Southern Lights and Shadows Part 5

BY ALICE MACGOWAN

Up and down the long corn rows Pap Overholt guided the old mule and the small, rickety, inefficient plough, whose low handles bowed his tall, broad shoulders beneath the mild heat of a mountain June sun. As he went--ever with a furtive eye upon the cabin--he muttered to himself, shaking his head:

"Say I sha'n' do hit. Say he don't want me a-ploughin' his co'n. My law!

Whut you gwine do? Thar's them chillen--thar's Huldy. They got to be fed--they 'bleeged to have meat and bread. Ef I don't--"

Again he lifted his apprehensive glance toward the cabin; and this time it encountered a figure stepping from the low doorway--a young fellow with an olive face, delicately cut features, black curling hair, the sleep still lingering in his dark eyes. He approached the fence--the sorry, broken fence,--put his hands upon it, and called sharply, "Pap!"

The old man released the plough-handles and came toward the youth, shrinking like a truant schoolboy called up for discipline.

"Pap, this is the way you do me all the time--come an' plough in my co'n when I don't know nothin' about hit--when I don't want hit done,--tryin' to make everybody think I'm lazy and no 'count. Huldy tellin' me I ought to be ashamed of myse'f, in bed while my po' old pappy--'at hain't ploughed a row of his own for years--is a-gittin' my co'n outen the weeds."

The father stood, a chidden culprit. The boy had worked himself up to the desired point.

"You jest do hit to put a shame on me. Now, Pap, you take that mule--"

"W'y, Sammy,--w'y, Sammy honey, you know Pappy don't do it fer nair sech a reason. Hit don't look no sech a thing--like you was s.h.i.+f'less an' lazy.

Hit jes look like Pappy got nothin' to do, an' love to come and give you a turn with yo' co'n; an', Sammy honey,"--the good farmer for the moment getting the better of the timid, soft-hearted parent,--"hit is might'ly in the weeds, boy. Don't you reckon I better jes--"

The other began, "I tell you--"

"There, there! Ne'mine, Sammy. Ef you don't want Pappy to plough no mo', Pappy jes gwine to take the plough right outen the furrow and put old Beck up. Pappy gwine--"

The boy turned away, his point made, and strolled back to the cabin. The old man, murmuring a mixture of apologies, a.s.surances, and expostulations, went pathetically about the putting up of the mule, the setting away of the plough.

n.o.body knew when Pap Overholt began to be so called, nor when his wife had received the affectionate t.i.tle of Aunt Cornelia. It was a naming that grew of itself. Forty years ago the pair had been married--John, a st.u.r.dy, sunny-tempered young fellow of twenty-one, six feet in his stockings, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, and with a name and a nature clean of all tarnish; Cornelia Blackshears, a typical mountain girl of the best sort.

When, at the end of the first year, old Dr. Pastergood, who had ushered Cornelia herself into this world, turned to them with her first child in his arms, the young father stood by, controlling his great rush of primal joy, his boyish desire to do something noisy and violent; the mother looked first at her husband, then into the old doctor's face, with eyes of pa.s.sionate delight and appeal. He was speechless a moment, for pity. Then he said, gently:

"Hit's gone, befo' hit ever come to us, Cornely. Hit never breathed a breath of this werrisome world."

A man who had practised medicine in the Turkey Tracks for twenty-five years --a doctor among these mountain people, where poverty is the rule, hards.h.i.+p a condition of life, and tragedy a fairly familiar element, would have had his fibre well stiffened. The brave old campaigner, who had sat beside so many death-beds and so many birth-beds, and had seen so many come and so many go, at the exits and entrances of life, met the matter stoutly and without flinching. His stoic air, his words of pa.s.sive acceptance, laid a calm upon the first outburst of bitter grief from the two young creatures.

Later, when John had gone to do the ch.o.r.es, the old doctor still sat by Cornelia's bed. He took the girl's hand in his--an unusual demonstration of feeling for a mountaineer--and said to her, gently,

"Cornely, there won't never be no mo'--there'll be nair another baby to you, honey."

The stricken girl fastened her eyes upon his in dumb pain and protest. She said nothing, the wound was too deep; only her lips quivered pitifully and the tears ran down upon the pillow.

"Now, now, honey, don't ye go to fret that-a-way. W'y, Cornely, ye was made for a mother; the Lord made ye for such--an' do ye 'low 'at He don't know what He's a-gwine to do with the work of His hands? 'For mo' air the children of the desolate'--don't ye know Scripter says?--than of them that has many. Lord love ye, honey, girl, you'll be mother to a minny and a minny. They air a-comin'; the Lord's a-sendin' 'em. W'y, honey,--you and John will have children gathered around you--"

The one cry broke forth from Cornelia which she ever uttered through all her long grief of childlessness: "Oh, but, Dr. Pastergood, I wanted mine--my own--and John's! Oh, I reckon it was idolatry the way I felt in my heart; I thought, to have a little trick-bone o' my bone, flesh o' my flesh--look up at me with John's eyes--" A sob choked her utterance, and never again was it resumed.

In the years that followed, the pair--already come to be called Pap Overholt and Aunt Cornely--well fulfilled the old doctor's prophecy. The very next year after their baby was laid away, John's older brother, Jeff, lost his wife, and the three little children Mandy left were brought at once to them, remaining in peace and welfare for something over a year (Jeff was a circ.u.mspect widower), making the place blithe with their laughter and their play. Then their father married, and they were taken to the new home. He was an Overholt too, and shared that powerful paternal instinct with John. Three times this thing happened. Three times Jeff buried a wife, and the little Jeff Overholts, with recruited ranks, were brought to Aunt Cornelia and Pap John. When Jeff married his fourth wife--Zulena Spivey, a powerful, vital, affluent creature, of an unusual type for the mountains,--and the children (there were nine of them by this time) went to live with their step-mother, whose physique and disposition promised a longer tenure than any of her predecessors, Pap and Aunt Cornelia sat upon the lonely hearth and a.s.sured each other with tears that never again would they take into their home and their lives, as their very own, any children upon whom they could have no sure claim.

"Tell ye, Cornely, this thing o' windin' yer heart-strings around and around a pa.s.sel o' chaps for a year or so and then havin' 'em tore out--well, hit takes a mighty considerable chunk o' yer heart along with 'em." And the wife, looking at him with wet eyes, nodded an a.s.sent.

It was next May that Pap Overholt, who had been doing some hauling over as far as Big Turkey Track, returned one evening with a little figure perched beside him on the high wagon seat. "The Lord sent him, honey," he said, and handed the child down to his wife. "He ain't got a livin' soul on this earth to lay claim to him. He is ourn as much as ef he was flesh and bone of us. I even tuck out the papers."

That evening, the two sitting watching the little dark face in its sleep, Pap told his story. Driving across the flank of Yellow Old Bald, beyond Lost Cabin, he had pa.s.sed a woman with five children sitting beside the road in Big Buck Gap.

"Cornely, she looked like a picture out of a book," whispered Pap. "This chap's the livin' image of her. Portugee blood--touch o' that melungeon tribe from over in the Fur Cove. She had a little smooth face shaped like a aig; that curly hair hangin' clean to her waist, dark like this baby's, but with the sun all through it; these eyebrows o' his'n that's lifted in the middle o' his forred, like he cain't see why some onkindness was did him; and little slim hands and feet; all mighty furrin to the mountains. I give 'er a lift--she was goin' to Hepzibah, huntin' fer some kind o' charity she'd heard could be got there; and this little trick he tuck to me right then."

The woman bent over and looked long at the small olive face, so delicately cut, the damp rings of hair on his forehead, the tragic lift of the brows above the nose bridge, the thin-lipped scarlet mouth. "My baby," she murmured; then lifted her glance with the question: "An' how come ye to have him? Did she--did that womern--"

"No, no. 'Twas this-a-way," Pap interrupted her. "When I came back from Big Turkey Track, I went down through Hepzibah--I couldn't git this chap's eyes--ner his little hands--out o' my head; I found myse'f a-studyin' on 'em the hull enjurin' time. She was dead when I got thar. She'd died to Squire Cannon's, and they was a-pa.s.sellin' out the chillen 'mongst the neighbors. No sooner I put foot on the po'ch 'n this little soul come a-runnin' to me, an' says: W'y, here's my pappy, now. I tole you-all I did have a pappy. Now look--see--here he is.' Then he peeked up at me, and he put up his little arms, an' he says, jest as petted, and yit a little skeered, he says, 'Take me, pappy.' When I tuck him up, he grabbed me round the neck and dug his little face into mine. Then he looked around at all the folks, and sort o' s.h.i.+vered, and put his face back in my neck--still ez a little possum when you've killed the old ones an' split up the tree an'

drug out the nest."

Both faces were wet with tears now. Pap went on: "I had the papers made right out--I knowed you'd say yes, Cornely. He's Samuel Ephraim Overholt.

A-comin' home, the little weenty chap looks up at me suddent an' axes, 'Is they a mammy to we-all's house whar we goin' now?' Lord! Lord!" Pap shook his head gently, as signifying the utter inadequacy of mere words.

Little Sammy grew and thrived in the Overholt home. The tiny rootlets of his avid, unconscious baby life he thrust out in all directions through that kind soil, sucking, sucking, grasping, laying hold, drawing to him and his great little needs sustenance material and spiritual. More keen and capable to penetrate were those thready little fibres than the irresistible water-seeking tap-root of the cottonwood or the mesquite of the plains; more powerful to clasp and to hold than the cablelike roots of the rock-embracing cedar. The little new member was so much living suns.h.i.+ne, gay, witching, brilliant, erratic in disposition as he was singular and beautiful in his form and coloring, but always irresistibly endearing, dangerously winning. When he had been Sammy Overholt only two weeks, he sat at table with his parents one day and scornfully rejected the little plate that was put before him.

"No!" he cried, sharply. "No, no! I won't have it--ole na.s.sy plate!"

"W'y, baby! W'y, Sammy," deprecated Cornelia, "that's yo' own little plate that mammy washed for you. You mustn't call it naisty."

"Hit air na.s.sy," insisted young Samuel. "Hit got 'pecks--see!" and the small finger pointed to some minute flaw in the ware which showed as little dots on the white surface.

Cornelia, who, though mild and serene, was possessed of firmness and a sense of justice, would have had the matter fairly settled. "He ort not to cut up this-away, John," she urged. "He ort to take his little plate and behave hisse'f; 'r else he ort to be spanked,--he really ort, John, in jestice to the child."

But John was of another mould. "Law, Cornely! Hit's jest baby-doin's. The idee o' him a-settin' up 'at yo' dishes ain't clean! That sh.o.r.e do beat all!" And he had executed an exchange of plates under Cornelia's deprecating eyes. And so the matter went.

Again, upon a June day, Sammy was at play with the scion of the only negro family which had ever been known in all the Turkey Track regions. The Southern mountaineers have little affinity, socially or politically, with the people of the settlements. There were never any slaveholders among them, and the few isolated negroes were treated with almost perfect equality by the simple-minded mountain dwellers.

"Sammy honey, you an' Jimmy mus' cl'ar up yo' litter here. Don't leave it on mammy's nice flo'. Hit's mighty nigh supper-time. Cl'ar up now, 'fo'

Pappy comes."

Sammy stiffened his little figure to a startling rigidity. "I ain't a-goin'

to work!" he flung out. "Let him do it; _he's a n.i.g.g.e.r_!" And this was the last word of the argument.

This was Sammy--handsome, graceful, exceedingly winning, sudden and pa.s.sionate, disdaining like a young zebra the yoke of labor, and, when crossed, absolutely beyond all reason or bounds; the life of every gathering of young people as he grew up; much made of, deferred to, sought after, yet everywhere blamed as undutiful and ungrateful.

"Oh, I do p'intedly wish the neighbors would leave us alone," sighed Pap Overholt, when these reports came to him. "As ef I didn't know what I wanted--as ef I couldn't raise my own chile;" and as he said this he ever avoided Aunt Cornelia's honest eye.

It was when Sammy was eighteen, the best dressed, the best horsed--and the idlest--to be found from Little Turkey Track to the Fur Cove, from Tatum's to Big Buck Gap--that he went one day, riding his sorrel filly, down to Hepzibah, ostensibly to do some errands for Aunt Cornelia, but in fact simply in search of a good time. The next day Blev Straly, a rifle over his shoulder and a couple of hounds at heel, stopped a moment at the chopping-block where Pap was splitting some kindling.

"I was a-pa.s.sin'," he explained--"I was jest a-pa.s.sin', an' I 'lowed I'd drap in an' tell ye 'bout Sammy. Hit better be me than somebody 'at likes to carry mean tales and wants to watch folks suffer." Aunt Cornelia was beside her husband now.

"No, no," Blev answered the look on the two faces; "nothin' ain't the matter of Sammy. He's jest married--that little Huldy Frew 'at's been waitin' on table at Aunt Randy Card's _ho_-tel. You know, Aunt Cornely, she is a mighty pretty little trick--and there ain't nothin' bad about the gal.

I jest knowed you and Pap 'ud feel mighty hurt over Sammy doin' you-all like you was cruel to him--like he had to run away to git married; and I 'lowed I better come and tell you fust."

The "little Huldy gal" was, as Blev Straly had described her, a mighty pretty little trick, and nothing bad about her. The orphan child of poor mountaineers, bound out since the death of her parents when she was ten years old, she had been two years now working for Aunt Randy Card, who kept the primitive hotel at Hepzibah. Even in this remote region Huldy showed that wonderful--that irrepressible--upward impulse of young feminine America, that instinctive affinity for the finer things of life, that marvellous understanding of graces and refinements, and that pathetic and persistent groping after them which is the marked characteristic of America's daughters. The child was not yet sixteen, a fair little thing with soft ashen hair and honest gray eyes, the pink upon her cheek like that of a New England girl.

At first this marriage--which had been so unkindly conducted by Sammy, used by him apparently as a weapon of affront--seemed to bring with it only good, only happiness. The boy was more contented at home, less wayward, and the feeling of apprehension that had dwelt continually in the hearts of Pap and Aunt Cornelia ever since his adolescence now slept. The little Huldy--her own small cup apparently full of happiness--was all affectionate grat.i.tude and docility. She healed the bruises Sammy made, poured balm in the wounds he inflicted; she was sunny, obedient, grateful enough for two.

But a new trait was developed in Sammy's nature--perversity. Life was made smooth to his feet; the things he needed--even the things which he merely desired--were procured and brought to him. Love brooded above and around him--timid, chidden, but absolute, adoring. Nothing was left him--no occupation was offered for his energies--but to resent these things, to quarrel with his benefits. And now the quarrel began.

Its outcome was this: Toward the end of the first year of the marriage, upon a bleak, forbidding March day--a day of bitter wind and icy sleet,--there rode one to the Overholt door who called upon Pap and Aunt Cornelia to hitch up and come with all possible haste to old Eph'm Blackshears, Cornelia's father--a man who had lived to fourscore, and who now lay at his last, asking for his daughter, his baby chile, Cornely.