 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL
This don't pretend to be "Literature." This is just a tale
for red-blooded folks who want a story and not just a lot of "psychological"
stuff or "analysis." Boy, you'll love it! Read it
here, see it in the movies, play it on the phonograph, run it
through the sewing-machine.
A Wild Thing
It was night in the mountains of Kentucky. Wild
hills rose on all sides. Swift mountain streams flowed
rapidly up and down the mountains.
Jemina Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing
whiskey at the family still.
She was a typical mountain girl.
Her feet were bare. Her hands, large and powerful,
hung down below her knees. Her face showed the
ravages of work. Although but sixteen, she had for
over a dozen years been supporting her aged pappy
and mappy by brewing mountain whiskey.
From time to time she would pause in her task, and,
filling a dipper full of the pure, invigorating liquid, would
drain it off—then pursue her work with renewed vigor.
She would place the rye in the vat, thresh it out with
her feet and, in twenty minutes, the completed product
would be turned out.
A sudden cry made her pause in the act of draining a
dipper and look up.
"Hello," said a voice. It came from a man clad in
hunting boots reaching to his neck, who had emerged
from the wood.
"Hi, thar," she answered sullenly.
"Can you tell me the way to the Tantrums' cabin?"
"Are you uns from the settlements down thar?"
She pointed her hand down to the bottom of the hill,
where Louisville lay. She had never been there; but
once, before she was born, her great-grandfather, old
Gore Tantrum, had gone into the settlements in the company
of two marshals, and had never come back. So
the Tantrums, from generation to generation, had'learned
to dread civilization.
The man was amused. He laughed a light tinkling
laugh, the laugh of a Philadelphian. Something in the
ring of it thrilled her. She drank off another dipper of
whiskey.
"Where is Mr. Tantrum, little girl?" he asked, not
without kindness.
She raised her foot and pointed her big toe toward
the woods.
"Thar in the cabing behind those thar pines. Old
Tantrum air my old man."
The man from the settlements thanked her and strode
off. He was fairly vibrant with youth and personality.
As he walked along he whistled and sang and turned
handsprings and flapjacks, breathing in the fresh, cool
air of the mountains.
The air around the still was like wine.
Jemina Tantrum watched him entranced. No one
like him had ever come into her life before.
She sat down on the grass and counted her toes. She
counted eleven. She had learned arithmetic in the
mountain school.
A Mountain Feud
Ten years before a lady from the settlements had
opened a school on the mountain. Jemina had no
pailful to school every morning and leaving it on Miss
Lafarge's desk. Miss Lafarge had died of delirium tremens
after a year's teaching, and so Jemina's education
had stopped.
Across the still stream still another still was standing.
It was that of the Doldrums. The Doldrums and the
Tantrums never exchanged calls.
They hated each other.
Fifty years before old Jem Doldrum and old Jem Tantrum
had quarrelled in the Tantrum cabin over a game
of slapjack. Jem Doldrum had thrown the king of
hearts in Jem Tantrum's face, and old Tantrum, enraged,
had felled the old Doldrum with the nine of diamonds.
Other Doldrums and Tantrums had joined in
and the little cabin was soon filled with flying cards.
Harstrum Doldrum, one of the younger Doldrums, lay
stretched on the floor writhing in agony, the ace of hearts
crammed down his throat. Jem Tantrum, standing in
the doorway, ran through suit after suit, his face alight
with fiendish hatred. Old Mappy Tantrum stood on
the table wetting down the Doldrums with hot whiskey.
Old Heck Doldrum, having finally run out of trumps,
was backed out of the cabin, striking left and right with
his tobacco pouch, and gathering around him the rest of
his clan. Then they mounted their steers and galloped
furiously home.
That night old man Doldrum and his sons, vowing
vengeance, had returned, put a ticktock on the Tantrum
window, stuck a pin in the doorbell, and beaten a
retreat.
A week later the Tantrums had put Cod Liver Oil
in the Doldrums' still, and so, from year to year, the
feud had continued, first one family being entirely
wiped out, then the other.
The Birth of Love
Every day little Jemina worked the still on her side of
the stream, and Boscoe Doldrum worked the still on his
side.
Sometimes, with automatic inherited hatred, the
feudists would throw whiskey at each other, and Jemina
would come home smelling like a French table d'hôte.
But now Jemina was too thoughtful to look across
the stream.
How wonderful the stranger had been and how oddly
he was dressed! In her innocent way she had never
believed that there were any civilized settlements at
all, and she had put the belief in them down to the
credulity of the mountain people.
She turned to go up to the cabin, and, as she turned
something struck her in the neck. It was a sponge,
thrown by Boscoe Doldrum—a sponge soaked in whiskey
from his still on the other side of the stream.
"Hi, thar, Boscoe Doldrum," she shouted in her deep
bass voice.
"Yo! Jemina Tantrum. Gosh ding yo'!" he returned.
She continued her way to the cabin.
The stranger was talking to her father. Gold had
been discovered on the Tantrum land, and the stranger,
Edgar Edison, was trying to buy the land for a song.
He was considering what song to offer.
She sat upon her hands and watched him.
He was wonderful. When he talked his lips moved.
She sat upon the stove and watched him.
Suddenly there came a blood-curdling scream. The
Tantrums rushed to the windows.
It was the Doldrums.
They had hitched their steers to trees and concealed
perfect rattle of stones and bricks beat against the windows,
bending them inward.
"Father! father!" shrieked Jemina.
Her father took down his slingshot from his slingshot
rack on the wall and ran his hand lovingly over the elastic
band. He stepped to a loophole. Old Mappy Tantrum
stepped to the coalhole.
A Mountain Battle
The stranger was aroused at last. Furious to get at
the Doldrums, he tried to escape from the house by crawling
up the chimney. Then he thought there might be
a door under the bed, but Jemina told him there was not.
He hunted for doors under the beds and sofas, but each
time Jemina pulled him out and told him there were no
doors there. Furious with anger, he beat upon the
door and hollered at the Doldrums. They did not
answer him, but kept up their fusillade of bricks and
stones against the window. Old Pappy Tantrum knew
that as soon as they were able to effect an aperture they
would pour in and the fight would be over.
Then old Heck Doldrum, foaming at the mouth and
expectorating on the ground, left and right, led the
attack.
The terrific slingshots of Pappy Tantrum had not
been without their effect. A master shot had disabled
one Doldrum, and another Doldrum, shot almost incessantly
through the abdomen, fought feebly on.
Nearer and nearer they approached the house.
"We must fly," shouted the stranger to Jemina. "I
will sacrifice myself and bear you away."
"No," shouted Pappy Tantrum, his face begrimed.
"You stay here and fit on. I will bar Jemina away. I
will bar Mappy away. I will bar myself away."
The man from the settlements, pale and trembling
with anger, turned to Ham Tantrum, who stood at the
door throwing loophole after loophole at the advancing
Doldrums.
"Will you cover the retreat?"
But Ham said that he too had Tantrums to bear
away, but that he would leave himself here to help the
stranger cover the retreat, if he could think of a way of
doing it.
Soon smoke began to filter through the floor and ceiling.
Shem Doldrum had come up and touched a match
to old Japhet Tantrum's breath as he leaned from a
loophole, and the alcoholic flames shot up on all sides.
The whiskey in the bathtub caught fire. The walls
began to fall in.
Jemina and the man from the settlements looked at
each other.
"Jemina," he whispered.
"Stranger," she answered.
"We will die together," he said. "If we had lived I
would have taken you to the city and married you.
With your ability to hold liquor, your social success
would have been assured."
She caressed him idly for a moment, counting her toes
softly to herself. The smoke grew thicker. Her left
leg was on fire.
She was a human alcohol lamp.
Their lips met in one long kiss and then a wall fell on
them and blotted them out.
"As One."
When the Doldrums burst through the ring of flame,
they found them dead where they had fallen, their
arms about each other.
Old Jem Doldrum was moved.
He took off his hat.
He filled it with whiskey and drank it off.
"They air dead," he said slowly, "they hankered
after each other. The fit is over now. We must not
part them."
So they threw together into the stream and the
two splashes they made were as one.
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