“Hit's gone, befo' hit ever come to us, Cornely. Hit never breathed a breath of this werrisome world.”
A man who had practised medicine in the Turkey Tracks for twenty-five years —a doctor among these mountain people, where poverty is the rule, hardship a condition of life, and tragedy a fairly familiar element, would have had his fibre well stiffened. The brave old campaigner, who had sat beside so many death-beds and so many birth-beds, and had seen so many come and so many go, at the exits and entrances of life, met the matter stoutly and without flinching. His stoic air, his words of passive acceptance, laid a calm upon the first outburst of bitter grief from the two young creatures. Later, when John had gone to do the chores, the old doctor still sat by Cornelia's bed. He took the girl's hand in his—an unusual demonstration of feeling for a mountaineer—and said to her, gently,
“Cornely, there won't never be no mo'—there'll be nair another baby to you, honey.”
The stricken girl fastened her eyes upon his in dumb pain and protest. She said nothing, the wound was too deep; only her lips quivered pitifully and the tears ran down upon the pillow.
“Now, now, honey, don't ye go to fret that-a-way. W'y, Cornely, ye was made for a mother; the Lord made ye for such—an' do ye 'low 'at He don't know what He's a-gwine to do with the work of His hands? 'For mo' air the children of the desolate'—don't ye know Scripter says?—than of them that has many. Lord love ye, honey, girl, you'll be mother to a minny and a minny. They air a-comin'; the Lord's a-sendin' 'em. W'y, honey,—you and John will have children gathered around you—”
The one cry broke forth from Cornelia which she ever uttered through all her long grief of childlessness: “Oh, but, Dr. Pastergood, I wanted mine—my own—and John's! Oh, I reckon it was idolatry the way I felt in my heart; I thought, to have a little trick-bone o' my bone, flesh o' my flesh—look up at me with John's eyes—” A sob choked her utterance, and never again was it resumed.
In the years that followed, the pair—already come to be called Pap Overholt and Aunt Cornely—well fulfilled the old doctor's prophecy. The very next year after their baby was laid away, John's older brother, Jeff, lost his wife, and the three little children Mandy left were brought at once to them, remaining in peace and welfare for something over a year (Jeff was a circumspect widower), making the place blithe with their laughter and their play. Then their father married, and they were taken to the new home. He was an Overholt too, and shared that powerful paternal instinct with John. Three times this thing happened. Three times Jeff buried a wife, and the little Jeff Overholts, with recruited ranks, were brought to Aunt Cornelia and Pap John. When Jeff married his fourth wife—Zulena Spivey, a powerful, vital, affluent creature, of an unusual type for the mountains,—and the children (there were nine of them by this time) went to live with their step-mother, whose physique and disposition promised a longer tenure than any of her predecessors, Pap and Aunt Cornelia sat upon the lonely hearth and assured each other with tears that never again would they take into their home and their lives, as their very own, any children upon whom they could have no sure claim.
“Tell ye, Cornely, this thing o' windin' yer heart-strings around and around a passel o' chaps for a year or so and then havin' 'em tore out—well, hit takes a mighty considerable chunk o' yer heart along with 'em.” And the wife, looking at him with wet eyes, nodded an assent.
It was next May that Pap Overholt, who had been doing some hauling over as far as Big Turkey Track, returned one evening with a little figure perched beside him on the high wagon seat. “The Lord sent him, honey,” he said, and handed the child down to his wife. “He ain't got a livin' soul on this earth to lay claim to him. He is ourn as much as ef he was flesh and bone of us. I even tuck out the papers.”
That evening, the two sitting watching the little dark face in its sleep, Pap told his story. Driving across the flank of Yellow Old Bald, beyond Lost Cabin, he had passed a woman with five children sitting beside the road in Big Buck Gap.