Lamb in His Bosom

by Caroline Miller

  In the fall of that year there was talk at the Coast of deep fields of gold to the west, free for the digging. It was away yonder on the other side of rivers and mountains and dry, deserty places. When the year’s trading was over, Jake and Lonzo went home without Lias; he was gone to the goldfields of California. That was the word that Lonzo was to carry home from him to Margot.

  So Lias could not know that Fairby was dead; they felt pity for him because he did not know. Sometime he would come home again bringing cartloads of gold; then they would all eat out of gold mush-bowls and sleep under quilts of gold cloth. Fairby, when she lived, had excelled in accounts of these imaginings, and stood high in the opinion of the other children. Was it not her Pa who had gone to bring back gold? And when he came back, Mammy would hush her crying and would wear gold rings on her fingers thick as feathers on a bird’s back.

  Now of a rainy night when the daylight had gone out quickly under lowering clouds, when wind howled over the roof and rain beat hard against the sturdy logs of Cean’s house, she would wonder where Lias was, and how he fared, and the children would speak softly among themselves of Uncle Lias. A rain drop might sizzle into the fire from down the chimney…what roof did Lias have to keep his head dry on this night of wet winter?…As Cean went to see if the children were covered against the cold, she would wonder, Does Lias sleep warm and have cover aplenty where he is?…Mayhap he is dead in that wild land of buccaneers and trollops.…If it had not been for Fairby, then Caty would be alive today.…If Fairby had never been borned.…Oh, Fairby was innocent.…It is Lias who should bear all the blame for this sorrow.… Lias brewed the grief for us all, and left us alone to drink it for him.…But vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Had Godalmighty aimed at Lias and struck Fairby?… Lias, mayhap, was out o’ His reach!… But, no, that could not be.… “Though I take the wings of the morning and fly….”

  “May the Lord have mercy on ye, Lias, wherever ye may be,” Cean prayed.

  Chapter 17

  War talk flamed around the camp fires under the live-oaks at the Coast. As far back as Lonzo could remember, men had talked of war with the North; but now there were stronger arguments for and against War. Now there were hotter heads. Always slow-tongued, Lonzo had little to say; he listened, and kept his own counsel. He would lean over a trading-counter and listen while some young blood of a planter’s family harangued over states’ rights. There were fire-eaters among these planters, Lonzo thought; they would fight at the drop of a hat. Their eyes flashed and their skins darkened when they recounted some new tale from up North—some runaway slave, mayhap, that was petted and pampered when what he needed was fifty lashes on his greasy back. Rich planters would tighten their fists, wishing for a war so that they could go and lick the Northern upstarts who hadn’t learned to tend to their own business. The planters argued that the Negro was well cared for under slavery. Didn’t the overseer dole out corn and bacon every Saturday noon, so much to a man and so much extra for every black that was in his shanty? Didn’t every house in the quarters have its garden patch to go with it? Weren’t the wenches busy in the weaving-sheds from dawn till dark, making cloth for the slaves, and didn’t the mistress herself oversee them, holding them to so many lengths a day before they could leave the looms at night? The sempstresses sewed the cloth into garments; black cobblers cured cowhides, tanned them, dressed them, and made winter boots for young and old to wear to the meetinghouses o’ Sunday. No nigger in slavery went hungry; it paid to feed the blacks well. They would fall sick if they were not fed well, and planters who denied their slaves meat and lard found them to be lean and scrawny and weak, not fitten to bring a top price when they were placed on the block. Besides, no number of lashes on his back can keep a black from stealing when he is hungry—a pig in the dead of night, or a side of meat from the smokehouse—if the overseer does not hand him out his rations Saturday by Saturday. For a nigger does love hog meat. As for the matter of the rawhide lash that the cantankerous Yankee preachers had so much to say about, was ever a black whipped unless he had stolen from his master, or played sick to keep from working, or sassed a white man? One overseer at the Coast had a stiff right hand on which the thumb and fingers stuck out like a dead man’s; he had broken it on a Negro’s blackbone skull when the black man sassed him. That man’s hand was a sight for Lonzo to see.

  The talk went on about Lonzo; he listened to planters, overseers, backwoodsmen, merchants, gleaning knowledge of the strange life that went on here at the Coast. The planters made out an easy life for the Negro; never did one lie sick without a physic, for the mistress would visit the quarters herself, carrying physics and ways of treatment. Some plantations even had hos-pi-tals where the blacks were treated like you would put a fine hog in a pen by itself and tend it till it was well, for niggers cost more than any hog. Unless you raise him in the quarters, a healthy buck will cost you five hundred dollars.

  That was a mystery to Lonzo—how a man could be worth so much. He would nighabout sell himself for that much, if it were not for that lashing business. He’d never let another soul whip his hide like he was a yaller dog, not ’lessen he was dead.

  Talk of states’ rights was too deep for Lonzo; the sovereign right of a commonwealth to secede was an argument that he could not follow. Talk of Tar-heel fire-eaters in Carolina, and Copperheads in the North who would fight on the side of the South if it came to that, was interesting, but outside the bounds of his own life. He owned not one black; never would he own one; he would be a master-fool to run off up North and fight over a nigger! And as for the sovereign right of a commonwealth to secede, he did not know.

  He would squirt his tobacco-stained spittle accurately to a wet corner where other spittle lay, spat from other mouths that were noisy with argumentative words, or still with heavy reflection, like his own.

  If Lias had been here, he would have interposed questions where he did not understand, and later he would have argued as Vince Carver used to do. But Lias was away yonder in California. Lonzo was ashamed to show his ignorance; he would rather listen and let come out what would come out; later, back home, he would argue the matter in his own mind as he ground an ax on the whetrock, or mended a wheel on the ox-cart, or carved a wooden doll of a winter night for Wealthy or Lovedy. But to save his life he could not understand, for all his thinking, why the Coast planters wanted a war. He would scratch his head, plum bumfoozled over that.

  The moon waxed and waned, month by month, riding away yonder above Cean’s house set low on its blocks and sleepers. Her cabin hugged the slope of sandy earth, withdrawing a little way from the swamp that teemed with wild things and black muck and mosquitoes.

  Cean’s house was weatherbeaten now, a little shaggy at the eaves where so many raindrops had rolled to the earth in sheer wide waterfalls. The bright gold of the new logs was vanished away under the beat of rain and wind and sun. The house was dove-colored now, and weathered; fourteen years will put a little age on a house or upon anything.

  Cean’s yard was a pretty place as long as some old hen with a brood of new chicks did not scratch up her sprouting seeds, as long as there was rain enough to make her flower bushes grow and bloom.

  Her boxwood put out a few new leaves each spring; her privet bushes grew taller and broader, year by year. In summer the crepe myrtle made a flowering lane down the slope to Ma’s. Through the varying seasons the crepe myrtle shed its bark, its fluttering foam of bloom, its leaves, like a pretty woman changing her garments of differing colors and texture, as befits the season. Cean sometimes wondered how a senseless thing like a tree or a flower can feel heat and cold, can count days and months like a body, can change her garb to suit the weather. Two years gone, Lonzo had brought her a century plant from the Coast, and Cean set it in a far corner of her yard and watered it. She wondered how anybody would ever know if it counted a hundred years right till it was time for it to bloom. She would not be here, nor Lonzo, nor the last youngest child that she might bear. She would never know;
the only way would be to write this flower bush’s true age out in Pa’s bible, and let her grandchildren wait and see about it. But she did not like to ponder over such matters. In a hundred years the almanac would say Anna Dominy Nineteen-Fifty, and she would be dead and rotten long ago. There would be nothing alive that she had known—not a child, nor a cow, nor a bird. Yes, the ’gators were long-lived creatures; they would go on bellowing in the spring; and the turtles would go on sticking out their ugly heads on leathery necks. The pines would go on living, and Cean’s boxwood and evergreens. But she and hers would be gone, like prince’s-feathers and old-maid flowers and bachelor-buttons that die with killing frost, leaving only dried seeds for a careful hand to garner if it will; blazing-star and mulberry geraniums will leave roots to sleep in the earth like a wild thing; Cean would leave no roots to wake again to the sun of another year. Her children, she judged, were her seeds and roots and new life. Godalmighty must have meant it to be that way.

  It was a thing to mull over; but Cean would reprove herself for thinking too long on such matters. It was not her business that her century plant might break into flower when she was dust without even a stink to it, that these same tough-hided ’gators might bellow in the warm dark of some far-off year, that her boxwood might hoard a nest of hornets in its green fastnesses when she was not here to see it put out its few precious leaves, spring by spring. Cean would remind herelf that by much worrying and thinking Ma had driven herself to where she was mighty nigh as crazy as a bat.

  The clock on Cean’s mantelpiece marked the hours carefully, alloting so much space here, and here, and here; the hands moved around the clock’s inscrutable face, careful not to haste in their ways for any great matter that might lie ahead, nor to pause for any brief, perishable happiness.

  The moon came and went high in the sky over Cean’s house. She liked the way the wild Indians called the months; she always called them by Indian names in her mind. Of course, to set down a birth or death, or in trading matters, a body would give the months their rightful, reasonable names. But Cean liked the wild flavor in the sound of the names of the Indian moons: January is the Cold Moon; February is the Hunger Moon (and were not the victuals like to give out along then before the garden patches were sown?); March is the Crow Moon (and did not the crows caw after every grain of dropped seed corn, flocking black in the wet March winds?); April is the Grass Moon, when dusty-colored wood violets wither out on the slopes among the new grass; May is the Planting Moon (but there was something amiss here, for Lonzo would be a pretty sight to leave his fields bare until May) ; June is the Rose Moon, and the seven-sister bush and the moss rose and the climber by the chimney are laden with blossoms, thick as stars in a wintry sky; July is the Thunder Moon, when heat devils dance across fields and thunder cracks like iron in the hot sky; August is the Green-corn Moon (if he could catch the seasons right, Lonzo’s corn would be tall as his head with tossels as yellow as butter and ears as thick on the stalk as scales on a fish’s back, or nighabout that thick); September is the Harvest Moon; October is the Hunting Moon; November is the Frosty Moon; December is the Long-night Moon.…Cean thought that the wild redmen were not so savage as people said, for they had the gumption to name the months of the year better than ever she could if she were put to it. Cean had never seen a redman, but Lonzo had; they were the color of old copper money, naked except for a rag about their hips and groin, and shiny with bear grease; they wore eagle feathers in their hair, and silver handwork, set with moonstones and chalcedony and bloodstones, about their necks and arms. She would love to see a redman who was tame and good-natured as some were reported to be, friends to the whites.

  And the full, frosty-white moon of another November—the Frosty Moon of the redman—came to its full and stood high over Cean’s house along about the middle of the month. It shone like a polished silver thing, white as the frost that lay thick in the still woods on every bent weed and fallen pine-cone, along every shining brown pine-needle that lay on the floor of the forest, part of a springing, soft carpet for timorous, furry feet.

  And the Frosty Moon brought with its fulling Cean’s second son that would cry for her, and take warmth from her warmth, and grow, if she were careful of him, into a man.

  But Cean, weak and fearful and prone to mull over any little thing, could hardly be proud that it was a son. For Lonzo said that it wouldn’t surprise him much if some of them hot-heads at the Coast were to bring down a war upon everybody’s heads with their wild talk. Girl children could never go to war; nighabout Cean could wish that this were another whimpering, hatchet-faced gal in her arms.

  They had food aplenty ahead. If the red Indians would stop their roaming and set their hands to work rather than to mischief, they could make food aplenty, too, and there would be no Hunger Moon for them. Cean had heard tell that squaws sometimes came to houses in the settlements and held up their hands, begging for something to eat; they did not know white man’s talk, so their mouths were dumb, and their empty hands spoke for them. Cean wished that a friendly squaw might come to her door, some day in late winter; she would be glad to give the red woman enough to fill her belly, and her children’s windy bellies that growled with hunger. For Cean and Lonzo had aplenty and to spare. Out in the smokehouse there were kegs of lard and sides of meat, sweet brown hams and shoulders, and sausages fried and buried in lard; piled back in the corner were pumpkins, pale-colored in the half-light; behind the corn–crib were mounds of dirt and pine straw covering banks of potatoes—all Cean had to do was go and grabble out as many as she needed; in the loft were dried peas aplenty; in stone crocks Cean had preserved all manner of things in thick sweetness—mayhaw jelly, blackberries, huckleberries, watermelon rind, wild plums. Like her mother, Cean set a good table. With corn aplenty for meal and hominy, with potatoes to fry, with syrup to be sopped up with a hot biscuit, and preserves to be had for the asking, it was no wonder that Cean had only a coming war to worry her. When her table was set, neat and tidy with its crockery plates and bone-handled knives and forks and pewter spoons, it was a pretty sight to see. Maggie and Kissie would rake the coals from the top of the oven, would push the coals from under the pots and skillets, would lift the pot lids and let the food cool a little. Rich simmerings would mingle with the floury, fresh odor of buttermilk biscuits and varied scents of boiled beans, stewed pork, and such like—all fitten to stir the hunger of a stone man. The roasted potatoes would come out of the hot ashes to be peeled and buttered. “Fine rations,” Lonzo would say as he sat down to eat; at his words a satisfied smile would settle on Cean’s lips. And for the next meal she might stir up a sugar-cake to please him and make him eat the heartier.

  Vincent Jacob, Cean’s youngest, throve under his mother’s and sisters’ care. He was a fine, big-chested, big-bellied child, heavy on Cean’s arm, and Lonzo was the master-proud of him. After all those girls, he was glad to hold a son on his knee again—a son, broad in the shoulder and lean in the hip joints, to fight with his fists and earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, bread for him and his’n when it was his time, after Lonzo.

  When little Vince was old enough, Cean had Lonzo carry her to see her mother; for Margot sent word that Seen Carver was failing fast. They rode through the woods on a December day when the birds were all out, rustling through the bushes and twittering in the warm sunshine. Their mating songs had been forgotten in the cold peril of winter, but their tremulous chirpings made the morning seem gay and springlike.

  Cean brought her broad-browed, big-jointed man-child up to the bed for her mother to see; but Seen paid him no mind. Her mind was nighabout plum gone now, and only once in a long while would she call for one of them, or talk with any sense at all.

  Cean sat beside her mother’s bed. Her children, gawky and abashed at the sight of this sick old woman under the cover, stood about for a while, watching Seen‘s sunken eyes and drawn mouth curiously, as they would note a dead snake or a new calf; then they straggled out to the yard to play with Margo
t’s Vincent, to hunt hen nests in the hay of the crib loft, or to beg Uncle Jake to tell them about the Coast country. Maggie carried Cean’s baby out with her, and left Cean alone with her mother.

  Lonzo was out on the porch, talking with Jasper about some day soon when Jasper and Jake were to help him with the deadening of a strip of woods to the north of his place that he was taking in as new ground for corn.

  Cean watched her mother’s shrunken, unknowing face; her heart was too heavy for weeping. A blue vein beat on the temple of Seen’s dried, bald skull; her lids twitched now and then over her blind, white-skimmed eyeballs where cataracts grew thick and white like gristle.

  Seen’s horny, restless hands moved restlessly on the quilt; her breath came softly and quickly out of her shrunken chest, and went again, sighing.

  Cean bent over her mother’s face and took her hand and called her softly:

  “Ma….”

  She called her again, hoping that they might talk once again, as they used to do. But Seen would pay her no mind; she mumbled words that Cean could not understand; Cean knew the words were not for her ears….

  (For Seen, with all her mind a-dream, was talking with her mother.

  She was a child in a long, full-skirted dress of blue-barred homespun. It had little flecks of red and green in the center of each check; her mother had woven tips of bright flannel into the length to make it please a little girl.

  Seen was proud of her dress; she herself had stirred the indigo liquor for the blue of it; she herself had held the swift for the cloth of this dress, had sorted out the reed quills from the quill-gourd, handing them one by one to her mother to be set in place on the loom.

  Seen liked this dress. Her hands smoothed the pretty length of it that went down to her shoe toes, new and heavy and stiff; this dress was so new that it had never been washed.)