POVERTY PRIDE.
IT was inevitable that Callista should find promptly how
impossible is the attitude of scornful miss to the married wife,
particularly when her husband's daily labor must provide the
house whose keeping depends upon herself. Lance, too, though he
continued to give no evidence whatever of penitence, was full of
the masterful tenderness whose touch had brought his bride to
his arms. The girl was not of a jealous temper; she was not
deeply offended at the reckless behavior which had disturbed the
infare, any more than she had been at his conduct on the wedding
evening. Indeed, there was that in Callista Cleaverage which
could take pride in being wife to the man who, challenged, would
fling a laughing defiance in the face of all his world. It
remained for a very practical question--what might almost be
termed an economic one--to wear hard on the bond between them.
They had married all in haste while September was still green
over the land. The commodious new cabin at the head of Lance's
Laurel was well plenished and its food supplies sufficient
during the first few weeks of life there; in fact, Lance [155] gave
without question whatever Callista asked of him--a thing unheard
of in their world--and Callista's ideas of asking were not small
nor was she timid about putting them into practice. The pair of
haggards might have seemed, to the casual onlooker, safely
settled to calm domestic happiness.
Day by day the gold and blue of September inclined toward the
October purple and scarlet. The air was invigorated by frost.
The forest green, reflected in creek-pools, was full of russet
and olive, against whose shadowy background here and there a gum
or sourwood, earliest to turn of all the trees, blazed like a
deep red plume. Occasional banners of crimson began to show in
the maples and plum colored boughs in sweet-gums. The perfect
days of all the year were come.
Mid-October was wonderfully clear arid sweet up at the head of
Lance's Laurel; the color key became richer, more royal; the
sunset rays along the hill-tops a more opulent yellow.
It was not till the leaves were sifting down red and yellow
over her dooryard, that Callista got from Lance the full story
concerning their resources, and the havoc he had made of them to
get ready money from Derf. He had been hauling tanbark all this
time to pay the unjust debt. When she knew, even her inexperience
was staggered--dismayed. So far, she had not gone home, and she
shut her lips tight over the [156] resolution not now to do so
with a request for that aid which her grandfather had refused
in advance.
"We'll make out, I reckon," she said to her husband dubiously.
"Oh, we'll get along all right," returned that hardy adventurer,
easily. "We'll scrabble through the winter somehow. In the
summer I can always make a-plenty at haulin' or at my trade. I'm
goin' to put in the prettiest truck-patch anybody ever saw for
you; and then we'll live fat, Callista." He added suddenly,
"Come summer we'll go camping over on the East Fork of Caney.
There's a place over on that East Fork that I believe in my soul
nobody's been since the Indians, till I found it. There's a
little rock house and a spring--I'm not going to tell you too
much about it till you see it."
Callista hearkened with vague alarm, and a sort of impatience.
"But you'll clear enough ground for a good truck-patch before we
go," she put in jealously.
"Uh-huh," agreed Lance without apparently noting what her words
were. "I never in my life did see as fine huckleberries as
grows down in that little holler," he pursued. "We'll go in
huckleberry time."
"And maybe I can put some up," said Callista, the practical,
beginning to take interest in the scheme. [157]
"Shore," was Lance's prompt assent. "I can put up fruit myself--I'll
help you."
He laughed as he said it; those changeful hazel eyes of his
glowed, and he dropped an arm around her in that caressing
fashion not common in the mountains, and which ever touched
Callista's cooler nature like a finger of fire, so that now,
almost against her will, she smiled back at him, and returned
his kiss fondly. Yet she thought he took the situation too
lightly. It was not he that would suffer. He was used to living
hard and going without. She would be willing to do the same for
his sake; but she wanted to have him know it--to have him speak
of it and praise her for it.
The season wore on with thinning boughs and a thickening carpet
beneath. The grass was gone. Men riding after valley stock, sent
up to fatten on the highlands, searched the mountains all day
with dogs and resonant calls. They stopped outside Callista's
fence to make careful inquiries concerning the welfare or
whereabouts of shoats and heifers.
"Yes, and they've run so much stock up here this year," Lance
said resentfully when she mentioned it to him, "that there ain't
scarcely an acorn or a blade of grass left to help out our'n
through the winter. I'm afraid I'm goin' to have to let Dan
Bayliss down in the Settlement take Sate and Sin in his livery
stable for their [158] keep. The time's about over for haulin'. I
can't afford to have them come up to spring all ga'nted and
poorly."
Days born in rose drifts, buried themselves in gold; groundhogs
and all wild creatures of the woods were happy with a plentitude
of fare; partridges were calling, "wifey--wifey!" under wayside
bushes; the last leaves had their own song of renunuciation as
they let go the boughs and floated softly down to join their
companions on the earth. One evening, gray and white cirri
swirled as if dashed in by a great, careless brush, and the next
morning, a dawn strewn with flamingo feathers foretold a rainy
time. All that day the weather thickened slowly, the sky became
deeply overspread. At first this minor-color key was a relief, a
rest, after the blaze of foliage and sun. A rain set in at
nightfall, and a wind sprang up in whooping gusts; and on every
hearth in the Turkey Tracks a blaze leaped gloriously, roaring
in the chimney's throat, licking lovingly around the kettle.
These fires are the courage of the mountain soldier and hunter.
Only Callista, warming her feet by the blaze in the chimney
Lance had built, thought apprehensively of the time when she
should have no horse to ride, so that when she went to meeting,
or to her own home, she must foot it through the mud.
It was an austere region's brief season of plenty. Not yet cold
enough to kill hogs, all crops were [159] garnered and stored;
there was new sorghum, there were new sweet potatoes, plenty of
whippoor-will peas--but Callista's cupboard was getting very bare
indeed. She looked with dismay toward the months ahead of her.
It was in this mood that she welcomed one morning the sight of
Ellen Hands and Little Liza going past on the road below.
"Howdy," called Ellen, as the bride showed a disposition to come
down and talk to them. Each woman carried a big, heavy basket
woven of white oak splints. Little Liza held up hers and shook
it. "We're on our way to pick peas," she shouted. "Don't you
want to come and go 'long? Bring yo' basket. They' mighty good
eating when they' fresh this-a-way."
Callista would have said no, but she remembered the empty
cupboard, and turned back seeking a proper receptacle. At home,
they considered field-peas poor food, but beggars must not be
choosers. She joined the two at the gate in a moment with a
sack tucked under her arm. It was a delightful morning after the
rain. She was glad she could come. The peas were better than
nothing, and she would get one of the girls to show her about
cooking them.
"Whose field are you going to?" she asked them, carelessly.
"Why, yo' gran'-pappy's. Didn't you know it, Callisty?" asked
Little Liza in surprise. "He [160] said he was going to plow under
next week, and we was welcome to pick what we could."
Callista drew back with a burning face.
"I--I cain't--" she began faintly. "You-all girls go on. I
cain't leave this morning. They's something back home that I
have obliged to tend to."
She turned and fairly ran from the astonished women. But when
her own door was shut behind her, she broke down in tears. A
vast, unformulated resentment surged in her heart against her
young husband. She would not have forgone anything of that charm
in Lance which had tamed her proud heart and fired her cold
fancy; but she bitterly resented the lack of any practical
virtue a more phlegmatic man might have possessed.
She shut herself in her own house, half sullenly. Not from her should
anyone know the poor provider her man was. She had said that she
would not go home without a gift in her hand, she had bidden mother
and grandfather to take dinner with her--and it appeared horrifyingly
likely that there might hardly be dinner for themselves, much less
that to offer a guest. Well, Lance was to blame; let him look to
it. It was a man's place to provide; a woman could only serve
what was provided. With that she would set to work and clean all
the cabin over in furious zeal--forgetting to cook the scanty
supper [161] till it was so late that Lance, coming home, had to
help her with it.
Things looked their worst when, one morning, little Polly
Griever came running up from the gulch, panting out her good
news.
"Oh, Callisty, don't you-all want to come over to our house? The
sawgrum-makers is thar, an' Poppy Cleaverage has got the furnace
all finished up, and Sylvane and him was a-haulin' in sawgrum
from the field yiste'dy all day."
Sorghum-making is a frolic in the southern mountains, somewhat
as the making of cider is further north.
"Sure we'll come, Polly," Callista agreed promptly, with visions
of the jug of "long sweetening" which she should bring home with
her from Father Cleaverage's and the good dinner they should get
that day.
"Whose outfit did Pappy hire?" asked Lance from the doorstep
where he was working over a bit of rude carpentry.
"Flenton Hands's," returned the child. "A' Roxy says Flenton
drove a awful hard bargain with Poppy Cleaverage. She says
Flenton Hands is a hard man if he is a perfesser."
Callista laid down the sunbonnet she had taken up.
"I reckon we cain't go," she said in a voice of keen disappointment.
Anger swelled within, her at Kimbro for having dealings with the
man against whom Lance's challenge was out. [162]
"I couldn't 'a' gone anyhow, Callista," Lance told her. "I have
obliged to take Sate and Sin down to the Settlement and see what
kind of a trade I can make to winter 'em; but there's no need of
your staying home on my accounts."
Callista looked down at his tousled head and intent face as he
worked skilfully. Was he so willing to send her where she would
meet Flenton Hands? For a moment she was hurt--then angry.
"Come on, Polly," she said, catching up sunbonnet and basket,
and stepping past Lance, sweeping his tools all into a heap with
her skirts.
"I don't know what Father Cleaverage was thinking of to have
Flenton on the place after all that's been," Callista said more
to herself than the child, when they had passed through the
gate. Her breakfast had been a failure, and she was reflecting
with great satisfaction on how good a cook Roxy Griever was; yet
she would have been glad to forbear going to any place where the
man her husband had threatened was to be met.
Polly came close and thrust a brown claw into Callista's hand,
galloping unevenly and making rather a difficult walking
partner, but showing her good will.
"Hit don't make no differ so long as Cousin Lance won't be thar,"
she announced wisely. "Cousin Lance always did make game of Flent.
He said that when Flent took up a collection in [163] church, he
hollered 'amen' awful loud to keep folks from noticin' that he
didn't put nothin' in the hat hisse'f. I wish't Lance was comin'
'long of us."
With this the two of them dipped into the gay, rustling gloom of
the autumn-tinted gulch, with Lance's Laurel reduced to a tiny
trickle between clear little pools, gurgling faintly in the
bottom.
Before they came to the Cleaverage place they heard the noise of
the sorghum making. A team was coming in from the field with a
belated load of the stalks, which should have been piled in
place yesterday; Ellen Hands and Little Liza appeared down the
lane carrying between them a jug swung from a stick--everybody
that comes to help takes toll.
When Callista arrived, half-a-dozen were busy over the work;
Hands feeding the crusher, Sylvane waiting on him with bundles
of the heavy, rich green stalks, and Buck Fuson driving the
solemn old horse his jogging round, followed by fat little Mary
Ann Martha, capering along with a stick in her hand, imitating
his every movement and shout.
The rollers set on end which crushed the jade-green stalks were
simply two peeled hardwood logs. Flenton had threatened for years
to bring in a steel crusher; but, up to the present, the machine his
grandfather made had been found profitable. The absinthe-colored
juice ran down its little trough into a barrel, whence it was
dipped [164] to the evaporating pan, about which centered the
hottest of the fray. In the stone furnace under this great, shallow
pan--as long and broad, almost, as a wagon-bed--old Kimbro himself
was keeping a judgmatic fire going. Roxy Griever, qualified by
experience with soap and apple-butter, circled the fire and kept
up a continual skimming of froth from the bubbling juice, while
she did not lack for advice to her father concerning his management
of the fire.
Flenton handed over to Fuson his work at the crusher, calling
Polly to mind the horse, and came straight to Callista.
"I'm mighty proud to see that you don't feel obliged to stay
away from a place becaze I'm thar," he said in a lowered tone,
and she fancied a flicker of fear in his eyes, as though he
questioned whether her husband might be expected to follow.
"Lance was a-goin' down to the Settlement to-day," she said
bluntly, "and I'd have been all alone anyhow; so I 'lowed I
might as well come over."
Hands looked relieved.
"I hope you ain't a-goin' to hold it against me, Callisty," he
went on in a hurried half whisper, "that Lance is namin' it all
around that this here scope o' country ain't big enough to hold
him and me."
Callista shook her fair head in a proud negative.
"I've got my doubts of Lance ever having said [165] any such," she
returned quietly. "Yo' name has never been mentioned between us,
Flent; but if Lance has a quarrel, he's mighty apt to go to the
person he quarrels with, and not make threats behind they' back.
I think little of them that brought you such word as that."
"That's just what I say," Hands pursued eagerly. "Why can't we-all
be friends, like we used to be. Here's Mr. Cleaverage that don't
hold with no sech," and he turned to include Kimbro, who now came
up to greet his daughter-in-law. Again Callista shook her head.
"You men'll have to settle them things betwixt yourselves," she
said, sure of her ground as a mountain woman. "But, Flent, I
reckon you'll have to keep in mind that a man and his wife are
one."
"Oh," said Hands dropping back a step, "so if Lance won't be
friendly with me, you won't neither--is that it?"
"I should think yo' good sense would show you that that would
have to be it," said Callista doggedly. She had no wish to
appear as one submitting to authority, and yet Flenton's evident
intention of seeking to find some breach between herself and
Lance was too offensive to be borne with.
"Now then, why need we talk of such this morning?" pacified
Kimbro. "My son Lance is a good boy when you take him right.
He's got a [166] tender heart. If he ever quarrels too easy, he
gets over it easy, as well. Flenton, you'll have to tend to the
crusher; I got to keep the fire goin' for Roxy.
"Hit 'minds me of that thar lake that it names in the Bible,
Callisty," the Widow Griever said meditatively, looking at the
seething surface as she wielded her long-handled spoon. "And
then sometimes I study about that thar fiery furnace and Ham,
Sham _and_ Abednego. Poppy, looks like to me you ain't got fire
enough under this eend."
"I've just made it up there," said Kimbro mildly. "I go from one
end to the other, steady, and that keeps it as near even as
human hands air able to."
"Flenton, he was mighty overreachin' with Poppy," the widow
lamented. "He's a mighty hard-hearted somebody to deal with, if
he is a perfesser, and one that walks the straight an' narrer
way. Poppy has to furnish all the labor, 'ceptin' Flent and Buck
Fuson, and we've got to feed them men and their team, and then
they git one third of the molasses. With three meals a day, an'
snacks between times to keep up they' stren'th, looks like I
never see nobody eat what them two can."
The gray little cabin crouched in a corner of the big yard; a
shed roof, running down at one side of it, looking comically
like a hand raised to shut out [167] the clamor. Everybody shouted
his opinion at the top of his voice. Nobody thought anybody else
was doing just what he ought. Roxana hurried from group to group of
the workers, advising, admonishing, trying to bring some order
out of the confusion. And in the midst of it, Callista watched
the bubbling juice enviously. It seemed everybody had something
to harvest, care for and put away, except herself. [168]