The Common Lot and Other Stories by Emma Bell Miles

Author:Emma Bell Miles [Miles, Emma Bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804011730
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2016-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

eight

Flyaway Flittermouse

From Harper’s Monthly Magazine 121 (July 1910): 229–35; illustrated by W. Herbert Dunton

Though Miles is known for her love and concern for children, “Flyaway Flittermouse” is her only story in which a toddler is the main character. Flittermouse epitomizes innocence and trust as she wanders by herself along a country road. She charms each local traveler she meets and brings about good will, all without effort, guile, or awareness on her part. This story had its origins in an actual event. On a hunt for huckleberries in July 1909, two-year-old Kitty, Miles’s youngest daughter, became separated from her siblings. When the child was discovered missing, her family and neighbors launched a search. According to the account Miles recorded in her journal, Kitty’s eventual savior was a neighborhood lad headed out to see his girlfriend. Hearing the child crying in the berry bushes, he delayed his journey long enough to carry her home. Kitty’s adventure served as inspiration for the story of “Flittermouse,” Emma’s pet name for her baby girl.

. . .

Ever since the first of the week, when the elder children started for school, with a basket of biscuits and fried pork and a First Reader among them, Flittermouse had been lonely. To-day it was worse than ever; for not only had Pappy left to work before she waked in the morning, but even Mother was almost inaccessible through the malignance of a headache. As for little Man-alive, the only playmates that interested him were his own seashell feet and hands.

Aunt Libby, having “drowned the miller” in making up her bread, came to borrow flour, and stayed to help with the churning; but now she was gone back home across the field, and Mother lay with tight-closed eyes on the bed. Flittermouse tried for a while to keep store, in imitation of her brothers, on the plank shelves they had arranged in the fence corner; but after pouring out the cans of water which represented barrels of oil and sorghum, and dismantling the rows of patiently moulded mud loaves and red-velvet oak tips, galls, and acorns which made up the rest of their stock, there did not seem to be much to do here; besides, she had an uncomfortable conviction that the boys would not approve her activities when they came home.

Across the fence, in a great airy cavern of shade beneath an oak, was a playhouse of more domestic character, all aglitter with broken china and upholstered in plushy moss. She had so often slipped between the rails to play here with sister that the fascination of forbidden fruit was absent from its neat and pretty housewifery, and the two little bare feet did not linger, but only printed the ground lightly as they pattered past.

Along the dew-damp sand broad shadows lay invitingly, though the day was not yet too warm. A cardinal flashed between the trees as she looked, and, “Birdy,” she greeted him, with an indescribable circumflex; adding immediately and regretfully, “Flyed away; gone wa-ay off-in-woods.” She heard the Song of the Open Road as plainly as it was ever sung.

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