Side-Blades & Water-Melons

My far-away cousin could never have been pretty except to a fond husband’s eyes. I should have liked to think her tolerably good-looking now, since he loved her so dearly and praised her so enthusiastically, and she was so much more than good to me. I could not help using and believing the eyes that showed me a tall, lean woman whose skin, once fair, was now nearly as yellow as the freckles spattered all over her forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin. Nose and chin were long, her cheek-bones were high, her eyes were pale, the lashes so light and thin as to be scarcely visible at all, and her scanty flaxen hair was dragged tightly away from a high bony forehead. Her gown to-day was white cambric, as clean, as glossy, and as opaque as cream-laid letter-paper. Her head was bare, and she carried over it a green parasol which made her complexion livid. Her voice was soft and sweet, and her manners were liked by everybody. I was glad to think of these things, and to feel the charm of tone and manner, as she asked if I “would not like to pay a visit to the peaches and watermelons.”

I should have preferred to stay where I was, having got very well acquainted with my attendant fairies, and eaten enough sweets to take the edge from my appetite, even for ripe, fresh fruit. Still, I got up with a tolerable show of cordiality, comprehending that she meant to please me, took the hand she offered, and was soon out of the cool shade in the open field separating garden from orchard. Captain Gates was really as proud of his reputation as the most successful fruit-grower in the county as his wife was, although he affected to ridicule her weakness in the same direction. There were two acres of peach trees, most of them laden with fruit. When pressed to “eat all I could swallow,” I managed to do away with three immense globes of crimson-and-gold, and then gave out, shamefacedly:

“You see I am so little, and the peaches are so big!” I urged. “I hold just so many and no more.”

“Of course, you comical little thing!” interrupted Cousin Nancy, highly amused. “By and by, on our way back from the watermelon patch, maybe there will be more room. I shan’t ask you to pick the melons from the vines and eat them by the dozen. Come along!”

She did not seem to mind the heat that struck upon my face and head like the breath of an oven, as we crossed another open field, to that in which Captain Gates’s famous melons lay by the hundred, growing larger and more luscious in the August sunlight that warmed them through and through. Some were dark green, some light green, some were streaked and mottled with white-and-green.

“Oh, Cousin Nancy!” I cried, “I did not know there were so many in the world! What will you do with them all?”

She led the way farther into the network of vines, the rank leaves and starry blossoms bobbing about her feet. The fruit and flowers of Cold Comfort did something toward filling the place left void in her heart by the lack of the children that had never come. She stood still and looked over the wide patch as if she had made every melon there, and meant to have the full credit for her work.

“Do with them, monkey! Why they are as good as a silver mine the beauties! Every full-grown one stands for a quarter of a dollar. We send six wagon-loads to Richmond every week, and people come for them from every direction as far as across the river in Goochland; and we give dozens away to our neighbors, and the negroes come at night to steal them Oh! oh!! OH!!!”

She gathered her skirts tightly and high above her ankles with both hands, letting the green parasol tumble, head foremost, to the ground, and screeched as if she had trod upon a yellow-jacket’s nest. She was going to have Nerves again, with no hartshorn, or burnt feathers, or turkey-tail fan, or Cousin ’Ratio near. I started to run to the house for help, but she grabbed my frock frantically.

“If you budge one inch you are a dead child!” she wheezed, her pale eyes bulging from the sockets. “Cap’n Gates and the overseer came out here last night and just sowed all this patch with side-blades!” (Scythe-blades.) “Edges up! Sharp as razors and thick as thieves! Hundreds of them! To keep the negroes from stealing any more of them! I heard Cap’n Gates tell them he was going to do it, and the overseer told them this morning that they had done it. And I haven’t an atom of an idea where a solitary one of the murderous things is! We are as good as dead if we try to get out. We might tread upon one, at the first step! How could I forget it? Oh, how could I?”

I felt the blood drain away from my face, and I trembled as violently as she. Then a thought came to me, and I got it out between chattering teeth.

“We didn’t tread on any of them coming into the patch.”

“That was sheer providence, honey. We might have been cut in two before we had gone ten yards.”

“But, Cousin Nancy!” catching at her hands as she began to wring them again, and to sob and squeal as she had done in the morning. “Listen! I am sure I could go out by the very same path! Let’s try! We can’t stay here always.”

“Path! There isn’t a sign of a path! Look!”

She pointed a bony finger in the direction we had come. The leaves and blossoms disturbed by our feet and skirts were as still as the hundreds and thousands of other leaves on all sides of us. We had not bruised a vine, or left a footprint, that we could see. The sun poured down upon us like fire from heaven; we were in the middle of the patch that seemed, to my horrified eyes, miles and miles in extent, and not another creature was in sight.

“Our only hope is to scream as loud as ever we can,” said Cousin Nancy. “Nobody knows where we are; the hands are all in the tobacco, a mile on the other side of the house, and Cap’n Gates and Mr. Owen may be even farther off, for all I know. If we can’t make anybody hear us, the Lord have mercy upon our souls! We shall have sunstroke inside of an hour.”

I picked up the green parasol, and with clumsy, shaking fingers opened it, and stood on tiptoe to hold it over her head, crying, meantime, as piteously as she, such was the contagion of hysterical terror. Then, with one accord, we lifted up our voices, weak with weeping, in a thin screech. I said “Help! help! help!” she cried, “Murder! murder!” and “Cap’n Ga-a-tes!” We made enough noise to startle the dogs in the house-yard and at the stables, and brought from the nearer “quarters” and corn-field a gang of negroes, of all sizes and ages, all running at the top of their speed, and the faster as they descried us. It would have been excruciatingly funny at any other time, and to one that was not an actor in the drama, to observe that not one man, woman, or pickaninny of the excited crowd offered to pass the confines of the melon patch. Each one was mindful of the hundreds of buried side-blades with their edges uppermost, and almost all were bare-footed.

“Run! some of you-all, for Marster an’ Mr. Owen!” shrieked Malviny, getting her wits together before the others could rally theirs. The shrill order arose above the chorus of groans and cries and pitying exclamations, and Cousin Nancy, on hearing it, gave one wild cry, and dropped where she stood, a heap of white cambric, head, arms, and green parasol, crushing the vines, and her head just grazing a mammoth melon.

I had never been so frightened in all my life as when I got hold of her head, and tried to lift it. It was as heavy as lead. Too much terrified and too foolish to bethink myself that a cut would bleed, I concluded that she had struck one of the murderous blades, and it had killed her. Her eyes were closed; her jaw had fallen; her cheek lay close against that of the big melon, and the vines met over her nose. It was a ghastly and a grotesque spectacle, and I behaved as any other nine-year-old would jumped up and down and screamed, beating my palms together, and calling alternately for “Father!” and “Cousin ’Ratio!”

Since that horrible moment I have believed stories read and heard of people being scared to death, or into insanity. In the great, round world, there was nothing present to me but a cruel expanse of green below, a white-hot sky above, and at my feet a dead woman, killed by the razor-like blades thick-set under every leaf, and guarding every melon. Then all this was swept out of sight by a black wave that took me off my feet.

I awoke in the shade of the peach orchard. Mr. Owen, the overseer, had laid me down on the grass, and I heard him say, “She’s all right now.” I sat up and stared around me. Cousin Nancy, still in a dead faint, was stretched upon the ground a little way off, a fluttering swarm of women about her, with water, brandy, hartshorn, cologne, fans, and burning feathers, and Cousin ’Ratio, kneeling over her, was calling in her ear, the tears running down his bristly cheeks.

“Miss Nancy! honey! sugar-lump! wake up! it’s me, dearie! The danger is all over. What a doggoned fool I was to put the side-blades there!”

When she at last revived, she was taken to the house and put to bed. She was not yet able to sit up when my father and mother drove over for me in the cool of the afternoon.

“My tomfoolery came near to being the end of the poor dear,” said Cousin ’Ratio, walking with us to the carriage, when we had taken leave of his wife. “I feel mighty bad about it, too, as you may suppose, for it was my fault in not reminding her of those cussed side-blades. Between ourselves, Burwell,” coming nearer to my father and glancing over his shoulder to be sure none of the servants were within hearing, “Owen and I put just exactly two in the whole patch, and they were near the fence. Miss Nancy never went within a Sabbath day’s journey of them. We made a mighty parade of toting twenty of them past the quarters, taking two of the hands along to help. They laid them down by the fence, and we came down after dark and carried all but two off to the old tobacco barn, and hid them there. I wasn’t likely to rust my best side-blades by burying them in the dirt. But I’d rather have ruined them all and lost every blessed melon on the place, than have given Miss Nancy’s Nerves such a shock.”