Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  Seen seemed dazed; she did not at once recognize her duty in this matter. She had handled many another death, but this was her own house, her own grief, and not a neighbor’s. Once before to her own house Death had come, but Eliza-beth had been too little to be told about it. And that time, she depended on Vince, anyhow.

  When she came to herself a little she saw her duty clear before her. For she knew that Death had a habit of slipping inside houses and stealing away souls that might not suspect that he had come for them—unless they be told. Thus it was that so many people died in their sins. Vince was a good man, but he ought to be told that Death was here, come for him. It would be hard to do, for already he was half gone. Death had stolen a march on her. She was comforted by Jasper, who stood there by her with his hand on her shoulder. He had put her stockings on her. As though she cared whether she were shod or not!

  She pulled and tugged at Vince until Lias, who was ever short-tempered, scolded her:

  “Let ‘im be, fer God’s sake, Ma….” And then his voice broke.

  She waked Vince, though his eyes slid shut whenever she loosed her grip on him. She must be sure that he understood, so that if there were anything that he wanted to set straight, he could set it straight. A body never rests easy in the grave if it leaves something undone here.

  She did not tell Vince straight out; she knew that he was nobody’s fool.

  “Vince, d’ ye hear me?”

  He grunted with his mouth open, with his eyes set on her eyes, giving assent.

  “Is they anything ye want t’ say?”

  They listened, straining to hear his last words. They must know his last wish and must execute it—for no oath before God, no word of Bible, is so awful, so compelling, as a dying man’s words.

  Vince grunted, a gruesome, unnatural sound. Lias turned his back quickly and went to the fire, but Jasper stood with his backbone as stiff as his ma’s.

  The old man’s eyes found Margot and set in a stare. Sleep wrapped him like a shroud and made him senseless and careless of death.

  Vince had no sin to confess, Seen knew; he was a good man and had ever been.

  The old man’s eyes were set on the spot in the air where he had met Margot’s eyes, until Seen pulled the lids shut and weighted them, as his body cooled.

  Seen washed her new dead while dawn was breaking. Margot helped her. The two women were steeled to this emergency. Common words of everyday speech passed between them; they talked to hide the ghastly stillness. They washed his naked, wasted, sore-eaten body. Once the breath was gone, here was an unclean body to be prepared for its burial in the clean earth. Seen could not allow herself to remember now that this piece of flesh had many times yearned to her flesh, creating wonder upon wonder of life—men who stood yonder, shut out from their father’s nakedness, grieving for him. She raised the limp body, and Margot helped her clothe it in clean clothing. She set her hand under his chin to see that the jaws were set together properly. She brushed his hair down with a bristle-brush; it was docile under her hand as he had been docile since he was sick, but never before. Margot shook out a clean sheet….

  But Seen could not lay it over his face.

  Godalmighty, this was Vince she was laying out! This was Vince whose smell she was shutting off under a clean sheet! This was Vince whose hair and beard she had washed, his neck limber in her hands! And he had let her do it; he had been careful not to remind her of what she was doing, until she was through with it—of whom she was laying out to cool. His hands had stayed where she laid them, folded on his breast.

  Seen let the sheet fall; it crumpled on his breast and brushed his newly-washed beard. She clumped blindly across the floor of the kitchen-house. Jasper met her and held her in his arms against his breast; she beat her forehead on his hard young breast, crying and crying and telling him, as though she had only just heard it:

  “Oh, Jasper—yore Pa’s gone.…Yore Pa’s gone….”

  Lias dropped his head into his arms on the kitchen table. Jake rose without a sound, though his mouth was crimping, and went out of the house. Jasper laid his face against his mother’s thin gray hair. They wept as strong souls weep, with cries breaking silently out of the roots of their beings; they wept as men weep who know that a bulwark against destiny has gone down, who know that their own tried spirits must henceforth be that bulwark making a stand out in the lonely fore.

  Margot heard their grief; she remained in the room where the sheet covered this man that they loved more, now that he was dead, than they had ever loved him while he lived. Now she could almost love him, too, forgetting the loathing she had felt for him all the while that she had loved Lias. The sheet would never stir now, unless another hand than his lifted it. Seen had closed his mouth and weighted his eyelids; Margot need not hate him now, nor fear him…. But It was mighty long and still there on the bed; death had lengthened Its stature strangely. It could bide Its time now; It knew all the secrets of death, secrets of more worth than word or thought. For one ghastly moment she could feel Its eyes staring at her from beneath the concealing sheet; for those eyes had the power of death in them, and could laugh at the futile sheet and the thin, brown coppers on the lids. It was beyond the limitations of the body now, and could see where It liked, regardless of light or dark or any foolish obstruction. She was a pitiful creature beside that Thing that was with her in the room. But she must stand her ground! And she stared the Thing down, her heart hard as iron. Once she could swear that the sheet rose whiter and taller, and moved; but in the next moment she knew that it was only a trick of her eyes that danced with fear. She heard them weeping in the other room—the weeping of the children of these spent loins, the wailing of the beloved of this impotent body. She dropped her face into her hands. She had been afraid of this poor, sick, old man who lay dead. There were no ghosts—and if there were, Vince Carver would be a good, kind ghost. Had he not overlooked her marrying Lias, and never parted his lips against her? She could let him know now that she was a decenter woman than he had thought. But he knew it already, mayhap, for he was out yonder where knowledge of all things floods like a sea of light. She eased her weight down on her knees, and tried to form a prayer to this new spirit in another world— “My thanks to ye…my thanks to ye.…” She dropped her head on the side of the bed; she wished forgiveness from this old man whose heart she had made to ache. Her thoughts reached vainly, trying to tell him that she was not altogether evil, as he had believed. He moved under her hand, and she went cold with horror.

  Then she realized that it was only his hands that her own movement had disturbed, since they were not yet stiff. Suddenly, in her relief, she knew why she wanted to say her thanks to him—“My thanks to ye for dying, for getting from between Lias and me….”

  Lias rode off to tell the neighbors, and Jasper went to bring Cean. It was two hours by sun then. Seen was surprised to find it morning; to her the air had the feel of late afternoon, it seemed the end of a weary day.

  They had gone through the motions of eating the breakfast that Margot had cooked, but not a soul could swallow a mouthful. Vince had eaten his meals in bed for many a day, but never till this day did the head of the table seem forsaken. The empty chair was now a cruel reminder that swallowing and breathing can cease, aye, even in one who is as steadfast a surety as the sun. Now they knew that he would never eat with them again until they sat down at meat with him in the Glory-World. The thing that separated them was Death, broader than the farthest reach of sky from east to west, deeper than the depths of the Middle Passage to the Old Country, blacker than any night, and more to be feared than any demon in hell. They knew all these things. Yet Seen spoke of how happy Vince must be right now, holding little Eliza-beth in his arms. Her eyes filled as she said it, and she yearned to caress that little angel, and to be caressed by the big, stalwart angel that was Vince, striding, broad-shouldered again now, about heaven, with Eliza-beth in his arms, her silver wings folded on her shoulders, and sweet as her mother’s dre
ams of her in a little blue robe that God had given her to wear. Oh, the house ached for Vince and Seen’s heart ached for Eliza-beth, too, the while it was aching for Vince. It seemed only yesterday that Seen had watched Vince dig Eliza-beth’s grave out yonder at the side of the house.…Now Seen went to the shutter and opened it, and looked yonder to the grass under the pines. The day was still and only a little cold, for the weather had warmed up again after the cold snap. Elizabeth’s little grave seemed lonesome under the leaning pines, but it would soon have company. The neighbors would dig out another hole this very morning, and Vince would go into it.

  Margot stirred about the fireplace, cooking dinner for neighbors who would come. As she went busily about, she carried on her arm the girl-child that had got her pretty puckered lips from Bliss Corwin, and her scornful flaring nostrils from Lias Carver, and her ugly clubfeet from old Satan.

  Seen latched the shutter and turned back to the fire. She sat there close beside the fire. Slowly her life showed itself to her to be resolved into two parts, as a sharp knife is passed around a smooth fruit, causing it to fall apart into two perfect halves. The first half lasted until last night, filled with work and care and going hither and yon doing this thing and that thing, making a home, rearing big men and a good woman as her children; the second half began last night when Vince’s breath left him. This day—the day when Vince would be buried –was the first day of the second part. (For the weather was not cold enough to keep him out until tomorrow unless they put him in a room without a fire, and even then he might purge a little at the nose and mouth.) The second part of her life would hold neither work nor care, neither going nor doing, for her home was made and her children were grown; this second part would be weary waiting for God to call her home to be with Vince, where she belonged.

  Seen said nothing of all these things, but her children noticed that she was different ever afterward from the mother they had known before; they forgot, while she remembered, that before ever she was their mother she was Vince Carver’s wife.

  Lias wondered over the manner in which Jasper stood his father’s death—better than any of them. Jasper was most like his mother, the neighbors said. Cean was like that, too.

  Jasper withstood grief as a stone withstands rain. Cean sat in a chair among her little children and never did she break down once; only silent tears slipped down her cheeks. Jake was gone most of the day; he was down by the river, for he was ever a rabbity sort of feller, hiding out when something got the best of him….

  Lias did not know how Jasper and Cean and Ma could hold themselves in so. Down in the woods he sat on a log and pulled wire grass, thread by thread, from its roots; then thread by thread he cast the grass away. He stilled his fingers for a time and held them locked on his crossed knees, but before he knew it he was back at the grass-pulling, and his foot was scraping the earth clean between two clumps of grass. A little gray lizard skimmed down the log toward him. He sat motionless, watching it. The lizard lay still for a moment, rearing its head to watch the great unfamiliar hulk on the log, then it moved across a ragged hole where the rotten brown heart of the log lay exposed. Lias watched the lizard’s gray color turn to the brown of the rotten wood; then, as the lizard slipped down the smooth, weathered side of the log and climbed across a clump of grass, it turned green as the grass. It crawled across the toe of his dark boot and was dark again.…Lias stamped his other boot heel hard on the lizard; it squirmed and lay still, its in’ards smearing his boot—in’ards that were neither brown, nor green, nor gray, but red, like his own, he reckoned. He picked up the crushed lizard by its tail and flung it away, and wiped his boot clean with a handful of grass. “Tarnal thing!” he said.

  “He kain’t be dead,” he thought. “He kain’t be dead….”

  Pa had been his best friend, and he had been a friend to pore little Bliss. He had known that Lias wanted Bliss‘s little child even if it would limp all its days. Pa had taken Ma to see the child when it was three days old, and they had brought it back to Lias’s own house for Margot to tend to. Ma said that Bliss had cried to see the little thing taken away from her, but Susanna Corwin was glad to get the sin-bred child out of her house. Anybody would know it all its life for a sin-child, because of its ugly, stumped feet.

  Now Lias could send Margot back to the Coast.…No! He couldn’t. Pa would turn over in his grave. So Lias must keep on slipping over to Bliss’s house, meeting her by the creek when she could get away from her mother’s storming tongue and her father’s stolid disgust.

  Oh, Pa had told Lias that he was making Bliss the laughingstock of all these parts, that he was bringing his own name to be a joke among the neighbors.…But Lias would not listen. For he could fall on the grass beside Bliss and feel her cool hands smooth his forehead once, and hear her little voice hush his quarreling, and he would forget that ever he had been worried up about anything. There was something about Bliss that was as good for him as a dose-t of camomile tea. If he was dead and in hell, she could come to him and say, “Oh, shet up yore old quarrelin’, Lias,” and he’d hush. She always knew how he felt about things, Bliss did; but never did she count them worth worrying over, or quarreling about. She was a sweet thing, a mortal sweet thing, Bliss was….

  Through the pinywoods came the silver wrangling of cowbells. Lias heard the iron clanking on iron on the necks of his father’s cattle. Without moving his eyes from an ant that climbed along a pine root two foot away from his boot, he could name the cow that bore each bell—Bonnie, or Gypsy, or Bess, or the little pied-ed heifer, Spot. Each bell seemed to sound a tone deeper or higher than an ‘ other; all the varied tones mingled to lull the mind, rather than to tease it, for wherever the bells clink-clanked in a steady, patient wrangling, there the cows were feeding at peace, or resting, stirring their bells only to toss away a biting fly. To the east, where the ground was higher, the finer clanking of a sheep-bell might be heard, a thinner sound, as became the little woolly beasts mincing over the grass on their delicate feet that seemed too small to bear their fleece-laden bodies. An old bay-black wether led the flock, the little bell swung under his neck by a buckskin thong. Lias knew that bell, too. He knew each bell, and the beast that bore it. These dumb things were his kin, not in blood, but in circumstance. As Vince Carver’s crops prospered, these bellies would be full and these backs fat and broad; when the crops failed, these beasts were denied, as Vince Carver’s family was denied, and not one whit more. Lias listened to the cow-bells swinging on the necks of the dumb creatures whose bags were drained each day, night and morning, to feed the Carvers; he heard the old bellwether that had led the sheep up for the shearing these many years, giving up his own reddish-brown wool first so that his flock would not be afraid of the shearing, holding his tender eyes half closed as Vince Carver’s shears went carefully through his winter fleece. Since Lias was a little feller that old bay-black sheep had led the flock. Once when Jake wasn’t knee-high to a duck he had cried his eyes out when Ma sang that old song about the bay-black sheep; he thought that it was Pa’s bay-black sheep that had lost its lamb away low down in the valley, where the buzzards and the butterflies were a-pickin’ out its eyes.…. It made a good joke to tell on Jake now, for the old wether couldn’t have a lamb if he tried.

  To Lias the sound of the bells was a forlorn and forsaken tolling, for the man who had been judge and protector and slayer of these dumb beasts would soon be under this ground that was his, over which the beasts that were his walked grazing, subject yet to his will.

  They stood about the hole while the wet earth thudded down upon the yellow pine box. The elder would be along in the spring. Now they would put him away the best way they could. Lige Corwin prayed a half-hearted, choking prayer; the neighbors stood around the grave, sorry enough for Vince Carver to die, but unable to say a word, or to do a thing but cover up the yellow pine box.

  Seen had to look away from the soggy soil that was thrown in, a spadeful at a time, on Vince. She must not lose this peace in he
r heart; it could be but a few short years until she would see him again in the Glory-Land, with Eliza-beth; and they would climb the golden stairs together up to God’s white throne, where prayers from sorrowful earth gather about God’s ears and are thick and sweet and compelling upon His remembrance.

  Cean stayed that night at her mother’s house. They lay, each in his bed, with their ears aching with the sound of the hounds’ mournful baying. Never was there so lonesome a sound.…The dogs slunk through the dark with their tails between their legs, and prowled around the pale mound where Vince Carver lay in the damp earth close alongside Elizabeth. The freshly turned soil gave up a keen clean odor to the sniffing of the hounds; but among the scent of clay and rain and grass and tree they found, too, a faint, curious odor of their master.

  Chapter 13

  The winter was mild and sweet-tempered. The leaves had scarce a chance to turn for the little frost they had felt, and all through the cold months you could hear the frogs croaking, clinking like bright metals one upon another, for they were out of their burrows, fooled by the warm weather. Men must start their spring plowing early this season, for crops must be up and doing before hot summer; there had not been enough cold to kill the worrisome insects that would swarm alive over the fields in the hot months.

  Fairby’s first birthday fell in the middle of this warm winter.

  Margot baked a sugar-cake and Jasper pared down a candle till it was a little size, and they set the cake and the candle in the middle of the eating-table at dinner-time. Fairby blew her face red, trying to quench the little flame that was so toucheous that it swerved from every least breath of air; but she could not blow it out. She sat in the high chair that Lias had whittled out of a walnut block for her, and frammed against the table with her feet that were crumpled as though a strong hand had broken them.