The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
weather on the baby’s account; yet she was wondering how to round out a good dinner for Macon from bulk pork and meal. As she carried the last of the wash up to hang it out on the fence, she saw the flicker of a white dress moving along a woods-path. Some one was coming to see her—some one fashionably attired, yet carrying a baby on her hip like any mountain woman! Then she recognized Nigarie.
She stood and trembled, without a word to say, abashed not at all by Nigarie’s finery, but because she did not know on what ground the visitor would meet her.
Transgressing all mountain custom the new-comer flew at her with a little laughing cry and kissed her on the cheek.
“My, ain’t you pretty yet!” she said half enviously as she entered the cabin. “I’ve been to the bear-grass rock—remember, Sarepta?” Nigarie’s bright eyes were full of misty recollection as she untied the baby’s cap. “It’s just like it used to be,” she said thoughtfully. “Funny how things stay, and we change. I filled Sammy’s apron full of bear-grass; shall we have a sallet for dinner? Where’s your baby, honey?”
With a catching of the breath that was almost a sob, Sarepta brought out the thin little occupant of her cradle. Without a word she laid it across Nigarie’s knees.
The little creature began to wail feebly, and before his mother could take him and hush him, Nigarie, moved by what impulse of immortal compassion who can say, lifted him to her breast.
“Why, he’s starved most to death,” she said gently. “I reckon you ain’t been able to nurse him. I wish I could—why couldn’t I?” She broke off and laughed in her usual elfish inconsistent fashion. “Sammy pesters me most to death,” she said with apparent irrelevance. “There ain’t any fun stayin’ at a hotel with a baby. I’ll bet I’ll never try it again. As soon as he’s old enough I’m going to leave him with Mother Stetson. He’s so spoiled he wouldn’t do anything but holler if you put him down.”
But skilled Sarepta had taken the fat little new-comer with his royal airs of kinghood and disposed him on a quilt upon the floor. Smilingly, silently, she furnished him with a green switch, and attracted the cat’s attention.
“Well, you are a wonder,” Nigarie said—“but then, you always were. I’m sick of the hotel—do you reckon you could board me for the rest of the time I want to stay? It would be like the old days—and you could take care of Sammy when I wanted to go somewhere.”
Sarepta on her knees looked up at the ruling spirit, sitting above her, nursing her baby, and a mighty gratitude, a wordless emotion which she could not for the life of her have expressed, shook her from head to foot. Here, then, was the answer to her prayers.
“I’ll make you as comfortable as I kin,” she managed finally to say. “We’re mighty poor folks—but you know that—you heard it over at the hotel before you ever put foot in this house. Oh, Nigarie, if you would only stay with me a while!”
And so the butterfly woman, the little cuckoo who never wanted a nest of her own, folded her wings for a season in this humble place. She nursed Sarepta’s baby as she nursed her own. The envious eyes of the mother were on her as the little fellow’s thin body rounded, and the puny limbs grew stronger. To Sarepta it seemed almost a miracle from heaven, and the little cabin a holy place.
The days were filled with a deep peace and vital joy. Nigarie was happy in having some useful work, or rather in being herself actually necessary to the daily welfare of others; Sarepta, in watching her child grow, in the presence of a dear and merry companion, and in seeing Macon take that long-looked-for “start.” For he, profiting by Nigarie’s presence, secured work with a valley farmer, and began working out the purchase of some two acres of land. He came home every Saturday night, carrying on his back provisions for the coming week, and left before day on Monday morning. Hence Sunday was the white milestone of the week to both women; for Macon was gifted with temperament and charm.
Sarepta’s kitchen outfit was hardly less crude than that of the playhouse had been, yet she always contrived a little feast for his day at home. Talent he had, too. All the long still afternoon and after the moon had climbed above the mountain he sat on the porch, his chair tilted back against the house-logs, and played upon the banjo. He played, and set the whole fragrant night throbbing, until their only neighbors, among the pines far up the height, sat listening too, in another cabin door; played until the two mothers, the long-continued rhythm going to their heads, sprang up, took hold of hands and danced together like two girls over the shaking puncheons; played until the spiders peeped out from the roof-boards to hear, and the whippo-wills came right up to the fence and thrilled the night with their wild jodeling. And in truth his music was hardly less eerie than theirs; a barbaric jangle, interspersed with strange rocking whoops and calls, and elaborated with curious fingerings—snaps and slides and twangs unknown to banjo-players outside the mountains.
There were in it tone-pictured incidents of cabin life, and echoes of the larger enfolding life of nature—murmuring undertones as of drumming rain, ghostly half-whispered minors, and long chuckling meditations mellowed as if by the product of hidden stills. He sang too in the excellent baritone of the mountaineer—not the elder ballads which girls delight in and mothers croon, but man-songs—real folk-song of raid and foray, rollicking drinking-songs, with boast and challenge, and peculiar baying rhythms that reached a climax in the long-drawn hunting-yell.
Some of this music was known to his hearers; some, unacknowledged, was his own composition or improvisation. Nigarie had heard better in theatres, of course, but this was knit in with her earlier recollections. To this every fibre of her being responded as to the dramatic element—breath of sweet keen frost or exultant storm.
She had not known such contentment since she left the mountains.
“We’ve been everywhere, Sam and me,” she remarked one evening as the three sat together in the dark. “I’ve lived at the sea-shore, in the West, and we had a winter in New York; but I always wanted, I think, to come back here—on a visit,” she added the concluding words hastily, for she knew that no place on earth could hold her long.
In the fall Nigarie Stetson returned to her own life. Those restless, wayward, eager feet went back to seek new paths—and yet new ones. Sarepta watching her departure through tears that were not all bitter, a round, rosy baby on her shoulder, knew somehow that the visitor would never return. And she wondered at herself meekly. Where was the bitterness of loss, where the canker of envy she had once thought to endure when this moment arrived?
She turned a thoughtful face and kissed her child. She entered her small dun dwelling and looked about at smoke-browned beam and rooftree with new eyes. She began to realize that in the unhurried, intimate conversations of those long summer days she had come into an understanding of the quiet, unassailable dignity of her own position, and learnt the intrinsic worth of usefulness as contrasted with the false value of unearned riches. She felt dimly and half unwillingly, as she contemplated Nigarie’s lot, that there was something almost disgraceful about being “kept” in soft and delicious idleness. Even the remembrance of the three starved babies was no longer a bitterness. Surely it were better to have borne and loved and lost them, every terrible, precious memory of them, than to bear the burden of feverish apprehension which Nigarie evinced toward motherhood itself; to speak continually and openly of the baby as an unearned burden.
She established her boy in his cradle, preparatory to taking up her work. She was suddenly full of a zest for life to which her days had long been stranger.
Macon, having completed his purchase of land, was now busied near home, hewing logs for a cabin of their own. By way of doing his best he had come into the house, ostensibly for a drink, but really to try a new tune on his banjo. At some political meeting the phrase about “dipping the pen in gall” had caught his fancy and suggested to him a new couplet to which he was tentatively fitting an air:
“I dip my pen in golden ink, to write my love a letter,
And tell her that most every day I love her a little better.”
The nearly perfect monogamy of the region renders it unlikely that a mountaineer compose verses in honor of