Читать книгу South Moon Under - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Страница 6

Table of Contents

A few pine needles sifted down on the shoulders of the company assembled for the burying of Lantry’s wife. The man and his daughter Piety stood together, a little apart from the rest of the family, as the last spadeful of sand spattered over the grave. In death the woman had been brought back across the river to the burying-ground in the piney-woods. Lantry had turned over the stiff, fox-faced body to her kin with something like relief, as though he were returning a mule or horse he had borrowed.

Old man Wilson, the dead woman’s father, remarked brightly, “Seven yare, nigh to the day, son Lantry, since you takened her acrost the river to live in the scrub.”

Lantry nodded, stroking his beard, where a streak of silver ran like a thin shaft of lightning. Piety moved closer to him.

Old man Wilson continued, “You’ve prospered, son, and this pore dead creeter he’ped you to do so. Your young uns is all growed and raisin’ families, exscusin’ Py-tee, and her almost twenty-two.”

Lantry spoke to her under his breath, “Le’s go, honey. Ol’ Wilson’s drunk.”

They turned away through the pine trees towards the river. Their rowboat rocked among bonnet-pads at the landing. They stepped in and Lantry poled off silently. Martha and Zeke and Thaddeus and their families were to return to the scrub by wagon, crossing the river bridge at Eureka. They watched after their father and sister. Through a break in the trees they saw the big man bend to his oars. The young woman sat facing him, her small, childlike face cupped in her hands.

“Long as Pa’s got Py-tee where he kin look at her,” Martha said drily, “the rest of us kin live or die——”

On the scrub side of the river Lantry grounded his boat at his open landing. South of Otter Landing the river bluffs flattened, and scrub met swamp in a twisting moil of briers and rattan and moccasins. There was no fertile ledge of hammock. Only cypresses reared their feathery heads from gigantic bases. Lantry waved his hand towards the south. He gave voice to his uneasiness for the first time in seven years.

“Nobody won’t never slip up on us that-a-way,” he said.

Piety blinked at him, taking her thoughts from her mother. For Lantry, she sensed, there were other enemies than death. They walked together up the ledge. The trail passed up through the rich darkness of hammock, across a cleared field, and through a gate in the slat fence to the house yard. They crossed the breezeway and lifted the latch into the front room. Piety looked about her. The house was no emptier than before. No place would be empty, she thought, with Lantry in it. The man’s bulk, the fire of his presence, filled the room so certainly that his wife, returning from the grave, would have crowded it. Piety stared at the hearth, missing the accustomed sight of her mother sitting near the fire. It was as though a sharp-nosed, snappish bitch of long association was gone.

The burying had been at noon. It was now mid-afternoon. Lantry and his daughter longed to go to the interrupted work of the field. They sat stiffly on a bench against the wall. Her mother, Piety thought, had enjoyed so little.

In the sustaining of life were pain and pleasure. Her mother had only understood the pain. Piety and Lantry and indeed most folk she knew, felt a sharp pleasure in the details of the precarious thing that was existence. Breakfast was good, and dinner and supper, and a little snuff afterwards. The tug of the plow at the arms was good, and the sight of new cane and corn sprouting green above the earth. Deer, big-eyed and curious, and their spotted fawns; fox-squirrels upside down on a pine tree, black-backed and glossy, flicking their tails; all the small creatures that crossed her path were good to watch. She had never understood her mother’s grumblings.

Towards dark the creak of wagon wheels sounded down the scrub road. The rest of the Lantrys were returning to their homes; Zeke, lonely because he had lost his wife in childbirth in the fall; Martha, contented with her husband, Sylvester Jacklin, and her twin babies; Thaddeus, homesteading with his bride four miles to the north. The wagon halted a moment at the gate; then, as though its occupants had suddenly changed their minds, rattled on northward.

Piety and Lantry breathed deeply, rose from the bench and went together to the kitchen. Lantry sat by the range, tending the fire while she cooked their meal. They ate in their accustomed places across from each other at the kitchen table, the space empty at the end where Mrs. Lantry had sat. Lantry watched Piety as she washed the dishes at the water-shelf. She made quick, light movements like a quail. The man followed her with his eyes. When they left the kitchen he drew his hand across her soft hair.

“I’ll move into the front room to sleep,” he said. “You keep your mammy’s bedroom.”

They were exhausted and slept long and hard. In the morning she heard him stirring ahead of her. He was building the kitchen fire. She opened her bedroom door and peered into the front room. He had built a quick blaze on the hearth for her to dress by. Something more than the small fire warmed her bones. At breakfast Lantry moved to the place at the end of the table. They sat close together. He ate silently, moving his beard, his thoughts milling behind his eyes. Startled, he looked up to see Piety staring at him, her hands in her lap. She smiled, moving her head a little.

“What you studyin’ about, watchin’ your Pappy that-a-way?”

He poked his dull case-knife at her ribs to hear her quick laugh.

She wondered uneasily if he would go away to the field without her. She hurried to get the dishes done, the two beds made, the mosquito bars rolled back, the floors swept, the dog and cat and chickens fed, while he did the outside chores. He dallied over the stock feeding and milking until he saw her at the last of her work. He came to the breezeway with two hoes.

“We got a day’s work fightin’ the ’muda grass,” he said.

The day seemed short. They hoed adjacent rows. The man’s long arms swung the hoe faster than her small-boned ones. When he found himself too far ahead of her, he turned to her row and hoed back to meet her.

Mrs. Lantry’s illness had interfered with the routine of the house. The next morning Piety felt obliged to catch up with the washing. She rose long before daylight and had the clothes half-rubbed and the black wash-pot boiling before Lantry was up. After breakfast he contrived to keep himself busy about the yard. He repaired harness; drew off a new axe-handle; sorted over the equipment for his muzzle-loading gun. Piety was using the pot-water to scrub the floors. The corn-shucks scrub swished noisily across the rough breezeway. Lantry filled his shot-bag with shot, his horn with powder; polished the hickory ramrod; gathered a handful of dried Spanish moss for wadding.

“You thu, Py-tee?”

“I’m thu.”

“We best take the mule and wagon into the scrub for fat-wood.”

She took off her wet apron, put on her palmetto hat and went with him, leaving the clothes to flap on the line and the floors to dry without the usual last process of shuffling back and forth across them with a cloth under bare feet. The small thin figure with its shoulders a little bent trotted beside the great bulky one.

The scrub had not burned in the seven years since they had come to it. The mule threaded his way through young pines and oaks higher than his ears. Lantry had not been glad to see the heightening of the growth. He had liked to be able to see across it for a mile or two from the cabin doorstep. The mule came to a stop. He could go no farther into the scrub. The undergrowth was a twisted treachery. Saw palmetto ripped with its barbs at hide and flesh; the refuse of old fires cluttered the infertile sand with matted limbs, stumps and logs, all laced together with thorny vines. The man and woman climbed from the wagon and began to sort out scorched pine trunks, whose cores would burn like oil.

“I gits a dream, sometimes,” Lantry said in a low voice. “I gits takened by surprise from the river. I belong to run. I runs acrost the clearing and into sich a piece o’ scrub as this.”

The sweat started from his temples as he talked. All night, he told her, when the dream rode him, he ran through the scrub, his feet interminably enmeshed in its tormented tangle.

“I cain’t someway put my hand to peace and comfort,” he said.

Her heart beat hard. She braced her small feet in the high boy’s shoes.

She blurted, “Pa, what you been so feered of?”

He did not answer. His breath came and went like the air in a bellows.

He said at last, “You jest as good to know. Mought be some day—you and me alone this-a-way—you’d have me to hide out. Or lie for. Honey, I killed me a gov’mint man in the up-country.”

“How come you to do sich as that?”

The young voice was dispassionate, touched with a faint anxiety.

“I were makin’ moonshine whiskey. The revenooers come messin’ up with me. I got my gorge up and I killed me one. I lit out for the south. I been right smart oneasy ever since.”

She remembered a drunken man from Moss Bluff, swaying in the firelight on the night of the fence-raising, asking Lantry questions.

“Does folkses around here know?”

“Don’t nobody cold-out know, honey, but me and you. But ’pears to me, times, like, here and there a man has someway got a idee.”

“They ain’t nary one takened out after you?”

“If they has, they ain’t caught up with me.” He added slowly, “But all my life I got it to study on.”

Her heart thumped with his. She wanted to speak. She could not think of any words to comfort him. She went with him inside his fear, as though together they entered some lonely place of shadows. They rode home without further speech. They were warm and close. It was as though a skein of wool, tangled and torn, had been wound at last into a firm bright ball.

The spring proved dry, and in March they planted a garden at the foot of the bluff where the swamp merged with the river, and the ground was moist without need of rain. In a week turnips and collards and onions showed green against the black muck. One Saturday morning Lantry left her to work the garden while he rowed to Eureka to trade. When the dip of his oars was absorbed by the rush of the river she bent to her weeding.

She was aware, with a slight acceleration of her heartbeat, of the life going on around her; the movement of alligators floundering in the creek, the slow beat of the wings of herons, the catfish jumping. She worked quietly for so long that when she lifted her head she found herself looking into the close bright eyes of an astonished cat-squirrel. A black swamp rabbit hopped casually by a hand’s breadth away. She straightened her back and walked to the lower corner of the garden to find where he had pushed through the loose rail fence. She came there on the recent track of a panther. She was not afraid by daylight. She bent again to her work. She stayed at the garden until the earth about the plants was combed as smooth as her hair, hoping that Lantry would come so that she might meet him at the swamp landing.

She returned to the house and started a fire for supper. Towards sunset she heard him coming. He was whistling as sweetly as a redbird. She went to the door and shaded her eyes against the westerly sun. Lantry was swinging across the clearing. His bearded head was thrown back, his arms hung free from the shoulders, his long legs moved in time with his whistling. He stopped whistling abruptly and broke into a song. It was his favorite, “Git along down.” She heard him all the way across the clearing in a musical burst of thunder.

“Git along down, git along down,

Git along down to Richmond town

To lay my t’baccy down.”

She wondered where Richmond town might be, but by the time Lantry was at the house he was calling to her, waving his bags and bundles, and she did not remember to ask. He had gone to Eureka expressly to buy new strings for his banjo, hanging long unused under the rafters. Now they were alone, he might indulge his taste for music. He put the new strings on the instrument, tuned it and picked at it, trying its tone, while she cooked supper. He sat in the breezeway with the setting sun in his beard and tinkled softly against the clatter of the pans.

On the following Saturday he left her alone again. Time seemed to hang on her hands when he was away and she occupied herself with tasks with which she seldom concerned herself. She grated cassava roots and made starch and pudding. The pudding was translucent like gum drops. Lantry was fond of it. She went a short way into the scrub and cut boughs of Highland ti-ti for a new yard-broom. Lantry returned, his red-brown eyes glowing, with a small accordion for her.

She preferred to listen to him rather than to play herself, but she turned earnestly to learning the instrument. It was harder than ploughing new ground to remember the difference between the two kinds of notes, and that the accordion was opened for one and closed for the other. She wheezed gravely in and out, her eyes on him, the tip of her tongue between her lips, following his directions. For more than a week she achieved nothing beyond distressing howls and wheezes. Suddenly Lantry guffawed with a great roar, as she had not heard him since he laughed with Annie Wilson at the fence-raising.

“Honey,” he said, “quit a-twistin’ that pore ol’ sick tomcat’s tail!”

They laughed together until they were faint from it.

“Here, honey, leave me show you——”

He took the accordion and closed his eyes and swayed his shoulders. The music seemed to flow into him and then flow out again. He played tunes she knew and tunes that were strange, songs any one could tell came from a long way off. Some were lively. Others were sweet and infinitely sad. Then he opened his eyes and handed her back the instrument, showing her once more the way it went.

She learned finally to play with the patient steadiness of her shooting. She wheezed out the hymns very well, and slow measured pieces like “Nellie Gray.” She had no feeling for rhythm. When she got into pieces like “Little Brown Jug” and “Run, Nigger, Run,” she stumbled and tripped over her own notes. She was hopelessly lost in such dance tunes as “Hen Cackle.” Sweating, with a desperate intent, she squeezed a random note here and there from the accordion in an attempt to keep the pace, until Lantry stopped her gently.

“Py-tee, no use to try sich as that no more. Dogged if you don’t double back on your own track like a run wild-cat.”

He accepted her peculiar timelessness at the slower pieces and they played them together with mutual satisfaction. Through two springs and summers, into the second autumn, Zeke or Thaddeus or Martha, walking down the road to visit, heard the pair at their music. They came on them sitting in the breezeway or before the hearth-fire, absorbed in the magic of string and wind.