“THAT’S ALL THE CHURCH I GET”
I made a great palaver to Iron-Heels about giving me the banjo ribbon.
She consented easily. Coquetry was not her specialty.
“What might be your name?” she asked.
There was no dodging now. The old woman spoke up as though to save me
pain: “His name is Nicholas. But he is no kin to Lawyer Nicholas of
Flagpond.”
After a long silence the girl said: “We came from Flagpond, once upon a
time.”
She had been looking out the door at the clear bowl of the spring, and
the reflection of the tall bushes, leaping in the wind.
I thought to myself: “She herself was John Kenton’s chief rose.” I
thought: “He had her in mind when he set these ameliorating bushes
through the wild.” Possibly the girl could not read or write. Yet she
was royal.
Democracy has the ways of a jackdaw. Democracy hides jewels in the
ash-heap. Democracy is infinitely whimsical. Every once in a while a
changeling appears, not like any of the people around, a changeling
whose real ancestors are aristocratic souls forgotten for centuries.
As the girl’s eyes narrowed, she became Queen Thi, the masterful and
beautiful potentate of immemorial Egypt whose face I have seen in a
museum, carved on a Canopic jar. She was Queen Thi only an instant,
then she became a Tennessee girl again, with the eyes of a weary doe.
She said: “Them roses give me comfort. That’s all the church I get.”
I asked: “Why are there so many roses between here and Greenville and
none near Flagpond?”
It was her turn not to speak. The old woman as though to save her pain,
answered: “The flowers of these parts were all brought in by John
Kenton. He lived in Flagpond, but could not sell them there.”
And the mother of the little boy, the man-woman, whose husband had
killed Kenton, broke her long silence: “The only flowers we have to-day
are these he brought. I think we would die without them.... How do we
get through the winter?”
Lady Iron-Heels and her sister-in-law took a swig of whisky from the
jug under the table, and lifted up their hoes from the floor. The boy
whimpered for a drink. They said: “Wait till you are a man.” All three
climbed the hill.
Lady Iron-Heels was the last to go over the ridge. She saw me gather
buds from both those bushes by the spring. She made a gesture of salute
with her hoe.
I never travelled that way again. I passed by quickly; therefore I had
a glimpse of what she was intended to be. “He that loseth his life
shall find it.” I see her many a time when I am looking on scattered
rose-leaves. She was a woman, God’s chief rose for man. She was scorned
and downtrodden, but radiant still. I am only saying that she wore the
face of Beauty when Beauty rises above circumstance.
The buds that I had gathered did not fall to pieces till I had passed
by Daniel Boone’s old trail on through Cumberland Gap, on over big
hill Kentucky into the Blue Grass. On the way I wrote this, their poor
memorial, the Canticle of the Rose:--
It is an article of my creed that the petals of this flower of which we
speak are a medicine, that they can almost heal a mortal wound.
The rose is so young of face and line, she appears so casually and
humbly, we forget she is an ancient physician.
Yet so much tradition is wrapped around her stalk, it is strange she is
not a mummy. Her ashes can be found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, in
everlasting companionship with the ashes of the lotus and the papyrus
plant. Her dust travels on every desert wind.
No love-song can do without her.
No soldier and no priest can scorn her. There were the Wars of the
Roses. And there was a Rose in Sharon. Our wandering brother Dante
found a great rose in Paradise.
There are white roses, sweet ghosts under the pine. There are yellow
roses, little suns in the shadow. But the normal bloom is red,
flushed with foolish ardors, laughing, shaking off the gossamer years.
She remembers Love, but not too well, if love is pain. There is no
yesterday that can daunt her and keep her dear heart-laughter down. In
springtime her magic petals bring God to the weary and give Heaven’s
strength to the wavering of heart.
She can turn the slave to a woman, the woman to something a little
more than mortal. Oh, how bravely, with the same life-giving red, with
the last of her virgin strength, she blooms and blooms on almost every
highway. We find her on the road to Benares, on the road to Mecca, on
the road to Rome, and on the road to Nowhere, in Tennessee.
Her red petals can almost heal a mortal wound.