The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
exposure afforded shelter in winter to any number of pigs; and beneath the overhang facing the valley two little girls had built a playhouse. Here signs of frequent occupancy were not lacking: the ground was lightly printed all over by slim bare feet, and the rock was smudged with woodsmoke above a tiny furnace of stones. No real playthings were visible, but the rock shelves were stocked with potsherds and broken crockery, and there were tin pails and even little skillets and cookers, cleverly fashioned from old tin cans, for the making and serving of real bear-grass salad.
It was, however, too late in the season for bear-grass. The tide of young summer had brimmed the valleys, and came rushing up the slopes to burst along the bluffs in a high-flung surf of laurel bloom. The two small friends were seated now on the grassy top of the rock, shaded by a great arching tupelo; they were piecing quilt patterns. They had laid out for comparison on their knees and about on the grass, the Eagle, the Dream, the Texas and Kentucky Stars, the Crazy Ann, the Tree of Paradise, and three or four varieties of brick-work and log-cabin. The pattern under immediate consideration was the Broken Urn.
“I been a-studyin’,” said Nigarie, the sprightly, dark one, “whether hit wouldn’t be the prettiest to piece the urn out whole.”
“Let’s try hit that-a-way,” agreed Sarepta, a child with an angel’s face.
Against nature, the beauty was also the worker, and Sarepta’s small skilled fingers swiftly cut and laid out in pink and brown calico the design they had mentioned, her big gray eyes shaded by sumptuous lashes, brooding full of tender dreams above a tangle of flaxy-gold curls falling about the down-bent, intent face, pure in outline and tint as a pearl.
Even loquacious Nigarie sat acutely observant, scarcely speaking, her three-cornered kitten countenance with its hard, round little cheeks under the beryl-green eyes puckered to disproportionate anxiety, till the urn was an accomplished fact, so absorbed were they both in this, their one avenue of artistic expression.
“Hit’s some like grandma’s Vase of Friendship,” commented Nigarie, drawing a long breath when it was done.
“We could call this the Friendship’s Urn,” suggested Sarepta, timidly. Nigarie usually did the suggesting for the pair.
That small person now ran a reckless hand to the bottom of her basket and plowed up her collection of scraps. “This rosebud sprig’s the prettiest I’ve got. Hit’s a piece of Easter’s weddin’ dress,” she volunteered.
“I’ve got one block all pieced outen scraps Easter an’ Ellender given me,” Sarepta showed it.
“I’ve got one made all outen the boys’ shirts, and some over,” Nigarie tossed her braids. “Harmon’s and At’s, and this pink stripe’s Macon’s, and this ’n’s Joel’s, and here’s Mart’s; and hit’s set together with Sam Stetson’s.”
“Sam Stetson’s!”
“Cert’n’y; I reckon Sam Stetson ain’t none too good to have a piece of his shirt in my quilt if his pappy does keep the hotel, an’ he is goin’ to school in the settlement. I wish’t I could swap you out of that blue gingham, Sarepta. I want hit to go with this sprig weddin’ dress.”
“I’ll—I’ll let ye have it all for—for that one.” The gray eyes glowed as she indicated the pink striped scrap from Macon Kinsale’s shirt—and she cherished it tenderly, tucking it jealously deep in the bottom of an orderly basket when Nigarie willingly exchanged it for the blue gingham.
The trade effected, they sewed busily.
“That’s goin’ to be plumb pretty,” commented Sarepta at last, leaning to look at her friend’s work. “Do you reckon you ’n’ me ’ll ever—make us a weddin’ dress?”
The sweetest imaginable color crept over both little faces, and shining eyes were bent swiftly to their needlework.
Sarepta’s fingers stole toward the pink striped scrap in her basket.
“Mine’ll be silk,” said Nigarie confidently.
It was even so. . . . All through the years, Nigarie was shielded, favored. As an only child, she went to school while Sarepta was fulfilling at home the duties of the eldest girl in a large family. Work was found for Nigarie at Stetson’s summer hotel, and when she came home it was to make ready for her marriage to the proprietor’s son, Sam Stetson. Sam was in business now in a flourishing little city, and doing well. Nigarie promised to write often to Sarepta; but soon the letters became fewer, and after a time they ceased.
Even while there was communication, Sarepta had slight understanding of Nigarie’s social evolutions, as described in occasional newspaper clippings enclosed. Statements about refreshments, decorations and costumes conveyed little meaning to a mind accustomed to clothe its thoughts in the antique dialect of the mountains. But she made out that the wedding dress and several others were indeed of silk.
She was not disturbed by that, for she could dwell on her own wedding, when she came down-stairs, shining with a mysterious happiness, in her lawn and cheap ribbons, to find the big log sitting-room filled to overflowing with her kin. She had tremblingly given her promise to love, honor and obey, and had kept it, with a willing spirit if not always to the letter. But Macon’s “protect and cherish”—well, as a true wife she never permitted herself to form any conclusion as to whether it had been forgotten five minutes afterward. Macon had done the best he could; as time went on she reiterated that to herself almost fiercely. He had done the best he could!
After the first infare with their meagre furnishing to a cabin on his uncle’s land, they had moved, in seven years, nine times, from shack to cabin and from cabin to shack, hounded by poverty and circling like stags as close to home as possible. Macon had indeed done his best; but Sarepta, whose wants were so few, had to pinch in ways she considered hardly decent. She had always lived on little; she learned now to live on next to nothing. She ate food which she had always regarded as fit only for pigs or chickens. Her mind was occupied, not occasionally but constantly, with problems that were like gravel in a shoe, as insistent as they were contemptible: “If I divide this inch of pork, will it season Macon’s potatoes for supper and again at breakfast? If I pick a mess of sarvices to-day, have I got sugar in the house to make a cobbler for Sunday dinner? Can I, by piecing Macon’s shirt sleeves, and lining the yoke with flour-sacking, get enough out of this gingham to make me a sunbonnet?”
Women always get the worst of poverty. And Sarepta was no miser by nature. Some wives eat the biscuit end of the pone and the skin of the meat because they are afraid no one else will; she chose them because she could not bear that any one else should have to.
Again and again they strained every nerve and sinew to win a shack and clearing of their own, only to be disappointed. Every time, just as the signing of the deed seemed a probability of next week, something happened—a drought on the garden, a murrain on the cow, or another baby. Three of these had come—and gone—leaving no more visible impress than a little less elasticity of Sarepta’s figure, a little deepening of the shadow behind her beautiful eyes; for each, after a few weeks of ineffectual striving to digest the cows’ milk which the poor mother was obliged to give it, had quietly straightened out in her arms and died.
The fourth was three weeks old and already ailing, on the day of Nigarie’s return.
Sarepta heard the news from a neighbor woman who shared her tubs and huge pot and did washing for the hotel people. Nigarie’s fat baby, her airs and her summer wash frocks were subjects of an intermittent conversation that went on all morning below the spring in the hollow. The mountain woman’s beauty one might almost say was undiminished by her hard life. In the limp unlovely frock it shone out a luminous, incongruous fact. No one seeing her, pounding away at the bat-block and replying with mild monosyllables to the rhapsodies of the other, would have guessed that she was almost sick with terror lest this last puny life slip also out of her grasp. A woman must learn to chatter of other things, lest the gods take notice and in pity slay.
It was the first of April—beautiful weather, but the hard time of year, when the hungry winter has gnawed the last scraps of pork