I
By pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon
me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their
boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could
sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been
suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a
key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how
long I “stayed in”; and Coretta’s opinions always echoed the hearth
voice of the clan.
But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon
with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the
highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I
could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could
be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I
made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them paling
off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until
noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling
from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the
door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was “bad off.”
Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta
wanted to borrow such or such an article for breakfast. It was always
something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the
borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a
broken day.
For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her
borrowing the day before. “Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me
my mornings.”
She would promise; then it would happen again--the violent waking, with
its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her
excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me.
“But I didn’t know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an’ we
couldn’t eat biscuits ’thout salt in ’em.”
Or, “That man come after supper to see about sellin’ the cow, an’ we
talked so late I clean forgot we didn’t have a speck o’ coffee for
breakfast.”
Or, “I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an’ there
was the box plumb empty.”
Or, “Uncle Rann got in last night. We didn’t have a dust o’ flour, an’
I couldn’t set him down to pone-bread an’ him come all the way from
Madison to see us.”
Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight
exasperation over my failure to get her point of view.
“But Sam _had_ to git to the ploughin’ early, an’ you only had to jest
set an’ write!”
That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which
done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a
bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress.
It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or
break into an untraceable legend of itself; but it never did. One day,
looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of
a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She
was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog’s feet newly scalded. A
sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From
the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning. A tub
in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children
darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily
expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so
unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness,
that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden
interest in the baby’s attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from
her continent of discovery, the ash-pan. Coretta snatched the baby and
began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are
unknown.
“If I could skip a year ’thout a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with
my work,” she said.
But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate
repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance
that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God.
Her own mind was making occult connections. “Did you see the sign in
the elements last night, Mis’ Dolly?”