Chapter I

By pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how long I “stayed in”; and Coretta’s opinions always echoed the hearth voice of the clan.

But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them paling off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was “bad off.” Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta wanted to borrow such or such an article for breakfast. It was always something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a broken day.

For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her borrowing the day before. “Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me my mornings.”

She would promise; then it would happen again--the violent waking, with its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me.

“But I didn’t know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an’ we couldn’t eat biscuits ’thout salt in ’em.”

Or, “That man come after supper to see about sellin’ the cow, an’ we talked so late I clean forgot we didn’t have a speck o’ coffee for breakfast.”

Or, “I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an’ there was the box plumb empty.”

Or, “Uncle Rann got in last night. We didn’t have a dust o’ flour, an’ I couldn’t set him down to pone-bread an’ him come all the way from Madison to see us.”

Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight exasperation over my failure to get her point of view.

“But Sam _had_ to git to the ploughin’ early, an’ you only had to jest set an’ write!”

That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress. It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or break into an untraceable legend of itself; but it never did. One day, looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog’s feet newly scalded. A sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning. A tub in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness, that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden interest in the baby’s attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from her continent of discovery, the ash-pan. Coretta snatched the baby and began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are unknown.

“If I could skip a year ’thout a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with my work,” she said.

But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God.

Her own mind was making occult connections. “Did you see the sign in the elements last night, Mis’ Dolly?”

I had not seen.

“It was jest after the rain stopped, an’ it was awful. There was a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin’ through it, an’ they ’most made letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was first wrote in, if we only had the preacher here to tell us. Nothin’ ’s goin’ to keep me from meetin’ next Sunday. I want to know if he read it an’ what it said. It may have been a warnin’ to them people to stop fightin’; but I reckon we all ort to be a little more keerful about doin’ the Lord’s will.”

I decided to defer any unorthodox suggestions, and divagated with: “What’s the matter with Irma’s nose?”

“She fell out o’ bed an’ nearly broke it. I had a time stoppin’ the blood. I was so scared at first I couldn’t remember the verse in the Bible that stops it right off, an’ I run aroun’ tryin’ everything else first. Then I got the verse right, an’ her nose never bled another drap.”

“What verse is that, Coretta?”

“The sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. Irmie never fell out of bed ’fore this, an’ it was time she did. I was right glad of it after I remembered the verse and got the blood stopped.”

“Why glad, Coretta?”

“You can’t raise a child that never falls out o’ bed. They die shore. Didn’t you know that, Mis’ Dolly?”

Her face was an eager flower, but what I saw was a glimpse of mediæval gates opening on time’s mossy twilights. Was it possible to pass through with Coretta, and look at the world with the eyes of a vanished age? Hitherto she had turned to me for scant crumbs of wisdom. Now she was aquiver with the reversal of our rôles.

“I’ve been afraid to tell you about sech things,” she said. “Some people jest laf at ’em. I been so sorry for you sometimes, doin’ things I knew were bad, an’ I dasen’t tell you.”

“What things, dear?”

“Oh, like sowin’ that sage in the garden. You shore have trouble if you sow sage. You have to get the bunches an’ set ’em out, or else get some strange woman ’at’s passin’ to sow it for you.”

“But isn’t that unfair to her?”

“No; she loses the trouble as soon as she crosses water. She’d only have to cross the branch by the spring an’ it ’ud be gone.”

That was the beginning of my subversion, which was soon alarmingly complete. If I had given Coretta crumbs, she now spread me a banquet. Her store of folk-wisdom fell upon me in showers that sometimes took my breath. Many of her rituals were too complex for memory here to set down, but she had scores of briefer ones, such as her cure for a dog’s tendency to vagabondage. With an auger greased with ’coon-oil made from a ’coon _the dog had caught_, you bore a hole in the gate-post. Then cut off a bit of the dog’s tail and fasten it in the hole; but do not let him see you. If he runs away after that, you can be sure he was peekin’ from somewheres.

She invited me to be present when granpap cured his mule of the swinney. Part one: we poured cold water on the mule’s shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint-rock until it smoked. Part two: carefully directed by Coretta, we laid the rock back where we had found it, same side up, “an’ pineblank the same way.” And we did indeed cure the mule.

But her remedy for fever was perhaps the gem of her store. You take fodder that has never been wet, grasp all you can in your hand, cut it squarely off above your hand, and squarely off below. Of the remainder left in your grasp make a tea. This tea is an unfailing cure for any kind of fever.

“Why didn’t you make it for Sam last year, Coretta?” I asked.

“We didn’t have any fodder that hadn’t been rained on. That’s the trouble with that cure. You can’t git fodder that hasn’t been wet. Every year I say I’ll cure a bit in the dry, but I always forgit about it till it’s too late.”

She was as learned in signs as in cures. “There,” she might say, “it’s goin’ to rain, an’ I’d laid out to wash to-morrow!”

“But the sky is clear, and there’s no wind from the west.”

“Didn’t you hear that rooster crow when he was gettin’ up into the cedar? If a rooster crows as he goes to his tree, his head’ll be wet ’fore he comes down. But maybe,” she reflected, casting no doubt on the oracle, “it’ll clear by sun-up, an’ I can wash anyhow.”

Her world of signs and portents and conjurations lay about her as familiar as her children’s faces, or the grass before her door. It touched her at every point and turn of her daily life. And then one day I impulsively clashed through it and shook its foundations. I was passing Sam’s cabin, when I saw, grouped at the roadside spring, Coretta, the children, and a young man who was holding the baby and lifting his shoe--yes, lifting his _shoe_ to the baby’s mouth!

“Wait!” I cried, with a suddenness that made the strange young man drop the shoe, though luckily he retained the baby.

Coretta began to explain. “The baby’s got the thrash, an’ I ain’t got time to take her all the way to old Uncle Dean Larky’s for him to blow in her mouth.”

“Blow in her mouth? That toothless old man!”

“He’s got the power in his breath. Jest blows in her mouth an’ says the three highest words in the Bible. But I couldn’t go so fur, an’ I’ve been watchin’ for Zeb Austin to pass. He’s black-eyed, you know.”

I saw that the young man was black-eyed--at that moment rather flashingly, hostilely black-eyed. Whether a magician benignly engaged, or a fool caught in his act, the interruption called for resentment.

Coretta was still explaining. “If a baby’s got the thrash, an’ a black-eyed man person gives her a drink out of his right shoe, it’ll cure the worst case as ever was.”

“Give me the baby,” said I.

She was handed to me. I walked off, up the hill, where I could get a view of the broad valley and a sky clear with sunlight--as clear and welcome as the dry light of science. Coretta followed.

“What’s the matter, Mis’ Dolly?”

“Lies!”

“Don’t you believe it’ll cure her?”

“No.”

“Don’t you believe--any o’ them things?”

“No.”

“Give me my baby!”

The arrogant world of mind, for all its embattled glitter, surrendered to the physical fact of motherhood. I gave her the baby.

It was two weeks before I saw Coretta. The day was warm; I had been circling about a hot stove for hours, canning blueberries, and had thrown off my slippers for stockinged comfort. Coretta came into the yard just as I stepped to the door.

“Don’t move,” she called, beginning to run. “Don’t move till I git your shoes! Ever’ step you take is a step in trouble.”

Aghast, I obeyed her. When the shoes were brought, and on my feet, she looked up triumphantly. “I _knew_ you wasn’t so unbelievin’ as you let on.”

And my surprised and chastened soul agreed.