Granpap’s toleration of me passed into liking very slowly. His
stolidity often brought my imagination down as if it had struck a wall;
and while I gathered up the pieces, the wall would become human and
wonder why I had given such an invidious thrust. Naturally the essence
of comradeship eluded us for some time. But finally he understood that
my assaults were harmless; that he merely happened to be on the horizon
when my enthusiasm was spraying the skies; and I began to see that he
was too much a part of Nature to become consciously her note-book. He
wore externality as a tree wears its bark, receiving all winds with
passionless impartiality; but those winds of change were his breath of
life.
One day I asked him if he did not sometimes feel that he would like to
live in a city.
“No,” he said, “I have to stay whar thar’s somethin’ happenin’.”
Not an eyelash of me betrayed my glee. The least sign of emotion, and
the gates of confidence would be snapped and sealed.
“In a city,” he said, “you don’t have seasons--jest weather.”
In the cabin with him lived his son Sam, Sam’s wife, Coretta, and
their children. Once he returned home after a night away, and was much
puzzled on learning of their “goin’s-on” in his absence. Cecil having
the earache, the father and mother had risen in the dead of night,
built a fire, and administered the usual remedy--warm rabbit’s oil
poured into the ear. So far granpap understood.
“But how,” said he, “could they think the roosters were crowin’ for
daylight when it was only midnight--an’ git breakfast too?”
“But, granpap,” explained Coretta, “we had been asleep for hours, and
how could you ’a’ knowed the time, with the night cloudy-gray, an’ no
stars, an’ the clock stopped?”
“Kain’t you _feel_ the time?” he asked, in concerned surprise, as if
she were pathetically deformed. And later he said to me: “K’rettie
kain’t feel the time at all. I hope the little feller ain’t goin’ to
take arter her.”
“Cecil? Oh, no! He’s a Merlin. You can count on that. Don’t you like
the boy’s name, granpap?”
He slowly cut a twig from the nearest dogwood and peeled it carefully.
“You noticed I never handle his name?”
“I’ve noticed.”
“K’rettie ain’t high-stocked with brains, but she’s got enough fer a
woman; an’ she’s not great on housekeepin’, but ’tain’t every man can
git hold of a woman like Cyn was. I ain’t got nothin’ agin K’rettie
but her namin’ the boy like that. He might as well be a furriner. I
counted on his bein’ named Dick,--Richard Merlin,--like my father an’
grandfather, an’ my oldest brother who was killed in the war. But this
sissy name, it’s bitterer’n this dogwood. I jest ain’t a-goin’ to say
it.”
He cut the twig into inch-long pieces and dropped them into his pocket
to be used as a substitute for tobacco.
That afternoon I remembered that I wanted to see Coretta about making
me a mattress of new splintered shucks. I did not often seek Coretta.
Married at fifteen, at twenty-two she was the mother of four. If she
had taken her maternal honors lightly, as a child should, I could have
gone happily to and from her presence. But she was determined “to do
right by the Lord’s gifts,” and her soft scramble for any crumbs of
wisdom that I inadvertently dropped usually hurried my departure to a
spot more suitable for meditation, where I could wonder what I had said
anyhow. I should have liked to carry off Coretta’s children and free
her petunia-blue eyes from clouds; but I remembered that I had once
impulsively taken a broom from a child who was struggling to use it,
and then found that I could not stay to do the child’s work. I really
had to be going. And four children might prove more embarrassing than a
broom. Four futures billowing to seas, and my life already pinched for
room! No; better the hurried step and remote gaze as I passed.
In the least matter of business, the Unakasian expects to be approached
by polite indirection. The more you curve and circle, softly as an
Indian in the enemy’s woods, casually as a sparrow hops, the surer you
may be of attaining your object. A straight march to the point, and you
will find yourself gesturing to empty air, so swiftly will he withdraw
from negotiations; so surely your breach of manners will be punished.
In half an hour’s talk with Coretta, I came somewhat hastily to the
mattress, and she sat troubled. I could safely begin on my home curve.
“His name is Richard Cecil, isn’t it? Richard is a fine old name. I
suppose you’ll call him that when he is older.”
Her surprised eyes swam in the gauze-light of pathos that I had learned
to ignore.
“Cecil is good enough for a little boy. But so many famous men have
been named Richard.”
“What men?”
“There was Richard Lovelace.”
“What did he do?”
“He wrote poetry.”
“Like you write?”
“Yes--no--not exactly,” I hastened. “And there was Richard Burbage, a
great actor.”
“One o’ them movie men?”
“No, he played in great plays--not like you see nowadays. And Richard
Lion-Heart, a mighty king. They buried him in that place I showed you
the picture of--Westminster Abbey,” I ventured, though I had visions of
his death in the arms of Saladin somewhere beyond the Balkans.
She was impressed, and I thrust on.
“And Dick Turpin,--Richard Turpin,--who was afraid of nothing.”
“Did they bury him in the Abbey, too?”
“No, but he died famously. Half of London went to his--er--funeral.”
She was silent a moment, and then said: “I’ll shore fix that bed for
you as soon as Sam can shuck out the corn.”
With this grateful stab in my heart I left her; and Katy went with me
to relate a story her papa had brought home. She pronounced “papa” as
did all the children, like the flower, poppy, with a soft trail at the
end, making a dear word more dear. Katy was eleven, the daughter of
Sam’s first wife.
When war stretched a hand into the Unakas, and one by one, then dozen
by dozen, the young men began to disappear, the people wondered more
and more what it was about. As a rule, they were not reached by the
daily papers which feed us truth and bathe us in illumination; and
Katy’s story showed how they had adapted the chief argument that had
sifted to them.
“There was a cripple, and he was a German. He was goin’ over to
Briartown, and stopped at a man’s house. The man and woman were gone
to the store. The childern were cookin’ some beans for dinner. The
cripple ast to stir the beans. An’ he put something into the pot. Some
powder or something. The woman come home and the childern told her. The
man come home and the woman told him. They took up the dinner and ast
the German to set to the table. He took a chair and passed the beans.
Nobody took any. Then the man said: ‘Have some beans yerself.’ But the
German said he wouldn’t choose any. Then the man got his gun, and said:
‘You will eat them beans or die.’ The German took some of the beans.
And in an hour his tongue was swelled out of his head.”
She paused, lifting anxious eyes, to know if I thought the story was
true.
“Yes, Katy,” I answered unflinchingly. Could such a climax be chance
invention? A mere accident of art?
“Papa says it is true, for he found a cripple on the Briartown road one
day an’ let him ride his horse for a mile. He couldn’t speak plain like
papa, an’ he knows it was that German, but he don’t see how Abraham
Ludd and Jim Dow let him git by.”
She was speaking of two neighbor boys in the service. One had risen to
a captaincy, the other had been decorated.
“Jim Dow----”
“Captain Dow, Katy,” said I.
“He don’t write to Nellie Ludd any more.”
“Did Nellie tell you?”
“No, but she’s quit goin’ to the post-office. She’s ashamed to ast an’
git nothin’ every time.”
I wondered if that was why Nellie flitted so ghost-like about the
hills, as difficult to capture as a bird fearing human hurt.
About supper-time I again called at the cabin, and as I sat by the
superfluous fire, I heard Coretta say: “Granpap, please pass the
sorghum to little Dick.”
And granpap, like a stone image with a movable arm, passed the sorghum.
The full Southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring
dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly; so
I left the house by what Sam called the stove-wood trail, a rear way
softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will halt the foot;
and mine poised in air for a second or less as I sighted a hemlock
bough like laced jet against the moon; as if Night, in defense, had
thrown a torn bit of her garment over the face of the usurper. When
I touched earth again, I was on new, mysterious ground, so quickly
are worlds created for us, the ramblers of the universe, tenants
insatiable. The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my
indiscretions. Like the roll of a hidden sea, the valleys whispered
upward with the life that stirs by night, the smaller wings, that dart
fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and the lithe, furry dwellers
in secret that come out of the earth to thread, more graceful than
swimmers, the channels of shadow. But that purring wave was only
the foam-flower of a vastly bedded silence; silence in which Nature
dreamed of a way to reconquer her world and rule alone; while, against
that dream, Beauty everywhere uncovered her soul. In behalf of man,
the first to divine her, the first to adore, she arrayed her magic,
invincible if so was his love. Everywhere she shone; on the laurel
shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of the orange fungi with their
creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees, and the rocks that fed
them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve
and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of golden light. The world
of minute things pressed as hugely significant as the solar system. And
as the sea, never hushed, the valley whisper reached for an intangible
shore. High above me there was escape by way of a blue eternity,
where two walls of cloud parted to show a chasm of sky. Lower down a
mist wound reverently about a star, then crept elfishly to the most
portentous peak, hanging there like a comic beard. While I waited its
whim, a voice, too fervently human, came through the clump of bushes at
my side. A second later, a tall figure bearing an armful of fagots was
checkered disappearingly along the path toward the cabin.
The next morning when I recalled the sounds I had heard, and put them
together understandingly, I had this: “K’rettie can make ’most as good
headcheese as ever Cyn could.” And I knew that in Merlin language
granpap had said: “My son’s wife, please God, is my daughter.”