GROWING PAINS
That night Mary McBirney carried the candle up to the loft for Azalea and
sat beside her while she undressed.
“I reckon you feel a little upset, honey,” she said in her gentle,
motherly way. “You saw them grand folks with their fine ways, and
beautiful home, and nice clothes, and it made you feel you wasn’t nobody.
I know just how you feel. I was born up Blue River Valley way, and till
I was fifteen I didn’t see nobody but folks of the same kind as mine.
Then two ladies came driving through our country, writing up us mountain
people, and telling all about the mountains and what trees and flowers
was on ’em, and they asked me to go along to do the cooking for them, and
shake down their beds for ’em and all that. So I went, and set up on the
front seat of the carriage with the driver, and I heard all they had to
say, and watched their way of doing things. Well, it set me back some.
I found out that what I knew wouldn’t fill the thimble point of their
knowing. They was wearing rough clothing for camping, but if I tried all
my days I couldn’t make clothes look like that. I wouldn’t know how to
buy them if I had the money. Me, I just did things anyhow, to get them
done, but they had a right way for everything and rules about how to act
in every kind of case. At first I tried to catch on to their ways, but
at last I saw it was going to be too much for me, and I just settled down
to be content in my own way with my own kind of folks. But my pillow was
wet many a night, honey. Growing pains, they were. You’re having them
now.”
“And so is Jim, I s’pose,” sighed the girl. “I s’pose he feels the same
way—all mixed up.”
“He ain’t feeling nothing like you be,” declared ma. “Jim’s a boy, and
matter of fact. He’s a leetle older than you, really, but not near so
old in his feelings. Jim saw what there was to see on top—saw what was
floating along the surface. But you think and feel in a different way,
and your feelings go down deeper. Now mind, I don’t say that I think
they always will. Jim’s tender and he’s true, and when men are tender
and true they feel deeper than any woman can feel. At least no woman can
get ahead of them that way. I’m waiting for Jim to get a little older
before his feelings set, so to speak. Just now he ain’t got any more
opinions than a nice soft bunny.”
“Oh, ma,” cried Azalea, “you don’t really know him if you think that!
Jim does a lot of thinking, and he’s as tender-hearted as he can be.”
Ma McBirney blew out the candle and smiled to herself in the dark. She
loved to hear her Jimmy praised. But he had seemed a little dull and
backward in comparison with the girl, and in her silent jealousy for her
boy, she had spoken of him in a fault-finding way. It healed her to hear
him praised in that warm manner.
“We’re lucky ones, Thomas,” she said when she had gone downstairs, “to
have two children like them. They’re pure gold.”
“So they be,” said pa. “So they be!”
And then he and ma walked silently out to the Pride of India tree beneath
which their Molly and Azalea’s mother were buried, and stood there a few
minutes before they closed up the house for the night.
The next week when pa went to town, he brought back great news.
“Them there Carsons down in the Atherton house,” he said to his family at
supper, “are up to the greatest things you ever heard of. They’re making
all the mountain folks welcome, and buying up their pieced bedquilts and
their hand-weaving, and their baskets and chairs. Why, Mr. Carson, he
and me was made acquainted by the grocer, and he asked me if I done
anything in the way of hand work. Well, I allowed I made pretty good
chairs, and he told me to bring down half a dozen big roomy ones for his
porch. He said like as not some of his friends would want some too.
Then I told him about your weaving and he said he’d like to drive his
wife up to see it. Said he’d like to look over our place. I’d been
telling him how sightly it was. They’ve got everybody humping.
Cannaby’s making roads for him, and Fletcher’s making shoes, and he’s
buying up fine hens—wants some of my guinea hens—and he’s looking for a
good cow, and I don’t know what all. I ain’t seen things so lively down
street since I can recollect.”
“If he comes up, he’ll bring Miss Carin, won’t he? Oh, ma, do you think
he’ll bring Miss Carin?”
“Sure he will,” said Mary McBirney. “She wouldn’t let him come up here
without her if she had her way, after all the liking she took to you.”
“And to Jim, ma. She liked Jim just as much as she did me.”
“Go along,” said Jim, “she wouldn’t ’a’ looked at me if you hadn’t been
there, Zalie.”
“She would too! What makes him act like that, ma?”
“He’s naturally modest and retiring,” said pa with a twinkle in his eye.
“He takes after me.”
“They must be awful good folks, them Carsons,” said ma admiringly.
“They’ve got plenty of goodness, but they ain’t blessed with any too much
sense,” remarked pa.
“What makes you think that, Thomas?”
“Well, the folks was telling me how this Mr. Carson goes riding all over
the mountain alone. He don’t seem to have no idea that he might stumble
on something it would be best for him not to see. Any morning, if he
gets up early, he can see a dozen streams of smoke rising from the
mountain side, and if he’s got the sense of a mule, he’ll know that
there’s a moonshine still at every one of them colyumns of smoke. Any
baby’d know that. The sensible thing for folks to do in this part of the
country, is to keep to the beaten track, and not to go too far on that.
Them moonshiners is dreadful sensitive. They think folks is prying into
their affairs when they ain’t no such intention and once they get that
idea they make it mighty uncomfortable for whoever has come under
suspicion.”
“You ought to warn him, pa: He can’t know our ways.”
“They ain’t my ways, I tell you that! Moon-shining ways ain’t my ways,”
declared pa.
Azalea didn’t entirely understand about these “moonshiners” as they were
called, though she had heard about them all her life. Pa explained to
her that they were people who made crude whiskey from the corn and sold
it without paying the government the tax which it had placed upon liquor,
and that because they did not pay this tax they had to make their whiskey
in secret. The officers of the government were always on the outlook for
them, and so these people had to keep on an outlook for the officers, and
they were liable to think that everyone who got anywhere near them was
spying on them.
“On the face of it,” said pa meditatively, “I suppose it don’t seem so
bad—making something you know how to make and selling it to them as wants
to buy, without saying by-your-leave to no one. But the country can’t be
run without money, and one of the ways it takes to raise money is by
placing a big tax on liquor. As for me, I wouldn’t care if ’twas ten
times bigger than it is. It’s done a heap more harm than good, to my
mind, although I’m not so pigheaded as to deny that it can do good
sometimes. But it ain’t just the making and selling of the whiskey in
secret that hurts these moonshiners. It’s the setting themselves against
the law, and getting to be outlaws, and keeping hate and fear and
suspicion in their hearts early and late, and bringing up their children
to the same ideas. It’s a wicked thing, Azalea, and it brings trouble
beyond measuring to the folks down here.”
“And yet,” said ma, “I know some moonshiners who are very pleasant
people.”
“Sure!” cried pa. “They’ll do anything for their friends and they’ll
stand by each other through thick and thin. And you’re not to think that
they’re all ignorant and unlearned. Some of them is smart as whips, and
send their children away to school and take books out of the public
library there at Lee. I could mention some not an hour’s ride from this
very spot who do it. And I’ve known whole communities of moonshiners to
be converted and join the church and turn from their evil ways, and they
make pretty noisy church members, most of them. It seems like they take
their religion hard. I’ve heard them at camp meeting and they was doing
more hollering and shouting than all the rest put together. I reckon
they thought the Lord had a good deal to forgive.”
“Why, pa!” murmured Mrs. McBirney. “How you talk! And before the
children! But now you can see, Azalea, why I don’t want you wandering
around alone on these mountains. You’re likely to run into one of them
stills while they’re in operation, and while they wouldn’t do any harm to
a girl, they’d think it up to them to give her a dreadful scare. So you
stick to the places you know about. You hear?”
“Yessum.”
Azalea thought about the moonshiners a good deal after this. It seemed
to her to be dreadful not to be able to live in a free and open way. She
could think of nothing that she would hate worse than having to hide, or
to be forever on the watch. In the old days when she had traveled with
the show she often had been made to feel that people did not want them
around. They had, in a way, been under suspicion, and houses were always
locked up more carefully when the show people came to town. Not that
there was any need of it, so far as she knew. They had not been thieves;
but they had been careless and dirty and miserable enough. It was very
different from the life she was leading now. Pa and Ma McBirney could
look anybody in the face. They would go out from their door, smiling, to
meet the people driving by, and would always beg them to stop and have
some spring water or fresh milk; and Jim and she were proud to be with
them. Everyone seemed to like the McBirneys. Everyone thought they were
good—and Azalea knew they were and that it was an honor for her to bear
their name.
At the same time, Azalea realized that she was somehow different from
them. For example, ma had spoken of giving up trying to be like those
ladies she traveled with. When she found they had so many rules and ways
which she couldn’t understand, she made up her mind not to worry about
all of these strange matters, but to be contented with her own people and
their manner of doing things. Now Azalea felt sure that she, for her
part, would not have given up.
“I’d have learned their way of doing things,” she said to herself. “I’d
have found out about those things that they knew and I didn’t, ’deed I
would. I just hate to have folks get ahead of me! I’m like old Nannie;
I want to keep up with everything on the road. And Jim does too, I
reckon. I hope pa and ma will let us go to school when it opens, though
Jim says it’s a dreadful long walk. But I don’t mind walking. Mercy, if
anybody knows how to walk, I’m the person!”
It was the very next Sunday that Azalea found out what the moonshiners
would do even to a person they were not much afraid of. She had gone to
the spring house early, to get the cream and butter, when she saw some
one dashing out of the bushes. It was a boy, but it took her several
moments to find out that it was some one she knew. When she made out
that it was her old friend Hi Kitchell with that white face and those
frightened eyes, she was amazed.
“Whatever ails you, Hi?” she called, running toward him. “You haven’t
been bitten by a rattler have you?”
But Hi was too out of breath to answer at once, and he dropped down on
the seat by the spring house while Azalea brought him a glass of water.
“It was men!” he managed to gasp at last. “It was men, Zalie. They was
going to kill me, and I hadn’t done no manner of harm to them. I was
walking up the trail—for I thought I might as well be here in time for
breakfast, since Mrs. McBirney had asked me to spend the day—and I
thought I’d take some short cuts. So plunk I went up the mountain, and
the first thing I knowed, I had run plumb into a whole gang of men
working like good fellows with a fire and coils of pipe and kettles, and
I don’t know what all. Soon as my eyes lighted on to them I guessed it
was a moonshiners’ still, and I tried to crawl away without anybody’s
seeing me. But, sir, one fellow, he caught sight of me, and he grabbed
his gun and started after me, and two others grabbed their guns, and I
just hiked up the mountain and they after me. But laws, I couldn’t run
with them fellows. Seems as if their legs was about three yards long.
They got me in no time and they stood me up against a tree and backed off
and pointed their guns at me and told me if I didn’t promise I’d never,
never tell on them, they’d put so many holes into me my mother’d think I
was a sieve. Well, I give my word I wouldn’t tell where their place was,
nor anything about them, and they let me go, but they said if I wasn’t
out of sight in two minutes they’d fire anyway. And they run after me a
ways just to give me a start.”
He grinned up at Azalea, as if half ashamed of the whole affair, and she
laughed back at him, reassuringly, though her face was rather white too.
“But you’ve told me, Hi,” she said. “And you’ve broken your promise.”
Hi frowned.
“Zalie,” he said sternly, “Don’t I tell you everything? Besides, you
don’t know where their place is, and I ain’t going to tell, partly
because I don’t want to, and partly because I don’t know. I don’t see
how I ever found the way here at all, I was so mixed up. And what’s
more, I don’t attach no importance to a promise that’s wrung out of a
fellow like that. Of course I promised! I had to. But that’s a very
different thing from a promise you give on your honor. I don’t want you
to think I’d break a promise, Zalie—not a fair and square promise.”
“Oh, Hi! don’t I know you wouldn’t? I’m only teasing. I won’t say a
word about it to anyone; but it shows ma was right. She said I must keep
to the road and not go prowling off by myself. How are you getting on,
Hi?”
“Oh, first-rate. I don’t like being shut up in the mill all day any too
well, of course. You see, it comes hard on a fellow who’s been used to
being out of doors early and late. But there’s little children there,
Zalie—little, little children. It makes me feel dreadful to see them. I
tell you, I’m not meaning to stay there long. I’m looking about all the
time for some kind of an outdoor job. Mr. Carson, he’s got me to pulling
weeds out of his brick walk. I have about half an hour after work and
before it gets dark and that lets me do quite a lot at the Carsons; and
then they give me my supper there.”
“But that makes such long hours, Hi,” Azalea protested. “You’ll wear
yourself out.”
“No I won’t, Zalie. I’m made of cast iron. And then the working out of
doors sort of rests me. It gives me an appetite too. And I tell you
what, I want to please Mr. Carson. He’s a fine man to work for. He
seems to kind of notice me, and I think maybe I can get took on there at
his place.”
“The Carsons are like that. They notice everybody. They even noticed
Jim and me.”
“Why, you goose, anybody would notice you!” cried Hi. “Don’t you know
that yet? Jim’s a mighty pleasant-looking boy too. Looks as if he knew
which end he was standing on, all right.”
But at that moment Ma McBirney’s voice, with a tone of impatience in it,
came out to them.
“Azalea, child, where in the name of goodness have you gone? Don’t you
know we’re waiting breakfast? Hurry up, child, do. Pa has just made up
his mind to take us all to the Singing.”
“The Singing? What’s the Singing?” asked Azalea, as she and Hi ran
toward the house with the butter and the milk in their hands.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know what a singing is,” said pa. Hi and Azalea
shook their heads.
“Well, then,” said pa, “nobody is to tell you, and before long you’ll see
for yourselves. Hustle now, we ought to have been on the road by this
time. It slipped my mind this was the date, till the Groggings went by
and reminded me.”
“My goodness,” sighed ma, “I’m glad our best dresses are fresh ironed,
Azalea. Here, everybody pay strict attention to eating! We’ve got to
get off if we’re to take any part in the doings!”