The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles
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cry for the crusade she is waging for the liberation of mountain women from the patriarchal culture they are forced to live in. The story probes the mountain woman’s dilemma: to take on the burdens of marriage and the cares of a household or remain a spinster and be condemned to much the same drudgery in the homes of others. Sixteen-year-old Easter Vanderwelt confronts the dilemma as she helps her married sister with the endless toil of caring for her babies, her husband, and the household, with little time to care for herself. Ultimately Easter must make her own choice between “slavery in her father’s house or slavery in a husband’s,” a decision that will determine the course of the rest of her life.
. . .
The big boy in the doorway was hot and dusty, but not tired. It was impossible to be really tired with running free on a morning when all the earth was awake and trembling with the eager restlessness of young summer. His head was carried high, with a deerlike poise; the dark young profile with its promise of early manhood flung up a challenge to greet the world. His gait all morning had been the wolflike pace by which the mountaineer swings the roughest miles behind him.
The woman—she was hardly the mistress—of the big log house was tired, however; she could scarcely remember a time when she had not been so. Life had resolved itself, for her, into conditions of greater or less weariness, and she had learned to be thankful if the weariness were not complicated by rheumatism or other pain. Her day was always long, her night was short; she had no time to think of the sunshine and roses in her own dooryard.
“I come apast Mis’ Hallet’s,” he explained his presence, “and she stopped me to send word that she wants Easter to come and stay with her a spell. I’ve got a note in my pocket, if I can find it.”
Mrs. Vanderwelt read the pencilled scrawl from Cordy Hallet, her married daughter. “Allison,” she began, a distressed frown puckering her lined forehead, “if you’re goin’ by the spring, would you just as soon stop and tell Easter? She’s churnin’ down thar. Ye might as well carry her a pokeful of cookies.”
She filled the boy’s hands with freshly baked saucer-wide cookies, scarcely more than sweetened soda biscuit-cakes, and put some into a paper bag for her daughter.
The young fellow might have chosen the highroad, but the sun-dappled path through the woods drew first his eyes and then his feet. Everything was in motion there, tilting and waving in the light breeze; dewdrops glittered still under the leaves; brilliant bits of insect life started out of the sun-warmed loam and rustled with many-legged creepings in last year’s dry leaves. On the way he cut a length of hickory, from which the sap-loosed bark could readily be taken, and walked on more slowly, shaping a whistle with his knife, and thinking of Easter, and their days in school. She was not so old as he by several years; perhaps she was not quite sixteen. He had scarce awakened to full perception of her girlish comeliness, but he admired her nervous agility and grace in play. She could run and climb, and play coosheepy and hat-ball, as well as any of the boys; that was his way of putting it to himself.
The spring was a dark pool, walled with rock and housed with a structure of logs and hand-riven clapboards. It had a shelf all round below the surface level, on which jars of milk stood in perpetual coolness. Easter, having finished her task, was nowhere to be seen; her churn stood outside, and new butter floated in a maple bowl of water, set on the rock to cool. Having tested his whistle and found to his delight that it would pipe three or four notes, the boy bent over the water for a while, his eyes caught first by the reflection of his own face and then by the leaping and stirring of sand and tiny pebbles where the vein rose through the bottom. He laid himself flat and drank deeply of the bluish cold water; then, closing the door of the spring-house against stray “razorbacks,” he began to look about in the woods. Once he called timidly, “Easter!” but the sound of her name in his own voice rather frightened him, inasmuch as he was not sure he ought not to put a Miss, or some such foolish handle, before it; and he proceeded uncertainly into the maple thicket below the spring, not knowing where to search. Then a gleam of blossom flashed between the boles, and he guessed that she would be there.
It was a white-flaming mass of azaleas, delicately rosy as mountain slopes of snow splashed over with the pink of dawn. In the midst sat a girl, drinking the overflowed sweetness of that dripping and blowing blank of flowers: now fingering single branches that lifted into the tender foliage their crowns and pompons, and now drawing all together down against her face in a sheaf of cool, pure petals—drowning her young senses in perfume. She had taken off her coarse shoes to plunge her feet into the dewy freshness of those ferns that in such maple-shaded hollows keep the azaleas company. Easter was too old to go barefoot, but not too old to delight in the feel of the ancient soil beneath her feet, and in the shining dewdrops on her instep’s blue-marbled satin. In after years, when the burden of responsibility bore heavily on her shoulders, she remembered that intermission among the flowers as her last taste of care-free pleasure, her last moments of childhood.
Suddenly, with a soft crash of rending growth, the boy parted the underbrush and came toward her. She gathered herself together with a swift instinctive modesty, tucking her feet under her skirt. “Howdy, Allison?” she greeted him, and “Howdy?” he answered, thrusting the bag of cookies at her by way of accounting for his presence.
She smiled in an embarrassed fashion as she took the poke from his hand. The thought of her bare feet made her unable to rise. The big boy dropped to the ground beside her. He delivered his message and watched her read the note.
“Air you goin’?” he asked, eagerly. “Hit’s closer to our house. I ain’t seen you since school broke up.”
“I reckon so,” the girl answered him. And then to relieve the situation she offered him cakes. At that he remembered some May-apples in his pocket and produced them with the awkwardness of big-boyhood. Each was still child enough to enjoy the tasteless fruit of the mandrake simply because it was wild; and to him, moreover, it had all the exaggerated value of a boy’s trove. Easter shared her cakes, and theirs was a feast of Arcady. So, too, might the Arcadian shepherds have piped among their flocks; for he tried his whistle again, and she must needs have it in her hands to blow upon it also.
Directly she glanced up and her face brightened. “There’s a hominybird,” she whispered ever so softly. Following her gaze, he, too, saw the tiny creature, swift and brilliant, a flying dagger, more like an insect than a bird. They turned to smile at each other, and as quickly turned away. It poised over flower after flower with a hum as of some heavy double-winged beetle; and ere it could be drunk with sweets a new sound possessed the stillness.
The morning had been vividly many-colored with bird notes. The thrush had waked first, his passionless strain cool as the very voice of dawn; the rest had all carolled of nests and mating, of their lives that were hidden overhead in that trembling world of semi-lucent leaves: keen struggle of life with hunger, brooding tenderness of care for the young, wooing, and quarrelling and fighting, the thousand tiny tragedies and comedies unperceived by human eyes. But now it was a mocker who set the dim, deep-lit shadow a-ripple with the pulsing of his own great little heart, in such wild song as could only come from the wild soul of a winged life—a song of world-old passion, of gladness and youth primordial. Oh, troubadour, what magic is in your wooing? Is it the vast and deep desire of Earth for the returning Sungod—her joy in the year’s unutterable glad release, her yearning to the most ancient of Lovers ever young? . . .
Allison drew himself nearer to the girl, and laid his hand over hers. The mating instinct awakens early in the young people of the mountains—cruelly early; we cannot tell why—as a sweet pain that overtakes the exquisite shyness of childhood unawares. She neither looked toward him nor shrank away. Slowly her hand turned until its moist, warm palm met the boy’s; and before he knew it he had kissed her—anywhere, any way.
A kiss is a mystery and a miracle. Easter sprang up, dazed and thrilled, regardless now of her bare feet—conscious only of a choking in her throat and an impulse to burst into the tearless sobbing of excitement. Allison, frightened perhaps even more than she, stood half turned from her, flushed and tingling from head to foot.
At last he found his tongue. “I won’t do that no more! I just don’t know what made me. . . . Easter, won’t you forget