Judith of the Cumberlands Part 7

"I'll bring Little Buck a play-pretty from the settlement," she said softly. "He'll keer a sight more for hit than for the apples. I wish I'd knowed you liked 'em--I'd brought you more. Why don't you come over and see us and git all you want? We've got two trees of 'em."

Chapter V

The Red Rose and the Briar

ALL through April Judith's project of a play-party languished. She had to pull steadily against the elders, for not only were the men hard at it making ready for the putting in of the year's crops, but it was gardening time as well, when even the women and children are pressed in to help at the raking up and brush piling. Wood smoke from the clearing fires haunted all the hollows. Everybody was preparing for the making of the truck patch. Down on the little groups would drop a cloud and blot out the bonfire till it became the mere glowing point at the heart of a shaken opal--for if you are wise you burn brush on a rainy day.

Old Jephthah opposed the plan for the girl's festivity on another ground.

"I've got no objection to a frolic, Jude," he observed quietly, on hearing the first mention of the matter, "but I wouldn't have no play-party at this house. Hit's too handy to that cussed still of Blatch's. A pa.s.sel of fool boys is mighty apt to go over thar an' fill theirselves up with corn whiskey, an' the party will just about end up in a interruption."

He said no more, and Judith made no reply. Though ordinarily she would have hesitated to go against her uncle's expressed wishes, her heart was too much set on this enterprise to allow of easy checking. She made no reply, but her campaign on behalf of the merrymaking went steadily on.

"I wonder you can have the heart to git up play-parties and the like when Andy and Jeff's a-sufferin' in the jail," Pendrilla Lusk plucked up spirit to say when the plan was first mooted to her.

Andy and Jeff, the wild young hawks, with the glamour upon them of lawless, adventurous spirits, and bold, proper lovers, equally fascinated and terrified the Lusk girls--timid, fluttering pair--and were in their turn attracted to them by an inevitable law of nature.

"I don't see how it hurts the boys for us to have a dance," rejoined Judith with asperity. "If we was all to set and cry our eyes out, it wouldn't fetch 'em back on the mountain any quicker." Then with a teasing flash, "I'll tell 'em when they git home what you said, though."

"Now, Jude, you're real mean," pleaded Cliantha Lusk sinking to her knees beside Judith and raising thin little arms to clasp that young woman around the waist. "You ain't a-goin' to tell them fool boys any sech truck as that, air ye? Pendrilly jest said it for a sayin'. We'd love to come to yo' play-party, whenever it is. I _say_ Andy and Jeff! Let 'em git out of the jail the way they got in."

This is the approved att.i.tude of the mountain virgin; yet Cliantha's voice shook sadly as she uttered the independent sentiments, and Pendrilla furtively wiped her eyes in promising to attend the play-party.

All this was in April. By the time May came in, that dread of a belated frost which amounts almost to terror in the farmer of the c.u.mberlands was ended; the Easter cold and blackberry winter were over, and all the garden truck was planted. Everybody began whole-heartedly to enjoy the time of year. The leaves were full size, but still soft; the wind made hardly any noise among them. In the pasture lot and fence corners near the house, meadow flowers began to star the green. The frog chorus, so loud and jubilant in early spring, had subsided now except at night, when their treble was accompanied by the ba.s.s "chug-chug" of the bull-frogs.

The mornings were vocal with the notes of yellow hammer, cuckoos; the cooing of doves, the squawk of the jay, and the drum of the big red-headed woodp.e.c.k.e.r sounded through the summer woods; while always in the cool of the day came the thrush's song. The early corn was in by mid April. About the first full moon of May the main crop was planted.

Early in June Judith, walking in the wood, brought home the splendid red wood lily, and a cl.u.s.ter too of "ratsbane," with its flowers like a little crown of white wax.

The spring restlessness was over throughout all the wild country; life no longer stirred and rustled; the leaves hung still in the long sunny noons. The air was clear, rinsed with frequent showers; the woods were silent except for birds and cow bells. The crops were laid by. The huckleberries ripened; the "sarvices" hung thick in the forest. Even the blackberries were beginning to turn and Andy and Jeff had been back at home more than a week, when Judith finally succeeded in getting her forces together and her guests promised. Many of them would have to walk four or five miles to sing and play for a few hours, tramping back at midnight to lie down and catch what sleep they could before dawn waked them to another day of toil. Thursday evening was set for the event. On Wednesday the Lusk girls coming in to discuss, found Judith with shining eyes and crimson cheeks, attacking the simple housework of the cabin.

"I wish't you'd sing while I finish my churnin'," the girl said, "I'm so fl.u.s.tered looks like I can't sca'cely do anything right."

The sisters clasped hands and raised their childish faces. Cliantha had a thin, high piping soprano like a small flute, and Pendrilla sang "counter" to it. They were repositories of all the old ballads of the mountains--ballads from Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and from Wales, that set the ferocities and the love-making of Elizabeth's time or earlier most quaintly amidst the localities and nomenclature of the c.u.mberlands.

"Sing 'Barb'ry Allen,'" commanded Judith as she swung the dasher with nervous energy.

The July sunshine filtered through the leaves of the big muscadine vine that covered and sheltered the tiny side porch. Bees boomed about the ragged tufts of clover and Bouncing Bet that fringed the side yard. The old hound at the chip pile blinked lazily and raised his head, then dropped it and slumbered again. Within, the big room was dim and cool.

The high, thin, quavering voices celebrated the love and woe of cruel Barbara Allen. Judith's dark eyes grew soft and brooding; the nervous strokes of her dasher measured themselves more and more to the swing of the old tune.

"I don't see how anybody can be hardhearted thataway with a person they love," she said softly as the song descended to its doleful end.

The next morning Judith hurried her work that she might get through and go over to the Bonbright house, there to put in execution her long-cherished plan of cleaning it and making it fit for Creed's occupancy that night. Old Dilsey Rust, their tenant, came in to help at the Turrentine cabin always on occasions like this, or with the churning or washing; and penetrated with impatience the girl finally left her a.s.sistant in charge of matters and set forth through the woods and across the fields, the little key which she had carried ever since that morning in early April in her pocket like a talisman. At last it was to open her kingdom to her. Behind the bolt that it controlled lay not only the home of Creed's childhood, but supposably the home of his children. Judith's heart beat suffocatingly at the thought.

Halfway across she met Huldah Spiller coming up from the Far spring with a bucket of sulphur water which was held to be good for Jim Cal's rheumatism.

"Whar ye goin'?" asked Huldah, looking curiously at the broom over Judith's shoulder, the roll of cloths and the small gourd of soft soap she carried.

"I'm a-goin' whar I'm a-goin'," returned Judith aggressively. But the other only smiled. It did not suit her to be offended at that moment.

Instead, "What are you goin' to wear to-night, Judy?" she inquired vivaciously. It was one of the advantages of waiting on table at a boarding house in the settlement--pieced out perhaps by the possession of red hair--that Huldah had the courage to address Judith Barrier as "Judy."

The hostess of the evening's festivities was half in the mind to pa.s.s on without reply; then her curiosity as to Huldah's costume got the better of her, and she compromised, with a laconic,

"My white frock--what are you?"

"Don't you know I went down to Hepzibah after you said you was goin' to have a play-party?" asked Huldah, tossing her head to get the red curls out of her eyes. "Well, Iley had give me fifty cents on my wages--"

Huldah worked as a servant in her sister's family, which is not uncommon in the mountains--"an' I tuck it and bought me ten yard of five-cent lawn, the prettiest blue you ever put yo' eyes on."

"Blue!" A sudden shock went over Judith. She had forgotten; and here Huldah Spiller would wear a blue dress, and she--oh, the stupidity, the bat-like, doltish, blindness of it!--would be in white, because it was now too late to make a change. Out of the very tragedy of the situation she managed to pluck forth a smile.

"I was aimin' to wear blue ribbons," she said finally. It had just come into her head that she could pull the blue bow from her hat--that blue bow with which she had zealously replaced the despised and outcast red--and so make shift.

"Blue's my best feller's favourite colour," contributed Huldah, picking up the bucket which she had set down, and starting on. "He 'lows it goes fine with aurbu'n hair."

"Wade never said that," muttered Judith to herself as she took her way to the Bonbright place.

But after all one could not be long out of tune with such a summer day.

The spicy odour of pennyroyal bruised underfoot, came to her nostrils like incense. Even the sickly sweet of jimson blossoms by the draw-bars of the milking lot was dear and familiar, while their white trumpets whispered of childish play-days and flower-ladies she had set walking in procession under the shadow of some big green leaf. Blue--the soft stars of spider-wort opening among the rocks reminded her of the hue; blue curls and dittany tangled at the path edge; but the very air itself was beginning to wear Creed's colour and put on that wonderful, luminous blue in which the c.u.mberlands of midsummer melt cerulean into a sky of lapis lazuli. Creed's colour--Creed's colour--her dark eyes misted as they searched the far reaches of the hills and found it everywhere.

Jephthah Turrentine used to say that if a man owned enough mountain land to set his foot on, he owned the whole of the sky above him; it was a truer word than this old mountain dweller could have known, since the mere possessor of a city lot, where other tall roofs cut the horizon high, must content himself with less of the welkin.

Judith opened the door, went in, closed it behind her, and gazed about.

There lay over everything a fine dust; there was the look of decay which comes with disuse; and the air bore the musty odour of a shut and long uninhabited house. The Bonbright home had been a good one for the mountains, of hewn logs, and with four rooms, and two great stone chimneys. Inside was the furniture which Mary Gillenwaters brought to it as a bride when her mountain lover came down to Hepzibah and with the swift ardour of his tribe--this Bonbright's fires of eloquence were all kindled upon the altar of his mating romance--charmed the daughter of its one merchant. These added to the already fairly complete plenishings, many of which had come over the mountains from Virginia when Sevier opened up the new State, gave an air of abundance, even of sober elegance to the room.

Reverently Judith moved among the dumb witnesses and servitors of Bonbright generations. Here was the spinning-wheel, here the cards, and out in the little room off the porch stood the loom. She had dreams of replacing these with a sewing machine. n.o.body wove jeans any more--but a good carpet-loom now, _that_ might be made useful. Unwilling to hang the bedding on bushes for fear of a chance tear from twig or thorn, she rigged a line in the back yard, and spread quilt and homespun blanket, coa.r.s.e white sheets and pillowcases that were yellowing with age, out for the glad gay wind to play with, for the sunshine to sweeten.

"What a lot of feather beds!" she murmured as she tallied them over.

"That there ticking is better than you can buy in the stores. My, ain't these light and nice!"

All the warm, sunny afternoon she toiled at her self-appointed labour of love. She swept and dusted, she scrubbed and cleaned, with capable fingers, proud of the strength and skill that made her a good housewife; then bringing in the fragrant, homely fabrics, made up the beds and placed all back in due order.

"He's boun' to notice somebody's been here and put things to rights," she said over and over to herself. "If it looks sightly, and seems like home, mebbe he'll give out the notion of stayin' at Nancy Card's, and come and live here." She brooded on the bliss of the idea as she worked.

Under the great mahogany four-poster in the front room was slipped a trundle-bed that she drew out and looked at with fond eyes. No doubt Creed's boyish head had lain there once. She wished pa.s.sionately that she had known him then, all unaware that we never do know our lovers when they and we are children. Even those playfellows who are destined to be mates find, all on a day, that the familiar companion who has grown up beside each has changed into quite a different person.

She rolled the trundle-bed back into place and turned to lift a pile of bedding that lay apparently on a chest. When it was raised it revealed the clumsy old cradle that had rocked three generations of Bonbrights.

She stood looking down at it with quickening pulse, then reached a fluttering hand and touched its small pillow tenderly. Here had rested that golden head, so many years ago; beside it his mother had sat and rocked. At the thought Judith was on her knees, her hands falling naturally upon the side and rocking the small bed. In a strange conflict of dreamy emotion, she swayed it back and forth a moment, and then--what woman could resist it?--began to croon an old mountain cradle song.

Suddenly the westering sun got to the level of a half shrouded window and sent a beam in across Judith's bent head.

"My land!" she whispered, getting to her feet. "I ain't got no call to stay foolin' here all day. Dilsey'll jest about burn them cakes I told her to bake, and I ain't fixed my blue bow for my hair yet."

She swept a glance around the speckless room, gathered up her paraphernalia of cleaning, pa.s.sed out, locked the door, and set her face toward home.

In Mary Bonbright's garden, now given over to weeds as the gardens of dead women are so apt to be, there had grown a singular, half wild rose.

This flower was of a clear blood red, with a yellow heart which its five broad petals, flinging wide open, disclosed to view, unlike the crimped and guarded loveliness of the more evolved sisters of the green-house.

Mowed down spring after spring by the scythe of Strubley, the renter, the vigorous thing had spread abroad, and as Judith stepped from the door its exultant beauty caught her eye. Flaming shields of crimson, bearing each its boss of filagree gold, the hosts of the red rose stood up bravely in the choking gra.s.s to which the insensate scythe blade had so often levelled them, and shouted to the girl of love and joy, and of youth which was the time for both. Wide petalled, burning red, their golden hearts open to sun and bee, they were the blossoms for the earth-woman.