The Common Lot and Other Stories. Emma Bell Miles

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      The Common Lot

      From Harper’s Monthly Magazine 118 (December 1908): 145–54; illustrated by Lucius Wolcott Hitchcock

      “The Common Lot” serves in many ways as the signature piece for most of Miles’s fiction. It is her battle 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 СКАЧАТЬ