Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 15
It seemed that winter as if the spring would never come, as if there would never be an end to the arid routine of corn meal mush and coffee for breakfast, corn meal cakes and coffee for dinner, and coffee and corn meal cakes for supper. March dragged its weary length into what seemed more like a year than a month. February had been full of mild, springlike days, days of strengthening sun and greening grass that had cheered the hungry tenant farmers into hopes of an early spring. But March closed down grim and inexorable. Bitter winds blew all day under a cold, gray sky, a dead, frozen sky, all one blank, even tone of pale gray, dreary and disheartening. They dried up the tender grass that had been springing in sheltered places. They whirled the fine dust of dried clay about the barns and houses. They pierced like knife blades through worn-out underwear and sleazy cotton dresses and threadbare jackets and made the doing of barnyard chores a shrinking misery.
There were not many chores. Judith had only her cow to milk and care for and her hens to feed. Often, however, she had wood to chop; for Jerry was busy now with the spring plowing and was not so attentive to the woodpile as he had been during their first year together. When she had finished these chores, she fled back into the house as a woodchuck scuttled to the protection of his hole. The bitter, dust-laden wind seemed to suck the moisture from her skin and from her very bones. She felt as bleak, dry, desolate, and soulless as the landscape. Looking out of the little window at the bare garden patch where she had planted a few onion sets and some seed of lettuce and radishes, and which as yet showed no hint of green, she felt dismal, hungry, and hopeless.
During these last weeks of the winter, she grew daily paler and more listless. It was time for the baby to be born, and she was heavy with a great lethargy, as if the life within her, in its determination to persist, were slowly and steadily draining her, leaving her body nothing but a shell, a limp, nerveless, irritable, collapsing shell.
She understood now why snakes and woodchucks crawled into their holes in winter. She wished she had a hole to crawl into, a hole where there were no meals to cook, no fire to keep going, no fretful child to pacify—a nice, dark, quiet hole where nobody ever came and where she could curl up and be at peace.
Little Billy was a strong, stirring, loud-voiced, and self-willed child. Often when his clamorous demands became too much for her nerves, she would slap him savagely and force him to blubber into silence, gasping and choking and catching spasmodically at the heaving surges of breath that rose in him like tidal waves. He learned to be afraid of her in these moods and would sidle away and hide under the bed or behind the stove till the storm had passed, peering out at her with scared, watchful eyes, as a puppy watches the foot that has just kicked him. In such moments she hated them both, the born and the unborn, two little greedy vampires working on her incessantly, the one from without, the other from within, never giving her a moment's peace, bent upon drinking her last drop of blood, tearing out her last shrieking nerve.
Sometimes she would give way to one of these fits of irritation when Jerry was in the house; and he would rush to intervene and save the child.
"Why do you act so mean to the young un, Judy?" he would demand, his voice harsh with anger.
"Mebbe you'd act mean too if you was shet up with him all day long, like you was in a jail."
Her mouth set into hard lines, and her level brows contracted darkly.
When she said such things he always looked at her in a puzzled, hurt, and somewhat impatient way.
She no longer looked forward to Jerry's homecoming at night. When he came in from the day's plowing, tired but still ruddy and vigorous in spite of his diet of corn meal, she felt more dragged out and irritable than ever. Out of her own weakness and nervelessness she grew to hate his ability to relax, his aura of excess vitality, that strong, male vitality of which she was becoming the victim. After a day at the plow he could still whistle and sing, fling the baby to the ceiling or ride him on his back about the kitchen. His thoughtless, boyish good humor made her feel hard, bitter, and morose.
While he took his ease in the evenings, she went about the kitchen silently, fried the corn cakes, and made the coffee, washed the grime from the baby's hands and face, and fed his milk and corn cake. After they had eaten, she would wash the dishes and undress the baby and put him to bed. Then she would come back and sit by the little lamp darning socks or mending rompers or putting great, coarse patches on the knees of overalls.
Sometimes Jerry, looking at her under the light of the lamp and noting the tense, drawn look on her pale features, would fume within himself with impotent rage. He blamed it all on the lack of proper food. Things were in a hell of a mess, he told himself, when a man could work from sun-up to sundown and not be able to give his wife even the food she needed. He felt himself burning with a fierce anger against the order of things which prevented him from giving her anything she could ask for. He wanted to be the source of all good things for her and for her children; and here he was scarcely able to keep the breath in her body. It never for a moment occurred to him that she could ever want anything which he could not supply if he were only given a decent chance. Yes, he was placed in a nice hell of a hole, he told himself. But of course this was one year in a hundred. His corklike optimism reasserted itself. Everything would be all right as soon as the new crop came on.
In bed he would put his arm over her protectingly.
"Things'll be a heap better, Judy, soon's garden truck begins to grow."
And she would sigh lightly, glad of the comfort of the bed and his warm, muscular arm, and fall into a deep, exhausted sleep.
It was on one of these bleak, windswept March days that the second baby was born, a surprisingly fat and healthy little boy, whom they named Andrew after Jerry's father. His health and vigor, however, had been obtained at the expense of his mother. For days after his birth she lay half unconscious, scarcely moving a finger, hardly lifting an eyelash.
"The girl must have nourishment," said Dr. MacTaggert. "Milk."
So Jerry scurried around and found where he could get a half gallon of milk a day without immediate payment; and at once she began to revive. He slaughtered one of the precious hens; Luella, who had come to take charge, made chicken broth which Judith sipped while the rest of the family gorged ravenously on the meat. The neighbors came bringing out of their great scarcity little delicacies for which in many cases their own mouths were watering: a pot of peach jam or a little jar of apple butter or a few new laid eggs. Aunt Selina brought a block of honey in the comb; and Jabez came carrying the first young onions and the first tender leaves of lettuce which he had grown under a window sash in a sheltered spot against his kitchen wall. To Judith, now rapidly growing stronger, these bits of green tasted better than anything else. Such succulence and flavor in the young onions! She had known every spring what it was to be hungry for green things; but young onions had never tasted so delicious before.
After the first half conscious days of exhaustion, she began to enjoy her convalescence. The strained tension of the long winter months was gone and already almost forgotten, and it was good to stretch luxuriously in bed and give way to the weakness which ignores all cares and responsibilities. Aunt Mary had taken little Billy over to stay with her. Luella was full of quiet competence. The new baby slept most of the time, and the house was still and orderly. Sunk in the utter relaxation that follows upon childbirth, she felt at first that there could be nothing more delicious than to lie motionless on her back and look lazily through the window at the slope of hillside, listen to the song of the returning birds, the cheerful cackle of the hens, the barking of the dog, and the subdued sounds made by Luella as she moved about quietly and adequately in the kitchen.
Soon, however, she grew restless with returning vitality and was glad to sit propped up with pillows and mend little Billy's clothes or sew on a dress for the new baby.
Sometimes she would ask Luella to bring her a pencil and a piece of paper; and using a pine shingle for a drawing board, she would amuse herself by sketching faces, some human, some animal, some half and half, as she had used to do when she was a little girl at school. Luella, looking over her shoulder, was scandalized.
"Why do you draw sech ugly things, Judy? It's a shame, when you kin draw so good, you don't draw sumpin purty an' nice. I wisht you'd draw me a nice pitcher in colors fer to hang on my wall."
"All right. There's some in the cupboard drawer, that Jerry bought for Billy to mark with."
Luella brought more paper and a handful of colored crayons; and Judith, not much interested, but rather curious to see how it would turn out, drew a picture in colors: A little house, a bit of rail fence, an apple tree in blossom, a hill rising steeply behind. Then she took another sheet and drew a large bunch of pink roses. Luella was delighted with the pictures, especially the roses.
"My, haow kin you draw 'em so good, Judy! Naow that's what I call nice work. I'm a-goin' to put frames on 'em an' hang 'em in my room."
Luella carried away the pictures in triumph, and Judith went on drawing her heads.
In a few weeks there was an abundance of garden "sass." The season was as bountiful as the year before it had been stingy. It rained and the sun shone hotly and the seeds in Scott County's fertile clay soil stirred, reached up their heads to their God, like millions of little sunworshipers and covered the earth with green.
Weeds grew too, tender and succulent from abundant moisture and rapid growth. They were easy to get rid of if they were attacked in time. One stroke of the hoe killed hundreds of them. Lying on the moist, steaming earth in the fierce heat of the sun, they shriveled and dried up in a few hours. But if they were allowed to live, they grew with incredible rapidity into great, tough giants and overtopped the vegetables in no time.
Judith spent all the time that she could spare from the babies and the house working in her garden, chopping out the weeds while they were still young and tender, hilling up the potatoes, hoeing the rows of lusty beets and beans and turnips, training the pole beans to climb on their poles and tying up the tomato vines to stakes. She liked this work. She liked the feel of the hot sun on her back and shoulders, the smell of the damp, warm earth. Some magic healing qualities in sun and earth seemed to give her back health, vigor, and poise. When she had hoed in the garden for an hour or two, she felt tired from her exertions, for her strength had only partly returned after the birth of the baby. Yet, in spite of the ache in her muscles, she was refreshed and in a way invigorated, more able to cope with the washtub and the churn, with the baby when he cried and refused to be pacified and with little Billy when he danced up and down and choked and grew purple in the face with rage.
It was a hard spring and summer for Jerry. He had put in five acres of tobacco; and this year there was no help to be had from Judith. Even if she could have left the children, she was much too weak for field work. So Jerry had to tackle it alone. Five acres of tobacco and ten acres of corn—a good full summer's work for three men, four if they worked union hours. But Jerry did not work union hours. He was determined that this year he was going to provide for his wife and family. The alarm clock was set every morning except Sunday for half past three. By half past four, he and the horses were jingling out of the barnyard. At eleven he came home for dinner; and noon saw him starting away again. That was the hardest wrench of all, to get up after eating and drag his swollen feet and aching muscles out into the hot noonday sun, before him the long broiling afternoon of endless plodding after the plow. It was not so bad after he had been working for an hour or so; he got his second wind and went along tolerably enough. Five o'clock came—quitting time for those who work for others; but it was only a little past the middle of Jerry's afternoon. Six o'clock, and the sun was still quite high in the sky. It was only when the sun dropped below the horizon that he clicked cheerfully to the horses and turned their heads toward home.
It was hard, too, on the horses. They grew gaunt and stringy-necked, their coats bleached by the sun into a dead, lusterless drab. Better, however, that they were thin; for then there was small danger of their dropping dead of the heat, as a fat horse might do. Jerry was a little sorry that he had not bought mules. They stood the strain of heat and hard work better than horses.
In the evening, after he had eaten supper, he rolled into bed in the same shirt that he had worn all day, or if it was very hot in no shirt at all. He was dirty, sweaty, unshaven. Tired in every muscle he fell asleep instantly. Judith had nothing to fear from his excess vitality. She, too, slept the sleep of exhaustion.
The weeds grew with such lustiness and vigor that Jerry had to cultivate his corn and tobacco again and again to keep the plants from being smothered. As soon as one generation was laid low another came to take its place. The earth teemed with the seed of this useless but vigorous and persistent life. By early July, however, Jerry saw the reward of his toil. By then the tobacco had spread its broad leaves and shaded the ground, and the corn had shot up thick and tall and dark green. When it had reached this stage, his crop needed no more cultivation. The weeds might continue to germinate all they liked; they could not grow if they did not see the sun. He took an occasional day off now and an extra hour or so at noon to loaf and play with Billy. If a neighbor happened by, he was willing to stop and chat with him. His vigor and good spirits began to return.
"Bejasus, I've got a good crop this year, Judy," he said, his face beaming with honest, simple satisfaction. "The corn's made. Nothin' can't hurt it. It's same as if it was in the crib. Of course a dozen things cud happen to that there terbaccer yet; but not likely. Everybody says terbaccer's a-goin' high this year. If I kin steer her safe to market, she'll bring us a neat little penny."
On Sundays they usually hooked up and went visiting. Often they went to Lizzie May's for the sake of Billy, who liked to have other children to play with. Jerry and Dan, too, were good friends and enjoyed an all day chat. Lizzie May had two children now: Granville, a year or so older than Billy, a stodgy, round-faced chunk of a child, and Viola, a little girl with yellow curls, her mother in miniature. Motherhood had improved Lizzie May. She had taken on flesh and seemed to have discovered some source of strength and vitality inaccessible to Judith. She beamed with maternal pride and satisfaction on her children. She kept their clothes and her own dresses and aprons washed and starched and fastidiously ironed; and she was always busy scrubbing, dusting, polishing, never tiring apparently of the endless cleaning of things just to have them get dirty again, a species of well doing of which Judith constantly experienced weariness. Her stove was always polished, her kettle shining, her floor scrubbed, her children clean and decent and neatly patched.
In addition to all this, Lizzie May had a "front room," an apartment rarely found in the houses of tenant farmers. It had a bright rag carpet on the floor made of rags all sewn by Lizzie May's own hands. Braided rag rugs were laid over the carpet in places where the wear might come if the room were ever used. There were lace curtains at the window, a bed with a white spread and pillow shams embroidered in red, a little what-not in a corner loaded with knick-knacks, two crayon enlargements on the wall, and a framed motto over the door. In this room the blinds were always drawn and sunlight entered only through chinks. It smelled of new rag carpet and freshly starched pillow shams and a slight mustiness, sweetish, and not altogether unpleasant. It had an air of cool, clean, quiet sanctity. After the children it was Lizzie May's greatest pride.
Judith often wondered why it was that Lizzie May got on so much better than herself. It was not hard to see why she was a better housekeeper. She had always liked housework and taken an interest in it. Besides, she did nothing else, never even venturing as far as the barnyard. Dan did all the outside chores and when he needed help in the field he called on one of his younger brothers.
But she was a better wife, too, for just what reason Judith did not know, though she was beginning to have vague thoughts on the subject. There appeared to be between her and Dan a settled, comfortable intimacy based on as perfect an understanding as can exist between a man and a woman. She bullied and nagged him a good deal about various things: his habits of drinking and fox hunting, his muddy shoes, his carelessness of her company table cloth. But she did not mean a great deal by the scoldings and he took them complacently. He on his side, though decidedly selfish in personal matters like most husbands, adored his family and considered his wife the sum of all perfections. Judith was quite sure that Jerry no longer regarded herself as perfect. What was worse, she felt her feelings gradually numbing into a growing indifference toward him. She saw quite clearly that Lizzie May and Dan got on much better than she and Jerry.
As a mother, too, Lizzie May was better than she. She hardly ever slapped her children or fell into a rage with them. They did not seem to annoy her. Why was this, Judith asked herself uneasily. She thought she loved her children quite as much as Lizzie May loved hers. Perhaps she did; but then quite possibly she did not. What was the matter with herself that she should be a failure? She began to brood and look into herself.
There was not the least doubt that she was a failure. It did not need comparison with Lizzie May to convince her of this. When she thought about it, as she did increasingly long and often, she faced the fact quite calmly and almost coldly, as she was in the habit of facing facts. She had always disliked housework. Now she loathed it as the galley slave loathes the oar. She let things slide as much as she could. The floor remained unscrubbed and the stove unpolished. Fluff collected in feathery rolls under the beds, and layer after layer of greasy smut formed on the outsides of the pots and pans. In the dark corners of the cupboard mice made nests of torn up bits of paper and rag and left little mounds of corn hulls and little black oblongs to show where they had feasted. When she opened the cupboard door, a stale and pungent smell testified to their presence. Dust collected on the shelves, cobwebs in the corners, and bedbugs in the beds.
Once in a while when the house got too distressingly dirty, she would have a grand clean up. She would spend two or three febrile days going into everything, cleaning the cupboards, sweeping down the walls, taking the beds apart, and soaking them with kerosene, washing the windows, polishing the stove. At such times her eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed with excitement. When it was all done she would sink back, tired but happy, and register a determination to keep things looked after in future so that such a thorough going over would never again be necessary.
It seemed to her that she was an even greater failure with the children. She cared more for them than for anything else in her life, she felt quite sure of that. She was consumed with anxiety lest they should fall sick. In summer she cooled and strained the milk with the greatest care, fearful of dysentery; and in winter she was anxiously mindful of draughts and chills, worried as to whether the babies were warmly enough dressed and constantly on the watch for the first signs of the much dreaded colds so common in all the leaky, draughty shanties during the winter season.
Nevertheless, in spite of her anxiety about the health and comfort of the children, she felt more and more that she begrudged them something. She did not serve them wholeheartedly, devotedly, joyfully, like Lizzie May. She wearied of the constant putting on and pulling off of little garments. More and more she chafed against the never relaxing strain of being always in bondage to them, always a victim of their infantile caprices, always at their beck and call seven days a week through weeks that were always the same.
They were so imperious, so rigorously demanding in the supreme confidence of their complete power over her. They were so clinchingly sure of their ascendancy. They gripped her with hooks stronger than the finest steel. If only she could have been a willing victim, like Lizzie May. But she could not. She strained away, and the hooks bit into her shuddering flesh, unalterably firm, enduring, and invincible. She knew that they would never let her go.
She found herself longing ardently for a single day, even a single hour when she could be by herself, quite alone and free to do as she chose.
At first when this wish formed itself in her mind the nostalgia of the fields and roads took possession of her. She imagined herself taking a long, carefree ride on horseback or following a turkey hen over the hills and hollows; and having found the hidden nest, coming back leisurely, aimlessly, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine and the touch of the wind on her face, feeling herself, as she had used to do, a part of the out of doors, untroubled by thoughts and happy that she was alive. Later on, in the winter, when the strain of her captivity dragged more and more wearyingly on exhausted nerves, she forgot the old nostalgia, forgot even to look out of the window, and longed for only one thing: quiet and peace—peace and deep, long sleep.