Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  The cane juice bubbled and frothed in the syrup-boiler under the outdoor shed in Rowan Smith’s yard. Smoke rolled out of the clay chimney overhead in the night, and eddied back under the eaves to sting the young folks’ eyes a little and make an excuse for laughter, for, as is well known, smoke follows the prettiest gal in a crowd. Lonzo fed pine knots into the open-necked furnace under the boiler, manifesting a certain mastery in affairs, for this was his Pa’s place and this was his own syrup-b’iling to which the young folks from near and far were invited. Dicie and her daughters dipped up the foam in long-handled strainers and poured it back as occasion demanded, to keep the syrup from boiling over. There was cane juice aplenty yonder at the cane-mill that stood at the edge of the circle of light, around which the ox had tramped a rut in his journeyings, pulling the arm of the cane-mill on his heavy wooden yoke. The mill was still now, and the ox set free to rest in the night, but there was juice aplenty in a barrel. Cean liked to rake a cane peeling around the edge of the boiler, and to suck the foamy, sweet skimmings from it. Ever the smoke followed her, and the loud-voiced young males bellowed their laughter and teased her, milling about among the shy, giggling girls like young bulls in a cow-pen. Lonzo’s eyes followed that little Cean Carver as she dodged the smoke from one side of the syrup-boiler to the other. He heard the teasing of the other boys, the bold, insinuating laughter. Rank jealousy possessed him, causing him to mope and to take to feeding the fire in earnest, with never a pleasant word, not even when Cean laughed out and said, “If that Lonzo Smith’d stop a-pokin’ pine knots in there, they wouldn’t be s’ much black smoke to worry folks.” Lonzo only glowered into the fire and Cean was sorry she had teased him, for she had meant no harm and never had he minded before. Soon the young folks were a-frolicking out in the full light before the furnace, but Lonzo wouldn’t dance. Burning pain made him sick at heart to see Cean out yonder going through the figures, with Jabez Hollis holding her hands and measuring his steps to suit hers. Lonzo was as hot and restless inside as the syrup that every now and then foamed over the iron rim onto the hard-baked clay if Dicie and Epsie and Ossie did not watch. When the young folks came back to the fire, hot in spite of the cold, and laughing, and nighabout ready to break up the gathering, Lonzo’s pent feeling overflowed upon the face of Cean with its brown eyes warm and bright as fires, and its lips hardly ever shut to because she was so gay. He was back in the dark behind the roaring chimney, and there were tears in his eyes as he watched her. He thought that they were tears of rage, for he wanted to kill her because she was so merry and he was so miserable, because she was yonder in the firelight within reach of inviting laughter and gleaming eyes that followed her. When she came slowly near him there in the dark—for she knew that he was there—rage took hold of him until he hardly knew what he was doing, and he caught her quickly, drawing her out into the dark. His arms crushed her, his lips loved her in quick, hard kisses, as a thirsty man falls beside a branch and gulps water until he is full. When Lonzo’s mouth had softened from the clinging press of her mouth, and his arms yielded her back to herself again, he told her: “Ye’re agonna marry me. I’m agonna tell ‘m so.” And he did, bringing her out from behind the chimney to face the ribald fun of the others, who had seen other betrothals such as this. To their questions Lonzo answered that he and Cean would marry in the spring. Jabez Hollis, because he was put out and jealous of Cean’s bright eyes, called out: “Why, Lonzo, that’s when wild things mate!” And Lonzo bawled, with his hand still holding onto Cean’s: “Yeah, hit is, hain’t hit!” And he laughed, unashamed. Cean cast down her eyes, shy of the rough joking, but her heart beat proud and high ever afterward—a man had chosen her.

  They talked about how high Margot held her head. Cean could hold her own head as high as anybody’s alive, higher than Margot’s, for Lias treated Margot meaner ‘n a dog, and Lonzo was ever good and kind to her. Cean pitied Margot. Sometimes Margot would come over and spend the day at Cean’s house, and the two women would talk of their little doings. Margot would humor Maggie’s every whim and diddle Kissie on her knees while Cean stirred about, cooking. She would sing the baby to sleep with the lonesome backwoods song she had learned since she came here:

  Bay-black sheep!Where’s yore lamb?

  ‘Way low down in the valley;

  The buzzards and the butterflies are pickin’ out hit’s eyes—

  Pore little lamb cries: Ma-a-a-Ma-aa-

  The baby would lie still in Margot’s arms, listening to the hard words and soft melody that Margot had picked up from hearing Cean sing it so many times to Maggie as she rocked her to sleep. Cean liked the song, but Margot thought it a mournful thing to sing to a little un warm in its mother’s arm. The baby seemed to like it, too; she lay still, her eyes wandering over Margot’s long white face, her body at peace since it was held, her mind lulled with a slow song.

  In the late summer Lonzo cut the hay on the far side of the cotton-field. Many a day Cean had picked an apronful of peas there, standing knee-deep in the welter of grass and purple-and-white pea blossoms and cool green pea-pods branched on their sappy stems. She loved that pea-field as much as anything on Lonzo’s place. It was wild, and yet tamed a little, too. It sloped down to a bog where Lonzo had set beegums in the cool. On past yonder was the swamp. Lonzo would be lucky if the bears didn’t steal all the honey that the bees could make. Lonzo said that the little critters liked a place off to theirselves. In the woods around this field gall berries grew thick as hops, and all manner of flowers, too, so that the bees could find a thousand colored cups of sweet, full and waiting for them. Cean liked to think of their land going down into the edge of the swamp, and lived upon, even on this lonely boundary, by something of hers—the bees, children of her hives near the spring, children’s children of her mother’s hives, six miles to the east. She liked to walk over to this field in the late afternoon and pick peas for tomorrow’s dinner, after Lonzo had come in from the field and could watch the children for her. Stooping, her legs girdled about by blossoming pea vines and spidery grasses, she would move slowly forward among the faint odors of growing things and the voices of a thousand insects that made a home of this yellowing wilderness of hay. The sun would move toward its setting as she gathered tomorrow’s dinner; the shadows would lengthen toward the east; the air would be a murmurous, hot haze, and the field a wide, clean space engulfing this small, brown woman finding food for her man’s brawn and her children’s growth. Now and then she would lift her head to look upon the sullen black swamp, or to watch a bumblebee that clung to a swaying pea-vine tendril, its lumbering black body seeming immense and heavy on the delicate curl of vine. Above her bent the white sky, shading to faint blue; clouds reflected the sunlight, dazzling the eye; the dome of earth arched blindly over color and light, holding them under its heat until the summer world was thick with thundery oppression.

  When Lonzo cut swathes in the pea-vine hay, swinging the scythe with a long side-swing of his body, a thousand stems gave forth their beads of thin sap; the thousand breaths from that sap mingled with the odor of drying grasses and the death-scent of dropped seeds, with tangy, woodsy air and the earth’s own good scent, and made breathing rich and rank for the nostrils.

  Lonzo was cutting the hay on the day when Margot came walking up the rise to Cean’s house, and Cean knew that something was wrong. She met Margot in silence, and Margot, tired a little from her hot, dusty walk from Vince Carver’s place, sat down on Cean’s doorstep and said, simply: “I’ve parted from Lias….”

  There was no need for many words. Cean’s heart fell; a parting is sadder than a death, Ma always said, for two people are dead to one another and yet go on living—as though you might cleave a body in twain and set the severed halves apart and leave them to bleed helplessly for one another. A parting breaks the sacredest vow that any woman or man can make, “...till death us do part, so help me Godalmighty.”

  And what would Lonzo say to this?

  Cean stood beside the door
; Kissie sagged on her hip and lunged toward Margot in happy restlessness that tired her mother’s arms and back fit to break. Magnolia sat solemnly beside Margot on the step, setting her feet close together as Margot’s were set.

  Cean said nothing for a little; she’d let Margot do the talking. Maybe this was just a little spat between Lias and Margot; he’d come around the bend after a little to carry his wife back home. She told Margot this, after she had thought the words over.

  Margot set her eyes on the dim trail that went around the bend back toward Lias. She shook her head and her eyes were black as tar.

  “No, he won’t come for me. I slipped off. He’d see me dead before he’d come and ask me to go home. He’ll be glad I’m gone.…And besides he wouldn’t go and beg nobody for nothing… not Godalmighty Hisself....”

  Cean wanted to say, “Why, Margot, what in the world could make you leave Lias any such a way?”

  She said:

  “Oh, I wouldn’t pay hit no mind, if I was you. Lias is rotten spoiled ‘n’ al’ays was....”

  Margot spoke angrily:

  “I’ve put up with his notiony ways, but I won’t put up with his taking up with another woman. I’m as good as Bliss Corwin, and better, too, if the truth was known. I’ll thank her to keep her hands off of Lias….”

  Oh, Cean thought, so it’s that little Bliss Corwin, no more’n a child and hardly big enough for her foot to reach the treadle of her mother’s loom. So Margot is jealous….

  Margot went on:

  “She’s a little nobody without sense enough to get in out o’ the rain! Fifteen…and running after a grown married man.… And him fool enough not to know better!… She needs her mammy’s hand to blister her good, that’s what she needs…. I’ll do it meown-self, ever I get the chance.”

  Cean held her peace. She could not think what to say. Margot misunderstood the silence.

  “I reckon ye’ll all side with Lias….” She spat out the words bitterly.

  Cean’s voice was like her mother’s:

  “I wouldn’t side with Lonzo hisself, if he done wrong.” Then she tried to turn off Margot’s anger. “Maybe ole Green-eye’s jest got ye….

  Margot was following out her own thoughts:

  “I saw him with me own eyes.… He kissed her…like he thought she mought break if he touched her….”

  Cean asked:

  “What did Ma say?”

  “She don’t know it. She can think her own thoughts about me. I just told her I was coming over here. Lias don’t know that I saw him….” She told Cean of it: last night she and Jasper were sitting on the empty kegs in the corner of the cow-pen, waiting for the cows to come up to be milked. It was nigh onto night. Bliss had driven over a yearling that her father had sold to Jasper. Lias was feeding up at the crib. He must have seen Bliss, for he came down to the cowpen. He did not see Jasper and Margot in the cow-pen, no doubt because he had no eyes for any soul but Bliss on her way back home. And Lias followed Bliss to the other side of some gall berry bushes, and they hid like two thieves, and he took her face in his two hands, and he kissed her and she didn’t say no.

  Cean said nothing. Margot went on talking, though her breath thickened with every word and her face changed from anger to grieving:

  “Jasper saw it…but he wouldn’t let me say nor do a thing.… I had to sit still and watch.…Jasper told me to shut my fool mouth….”

  She laid her head on her knees and could say no more for crying.

  When she was through with her crying she laid her simple plans before Cean: she wanted to stay at Cean’s house for the little time until Lonzo should go to the Coast. She would pick cotton or pull fodder or do anything there was to do. If Lonzo could manage to make his trip alone this year, on some excuse, and would let her go with him, she would pay him with all the fine jewels that she possessed. She brought forth from her bosom the fine leathern bag in which lay the swinging earrings and the little green stone as big as your thumb, and the sparkling rocks of moon-crystals, and a gold finger ring that Cean did not much like, for it looked a little like the clouded eye of a blind man that she had once shuddered to see. But these were Coast jewels, and because Cean did not like an opal was no sign that it was not a fine thing to have. Magnolia watched the pretty things wonderingly. Kissie grabbed her hands after them. Cean’s heart gloated over them, feeling a little guilty of its greed.

  When Lonzo came in from the field, Margot told him what she had told Cean, as simply as one man tells another of his plans for next year’s planting. Lonzo said little, but Cean could see that he did not like this business of a woman’s running away from her husband. Margot could feel his disapproval.

  “He don’t feel about me like you feel about Cean. He never did, I reckon. He used to think a heap o’ me, but never like you thought about Cean.”

  Lonzo felt better about it then. Always, in everything else, he had been behind Lias—Lias was smarter, taller, quicker; but now in this matter, Lonzo was the better man—Cean had not run off and left him! But he did not crow over Lias, even in his own heart; rather, he crowed over himself—Cean would never run off!

  Lonzo knew that it was worse than useless to go and talk to Lias and have him fling out and want to fight, as he always did when anybody tampered with his business. Lonzo would let this thing drift!

  Margot worked like a nigger slave in the field next day. She kept pace with Lonzo down the cotton-rows. Cean kept thinking that Lias would come—for he must know that Margot couldn’t be anywhere but here—or that Pa would come to talk Margot into going back home.

  Margot bent her back to the beating sun in the cottonpatch. Her heart had never been uplifted so high, nor cast down so low—uplifted because she believed that this was the right thing for her to do, and downcast because she could not make her heart do this thing without nighabout breaking it. For a heart may be lifted up and cast down in the same moment, as sometimes sunshine comes while rain is falling, and builds upward in the sky tall reaches of misty, unlikely beauty.

  Rain and sunshine fell together upon Margot in the changeable, equinoctial weather as she worked in Lonzo’s cotton-fields. Rain spangled her hair and sprinkled her face when she stood upright and lifted her head to the sky; sun dried the raindrops as she stooped again to a labor which she found satisfying. Here in the midst of black-green cotton leaves, where coveys of bob-whites stormed through like dry leaves in high wind, there was nothing to trouble her heart; here there was only good. True, she pinched a green worm from her arm and it fell on the ground, and red ants tormented it with their vicious, crowding stings; yonder, low on a cotton stalk, a winged bug, created to fly, struggled frantically against a spider’s cunning web. That was evil of a sort, and cruelty. But it was all as it was meant to be. There was a difference, though she could not think how. The spider was meant to spin a web for its food.…And this…well, mayhap this was meant to be so, too—this evil that had come between her and Lias. There was something in this field that came into her and purged her clean, as boneset tea purges disease from fevered flesh. There was no hot distemper in her heart now; there was hurting, but it was healing pain that must come to every wound that does not rot.

  Lonzo went off up to the house as evening closed in; Cean might need firewood chopped for supper. Margot finished up the patch in the early dark. She let loose her hair because ever she had liked it loose against her cheeks. Her long black hair loosed in the softly flowing air made intangibly real to her precious secret things which could never be set into words, nor yet thoughts; her self seemed loosed with her hair and was free, unbound from the coil of propriety and the hard pins of busy-day ways.

  It was cool now and she was nearly done with the long row. The rough, dried bolls, with their sharp points widespread, gave up to her fingers the cotton that bore its seeds as small, hard cores of life inside it. The sack hanging at her side was heavy; the end of the row was just ahead, waiting there for her in the thin dark. Stars lighted the sky dimly; the moo
n, come halfway to its full, burned like a curious candle set out in the southeast. Lightning-bugs drifted by in the warm dusk, and one caught in the long black tangle of hair below her cheek. It struggled there, fitfully lighting its distress. She watched the little light, inconstant but brighter than a star. After a little time the bug ceased its struggling in the maze of hair, but the light went on gleaming and vanishing, like a minute candle in an unimagined window, set and snatched away again—a small mute sign not to be understood.

  The far clang of the bells of Cean’s cows up at the cowpen came to her; the cows were lowing to be milked; she’d better go and help Cean milk. But she did not stir. She heard the cows lowing; she saw the greenish light of the bug’s body caught in her hair, and the light was like quicksilver, frantic to be free to spill out onto the night. In her mind she saw Lias with that child’s face in his two hands and his lips hovering above her mouth; then he laid her head on his breast, and she closed her eyes, and his face fell upon her face and hid it from Margot’s sight, and his bright-brown hair fell down upon her ashy-brown hair and mingled with it; and Margot gasped and would have run to curse Lias, but Jasper pushed her back on the keg so that she fell on her hands to the boggy muck of the cow-pen, and Jasper said, “Shut yore fool mouth.”….

  The furry body of the lightning-bug pulsated with greenish-silver light. Margot lifted it and crushed it carefully between her fingers. The light stained her fingers, and when she wiped them on a cotton leaf the light stained the leaf. Lightning-bugs were thick all about her in the coming night. She put back her hair from her face, and bound it up, and went on to the house.