Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 17
Two days later, when they got home from Dan's funeral, she thought on going into the kitchen that it smelled stale. Jerry was outside putting up the horses. She set the baby in the rocking chair and started to make a fire. A puff of acrid wood smoke blowing into her nose seemed all at once to have an intensely disgusting smell. She gripped the corner of the table to steady herself and her features contracted into an expression of mingled rage and horror. She knew that she was with child again.
Wednesday of the following week was hog-killing day for Jerry. Joe Barnaby came over to help him butcher. From the kitchen window Judith could see the men going about getting things in readiness, putting up three sets of crossed poles from which to hang the carcasses, arranging a scraping table, setting up the scalding barrel at a convenient angle and building a fire under a large, flaring iron kettle. It was a gray, frosty morning and they had their caps pulled down over their ears. Their breath came in white puffs.
Inside she had a roaring fire and the wash boiler on the stove to make more scalding water; for the hog-killing kettle that they had borrowed was not a very large one.
"There hain't no day I like better'n hog-killin' day," said Joe, warming his hands over the fire while they waited for the water to heat. "Some folks hates to see butcherin' day come. But I say to dress a hawg clean an' neat is as nice a job as there is a-goin'; an' it's a job a man kin put some heart into, 'cause he knows he hain't throwin' his work away. More'n that, he's got company by his side, an' that means a hull lot."
Joe's long, melancholy face showed its nearest approach to satisfaction, as he went out with Jerry, who had the sharpened butcher knife in his hand.
Judith stood over the wash tub rubbing out children's clothes. The baby crawled about on an old quilt spread on the floor. Billy, as was his three-year-old habit, had been spending his time getting from one mess of mischief into another. His latest adventure had been to fall backward into the slop bucket, from which he emerged with deafening screams. She had had to take off all his clothes from the shirt out and put on clean ones. The dirty clothes had gone to join the others in the tub. The heat and stale smells of the kitchen made her feel faint and sick. Her head swam dizzily. She wished she could go into the bedroom and lie down.
She heard the shrill squealing of the pig as its throat was cut, and, a little later saw Joe and Jerry carrying it to the scalding barrel. Billy in his red cap bobbed excitedly behind. Snap and Joe Barnaby's dog careened alongside, Snap with loud barks of joyous excitement, the strange dog silent and respectful as befitted a dog not on his own ground. Then men came hurrying in for the boiler of hot water.
"Fill her up agin, Judy—not full, jes half," Jerry called back, as he hurried away after bringing back the empty wash boiler.
She threw an old jacket over her shoulders and went out to the well for water. Coming back into the stuffy heat of the kitchen from the fresh, frosty air, the place seemed more foul and stinking than ever. Her stomach heaved tumultuously. Her knees trembled and she sank for a few moments into the old rocking chair.
Through the window she could see the men sousing the hog up and down in the scalding barrel, pulling him half way out, turning him a little and plunging him back again. The steam from the hot water rose up into the frosty air like a cloud of white smoke.
The baby began to cry and she got up wearily and warmed some milk for him, then crumbled a corn cake into it and fed it to him from a spoon. Having put him into dry diapers, she set him back on the quilt and went again to her washing.
The second hog and the third were soon killed, scraped, hung up, and disemboweled. Joe was a hog butcher of much experience and prided himself upon the quickness and neatness with which he could do the work. The three carcasses hung with stiffly spraddled hind legs from the three gibbets, trim, bright, and spotlessly clean against the dun-colored frowsiness of the yard. Snap, puffed up with the pride and arrogance of butchering day, stalked about the carcasses and would not let even a hen approach the enticing little pools of blood that dripped from their noses. When the cat attempted to sniff delicately at one of them, he ran her off onto the nearest fence; and when Joe Barnaby's dog tried to sidle up unobtrusively, he flew at him with bristling hair. Ominous growls alternated with sharp, excited barks.
Suddenly the kitchen door was flung open letting in a cold draught of fresh air, and Joe and Jerry, their coats and overalls streaked with blood, appeared bearing between them a galvanized iron tub full of steaming pig guts. They set the tub down in the middle of the floor with a heavy thump and made for the door.
"You'd better run 'em through quick, Judy, afore they git cold. An' I think there's one that's cut into. Watch out fer it," Jerry called back. He was already outside.
She scowled darkly at the tub, her black brows drawing together. The bluish viscera, bubbling up in innumerable little rounded blobs, filled it almost to overflowing. Bloody fragments emerged along with the masses of intestines. The outside of the tub was daubed and streaked with blood. An unspeakable stench rose from it, mingled with the stale heat of the kitchen and grew every moment denser, more nauseating, more unbearable. She gagged and reeled. Then, with a quick movement of sudden determination, she threw on an old coat of Jerry's that hung beside the door and a faded cap that she wore when she milked or chored about the yard, and went out, slamming the door sharply behind her.
Going swiftly through the yard, looking neither to right nor to left, she passed the two men.
"Where you a-goin', Judy?" Jerry called after her in surprise.
"I'm a-goin' to git away from that tub o' stinkin' pig guts you set in the kitchen. It kin stay there till it rots afore I'll tech hand to it."
Each word she uttered was hard and sharp, like the point of a nail. She paused not a second in her rapid walk and in a moment was gone from sight around the corner of the shed.
Jerry stood looking at the place where she had disappeared with an expression of dazed bewilderment, changing to annoyance and embarrassment. His pride suffered humiliation at this open affront from his wife before another man.
Joe came magnanimously to the rescue.
"That's jes the kind o' tantrums my woman goes into, on'y worse," he said. "An' she's allus a heap flightier when she's in the fam'ly way. But I never knowed Judy was given to them fits."
"She hain't," Jerry hastened to assure him. "I never knowed her to take on in sech a way afore. She's run guts many a time, like all the wimmin, an' never made no fuss."
"It grows on 'em," said Joe, ominously.
"Well, I s'pose we better pack it out," said Jerry, turning toward the house. "I hain't a-goin' to bother with the guts. There hain't but three four paound o' lard there at best. The pigs was too young to have much fat on their guts. We'll jes take an' heave it out back o' the shed where the hens kin peck it over."
The last sound Judith heard from the yard as she walked away was Snap fighting viciously with Joe Barnaby's dog, who had dared to approach too near to one of the blood pools.
She climbed the hill to the ridge road and walked and walked and walked. She no longer felt at all tired or sick at her stomach. A sense of burning indignation gave her power and energy. She wanted to keep on walking forever and put a longer and longer distance between herself and all that she had left behind: the hot, foul smelling kitchen with its odious tub of guts in the middle, the tub of filthy clothes, the steaming wash boiler, the screaming, insistent children, the men going smugly about with cheeks reddened by the frosty air, and trying to foist upon her the only part of the job that was tedious and hateful. The more she thought about it, the more redly her own cheeks burned with hot anger. She felt as if she could walk to the end of the world.
Her eyes, instinctively reaching out for freedom, sought the long view that sweeps from the top of the ridge to the horizon. It lay bleak and bare under a gray winter sky. Its bareness and monotony of tone made it more far-reaching than in summer. It seemed endless, as she imagined the ocean might be. Out of its calm and magnitude a sense of peace welled up and gradually enfolded her. Her step slackened into a measured, meditative pace. She half forgot the things that she had fled from and in a little while felt almost happy with the happiness that comes of peace and solitude and wide spaces. It was more than three years since she had been by herself in the open country. It was like meeting with an old lover who has not lost his power to charm. The cold air smelled good in her nostrils. She breathed deep and rested her eyes with a sense of quietness and calm on the long, dun stretches of winter fields.
Then it came upon her again quite suddenly. She felt that she had neither the courage nor the strength to go through with it all again, and so soon after the last time. Her flesh cringed at the thought and her spirit faltered. And when the child was born it was only the beginning. She loathed the thought of having to bring up another baby. The women who liked caring for babies could call her unnatural if they liked. She wanted to be unnatural. She was glad she was unnatural. Their nature was not her nature and she was glad of it.
She felt suddenly tired and sat down on a stone under a maple tree, her elbows propped upon her knees and her chin in her hands. A heavy cloak of misery hung about her its cold and clammy folds. The thought of her own utter helplessness against her fate settled upon her like the weight of something dead. For a long time she sat looking out over the winter landscape and seeing nothing. Her gaze was turned inward upon her own horror and despair.
After a while she began to cry, not passionately, but in a slow, cold, bitter way, as though even the relief of tears were denied her.
In the midst of her misery, thoughts of anxiety began to obtrude themselves. Suppose Jerry had let the fire go out. If he had, the baby would surely take his death of cold. Or he might have fallen head first into the slop bucket. Suppose Jerry had left Billy alone in the kitchen and he got to playing with matches or to poking bits of stick into the fire to set the ends burning. He could easily set fire to the house. And if anything happened to them it would be all her doing, because she had gone away and left them.
She began to shiver and became aware that her feet were like lumps of ice. She got up and turned hastily toward home. Looking about she was astonished to find how far she had come. As she hurried homeward her anxiety increased. Her heart began to beat fast and she stumbled over clods and bits of underbrush. The afternoon was fast drawing in to night.
When at last she reached the house and opened the kitchen door, the room was almost in darkness. Jerry was sitting by the table with the baby on his lap feeding him warm milk and corn cake. Billy was sitting on the floor eating some of the same mixture from a bowl. The room was frowsy and unswept. The washing was just as she had left it.
She had come back half prepared to be friendly with Jerry. But the look of aggrieved and self-righteous accusation that he cast at her as she opened the door was quite enough to kill feelings that at best were only struggling for existence. Her anger rose again as if it had never died. She returned his glance with a long, hard, black, piercing look and went to light the lamp. His sense of injury was changed into uneasiness and a vague anxiety. He would not admit it to himself; but he was afraid of her.
Silently she fried the corn cakes and some liver from the hogs that had been killed that day. When they had eaten and she was clearing the table, Jerry spoke.
"Lizzie May was here," he said, clearing his throat. "I had to tell her you'd stepped over to see Hat Wolf. She don't seem to know what to do with herse'f, poor gal. She feels dreadful about Dan."
"The more fool she. She dunno when she's well off," she answered brutally in a harsh, grating voice, and went on clearing the table, slapping the plates together viciously. Her own words shocked her; then she felt defiantly glad that she had said them.
He started, where he sat by the stove, and looked at her in astonishment. As she went on silently about her work, he kept glancing at her askance, questioningly, and with a vague uneasiness.
That spring they moved to another house close to several acres of fresh tobacco ground. Tobacco exhausts the soil in about three years and has to go through a renovating period. An old couple who aimed to raise only a patch of corn and perhaps an acre of tobacco moved into the house that they had left.
Lizzie May had taken her children and gone back to live with her father; and Jerry had thought of taking Dan's old house. But Judith did not feel that she could go to live in the house to which Dan had been brought home dead.
The house to which they moved was less than a mile from the one they left. It was built of pine boards roughly nailed together and neither sealed nor plastered. It had three bare, box-like rooms and a rickety back porch floored with boards many of which had rotted away from the nails that once held them. When you stepped on one end of these boards, the other end flew up into the air. The house stood on the top of a rather high ridge and commanded a broad view. Near it there was neither tree nor shrub; but there was a little clump of locust trees by the horsepond. Like Dan's old house it was bare, stark, and open to the sky.
A large and very dirty family of Pattons had lived there the year before. They were probably distantly akin to Uncle Joe Patton, although both families disclaimed all relationship. Judith spent days cleaning up the house and yard. The walls and ceiling of the kitchen were dark with soot and pendulous with dust webs. The floor was sticky with a long accumulation of grease and grime. Frying pan spatterings and the splashings from dish pan and wash basin showed just where the furniture of the Patton family had stood.
The yard was littered with rags, broken boards and old iron; and scraps of baling wire tripped the unwary foot.
She threw the old iron and baling wire into a pile behind the backhouse, and raked up the rest of the rubbish into several heaps of which she made bonfires to the delight and excitement of Billy, who hovered perilously near to the licking flames.
When it was all done there were still left many traces of the former occupants. In the packed dirt of the yard, old floor rags that had been trodden into the ground were continually coming to light. When she took hold of them to pull them out a rotted fragment came away in her hand and the rest clung obstinately to the dirt in which it was embedded. Billy, too, was continually crawling under the house and triumphantly dragging out filthy scraps of overalls, old shoes, stiff, and moldy, frayed fragments of straw hats, ghastly skeletons of corsets, eaten with mildew and rust, but preserving faithfully the shape of the female form that they had once embraced, old, rust-eaten shovels, broken rat traps, and the frowsy stubbs of ancient brooms.
These things she poked into the stove when Billy was not looking or relegated to the old iron scrap pile behind the backhouse. But the child was always bringing out more. It was an enticing mine of treasures.
As in almost all the other tenant houses, the windows were few and small, set high in the wall and placed without the slightest regard for comfort, convenience or symmetry. From the outside the house looked like a weathered packing case into which some one had sawed at random two or three small holes.
In spite of the dark rooms and the bare surroundings, Judith liked it better than the little house in the hollow. It was open to the wind and sky. From the tiny windows she could see far off. In the morning the first ray of sunlight brightened the top of the ridge; and at the end of day the sunset filled the house like a presence.