The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
outcast by his wife’s displeasure, while poor Cordy sat at night mending and freshening all the coarse little garments, scarcely outgrown, putting them in readiness for an expected use.
Oh, it was hard, it was hard on Cordy, thought the girl, pondering this thing of which she had no experience. It was hard; but she had as yet only the outsider’s point of view.
Next week she had a surprise. Allison brought his team on Saturday evening, and asked her, “provided she didn’t mind ridin’ a mule,” to go to the dance with him. It was a long way to Swaford’s Cove, and she would be fearfully tired to-morrow, but she was accustomed to pay dearly for every bit of pleasure, and did not hesitate. So he came again Sunday week to walk with her to the church at Blue Springs, and later took her to the close-of-school entertainment, where she had the pleasure of seeing Ellender speak a piece, clad in the frock that was the counterpart of her own.
In the midst of corn-planting time the baby died. The weak life flickered out one night as it lay across Cordy’s knees. Such was her exhaustion that the physical need of sleep came uppermost, and her grief did not reveal itself till next day.
The little body, cased in a rude pine box, was taken in the wagon to the untended graveyard by the Blue Springs church. Easter and Cordy rode beside Jim on the seat, and three neighbor women were behind in the wagon, sitting in chairs. These, with the Vanderwelt boys, who had helped dig the grave, were the only persons present at the burying. Cordy asked that one of the women should offer a prayer, but they protested that they could not.
“I never prayed out loud—afore folks—in my life,” said one. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“If one o’ you’ll hold my baby, I’ll try my best,” faltered the second, after some hesitation. “He’s cuttin’ teeth, and may not let nobody tetch him but me.”
So it proved; and the third, a poor creature of questionable reputation, burst into hysterical sobbing, and answered merely that she did not feel fit.
“I cain’t have it so,” whispered the poor mother, desperately. “I cain’t have my pore baby laid away without no prayer, like hit was some dead animal. Ef nobody else won’t say ary prayer—I will.”
She stood forth, throwing back her sunbonnet, clasped her hands, shut her eyes tight, and gasped. One could see the working in her throat. They waited. Easter stared at the open grave, shallow, because its bottom was solid rock; the impartial sunshine on the crumbling rail fence, and the little group of workaday figures; the rude stones of other graves scattered through the tangle of briers and underbrush. Then Cordy drooped her head, and whispered, with infinite sadness:
“Lord, take care of my pore baby, and give hit a better chance than ever I had.”
“Amen!” Hallet’s deep voice concluded with a dry sob, and the three women whimpered after him, “Amen!”
The earth was hastily shovelled in, and the woman who had accounted herself unfit to pray began crying out loud. Presently Jim led his wife back to the wagon.
She spoke but once during the ride homeward. “An’ I’ve got no idy the next’ll thrive any better,” she said, dry-eyed. Easter, sitting in one of the chairs back in the wagon, held her peace; so this was what life might mean to a woman.
All next week the bereaved mother went about her work muttering and weeping, until both Jim and Easter began to fear for her reason. But presently the work compelled her thoughts away from her loss. She began to take interest in the milk and the chickens; and she noticed Allison and Easter. She told her husband one day that those two would make a good match.
Far from a match, however, was the present state of affairs in that quarter. The mountain people have an overmastering dread of attempting to cope with a delicate situation in words, insomuch that the neighbor who comes to borrow a cup of salt may very likely sit for half an hour on the edge of a chair and then go home without asking for it. And Allison had never kissed her again. But both knew, without having discussed the matter at all, that Allison wished to marry Easter, and that she, although Allison was undoubtedly her man of all men, could not obtain consent of her own mind to agree.
Why?
Cordy awaited her sister’s confidence, and at last it came.
“I’m afeared,” the girl said, and her eyelids crinkled wofully, her mouth twisted so that she was fain to hide her face.
“You don’t need to be afeared,” said Cordy, slowly, staring straight ahead of her. “You’d be better off with him than ye would at home, wouldn’t ye? Life’s mighty hard for women anywhars.”
“Well, I don’ know,” said Easter, doubtfully.
But when, some days after, Allison did formally ask her in so many words, she gave him the same reason for her uncertainty.
“What air you ’feared of?” he demanded at once.
She was silent, terribly embarrassed.
“What is it you’re afeared of—dear? Tell me. Won’t you tell me?” He put his arms around her. She hid her face on his shoulder and began to cry. “You know I’d never mistreat you?”
“Hit ain’t that.”
“What, then?”
“I’m just afeared—afeared of being married.”
He took a little time over this, and met it with the argument, “Would you have any easier time if you didn’t get married?”
She tried to consider this fairly, but there was not an unmarried woman in all her acquaintance to serve as a basis for comparison. Most girls in the mountains marry between the ages of twelve and nineteen. She saw, however, that it was a choice of slavery in her father’s house or slavery in a husband’s.
Then Allison made a speech; his first, and perhaps his last. “Dear, dear girl, I’ll just do the very best I can for you. I cain’t promise no more than that. You know how I’m fixed. I’ve got nothing more to offer you than a cow or two, and a cabin, and what few sticks o’ furniture I’ve put in hit; but that’s more’n a heap o’ people starts with. Hit’s for you to say, and I don’t want to urge ye again’ your will an’ judgment. But I’ve got a chanst now to go North with some men that’ll pay me better wages than I ever have got, and I won’t git back till fall; and I—want—you,” he said, “to be my wife before I go. I want to know, whilst I’m away, that you belong to me. Then, if I was to happen to a accident, on the railroad or anywheres, you’d be just the same as ever, only you’d have the cows, and the team, and my place. Won’t you study about it?”
Easter thought of that for days, in the little time she had for thinking. But she thought, too, of the other side of the picture. Poor child, she had no chance for illusions. Sometimes she felt that she would be walking open-eyed into a trap from which there was no escape save death.
She thought of Cordy at that tiny grave. She dwelt upon her sister’s alienation from her husband. Would she, Easter, ever come to look upon Allison in that way?
Yet the time drew near when Allison must go with those who had employed him. The thing must be decided. There came a heart-shaking day on which, clad in a new dress of cheap lawn made for the occasion, and a pair of slippers, Cordy’s gift, she climbed into his wagon beside the boy, rode away, and came back a wife.
“But I mighty near wisht I hadn’t,” she said, thoughtfully, as she told her sister of the gayety of the impromptu wedding at home.
He wrote every week, some three or four pages—a vast amount of correspondence for a mountaineer. At the end of a month he sent her money, more than she had ever had before. His pride in being able to do this was only equalled by hers as she laid out dollar after dollar, economically, craftily, with the thrift of experience, for household things. He had given no instructions as to how the money was to be used; so she bought her dishes and cooking-pots, a lamp, a fire-shovel, and, by way of extravagance, a play-pretty apiece for Suga’lump and Sonny-buck, and even a tiny cap