors brought gifts to Lonzo and Cean through the summer. They spoke slow, hearty wish-you-wells and extended their offerings apologetically: “Mary thought you mought could do with a extry hen or two. The old domineckers wasn’t layin’ much, so I brung some along.” And the speaker would dump a sack of fat hens on the ground.

  Cean and Lonzo accepted the things as humbly as they were offered:

  “Much obleeged to ye, if ye think ye kin spare ‘em.”

  There were four extra shoats in the pen; a flock of hens scratched far afield or watched the back door for Cean’s hand flinging a scrap of food; three old geese and a gander waddled in and out of the cotton rows, hissing foolishly at Lonzo’s passing; five guineas, other than Cean’s own young flock, alighted daintily from the trees at the crack of day and potracked from atop the rail fences through the mornings. Neighbors had dropped by from as far away as Brushy Creek to set a spell, to eat Cean’s hot cornbread and to drink her cool buttermilk; when the sun was low they would set out again for home.

  The summer days passed slowly, it seemed to Cean. The little un was making her a little heavy with his weight, was crowding her breath in her bosom, was making her slower in her movements to dress, to water the calf, to hoe the sunflowers. Everything was a little heavy, a little slow, under the summer’s bright heat and swift growth. By night the crickets burdened the air with their heavy chirring; by day the locusts sang out their grating monotones. During the cooler hours of the day the air was thick with bird song. Mockingbirds tilted on saplings and briers, chucking fussily, and sang from the top of Cean’s chimney in notes that were smooth and heavy and golden—too sweet, like honey. On moonlight nights their singing disturbed Cean’s rest, and she was weary when day came, and rose, ill-tempered, to cook Lonzo’s breakfast. The ill-temper worked in her body like a slow fever, clouding her eyes, making her weak and easy to cry. Lonzo called her toucheous, and told her if people let their feelings stick out too far, they’d get stepped on. Cean would go off to the cow-pen and cry onto the head of the little yearling that would come for her to scratch his back with a stick. Lonzo would kill the little feller; Cean cried slow tears onto his head. But it wasn’t just the calf; she didn’t know what was the matter with her.

  On these days, by the time the sun was an hour or two high, the air began to still. Long before noon a heavy hush blanketed the bird songs, the chatterings of little creatures in the edge of the woods, the breezes that ran through the lusty, green corn. It was hot and close; heat devils danced far and wide over sandy levels. Lonzo worked through the heat of the day; the sun burned deeper and deeper into his brown skin, his eyes shone blacker when he looked over his crops, green and rustling in the hot sun. Cean was afraid he’d get down with the fever, working in the heat of the day, but he ignored her pettishness. Heat is good for cotton and corn; it won’t hurt a man if he will fill up on cool water and sweat it off.

  Cean soaked their clothes together in the wash-trough; his garments were stiff with sweat; hers were dirtied down the front with smut from the fireplace, and grease, and dishwater. With the white battling-stick she beat free the sweat and smut and dish-water; she boiled them away in strong suds from brown soap that her mother had made; she rinsed them away in cold water from the spring; she sunned them away as the clothes hung, sweet-smelling in cleanliness, on bushes near the spring. Sometimes while she was washing she would grow weak, and would lean against the trough till her head cleared; sometimes the little un would kick and push at her, and she would stand a moment, smiling, feeling its harsh, small impatience, her hands idling in the suds.

  On a hot, heavy day Lonzo butchered the calf. Cean wanted to hide away in the house, but she wouldn’t give in to her feelings; and Lonzo might call her toucheous. So she turned only her eyes away when Lonzo called the calf to him, when the little feller came across the lot, butting and bouncing up his back end in silly, put-on independence, when Lonzo laid the ax with all his strength on the little feller’s pied-ed forehead. The calf fell to his knees and bawled; Lonzo stopped the bawling with a butcher-knife, slitting the throat. Then the blood came out. Unless you slit the throat, it will bleed on the inside. Cean didn’t cry; she wouldn’t let the tears come out; she was like the stunned brain of the calf, bleeding on the inside.

  She helped Lonzo dress the beef, working at the wash-trough where they could dip water from the spring close by. She cut and sliced with the big butcher-knife, and her hands were soaked red with blood; clots of blood dried on the knife-blade and on her wrists.

  And sure enough, a little later, there was the hide stretched on the back side of the house, as she knew it would be, pied-ed in red and white, curing to make the little un some shoes.

  Now that it was over, it wasn’t so bad. She was glad that she had not let on to Lonzo how she felt; a woman has business to be as strong as a man. No, a woman has to be stronger than a man. A man don’t mind laying the ax between a calf’s eyes; a woman does mind, and has to stand by and watch it done. A man fathers a little un, but a woman feels it shove up against her heart, and beat on her body, and drag on her with its weight. A woman has to be stronger than a man.

  Cean was tired out when the butchering was done. She left the tallow until tomorrow. Her face was red, and the long muscles in her legs ached from much stooping by the fireplace to fry the steak. Lonzo had jerked some of the meat into long, thin strips and hung it in the sunshine to dry out; they would use it when the fresh beef was gone. He dumped the evil-smelling remains of their work into a deep hole in the upper end of the cotton-patch near Cean’s sunflowers. He never liked to see the buzzards finishing up a dumb critter.

  Long before noon, Lonzo hitched up the ox to the cart and Cean climbed to the seat beside him, and they went off across the clearing and down the slope toward her mother’s. A half of the beef lay in the bottom of the cart, staining the old, clean sheet with bright blood. Under and over it Lonzo had piled newly cut palmetto fans that shaded the meat in hot, rustling gloom.

  Cean mused soberly as they followed the faint trace of the trail. She had not traveled it many times; only twice had she gone back to her mother’s, once for soap and salt, once just to be a-goin’. In between, her mother and father had come to see her, bringing the new churn that her father had made, and a length of narr’d homespun that her mother had woven. Today Cean would bring back her mother’s candle-molds, borrowed to form the fat of the little calf’s carcass into light. She and Lonzo went to bed with the chickens now, but when the little un came, it might be uneasy in its in’ards in the night, and Cean would need candles. She would mold them, and set them in a piggin of cold water, and loose them from the molds, and set them away in the chest.

  More and more she found her thoughts drifting, like a river’s current that sets stronger and fuller toward the sea, to that day in the winter when she would lie down for her labor. Once when she was a little tyke her oldest brother, Jasper, had told her tha
t new babies were found in dead logs and stumps, and she had searched through all of a morning for a baby. She remembered the day now, and smiled a little within herself.…It was a summer morning of still heat, and Jake was a baby not walking then. She had raised Jake, toting him around on her hip, fixing sugartits to hush his crying when Ma was busy with something. She had toted him to the woods that day when she went to find a baby in a hollow stump, a naked, squirming, redfaced baby such as Jake had been when she first saw him; but the baby she would find would stay little, and be cute and lovin’ like the little pet coon Jasper had—only better. Cean jolted along in the road cart beside Lonzo, her mind apart in a sober, pleasurable place. She was a thin-legged, serious child carrying Jake on her hip. She could feel the warm sand oozing between her toes; she could hear the sighing wind washing evenly through the tops of the big pines….

  The little un suddenly strove against its confinement, striking with quick, soft blows. She would find it beside her one morning in winter, would look for it and find it, little and rose-colored, new and unbelievable. But it would grow and learn to walk.

  The slow-footed ox rounded a clump of leaning bay trees and Cean saw her mother’s house, weathered and settled on the land that her father had plowed over through the years since he and her mother had come from Carolina to settle here. Cean’s mother had never much liked the country here. She was born in the red hills and could not get used to sandy ridges and flat woods, wide and lonely, shaded sparsely by the long-leaf pines that were forever sighing over the land, and moaning in storms, and crashing down in big winds of the fall to lie drying through the seasons. Off there lay the swamp, breathing out fevers and swarms of mosquitoes. She had never admired the pines. They were a black and gloomy kind of tree. The magnolias were black and gloomy, too, and their flowers a little too white, like sickly children. All the land was miserable-looking, to her, low and flat and hard to live in. Back in Carolina there were silver poplars turning their leaves silver-side, dun-side in the wind, and pyeart little cedars were set on each side of doorways, and rows of boxwood grew all the way to the gates. She had brought cuttings of her mother’s Cape jessamine and boxwood from Carolina, and some of the cuttings had grown to tall, shapely clumps about her yard here in the pinywoods. She didn’t like this country; it would grow good crops, but back in Carolina folks settled closer together, people were gayer, and had frolics at odd times, and meeting-houses with dinner on the grounds, and fairs with people coming from all over the section to laugh and have a big time.