The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

Mid-October was wonderfully clear arid sweet up at the head of Lance's Laurel; the color key became richer, more royal; the sunset rays along the hill-tops a more opulent yellow.

It was not till the leaves were sifting down red and yellow over her dooryard, that Callista got from Lance the full story concerning their resources, and the havoc he had made of them to get ready money from Derf. He had been hauling tanbark all this time to pay the unjust debt. When she knew, even her inexperience was staggered – dismayed. So far, she had not gone home, and she shut her lips tight over the resolution not now to do so with a request for that aid which her grandfather had refused in advance.

"We'll make out, I reckon," she said to her husband dubiously.

"Oh, we'll get along all right," returned that hardy adventurer, easily. "We'll scrabble through the winter somehow. In the summer I can always make a-plenty at haulin' or at my trade. I'm goin' to put in the prettiest truck-patch anybody ever saw for you; and then we'll live fat, Callista." He added suddenly, "Come summer we'll go camping over on the East Fork of Caney. There's a place over on that East Fork that I believe in my soul nobody's been since the Indians, till I found it. There's a little rock house and a spring – I'm not going to tell you too much about it till you see it."

Callista hearkened with vague alarm, and a sort of impatience.

"But you'll clear enough ground for a good truck-patch before we go," she put in jealously.

"Uh-huh," agreed Lance without apparently noting what her words were. "I never in my life did see as fine huckleberries as grows down in that little holler," he pursued. "We'll go in huckleberry time."

"And maybe I can put some up," said Callista, the practical, beginning to take interest in the scheme.

"Shore," was Lance's prompt assent. "I can put up fruit myself – I'll help you."

He laughed as he said it; those changeful hazel eyes of his glowed, and he dropped an arm around her in that caressing fashion not common in the mountains, and which ever touched Callista's cooler nature like a finger of fire, so that now, almost against her will, she smiled back at him, and returned his kiss fondly. Yet she thought he took the situation too lightly. It was not he that would suffer. He was used to living hard and going without. She would be willing to do the same for his sake; but she wanted to have him know it – to have him speak of it and praise her for it.

The season wore on with thinning boughs and a thickening carpet beneath. The grass was gone. Men riding after valley stock, sent up to fatten on the highlands, searched the mountains all day with dogs and resonant calls. They stopped outside Callista's fence to make careful inquiries concerning the welfare or whereabouts of shoats and heifers.

"Yes, and they've run so much stock up here this year," Lance said resentfully when she mentioned it to him, "that there ain't scarcely an acorn or a blade of grass left to help out our'n through the winter. I'm afraid I'm goin' to have to let Dan Bayliss down in the Settlement take Sate and Sin in his livery stable for their keep. The time's about over for haulin'. I can't afford to have them come up to spring all ga'nted and poorly."

Days born in rose drifts, buried themselves in gold; groundhogs and all wild creatures of the woods were happy with a plentitude of fare; partridges were calling, "wifey – wifey!" under wayside bushes; the last leaves had their own song of renunuciation as they let go the boughs and floated softly down to join their companions on the earth. One evening, gray and white cirri swirled as if dashed in by a great, careless brush, and the next morning, a dawn strewn with flamingo feathers foretold a rainy time. All that day the weather thickened slowly, the sky became deeply overspread. At first this minor-color key was a relief, a rest, after the blaze of foliage and sun. A rain set in at nightfall, and a wind sprang up in whooping gusts; and on every hearth in the Turkey Tracks a blaze leaped gloriously, roaring in the chimney's throat, licking lovingly around the kettle. These fires are the courage of the mountain soldier and hunter. Only Callista, warming her feet by the blaze in the chimney Lance had built, thought apprehensively of the time when she should have no horse to ride, so that when she went to meeting, or to her own home, she must foot it through the mud.

It was an austere region's brief season of plenty. Not yet cold enough to kill hogs, all crops were garnered and stored; there was new sorghum, there were new sweet potatoes, plenty of whippoor-will peas – but Callista's cupboard was getting very bare indeed. She looked with dismay toward the months ahead of her.

It was in this mood that she welcomed one morning the sight of Ellen Hands and Little Liza going past on the road below.

"Howdy," called Ellen, as the bride showed a disposition to come down and talk to them. Each woman carried a big, heavy basket woven of white oak splints. Little Liza held up hers and shook it. "We're on our way to pick peas," she shouted. "Don't you want to come and go 'long? Bring yo' basket. They' mighty good eating when they' fresh this-a-way."

Callista would have said no, but she remembered the empty cupboard, and turned back seeking a proper receptacle. At home, they considered field-peas poor food, but beggars must not be choosers. She joined the two at the gate in a moment with a sack tucked under her arm. It was a delightful morning after the rain. She was glad she could come. The peas were better than nothing, and she would get one of the girls to show her about cooking them.

"Whose field are you going to?" she asked them, carelessly.

"Why, yo' gran'-pappy's. Didn't you know it, Callisty?" asked Little Liza in surprise. "He said he was going to plow under next week, and we was welcome to pick what we could."

Callista drew back with a burning face.

"I – I cain't – " she began faintly. "You-all girls go on. I cain't leave this morning. They's something back home that I have obliged to tend to."

She turned and fairly ran from the astonished women. But when her own door was shut behind her, she broke down in tears. A vast, unformulated resentment surged in her heart against her young husband. She would not have forgone anything of that charm in Lance which had tamed her proud heart and fired her cold fancy; but she bitterly resented the lack of any practical virtue a more phlegmatic man might have possessed.

She shut herself in her own house, half sullenly. Not from her should anyone know the poor provider her man was. She had said that she would not go home without a gift in her hand, she had bidden mother and grandfather to take dinner with her – and it appeared horrifyingly likely that there might hardly be dinner for themselves, much less that to offer a guest. Well, Lance was to blame; let him look to it. It was a man's place to provide; a woman could only serve what was provided. With that she would set to work and clean all the cabin over in furious zeal – forgetting to cook the scanty supper till it was so late that Lance, coming home, had to help her with it.

Things looked their worst when, one morning, little Polly Griever came running up from the gulch, panting out her good news.

"Oh, Callisty, don't you-all want to come over to our house? The sawgrum-makers is thar, an' Poppy Cleaverage has got the furnace all finished up, and Sylvane and him was a-haulin' in sawgrum from the field yiste'dy all day."

Sorghum-making is a frolic in the southern mountains, somewhat as the making of cider is further north.

"Sure we'll come, Polly," Callista agreed promptly, with visions of the jug of "long sweetening" which she should bring home with her from Father Cleaverage's and the good dinner they should get that day.

"Whose outfit did Pappy hire?" asked Lance from the doorstep where he was working over a bit of rude carpentry.

"Flenton Hands's," returned the child. "A' Roxy says Flenton drove a awful hard bargain with Poppy Cleaverage. She says Flenton Hands is a hard man if he is a perfesser."

Callista laid down the sunbonnet she had taken up.

"I reckon we cain't go," she said in a voice of keen disappointment. Anger swelled within, her at Kimbro for having dealings with the man against whom Lance's challenge was out.

"I couldn't 'a' gone anyhow, Callista," Lance told her. "I have obliged to take Sate and Sin down to the Settlement and see what kind of a trade I can make to winter 'em; but there's no need of your staying home on my accounts."

Callista looked down at his tousled head and intent face as he worked skilfully. Was he so willing to send her where she would meet Flenton Hands? For a moment she was hurt – then angry.

"Come on, Polly," she said, catching up sunbonnet and basket, and stepping past Lance, sweeping his tools all into a heap with her skirts.

"I don't know what Father Cleaverage was thinking of to have Flenton on the place after all that's been," Callista said more to herself than the child, when they had passed through the gate. Her breakfast had been a failure, and she was reflecting with great satisfaction on how good a cook Roxy Griever was; yet she would have been glad to forbear going to any place where the man her husband had threatened was to be met.

Polly came close and thrust a brown claw into Callista's hand, galloping unevenly and making rather a difficult walking partner, but showing her good will.

"Hit don't make no differ so long as Cousin Lance won't be thar," she announced wisely. "Cousin Lance always did make game of Flent. He said that when Flent took up a collection in church, he hollered 'amen' awful loud to keep folks from noticin' that he didn't put nothin' in the hat hisse'f. I wish't Lance was comin' 'long of us."

With this the two of them dipped into the gay, rustling gloom of the autumn-tinted gulch, with Lance's Laurel reduced to a tiny trickle between clear little pools, gurgling faintly in the bottom.

Before they came to the Cleaverage place they heard the noise of the sorghum making. A team was coming in from the field with a belated load of the stalks, which should have been piled in place yesterday; Ellen Hands and Little Liza appeared down the lane carrying between them a jug swung from a stick – everybody that comes to help takes toll.

When Callista arrived, half-a-dozen were busy over the work; Hands feeding the crusher, Sylvane waiting on him with bundles of the heavy, rich green stalks, and Buck Fuson driving the solemn old horse his jogging round, followed by fat little Mary Ann Martha, capering along with a stick in her hand, imitating his every movement and shout.

The rollers set on end which crushed the jade-green stalks were simply two peeled hardwood logs. Flenton had threatened for years to bring in a steel crusher; but, up to the present, the machine his grandfather made had been found profitable. The absinthe-colored juice ran down its little trough into a barrel, whence it was dipped to the evaporating pan, about which centered the hottest of the fray. In the stone furnace under this great, shallow pan – as long and broad, almost, as a wagon-bed – old Kimbro himself was keeping a judgmatic fire going. Roxy Griever, qualified by experience with soap and apple-butter, circled the fire and kept up a continual skimming of froth from the bubbling juice, while she did not lack for advice to her father concerning his management of the fire.

Flenton handed over to Fuson his work at the crusher, calling Polly to mind the horse, and came straight to Callista.

"I'm mighty proud to see that you don't feel obliged to stay away from a place becaze I'm thar," he said in a lowered tone, and she fancied a flicker of fear in his eyes, as though he questioned whether her husband might be expected to follow.

"Lance was a-goin' down to the Settlement to-day," she said bluntly, "and I'd have been all alone anyhow; so I 'lowed I might as well come over."

Hands looked relieved.

"I hope you ain't a-goin' to hold it against me, Callisty," he went on in a hurried half whisper, "that Lance is namin' it all around that this here scope o' country ain't big enough to hold him and me."

Callista shook her fair head in a proud negative.

"I've got my doubts of Lance ever having said any such," she returned quietly. "Yo' name has never been mentioned between us, Flent; but if Lance has a quarrel, he's mighty apt to go to the person he quarrels with, and not make threats behind they' back. I think little of them that brought you such word as that."

"That's just what I say," Hands pursued eagerly. "Why can't we-all be friends, like we used to be. Here's Mr. Cleaverage that don't hold with no sech," and he turned to include Kimbro, who now came up to greet his daughter-in-law. Again Callista shook her head.

"You men'll have to settle them things betwixt yourselves," she said, sure of her ground as a mountain woman. "But, Flent, I reckon you'll have to keep in mind that a man and his wife are one."

"Oh," said Hands dropping back a step, "so if Lance won't be friendly with me, you won't neither – is that it?"

"I should think yo' good sense would show you that that would have to be it," said Callista doggedly. She had no wish to appear as one submitting to authority, and yet Flenton's evident intention of seeking to find some breach between herself and Lance was too offensive to be borne with.

"Now then, why need we talk of such this morning?" pacified Kimbro. "My son Lance is a good boy when you take him right. He's got a tender heart. If he ever quarrels too easy, he gets over it easy, as well. Flenton, you'll have to tend to the crusher; I got to keep the fire goin' for Roxy.

"Hit 'minds me of that thar lake that it names in the Bible, Callisty," the Widow Griever said meditatively, looking at the seething surface as she wielded her long-handled spoon. "And then sometimes I study about that thar fiery furnace and Ham, Sham and Abednego. Poppy, looks like to me you ain't got fire enough under this eend."

"I've just made it up there," said Kimbro mildly. "I go from one end to the other, steady, and that keeps it as near even as human hands air able to."

"Flenton, he was mighty overreachin' with Poppy," the widow lamented. "He's a mighty hard-hearted somebody to deal with, if he is a perfesser, and one that walks the straight an' narrer way. Poppy has to furnish all the labor, 'ceptin' Flent and Buck Fuson, and we've got to feed them men and their team, and then they git one third of the molasses. With three meals a day, an' snacks between times to keep up they' stren'th, looks like I never see nobody eat what them two can."

The gray little cabin crouched in a corner of the big yard; a shed roof, running down at one side of it, looking comically like a hand raised to shut out the clamor. Everybody shouted his opinion at the top of his voice. Nobody thought anybody else was doing just what he ought. Roxana hurried from group to group of the workers, advising, admonishing, trying to bring some order out of the confusion. And in the midst of it, Callista watched the bubbling juice enviously. It seemed everybody had something to harvest, care for and put away, except herself.