CHAPTER XII.
WHAT SHALL HE HAVE WHO KILLED THE DEER?
WINTER was upon the cabin in the Gap. Through the long months much bitter knowledge had come to Callista. She found that she knew nothing a mountain wife ought to know. Finically clean about her housekeeping, she spent days scouring, rubbing, putting to rights and rearranging that which none used, nobody came to see; but she could not cook acceptably, and their scant fare suffered in her inept hands till she nearly starved them both.
Here, with some show of reason, she blamed her mother. Having never seen the time when she could go back to the Gentry place with a gift in her hand, she had not been there at all since her marriage. And here she blamed Lance. Between her incapacity and his earlier recklessness, they were desperately pinched. The season for hauling closed even sooner than he had feared. After it was past, he got a bit of work now and again, often walking long distances to it, since he had been obliged, as he had foreseen, to leave Satan and Cindy in the Settlement; and when the black horses came no more to the log stable behind the cabin, Callista accepted it as the first open confession of defeat.
Lance was one who sought a medicine for his spiritual hurts with as sure an instinct as that by which the animals medicate their bodies, creeping away like them to have the pain and wounding out alone. With the first cold weather he was afoot, his long brown rifle in the hollow of his arm, tramping the ridges for game. The wide, silent spaces spoke restfully to his spirit. Half the time he left the cabin ill provided with firewood and other necessities, but he brought back rabbits, quail, an occasional possum – which latter Callista despised and refused to cook, even when Lance had carefully prepared it, so that the dogs got it for their share. The undercurrent of the material struggle to make a living was always the pitiful duel between these two, who really loved well, and who were striving as much each for the mastery of self, as for the mastery of the other, could they but have realized it.
In late November, the days began to break with a thin, piercing sleet in the air, under an even gray sky. On the brown sedge, dry as paper, it whispered, whispered through the clinging white-oak leaves, with a sharp sibilance, as of one who draws breath at the end of a pageant; for the last flickerings of the gold and glory of Autumn were gone; the radiance and warmth and beauty of life all circled now around a hearth-stone.
"If we get much more weather like this, I'll go out and bring ye in a deer," Lance told his Callista; "then we'll have fresh meat a-plenty."
"Well, see that there's firewood enough to cook your deer after you've killed it," Callista retorted, resentfully mindful of Lance's having forgotten to provide her with sufficient fuel the last time he went on an unsuccessful hunting trip.
"You don't roast a deer whole," Lance told her tolerantly. "We'll dry some of the meat, and some we'll salt."
To Callista's exacting, practical nature, this figuring on the disposal of a deer one had not yet killed was exasperating. She wanted Lance to know that she lacked many things which she should have had. She wished him plainly to admit that he ought to furnish those things, and that he was sorry he could not. She had a blind feeling that, if he did so, it would in a measure atone.
"Well, it wouldn't take much wood to cook all the deer you brought home last time," she said with a little bitter half-smile.
Taunt of taunts – to reproach the unsuccessful hunter with his empty bag! Lance was not one to give reasons for his failure, to tell of the long, hard miles he had tramped on an unsuccessful quest. He merely picked up his gun and walked out of the house without looking to right or left, leaving his young wife breathing a little short, but sure of herself.
So far as he was concerned, he could find good counsel in the wild to which, he fled. This morning there was come over everything a blind fog, which was gradually thinning a little with the dawn, showing to his eyes, where it lifted, hundreds of little ripples fleeing across the pond from icy verge to verge, with a mist smoking to leeward. The forest swam about him in a milky haze; the trees stood, huge silver feathers, soft gray against the paler sky, their coating not glassy, like real sleet, but a white fringe, a narrow strip of wool, composed of the finest pointed crystals, along every twig. The yard grass, as he crossed it, was a fleece; the weeds by the garden fence, where he vaulted over, a cloud.
Dulling one sense, the obscuring fog seemed to muffle all others. Lance was shut in a little white world of his own, that moved and shifted about him as he went forward. In his heart was the beginning of self-distrust; a very small beginning, which he cried down and would none of; yet the mood sent him seeking a spot he had not seen for months. Straight as an arrow he went through the forest, guiding himself by his sense of direction alone, since he could neither see far nor recognize any familiar landmark in its changed guise.
An hour after he and Callista had parted in the kitchen of his own home, he was before that outside cabin of the Gentry place, at whose casement he had first held her in his arms, looking up at the blank square of closed panes. It was so early that none of the household was yet astir. The dogs knew him, and made no clamorous outcry. Shut in by the wavering walls of mist which clung and chilled, he stood long beneath her window, staring fixedly up at it. Something ominous and symbolic in the change which had come upon the spot since he last stood there, checked the beating of his heart, strive as he might to reject its message. The yard grass, green and lush on that September night, stood stark, dry, white wool; the bullace vine, whose trunk had borne his eager love up to her kiss, gleamed steel-like along its twisted stems; the sill itself was a bar of humid ice. All looked bleak, inhospitable, forbidding; the place was winter-smitten, like – like —
Some blind rage at the power which makes us other than we would be, which gives us stones for bread, stirred within him. He shivered. She was not there now – she was at home in his house – his wife. What had he come here for? This was a gun in the hollow of his arm – not a banjo; he was out trying to find some wild meat to keep them alive. She was waiting at home to – no, not in the gropings of his own mind, would he complain too bitterly of his bride. Heaven knows what the disillusioning was when Lance found for the first time that he and Callista could seriously quarrel – their old days of what might be termed histrionic bickerings for the amusement of an audience, he had put aside, as of no portent. When he discovered that Callista could look at him with actually alien eyes, and say stinging things in an even tone, the boundaries of his island drew in till there was barely room for his own feet amid the wash of estranging waters. But he turned resolutely from the thought. His concern should be all with his own conduct, his own failings. Callista must do what she would do – and he would play up to the situation as best he might.
Somebody moved in the house and called one of the hounds. He laughed at himself a bit drearily, and struck off across the hill, assured in his own mind that he had merely taken this as a short cut to the glen at the head of the gulch, where he hoped to find his deer. The clean winds of Heaven soothed the pain that throbbed under his careless bearing. He had not been five hours afoot, he was but just preparing to make his noon halt and eat the bit of cold pone in his pocket, when he was ready to smile whimsically at the ill-made, ill-flavored thing and decide that it would be "just as fillin'," even though Callista had not yet learned the bread-maker's art.
He must needs consider it rare good luck that he found a deer at all; but it was five miles from home, in the breaks of Chestnut Creek, that he finally made his kill. He had no horse to carry the bulk of wild meat; and, in his pride refusing to leave a part swung up out of harm's way, he undertook to pack the whole deer home on his shoulder – a piece of exhausting, heart-breaking toil, though the buck was but a half-grown one. He was not willing to risk the loss of a pound. There were no antlers; but he would make Callista a pair of moccasins out of the soft-tanned skin. Sunday he was due at old man Fuson's for a couple of days, to repair a chimney; but, come Tuesday or Wednesday, he would return and be ready to look after the venison. It ought to keep so long in this cold.
Callista, pent indoors all day, chained to distasteful tasks for which she was incompetent, had not won to as serene a temper as her mate. She saw him approaching, laden, through the grove, and hurried into the cold, closed far room to be busy about some task so that she need not meet him as he entered. When she emerged, he had skinned the deer and hung up the meat safely between two trees, and was already washed and sitting in the chimney-corner. His clear eyes went swiftly to her face with its coldly down-dropped lids. The man who can bring home a deer and not boast of it has self-control; but when Lance noted the line of his wife's lips, he reached for his banjo without a word, and began to hold his communications with it.
She knelt at the hearth to continue her supper preparations. For the first time since they had quarreled, she wished that she could make some advance toward a reconciliation. Yet there was Lance; look at him! Head thrown back a little, chin atilt, his eyes almost closed, showing a bright line under the shadowing lash, the firelight played on her husband's face and painted the ghost of a flickering smile about his mouth as he strummed lightly on the strings. Was that a countenance asking sympathy, begging for quarter? And listen to the banjo; it was no wistful, questing melody of "How many miles, how many years?" now; a light, jigging dance-tune rippled under his finger ends. Callista wondered angrily if he wished he were at Derf's. No doubt they would be dancing there to-night, as commonly on Saturday.
Lance, the man who wouldn't take a dare from the Lord A'mighty Himself, answered her silence with silence, and her unconcern with a forgetfulness so vast as to make her attitude seem actually resentful.
By and by she called him to supper, and when he came she refused to eat, dwelling angrily on the thought that he should have regarded her bidding as an overture to peace, and have made some answering movement himself.
In short, she was not yet done interrogating this nature, fascinating, complex, inscrutable, to know what was the ultimate point, the place where he would cry "Enough!"
The next morning saw him leaving early for Fuson's, and he went before Callista was out of bed. When she rose, she looked remorsefully at the tidy, small preparations for breakfast which he had made. It suddenly came home to her that, for a man in Lance's situation, the marrying of a wholly inept wife was daily tragedy. She decided that she would learn, that she would try to do better; and, as a first peace-offering, she hurried out to the grove and possessed herself of Lance's venison, that she might cure and prepare it.
After she had dragged the big, raw, bloody thing into her immaculate kitchen, she felt a little sense of repulsion at it, yet her good intentions held while she hacked and hewed and salted and pickled, on some vague remembrance of what she had heard her grandfather say concerning the curing of wild meat. It was noon when she went into the other room, leaving the outer door open so that the hound carried away the only portion of the meat which she had left fresh for immediate use. Tired, ready to cry, she consoled herself with the reflection that there was plenty remaining; she could freshen a piece of that which she had salted, for Lance's supper when he should return. For herself, she felt that she should never want to taste venison again.
Under her handling the meat deteriorated rapidly, and was in danger of becoming an uneatable mess. At last she turned a weary and disgusted back upon it, and left it soaking in weak brine. Ever since Saturday night the weather had been softening; it was almost warm when Lance came hurrying home Tuesday evening, meaning to take care of his prize at once. He arrived at supper time, ate some of Callista's bread and drank his coffee eagerly, turning in mute distaste from the hunk of ill-prepared meat upon the table. Supper over he hastened out to where he had hung the deer. His wife had a wild impulse to stop him; he might have guessed from the venison she had cooked that the meat was attended to. She resented the dismay in his face when he came back asking:
"Do you know what's come of that deer? I got Jasper Fuson to let me off sooner, so's I could make haste and tend to it."
The sense of failure closed in on Callista intolerably.
"I fixed it," she returned without looking up.
"All of it?" inquired Lance sharply. "Fixed it like that, do you mean?" indicating the untouched piece on the platter.
"Yes," returned Callista with secret despair; "all but what the dogs got."
"The dogs!" echoed Lance.
"Yes," repeated Callista with a sort of stubborn composure. "I left about a third of it fresh whilst I was putting the rest in the brine, and that old hound of yours came in and stole the fresh piece." She looked at his face and then at the meat. "I reckon you think that even a dog wouldn't eat this – the way I've got it."
The two young people confronted each other across the ruined food which his skill and labor had provided, her bungling destroyed. The subject for quarrel was a very real one, terrifyingly concrete and pressing. They were afraid of it; nor did they at that moment fail to realize the mighty bond of love which still was strong between them. Both would have been glad to make some advance toward peace, some movement of reconciliation; neither knew how to do it. In Lance, the torture of the thing expressed itself only in a fiery glance turned upon his wife's handiwork. To Callista, this was so intolerable that she laid about her for an adequate retort.
"Well," she said, affecting a judicial coolness, "it's true I don't know much about taking care of wild meat. We never had such in my home. There was always plenty of chickens and turkeys; and if we put up meat, it was our own shoats and beef."
Deer are growing scarce in the Cumberlands; not in half a dozen cabins throughout the Turkey Tracks would venison be eaten that season. But Lance adduced nothing of this.
"I think you might as well let the dogs have the rest of it," he said finally, with a singular gentleness in his tone. Then he added with a sudden upswelling of resentment, "Give it to 'em if they'll eat it – which I misdoubt they'll never do."
CHAPTER XIII.
BROKEN CHORDS
AFTER the episode of the ruined venison, Callista tried sulking – refusing to speak. But she found in Lance a power of silence that so far overmatched her own as to leave her daunted. He returned now from his long expeditions, to hang up his wild meat in the grove, and thereafter to sit bright-eyed and silent across the hearth from her, whistling, under his breath, or strumming lightly on his banjo.
Callista was a concrete, objective individual, yet she grew to recognize the resources of one who had for his familiars dreams that he could bid to stand at his knee and beguile his leisure or his loneliness. But dreams, so treated, have a trick of strengthening themselves against times of depression, changing their nature, and wringing with cruel fingers the heart which entertains them; so that those who feed the imagination must be willing to endure the strength of its chastisements.
Yet if Lance Cleaverage suffered, he kept always a brave front, and took his suffering away from under the eye of his young wife. To do him justice, he had little understanding of his own offences. An ardent huntsman, he had by choice lived hard much of his life, sleeping in the open in all weathers, eating what came to hand. Callista's needs he was unfitted to gauge, and she maintained a haughty silence concerning them. Since she would not inquire, he told her nothing of having been offered money to play at dances, but began to be sometimes from home at nights, taking his banjo, leaving her alone.
An equable tempered, practical woman might have trained him readily to the duties of masculine provider in the primitive household. But beautiful, spoiled Callista, burning with wrongs which she was too proud and too angry to voice, eaten with jealousy of those thoughts which comforted him when she refused to speak, always in terror that people would find out how at hap-hazard they lived, how poor and ill-provided they were, and laugh at her choice – Callista had her own ideas of discipline. If Lance went away and left no firewood cut, she considered it proper to retort by getting no supper and letting him come into a house stone cold. This was a serious matter where a chunk of fire may be sent from neighbor to neighbor to take the place of matches.
In this sort the winter wore away. In April there came one of the spring storms that southern mountaineers call "blackberry winter." All the little growing things were checked or killed. A fine, cold rain beat throughout the day around the eaves of the cabin. The wind laid wet, sobbing lips to chink and cranny, and cried to her that she was alone – alone – alone; she, Callista, was neglected, deserted, shunned! For Lance had a day's work at re-lining fireplaces at Squire Ashe's place. Busy with the truck-patch he had at this late day set about, and which he must both clear and fence, he had somewhat overlooked the wood-pile; and before noon the fuel was exhausted. Instead of gathering chips and trash, or raiding the dry spaces under the great pines for cones and crackling twigs, – as any one of her hardy mountain sisters would have done, and then greeted her man at night with a laugh, and a hot supper – Callista let the fire go out, and sat brooding. Without fire she could cook herself no dinner, and she ate a bit of cold corn-pone, fancying Lance at somebody's table – he never told her now where he was going, nor for how long – eating the warm, appetizing food that would be provided.
As evening drew on the rain slacked, and a cloud drove down on the mountain-top, forcing an icy, penetrating chill through the very substance of the walls, sending Callista to bed to get warm. She wrapped herself in quilts and shivered. It was dark when she heard Lance come stumbling in, cross the room, and, without a word, search on the fire-board for matches.
"There ain't any," she told him, not moving to get up. "It wouldn't do you any good if there was – there's no wood."
He did not answer, but, feeling his way, passed on into the little lean-to kitchen, and Callista harkened eagerly, believing that sight of the bowl of meal and the pan of uncooked turnips on the table by the window would bring home to her husband the enormity of her wrongs and his offences. Leaning forward she could discern a vaguely illuminated silhouette of him against this window. He appeared to be eating. She guessed that he had peeled a turnip and was making a lunch of that.
"Would you rather have your victuals raw?" she demanded finally, desperate at his silence. "I reckon I'd better learn your ruthers in the matter."
"I'd rather have 'em raw as to have 'em cooked the way you mostly get 'em," came the swift reply in a perfectly colorless tone. "I ain't particularly petted on having my victuals burnt on one side and raw on the other, and I'd rather do my own seasoning – some folks salt things till the devil himself couldn't eat 'em, or leave the salt out, and then wonder that there's complaints."
Her day of brooding had come to a crisis of choking rage. Callista sat up on the edge of the bed and put her thick hair back from her face.
"I cook what I'm provided," she said in a cold, even voice. "That is, I cook it when I'm supplied with wood. And I fix your meals the best I know how; but it would take one of the sort you named just then to cook without fire."
She had expected that he would go out in the dark and cut firewood for her. As for the matches, starting a flame without them was an easy trick for a hunter like Lance. She remembered with a sudden strange pang his once showing her how he could prepare his pile of shredded tinder, fire a blank charge into it, and have a blaze promptly. She heard him fumbling for something on the wall – his gun, of course. But the next instant there came the whine of the banjo; it hummed softly as it struck against the lintel. That was what he was getting – not the gun to light a fire – he was leaving her alone in the cabin! She guessed that he was going over to Derf's to play for a dance; and for a strenuous moment she was near to springing after him and begging him to stay with her.
But habit prevailed. She huddled, shivering, under her covers and went back to the sullen canker of her own wrongs. She might have had the pick of the countryside, and she had taken up with Lance Cleaverage. She had married him when and how he said – that was where she made her mistake. She should have told him then – she should have – but, in the midst of all this rush of accusation, she knew well that she took Lance when and how she could get him, and at this moment her heart was clamoring to know where he was and what doing.
So she lay shivering, cold to the knees, her hands like ice, her teeth locked in a rigor that was as much spiritual as physical, till she could bear it no longer. Then she got hesitatingly up from the bed and stood long in the middle of the darkened room, turning her head about as though she could see. She knew where each article of furniture stood. It was her room, her home, hers and Lance's. Lance had built it; she had somehow failed pitiably, utterly, to make it hers; and she was well aware that she had failed to make it home for him – yet it was all either of them had. Back over her mind came memory of their wedding morning, when, his arm about her waist, her head half the time on his shoulder, they had visited every nook of the place and discussed between tender words and kisses all its scant furnishings. Then suddenly, without having come to any decision whatever, she found herself out in the cold rain, running through the woods toward the big road and the Derf place.
Down the long slope from the Gap she fled, then past the old quarry, past Spellman's clearing, and around the Spring hollow. She had never set foot on Derf land before. Through the fine rain Callista – spent, gasping, wet and disheveled – at last saw the windows, a luminous haze; caught the sound of stamping, thudding feet, and heard the twang of Lance's banjo. She had approached through the grove, and stood at the side fence. The place was so public that its dogs paid little attention to comers and goers. When Callista came to herself fully, she realized that it was the bars of the milking place she leaned upon. Slowly she withdrew the upper one from its socket, stepped over, then turned and replaced it. With ever-increasing hesitation she faltered toward the house, avoiding the front and approaching the light at the side, where she hoped to be unobserved.
Shivering, shrinking, her loosened wet hair dragging in against her neck, she stared through the window into the lighted room. They were dancing in there. The sounds she had heard were from Lance's banjo indeed, but held in other hands, while Lance himself sat at a little table near the hearth, a steaming supper before him, Ola Derf waiting on him hand and foot, stooping to the coals for fresh supplies of good hot coffee, or smoking, crisp pones.
"Now you just hush!" she shrilled in response to somebody's importunities, as Callista hung listening. "Lance cain't play for no dancin' till he gits through his supper. And he's a-goin' to have time to eat, too. You Jim, put that banjo down – you cain't play hit. Pat for 'em if they're in such a hurry to dance."
The Aleshine girls from Big Buck Gap, a young widow who lived half way down the Side, two cousins of the Derf's themselves – these were the women in the room. Callista was desperately afraid lest one of the loud-talking, half-intoxicated men in there should come out and discover her; yet she could not drag herself away from sight of Lance sitting housed, warm, comforted and fed – a home made for him. Something knocked at the door of her heart with a message that this scene carried; but fiercely she barred that door, and set herself to defend her own position.
Grasping a trunk of muscadine vine, which, when she shivered, shook down icy drops upon her, Callista rested long, regarding the scene before her. What should she do? To return to her home and leave her husband there seemed a physical impossibility. To go in and play the high-and-mighty, as she had been wont to do in her free girlhood, to glance over her shoulder with dropped eyelids and inform Lance Cleaverage that she cared not at all what he did or where he went – this were mere farce; her time for that sort of mumming was past.
Lance had finished his supper now, and turned from the board. It seemed to Callista that he looked well pleased with himself, satisfied, even gay. The sight set her teeth rattling in fresh shivers. Still he did not play for the dancers, who continued to make what headway they might to the time of Jim's patting.
Callista saw Ola bring the banjo and lay it in Lance's lap. Then the little brown girl seated herself close beside him. He bent and placed the instrument properly in Ola's grasp, disposing the short, stubbed fingers on the strings. In the positive throe of jealousy that this sight brought, Callista must needs, for her own self-respect, recall that Lance had offered more than once to teach her to play, and that she had refused – and pretty shortly, too – to learn, or to touch the banjo, which she had come to hate with an unreasoning hatred. Now the dancers grew tired of Jim and his patting, and the call was for music.
"See here, Lance Cleaverage," said Buck Fuson, "we-all throwed in to get you to play; but we ain't a-goin' to pay the money and have you fool away yo' time with Ola."
This was the first that Callista knew of Lance earning money by his banjo-playing.
"All right," said Cleaverage laconically, not looking up from his instructions. "I've had me a good supper, and I've got a warm place to stay, and that's all I want. Go on and dance."
He addressed himself singly to Ola and her chords, moving her fingers patiently, taking the banjo himself to show her just how the thing was done. She was a dull pupil, but a humbly grateful one; and after a while it seemed to Callista that she could no longer bear the sight. She was debating starkly between the desperate course of returning home alone and the yet more desperate enterprise of going in, when a deeper shadow crossed the darkness behind her, and she turned with a smothered scream to find Iley Derf's Indian husband moving impassively through the glow from the window and making his way to the back door.
At the sight she wheeled and fled across the yard toward the front gate and the road. She gained that doubtful refuge just as a man on a horse came splattering up out of the muddy little hollow below the Derf place. With another cry she flung about and ran from him, stepped on a round stone, and fell.
For a moment she crouched, shivering, wet, bruised, trying to get to her feet, the breath sobbing through her parted lips; then somebody set a not-too-gentle grasp on her shoulder, and she looked up to divine in the dimness Flenton Hands's face above her. There was sufficient light from the noisy cabin behind to allow him to recognize her.
"Lord God – Callista!" he whispered, lifting her to her feet and supporting her with an arm under hers. "What in the world – "
"I – I – something scared me," she faltered. "It was that old Indian that Iley Derf married. He came right a-past where I was and, and – he scared me."
"Whar was you at?" inquired Hands blankly.
"In there," returned Callista, pointing toward the Derf yard, beginning to cry like a child. "I was looking through the window at them dance, and – and that old Indian scared me."
Twang – twang – twang, across the gusty blackness of the night came the jeer of Lance's banjo. There was no whisper now of "How many miles – how many years?" but the sharp staccato of "Cripple Creek," punctuated by the thudding of dancers' feet as they pounded out the time. Callista felt her face grow hot in the darkness. She knew that Flenton was listening, and that he must guess why she should hang outside the window looking in.
"Come on," said Hands suddenly, almost roughly. "This ain't no fit place for you, – a woman like you, – my God! Callista, I'll put you on my horse and take you home."
There was a new note in his voice, a new authority in his movements, as he lifted her to the saddle and, plodding beside her in the dark, wet road, made no further offer of question or conversation.
In spite of herself, Callista felt comforted. She reached up and gathered her hair together, wringing the rain from it and redding it with the great shell comb which always held its abundant coils in place. She could not in reason tell Flenton to leave her – she needed him too much. When they turned in at the ill-kept lane which led to Lance's cabin. Lance's wife caught her breath a little, but said nothing. Flenton lifted her gently down at her own door-stone, and, opening the door for her, followed her in and, with a match from his pocket, lit a candle. He looked at the cold ash-heap on the fireless hearth, whistled a bit, and went out. She heard him striking matches somewhere about the wood-pile, and directly after came the sound of an axe. It was not long before he returned, his arms piled high with such bits of dry wood as he could find, split to kindling size.