Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 12
After the baby's birth the routine of life in the little house in the hollow fell along quite different lines. Judith no longer went with Jerry to the field to hoe or top tobacco. The baby could not be left alone in the house. Judith sometimes wished to leave him for an hour or two so that she could give Jerry a little help when work was pressing. But he would not hear of it.
"S'pose he took a fit while you was gone, Judy. Or s'pose a rat should come."
"But he don't never have fits. An' we hain't got rats this summer. They're all over to Hat's place since that big yaller cat come here."
"But sumpin might happen to him, Judy. You can't never tell. I'll make shift to git along. If anything happened to him we wouldn't never be able to forgive ourselves. Besides you got plenty nuf to do, now you got him to take care on."
So Judith stayed at home and looked after the house and the chickens and the vegetable garden and tended the baby, while Jerry did the field work in the corn and tobacco. When there was a rush of work he hired Elmer or his own brother Andy.
The baby claimed most of Judith's attention. It was astonishing that so small a creature should make such heavy demands. Nursing him, bathing him, washing for him, rocking him when he cried, remaking his cradle, changing his diapers, taking him up and laying him down, washing for him again, changing his diapers again, rocking him again, nursing him again, putting him back in the cradle again occupied her days and part of her nights in a round of small activities which, after the novelty wore off, began to fret her like the tug of innumerable small restraining bands.
It was not that she took less interest in the baby. Instead he became each day more engrossing. In her scarcely outgrown childhood she had never cared much for playing with dolls; but this live doll that laughed and cried and gripped her fingers with its tiny hands and looked so ridiculously like Jerry was the most fascinating of playthings. The fascination, however, did not extend to his diapers, his clothes always accumulating in the washtub, his insistent demands night and day for her continual presence at his side and for all sorts of constantly recurring small attentions.
But dislike her bondage as she might, she was his slave. Miraculously this little newcomer who a few short weeks ago had been nothing to her but a burden of the flesh, now occupied with undisputed assurance the position of the most important thing in her life. Everything was for the baby. His health and comfort were the only things that really mattered. All the activities of her life centered about him. He was her first thought in the morning and her last care at night. When she came back into the house after working in the garden or feeding the hogs and chickens her first step was toward the cradle. He was always in her thoughts. She could not let her mind dwell upon the desolate vacancy that would be left if he should be snatched away from her. And yet she became daily more irritated and harassed by the constant small cares that his presence demanded of her.
Sometimes, to break the monotony and loneliness, she would take the baby on one arm and walk across fields by the short cut to Lizzie May's or down into the hollow to Hat's or up along the pike to her father's. There she would visit for a while, returning in time to do up the evening chores and get Jerry's supper. She often walked many miles in this way, carrying the baby on her hip.
On Sundays Jerry would hook up and all three of them would drive off to spend the day at her father's or at his father's or at the home of one or other of their many relatives. Judith looked forward to these Sundays. She who had always despised visiting was now glad to escape from the tedium and monotony of home into the comparatively refreshing atmosphere of other people's kitchens and dooryards. There she would sit and string beans or peel apples and talk with the women of the house about chickens and babies and the sicknesses and deaths and scandals of the neighborhood, clutching eagerly at these tattered scraps of other people's lives, as they fluttered past her in the idle and haphazard talk.
Soon, however, it was no longer possible to go visiting every Sunday. The summer passed; and the early fall, warm and calm and caressing, the full blown flower of the year, faded quickly into late fall with its cold, driving rain, keen winds, and sodden depths of mud. After Thanksgiving there were very few days when the weather was such that she could take the baby out.
So she stayed in the house with him long gray day after long gray day and plodded through the dismal daily round of dish-washing, clothes-washing, cooking, sweeping, nursing, and diaper changing. Each day was exactly like the one before it. Each day the demands of the baby and the rest of the household were precisely the same. Even the cooking allowed of no variation; for now that winter was come, there were just four things in the pantry: coffee, corn meal, dried beans, and hog meat, with perhaps an occasional cabbage or squash that by some miracle had escaped the frost. From as far back as she could remember she had been accustomed to this winter scarcity and had never minded it much before. Now she found herself continually longing for something new, something different to eat, not so much from starvation of body as of spirit.
Through the winter months the sun rarely shone and for days together the rain dripped dismally down the window panes and filled the dreary little house with its monotonous murmur. From the window she could see nothing but twinkling tawny puddles, slick, tawny mud, the outbuildings gaunt and black in the rain and above and beyond them the unchanging lines of the hills.
She borrowed Hat's books and her copies of the "Farm Wife's Friend" and read them through. But she could not get from them the mental stimulation that they had afforded to Hat. Instead of opening to her the door of romance, they seemed only flat, silly, and unreal. She was sure that no such people had ever existed. She had never cared much for reading any of the books that had fallen in her way. She got more satisfying entertainment from drawing pictures of the dog, the cat, and the chickens in the dooryard. She tried again and again to draw the baby, but could not make the picture look like him. She drew the view from the little kitchen window as it appeared from every position in the room. With each step that she took the view was a different one. But all the pictures had one thing in common: the sweep of hilltop lining itself against the sky. She amused herself by piecing these pictures together and making the whole line of hills that bordered the hollow on the window side.
She was glad when Jerry came home at night, and ran to meet him, listening eagerly to his talk of what had happened in the field or the stripping room. She devoured greedily his tale of how Luke and Hat had got into a quarrel about which of them was to light the fire in the stripping room; and how he, coming in in the midst of the quarrel, had settled it by lighting the fire himself. But Hat and Luke had not seemed to consider it settled, for they had not spoken to each other all day long.
When Jerry came home from his trips to town to buy sugar and coffee and get the corn ground at mill, she listened with the most lively interest to his rendering of the news gathered at Peter Akers' store. Young Jim Patton's wife had left him for the fourth time after a quarrel in which it was said that he had tried to use the hay fork and she the butcher knife. Ziemer Whitmarsh, driving home from a drinking bout over near Dry Ridge, had been arrested on the triple charge of abusing his horse, using profane and obscene language, and disturbing the peace. There had been a shooting affair over at Sadieville. A nigger had been killed and two white men wounded. Nobody seemed to know just how the trouble had started. Black Joe, a half witted nigger of the neighborhood, had been caught stealing Uncle Sam Whitmarsh's chickens. And Uncle Sam, with a buggy robe clutched over the shirt and drawers in which he had nabbed the thief, had appeared at Constable Seth Boone's door at one o'clock in the morning, covering the frightened nigger with his gun.
Sometimes Luella came to spend the day with her and dandled the baby and helped Judith with the housework or with some piece of sewing. Luella was only twenty-two; but already she was taking on many of the looks and ways of an old maid. Lizzie May never came; she was entirely taken up with her own family concerns. Sometimes Hat dropped in, bringing the latest copy of the "Farm Wife's Friend" and her most recent tale of wrongs at Luke's hands, or old Aunt Selina Cobb slipped in and sat for the afternoon, patching an already much patched shirt for Uncle Jonah. Aunt Sally Whitmarsh, who lived in the nearest house on the pike, wended her way across the fields once in a while and brought up to date the news and rumors of the neighborhood from far and near; for Aunt Sally was a great hand to collect gossip.
Sometimes Judith felt a bit creepy as she looked at Aunt Sally. Could it be that this calm featured, self-contained woman who sat placidly mending drawers for Uncle Sam and telling the news as dispassionately as if she were the personal column of a country weekly, had sown the seed of insanity in more than one of her children? Judith thought of Bessie Maud over in Black Creek Hollow and wondered if it could really have come through Aunt Sally.
Once young Bob Crupper drew rein in the dooryard; and instead of hallooing from the horse's back, flung himself from the saddle, tied the horse to a fence post and came striding toward the house. He was a tall, strongly built young fellow, handsome like his father and with his father's fearless and dreamy eyes.
"Is Jerry hereabout?" he asked, standing holding the knob of the open door in his hand.
"No, he's strippin'," answered Judith, looking up from her sewing. "You'll find him in the strippin' room."
"I wanta see him 'bout buyin' that little crop I raised on Uncle Ezry's place," explained Bob. "I hain't hardly got enough to make it wuth my while to haul it, an' I'll let it go cheap. There hain't a lot of it, but what there is is durn fine terbaccer."
"Mebbe he might buy it," said Judith. "He hain't got a big crop this year. Anyway, you'll find him in the strippin' room."
Bob made no move to go immediately in search of Jerry. Instead he closed the door that he had been holding open and made a step into the room.
"Bin cold this last few days, hain't it," he said, scratching up under his cap. "But the wind don't git you daown here in the holler. It blows mean up our way."
Something made Judith glance up swiftly from her sewing; and she caught Bob's eyes, which had been gazing at her neck and the curve of her right shoulder. When she raised her eyes he turned his away and fixed them on the woodbox.
"I see Jerry leaves you plenty wood to keep warm with," he said, with a short, embarrassed laugh.
"Yes, it's more'n some men does. Hat Wolf's allus a-kickin' 'cause Luke leaves her most o' the wood to chop."
"Well, the big heifer might as well be a-choppin' wood an' a-usin' up some o' that extry fat she's got. Naow a gal like you's too fine an' purty to chop wood."
She cast a swift glance at him.
"That's easy fer you to say, Bob Crupper, seein's you don't hev to chop my wood. If I was your wife or sister you'd think diff'rent, no matter if I was as good lookin' as the Queen o' Sheba."
"I dunno haow good lookin' the Queen o' Sheba was," answered Bob, emboldened by this rallying. "But I do know you're the best lookin' gal this side o' Georgetown."
He took a step nearer, and she could smell the whiskey on his breath, which she had not noticed before.
"I'd feel proud to chop wood fer you, Judy."
"Seein's you don't hev to," she flashed back. "I notice men is allus proud to do things fer wimmin if it's sumpin they don't hev to do. You'd better git along an' see to sellin' yer terbaccer crop."
Something brisk and decided in her manner made him take a step backward toward the door. But the whiskey gave him a little courage.
"I hain't a man that goes araound talkin' private to other men's wives," he began desperately, in a pompous, whiskey fuddled voice.
"You mean you air," countered Judith, getting up from her rocking chair. "You take yerse'f along about yer business, Bob Crupper."
The sharp and quite decided tone of her voice made him take another step backward and open the door. She gave him a push which sent him over the threshold and slammed the door in his face. Peering out of the little window, she saw him kick his horse in the ribs and gallop away. As she watched him out of sight she suddenly saw him standing by Wolf's wagon shed talking to Luke. He turned and looked at her, said something to Luke, and the two men laughed. She resented the look and the laugh and felt angry and insulted by his recent quite uninvited advances. Yet deeper seated and longer lasting than the anger and the feeling of insult, there was a sense of pleasurable excitement. Her neck and right shoulder were still warmly conscious of the bold gaze of his eyes. She looked at herself in the glass and saw that her cheeks were glowing—not entirely with anger. It was a long time before her neck and shoulder could forget how they had been looked at; and she was not sure that she wished to have them forget.
"Did Bob Crupper come to the strippin' room to see about your buyin' his terbaccer crop?" she asked, when she and Jerry were at supper that night.
"No. Was he here?"
"Yes. He come by on that big roan mare o 'hisn. I told him he'd find you in the strippin' room."
"I wouldn't mind takin' a risk on a small crop if I cud git it reasonable," mused Jerry.
Sometimes old Jonah Cobb, bent almost double, would walk silently into the house and sit for hours. Just why he came Judith did not know, for he hardly ever opened his mouth. He had been a tenant farmer ever since any one could remember. Now in his old age he still made every year a weak attempt to raise a little tobacco. Each spring he would prepare a bed; and when the setting season came he and Aunt Selina might be seen in the first gray of the dawn trudging out to set their plants. The dusk of the long spring day would be closing in before they struggled homeward again, he plodding a few steps behind. The result of their labors never amounted to more than a mere handful of tobacco. They occupied a one-room tenant house which Hiram Stone had long allowed them to consider their own. Here they kept some chickens, half a dozen rabbits, and a few hives of bees. Of late years Uncle Jonah had devoted a good deal of his attention to the bees and had come to consider himself quite a bee man. Almost every time that he opened his mouth it was to speak of bees. He would sit in Judith's kitchen for half an hour or more without opening his lips except to spit into the woodbox, and at the end of his period of silence would say abruptly:
"Bees needs salt same's sheep or cattle. A man otter salt his bees every so often."
After another twenty minutes he would break the silence by saying:
"Sorghum makes good feed for bees in winter."
Sometimes old Amos Crupper, the father of Bob, came in after supper and spent the evening sitting by the stove talking of wars and rumors of wars. The old man was tall, large and broad-shouldered, full of health and vitality. He had a massive leonine head, covered with a shock of thick gray hair, which he held erect in soldierly fashion. His eyes were fearless and dreamy, like those of his son Bob. He always looked clean and wholesome and was circumspect about his tobacco spitting.
He was a veteran of the Civil War and loved to talk of those far off days when as a youth of twenty he had toted a musket in defiance of what was for him the right. In a deep bass voice vibrant with chest resonance he would tell again and again in the same words stories of the events of the war that had made the deepest appeal to the simple nobility of his nature: stories of romance of devotion and of heroism.
When he was not talking about the war he talked about the virtues of his dead wife. Late in life he had made a second marriage with a sister of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, Aunt Amanda Baxter, herself a widow of long standing. He remained, however, an unwilling victim. In the neighbors' houses he talked continually about the beauty and sweetness of his first wife, alluding to her always as "My wife." He never spoke disparagingly of Aunt Amanda, but when he had occasion to mention her it was always as "That woman I'm a-livin' with naow."
Uncle Amos was fond of Jerry and Judith and spent many hours of undisturbed quiet sitting by their stove talking of the old war and of the wife of his youth.
Once in a while Joe Barnaby came over to get away from the thick atmosphere of home. Joe was a son-in-law of Uncle Sam, having married one of the latter's nine children, Bessie Maud by name. Bessie Maud had not spoken to her mother and father since the occasion of a quarrel which had occurred shortly after her marriage. That was eight years ago. She had also quarreled with several of her brothers and sisters and stopped speaking to them. Such long sustained family feuds were common enough in Scott County where slight grievances dwelt upon in solitude grew like a rolling snowball. But of late years Bessie Maud's temper had become so uncertain and her habit of mind so strongly anti-social that few even of the near neighbors ever went near her house. It was whispered that she had always been a little off. It was in the family, the neighbors said, and it was on Aunt Sally's side. Aunt Sally's father, old Abe Beasley, had been "queer," and so had several of her other relatives on the father's side. And of Aunt Sally's children there were others besides Bessie Maud who showed traces of the taint.
Although Joe was but little over thirty, his hair was streaked with gray, his chest sunken, his features drawn and pinched, his face clouded with a dull misery. How much of this was due to his having to provide for so many babies, to his affliction of chronic rheumatism, and to his domestic troubles nobody could say. The neighbors all felt sorry for him, but nobody was heard to waste any pity on Bessie Maud.
The visitor that Judith liked best to see push open the door was Uncle Jabez Moorhouse. Often the others wearied or annoyed her if they stayed too long. She always knew what they were going to say; and the men nursing the stove got in the way of her cooking. Uncle Jabez was the only one of them all who might say or do the unexpected. When he came in at the door, something of the outside came in with him; and as he stood spreading out his great hands over the top of the stove or sat and smoked meditatively by the oven door, it seemed to her as though a warmth and radiance reached out to her from his great, ungainly body. He was often silent, sometimes weary and cynical, rarely merry through these dismal winter months. Yet whatever his mood, she felt the same emanation from his presence: a heartened feeling, as if the pulse of life had grown stimulatingly strong and full.
Once when they were alone and he had been sitting silently by the stove for a long time, he said, re-crossing his legs:
"You know why I like to come an' set here, Judy? It's 'cause it's as good to me as a half pint o' whiskey in my belly."
The winter dragged slowly to a close, and on its heels came an early spring to hearten the mud-bound tenant farmers. The March winds and warm April sunshine dried up the mud and the shanties were no longer prisons.
"I've a mind to go to Georgetown nex' Court Day," said Jerry one April morning at breakfast. "I'd kinda like to see haow hosses is a-sellin' this spring."
"Let's both go," chimed in Judith eagerly. "I'd love to go. I hain't bin no place all winter; an' I hain't bin to Georgetown but onct in my life."
"But haow about the baby?"
"Luelly'll take care of him. Or we kin take him over to your mammy."
"I was countin' on ridin' over with Joe Barnaby. If you go we'll have to drive the cart an' let Joe ride by hisse'f. Why do you want to go, Judy?"
"For the same reason you wanta go," she flashed angrily. "Because I'm sick o' doin' allus the same thing every day."
Jerry tried to assume an expression of male dignity and importance.
"I'm goin' fer to see haow hosses is a-sellin'," he said.
"As if you need to go fer that! You know well nuf you kin ast anybody that's bin there. An' anyway you don't need to know; you hain't a-buyin' no hosses. Why don't you tell the truth? You wanta go fer a holiday; an' I wanta go fer a holiday. So we'll both go."
"All right. Have it yer own way," said Jerry. He had the air of making a concession, and he looked disturbed and annoyed.