The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
fled away, and left him standing so, rebuked, condemned.
Once alone, she flung herself on the ground and hid her face even from herself. This it was, then, to kiss a boy? “Oh dear, why is it like this?” she wept, and crept closer to the ground.
But she had not promised to forget.
When Easter Vanderwelt went to “stay with” her married sister, she planned to come home in time to enter school when it should open, the first Monday in August. There was the half-formulated hope of seeing Allison somewhere, sometime during the term, even if he did consider himself too old to attend. So she stacked her six or eight books in the loft room over the kitchen, with an admonition to her brothers not to disturb them in her absence. She had always kept them neat, and the boys should have them when she had learned them through.
But Cordy’s baby was a fretting, puny thing; Easter finally consented to forego the summer school and stay on till frost, when, it was hoped, the little ones would improve; and the round of toil soon drove out every other thought. Or did it? Four-year-old Phronie and Sonny-buck, his father’s namesake, scarcely out from underfoot, the ailing baby to be tended, preparing cow’s milk, washing bottles, wrapping a quill in soft, clean rags to fit the tiny mouth—looking after these was the task of a wife and mother; Easter could hardly devote all day and every day to them without figuring to herself a future of such, shared with—whom?
The children fell ill and needed to be nursed. There were the walls to tighten against winter with pasted layers of old newspapers. Hog-killing time brought its extra burdens. Cordy, a fierily energetic housewife, would set up a pair of newly pieced spreads and get two needed quilts done against winter. In the midst of it all she got an order for rug-weaving from a city woman, and begged Easter to stay through the cold weather, with the promise of a new dress from this source over and above her wage of seventy-five cents a week.
Easter’s lot was little harder in her sister’s house than at home, and there she had no wages; yet she was glad when at last she could shut the three dollars and seventy-five cents in her hard, rough, red little hand—she had accepted a hen and six chickens in part payment—and set her face once more toward her father’s house. Catching the hen and chickens and putting them into a basket made her late in starting. The sun was high when she turned out of the shortcut through the woods into the big road, and she found herself already tired. If a wagon would come along now, with room for herself and her small belongings—and, sure enough, before she had walked “three sights and a horn-blow” along the road, a wagon did. Who but Allison on the seat, and all by himself! She felt rather shy, this being the first time they had met alone since the morning he kissed her, under the swamp honeysuckles: she wished he had been any one else, but when he greeted her with, “Want ’o ride?” she clambered in over the wheel.
He stowed the basket under the seat. “What ye got thar?” he inquired, for the sake of conversation.
“Hit’s a old hen that stoled her nest and come off with these few chickens,” she answered. “What y’ been a-haulin’?”
“Rails to fence my clearin’,” he told her with pride. He had recently worked out the purchase of a piece of land. “Hit’s got a rich little swag on one ind, and a good rise on the other, in case I sh’d ever want to build. Hit fronts half a acre on the big road, too,” he added, shyly, looking from the corners of his eyes at the girl beside him.
Talking thus, as gravely as two middle-aged people, they rode across Caney Creek and into the ridges. “Gid up,” he gave the command to the team from time to time; but there was no haste in the mules; their long ears flapped as they plodded, and the wheels slid on through the dust as though muffled in velvet. He began to tell her of his hopes and plans, tentatively, without once looking at her.
“If I’m so fortunate—maybe next winter . . . I’ve been spoken to about a position in a hardware store in town, and . . .” He did not finish that sentence, but presently went on: “One man told me last week that he wouldn’t hire a single man—said they was always out nights, and no good in the daytime.”
Now Easter knew that Allison was never out at night to any ill purpose, and she smiled a bit wisely to herself. His favorite pose was that of the cosmopolitan, the widely experienced man; but that was pure boyishness. There was a rough innocence about him, despite his every-day familiarity with all the crimes that lie between the moonshine still and county court. What of evil there was in him seemed to have grown there as naturally as the acrid sap of certain wild vines or the bitterness of dogwood bark. The freakish lawlessness of even the worst mountaineer seems in some way different from the vice and moral deformity of cities, as new corn whiskey is different from absinthe.
Under her sunbonnet the girl inquired, demurely, “Why ’n’t ye stay here?”
“Oh, I’m jist restless, I reckon . . . I would stay if I had a home here.”
That word “home” laid a finger on their lips for full five minutes. Again he ventured, flicking nervously with his whip at the roadside weeds:
“And Mavity wants me in his new saloon. I seed him when I was in Fairplay last week. The wages is good.”
She spoke now quickly enough. “Don’t go thar, Allison! I don’t want to be—worried—’bout you.”
He turned away to hide a swift change of countenance, slashed hard at the inoffending bushes, and jerked out, in a husky, boyish voice, “What makes ye care?”
She dared not be silent. “Because I know how good you air. Because I don’t want to see—a boy like you go wrong.”
“I ain’t good!” he cried, almost roughly. Then he turned to find her looking at him serenely, silently—not quite smiling. . . .
That was all, but it was almost a betrothal to the two. From this moment she tried to imagine what life with him would be like. The picture she saw clearest was of a low-browed cabin in the dusk; through its doorway, glowing with red firelight, a glimpse of a supper awaiting a man’s return.
Mrs. Vanderwelt was as glad to see her daughter home again as was Easter to rejoin the family, but that did not prevent her levying on Easter’s wages. The dish-pan had gone past all mending, and the water-bucket had sprung such a leak that it was no longer fit for use except about the stable. The lantern globe was broken. So Easter reserved for herself only the price of eight yards of gingham.
“Ye’re jist in time for the dance over to Swaford’s,” announced her younger sister, Ellender, when, after the supper dishes were washed, they sat down to tack carpet rags. “They’re goin’ to give one a-Sata’day night.”
“You ’uns a-goin’?” asked Easter. Of course the boys would be there, and all the youngsters of the countryside—Allison, too. There are never enough girls to go round in a frolic in the mountains.
It transpired, however, that Ellender had no dress—at least, none that could appear beside Easter’s contemplated purchase. So Easter was forced to consider the means of providing eight yards for her sister as well as for herself.
This was on Monday. The sisters walked two miles to the store next day, and chose the double quantity of cheaper goods together. It was white with a small pink figure printed at intervals, coarse and loosely woven as a flour-sack. They stitched all day Wednesday, and finished the frocks Thursday morning. But on Thursday evening they received a letter recalling Easter to her sister’s house.
Easter’s trembling hands dropped in her lap.
“Cain’t you go this time, Ellender?” she pleaded.
“Maw says I ain’t old enough to do what Cordy needs. She says you ain’t—sca’cely,” the younger sister protested.
“You-all act like you wanted to git shut o’ me,” Easter almost wept. “Cordy can wait three days. I’m obliged to go to this dance.”
But she knew it was not so. Only in her pain she struck at what was nearest.
Easter’s return found an ominous tremor and strain