Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

He did not know why Margot reminded him of that woman that he had seen when he was just a little feller nighabout too little to remember it at all.

  Lias, at the Coast, kissed the woman hard on the mouth. Then he pushed her away so that she fell back on the bed again. She was more than a little drunk, and Lias’s tongue was loose enough to speak his frank thought:

  “Ye ain’t no more than a dirty trull.”

  The woman bristled, pushing back her heavy red hair from her forehead. She said:

  “Ye’re someun t’ be a-callin’ me names….” Lias rose unsteadily to his feet:

  “Nothin’ but a dirty trull....”

  He went out of the house.

  He had drunken too much; his in’ards were turning over; he was going to throw up.

  The sea wind from the bluff came cold in his face and freshened him. He went out toward the way the wind had come. He blew out his breath in sick gusts, lurching along in search of a place where he could be alone and lie down away from people who might say in an undertone as they passed:

  “There’s Vince Carver’s Lias…drunk again….”

  He went out to the bluffs, high and stable above the washing water. Live-oaks were massed thick and green. Their low branches swept the dry, white sand of the bluff. Moss draped the limbs, high and low, in a gray, noiseless curtain that hid the sea water from the houses and the houses from the sea water.

  Lias lay down, full length, on the earth. The wind sucked in and out of the trees. A twig broke under his thigh as he turned. He felt the feathery, fine sand clinging to his cheek where he had turned it to the earth. His stomach rolled and retched.

  Waves swept against the foot of the bluffs and went back in swirls of blackness. Lias heard the sound of the waves—Wash… sh…sh…Wash…sh…shh—the waves that were washing the land clean shore by shore. The sound reminded him of something, but he could not remember what it was. He wished the sound would go away; it troubled him—Wash…sh…sh…sh… He fell asleep. The wind blew the fine, feathery sand across him in gentle, airy rifts.

  Chapter 16

  It was dry as a powder-house in the summer of ‘49. A cow could stomp her hoof in the earth and dust would rise like smoke. The swamp went back into its sloughs and bogs, and wild things retreated with the water to the deep morasses far from Cean’s house. (Half a hundred miles to the south there lies a deeper swamp, mother to these little swamps. There the bogs are but a layer of slimy mud over a vast sunken sea; there you can set down your foot and cause the earth to tremble with your little heaviness, though you be but a light-weight creature; wild Indians call it Okefinokee, their unknowin’, heathen way of saying “Trembling earth.”)

  Along the edges of the swamp near Cean’s house the receding waters left wide stretches of muck that cracked into rough furrows as it dried out; a carpet of dead fish lay rotting there and blowflies swarmed in the stink. In other places, where the water was not quite gone, Lonzo and Cal caught fish in their bare hands and Cean had fish for supper every night until Kissie complained of it. Cean made the children tote water to her rose bushes to keep them from dying, until the water went too low in the well. And till it rained she must leave the floors unscoured.

  Cean had caught cold in her eyes, and they were red and weak-sighted. She tried May rain water. Always she had set cedar piggins under the eaves for the first rain water of May; it was a cure for sore eyes that the children caught in summer-time. Now Cean washed her own eyes in the water saved from warm May rains, but it did them no good. Some things just wouldn’t cyore up, she reckoned; you jest had to grow out of them. Such a thing was the loss of her twin sons, born a year and a half after Wealthy, born before their time, and dead before ever they breathed.

  It was a pitiful thing to wrop the little things in a new length of her homespun and lay them in a box in the ground as you would do with two pink still-born pigs. Lonzo could hardly abear hit. And how Cean did grieve over them! as though she did not have six other children besides. Long afterward, she would sit on the doorstep late of an afternoon and stare off toward the swamp while hushed tears rolled down her cheeks for the little lost boys. Her other children would be romping across the yard, maybe, making the warm air beat in her ears with their noise; but Cean seemed not to hear them. She were a-grievin’ for the little boys.

  She tried not to cry any more than she could help, for crying made her eyes worse. First thing she knew she’d be weak-sighted like Ma used to be; and now Ma was nighabout blind as a post. Sure enough, like Jasper said, Ma must have second sight now. They had tried her out; she could feel them come into her room even though they might steal in ever so quietly.

  Cean took care of her eyes, washing them many times a day in salty water, in May rain water, keeping out of the sun as much as she could. She didn’t want to go blind in this world; there was too much to look at. They said second sight was a finer thing to have, for by second sight a body can see visions and all manner of things that the ordinary eye cannot see—streets of the Glory World, the Pit of Torment, folks who are dead to this world but walk alive again, seen only by second sight. But Cean didn’t want to lose this first sight of hers. Sometimes while she nursed her eyes under a poultice of big white blooms of wild comfort, she would name over in her mind the many pretty sights she would never see again if she were blind.

  A pity Godalmighty had to threaten to take your eyes away before ever you would look and see what a pretty place He had given you to live in! With her mind dark behind the cold poultice, she could see clearly a thousand sights; she could lie quiet—till somebody came and called her—if it were a whole enduring hour, going from one thing to another, examining each of many remembrances, in no hurry to pass it for another that was no lovelier, only different, in a small or great degree. Once, long ago, before that rattler had struck her when she was new in this house and scared her nearly to death, she had thought a snake a powerful pretty thing. And it was a pretty thing yet! so she decided. Just because a rattler had struck her was no sign that God hadn’t made him pretty in another way from a coon or a frisky-tailed squirrel or a flower bush. When she was a little girl she would drive Ma’s calves away from the cow-pen to the river bottom, where they would forget their mother’s full bags in cropping the wet, sweet grass. The sun would be an hour high, for the cows were long since milked and turned out. So, on such a trip one morning, she had seen a moccasin, with her five rosy, shiny-skinned babies twisting about on the ground around their Ma before an old stump that would be their den. Cean would never forget that, for it was a rare sight. Hardly ever could you catch an old snake with her young; she would scatter them, daring you to find them. Cean never told her pa that there was a moccasin den in such and such a place. Let the old snake have her home that she had made in a rotten stump! She would have wild enemies aplenty to fight, without taking on a grown man who would fire the stump and drive her out in the open and beat her head flat with a stick.

  Law! the sights Cean could see inside her head when she tried! There was fog lying flat and thick yonder when you looked away through the pines early on some fall morning. Fog was a mystery to Cean; it was as like smoke as two peas, and yet different—no smell, no nothing. Let the sun come up and fog skedaddled off into nowhere, leaving the leaves of the low bushes slick and wet and spangled with a thousand spider webs that were built into the air of last night. And maybe down the throat of a flag-lily you would find a drop of dew formed into a flat shining bead, or a little bright-green spring frog sleeping high up into the morning hours. Oh, there were a thousand sights for folk-es’ eyes to see!

  But sometimes hard sights slipped in behind her eyes, too, as she lay holding her eyelids closed. She would move her head to the side, dodging them; that was no way to do, mulling over something you couldn’t help, looking at something you couldn’t change. But the sight of those two little boys, alike in every way, would not leave her mind in peace. It was a new marvel to Cean; always before she had looked and found two crumpled hands, two l
ittle folded feet, two eyes to look blindly into her face through the cloudy gray-blue that saves new-born eyes from the first cruel light of this world. And here were four little hands in a row, twenty little fingers with a finger nail on each one, and here were twenty little toe nails. Cean marveled most that forty little nails could have come perfect out of her body! No, not perfect! for they were white as fish meat, not pink as babies’ nails should be. Oh, the ways Lonzo did try to make them little boys live!…and never would they breathe once.

  Cean would sit on the doorstep in the early evenings and cry. It was a pitiful thing to her for the little fellers to breathe never once, to cry and be hushed in her arms never once, to taste their mammy’s milk never once.

  Never could she figure out why the little fellers had not lived unless it was Godalmighty’s way of showing Cean her place. You didn’t get off with just praying and crying over a sinful thing. God would hold your feet to the fire; He‘d cause you to remember again and again, as long as you lived, and just so often must you repent all over again. Weren’t hit exactly two years that Cean had made out, between Kissie and Cal, to have no more children? Well, then! These two little boys, given cold and white to her arms, were children that she had murdered in her heart ten years ago. She had murdered them because she denied life to her seed for two years before God outwitted her and sent her Cal. And she had thought to get off with crying a little in repentance, and bearing her children that had come since with patience and a quiet mouth and heart! Godalmighty had His own way of showing her the children she had laid out dead, slain by her own selfishness, by her own hand that had followed Margot’s evil talk of Coast ways. It did undo her to see Lonzo drive off that day, carrying the little boys in a box in the back of the jolting ox-cart. Cean wanted them buried by their grandpa, by their Aint Elizabeth. It would be too lonesome for them to be buried away off here by her house, six miles from nowhere; the dead like company, too.

  Oh, Cean was heavy-hearted, fit to die, but nobody ever heard about it. Lonzo thought she was weak and sickly; the children thought nothing about it, for the way of his own mother is the natural way to a child’s thinking; all else seems foreign and remarkable.

  There was always work to do to distract Cean from black thoughts; there were always fresh accidents to hurt where others had healed in her thoughts. A snapping-turtle bit off Cal’s trigger finger on his left hand, and Cean always afterward felt that she had too many fingers, since Cal lacked one of his. It was a pitiful thing to do—to wrop the bleeding stub, to hear Cal tell, between his snubbin’ breaths, that he hadn’t meant no harm to the old turtle. The other children crowded around, hush-mouthed in amazement at this new happening, a little envious of Cal. Fairby comforted Cal, telling him that it was a sight better for the old turtle to bite off his finger than to hang on till it thundered, as everybody said turtles did. When the hurting had stopped and the bite was healing, Cal had to unwrop the stub many times a day for the children’s eyes to see, for in the puckered flesh their credulous eyes could see the mark of a turtle’s hard teeth. And Pa said that a turtle hain’t got no teeth!

  Cean was always a-treatin’ something. In the cold rainy spells of the year, Wealthy and Caty, and sometimes even Lovedy, would take turns having croup of nights. Cean would keep her tallow and turpentine and camphor ready-mixed and warm on the fireplace; she would dose and rub the little chests, tight with cold, and sometimes she would crawl into bed beside Lonzo’s heavy snoring only when the roosters were crowing for day, to catch a cat-nap before the children would be up, quarreling over their wool stockings and hide shoes that lay fresh-greased before the fire from last night. One time Kissie ran a big sliver deep into her foot, and Lonzo had to split the flesh as you would a squirming fish, and dig out the frazzled wood, piece by piece. Cean had to fight Kissie like she was a wildcat, to hold her still, and since Kissie was now nighabout as big and strong as her mother, Cean and Lonzo swapped places, and Lonzo held Kissie down, who was fit to go into a spasm, and Cean dug out the leavings of the splinter from the bloody hole in Kissie’s foot where the leaders were drawn like cured rawhide. Cean drenched the wound with clear turpentine, knowing that it burned her child’s meat like living fire. Oh, some bad thing was always happening.…Even Maggie, careful and slow as she always was, slit her hand through one morning when she was slicing potatoes to fry, and Cean sewed the meat of Maggie’s hand together like it was a seam of homespun! The needle would hardly push through; the skin was tough like leather.

  But there were good things, too. Lonzo brought her a little case of Promethean matches from the Coast. It was a big surprise, and when he struck one between his teeth, she screamed out at the unlikely sight of fire in his mouth; it scared her till she trembled all over. Now the children would be powerful good and powerful smart for a whole day just to see their pa strike a match in his mouth. Cean was glad of the matches; they were better to hold in Cal’s contrariness than a dozen larrupin’s.

  And there was the gold and silver money in Cean’s chest. Each year Lonzo would trade some of his goods for silver dollars to take home to Cean; he cared little about the things just to hoard them, but Cean got a mighty lot of satisfaction out of it. Last year, because he could not forget her face as she looked when the little boys would not breathe her breath that she blew into their nostrils, he traded all the cargo of his cart for two gold eagles to carry back to Cean. And when she saw the two gold pieces, she did not complain that he had not fotched home to her the little things she had expected—pepper and cinnamon and cloves (from the Brazils or Chiny or even Moscovy, who could tell?), and a three-legged oven like the one Margot had, and a candle-mold of her own, for she was tired of borrowing Ma’s.

  How Cean did gloat over those gold and silver coins! Somehow to Lonzo it was worth his doing without all the things that he had wanted to buy for himself when he saw Cean sit before the fire of nights and run her brown fingers through the pieces of money that clanked softly together as they fell through her fingers, catching gleams from the firelight; Cean would recount to her children how gold lay deep in the black guts of the earth, yellow and heavy until some adventuring man found it and brought it to the light of day and to the hands of greedy men. The children would listen, and even Cal would be hush-mouthed while his mother talked; in the procession of Cean’s words they could see men, sick of the gold fever, hasting westward by foot or ox-cart, wandering westward across trailless deserts where there is never a tree—only sun and sand; they could see ships straining westward with the wind strong in all their sails. Once gold was struck in the up-country of Georgy at Dahlonega and Lonzo—if he had been old enough—might have upped and gone to dig the bright riches out of the ground if he had so willed; surely it would be a quicker, easier labor than sweating and straining, year after year, where rain was uncertain and crops came hard even with the best of seasons. But Lonzo would never up and dash to a fortune; it was not his way.

  But he had brought her two gold eagles from the Coast, and maybe that was a wiser way to do. Lonzo would have liked to buy himself a new wool hat at the Coast, and a pair of boughten shoes with the wooden measure left in them, a handful of iron door nails, and plowshares that shine new and cut clean. But remembering Cean’s face, white and scared at the sight of the two sweet, death-blighted babies that had come out of her living body, he called out the Spanish trader, Villalonga, from his counting-room, and offered him all that was on the cart—hides and honey, a load of white cotton and a measure of fine seed corn, syrup, brown sugar, and sweet cyored hams, all for two gold eagles that would bring a smile to Cean’s mouth when she saw them. Lonzo chose two gold eagles, rather than one double eagle. Cean liked to drop the coins through her fingers in the firelight of a night, and two are better than one for such a purpose.

  Sometimes in the night Cean would mull over this matter of gold until she could not sleep. There were fourteen pieces in her chest. You must stack ten pieces like them into the hand of a slave-trader before you could buy on
e little nigger slave.…But in California gold grows in the ground like pinders or ’taters. And at the Coast there are women who have nothing to do but work a little silk-cloth sampler with red and yellow worsted; yet these women eat rich food and wear soft, silk shifts next their hides, and live all their lives without sweating or digging or hoarding to have such.… Cean could not make sense out of it.…Why should some ground grow gold secretly in its in’ards, while other ground, like this of her’n and Lonzo’s, will grow only weeds unless it be tended like a sick baby? She did not know….

  How Jake did want to go West; but, no, he must stay home and help Jasper manure the garden patch and tote splinters to Ma’s fire, and help Fairby and Vince on and off an ox’s rump any time it pleased them to ride. In the first place, he was hardly old enough to go; he begrudged Jasper and Lias their ages and beards and deep voices. He wanted a hairy chest and a bellowing voice and haunches strong as Jasper’s; instead, his chest was white and blue-veined as a girl’s; he was tall, but his legs could not take Lias’s big stride, nor his arms Lias’s heft; his voice was but little deeper than Margot’s. Jake was jealous of his older brothers.

  He liked to lie out in the woods; he was a rabbity little feller, Ma always said. Now since he was grown he would lie out for days and nights by the river with a quilt and blazing fire to keep him warm at night. For his hunger he would have a few potatoes to roast in the ashes, and besides he could kill any wild meat and clean it and prop it on a spit to roast; he could cook a big venison haunch through so in half a day. Jake sometimes thought that he would like to have been born fresh to the woods like any little beast, forced to find food and shelter here and yonder like a fearsome thing. He thought that with his tinderbox and dog-knife he could get along forever but for the hard, wet cold of winter, and he could stand that, if he had to, in a hollow log out of the wind like a ’possum, or in a dark cave like a bear. Not a bear, not even a rattler, would harm him, for they would be sleeping off the cold, too, and he could scare off any hungry painter by pitching a chunk of fire at him. Wild things hate fire; it will sweep through the woods in rolling smoke and waves of flame that burn out their dens and singe their young and mayhap hem them in between two walls of fire and roast them to greasy cinders.