Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 19
Coming suavely and benignly after the cruel winter, the warmth fell like a softly enfolding presence. Spring is a gracious season in Kentucky, full of the smell of flowering locusts, of birdsong, and happy mornings. With sunlight falling through open doors and windows, the children playing outside and the baby asleep in her cradle, the house that all winter had been a cluttered, stinking prison became by contrast quiet, spacious, and restful.
Stimulated by the change, Judith cleaned house, raked up the yard, and burned the winter accumulation of rubbish, set out her garden and even planted some seed of sweet peas and nasturtiums about the house. The caressing spring days filled her with a sense of calmness and passive wellbeing.
She never sang or romped any more. She could not rejoice and be glad with these things of nature. But out of her calm torpor she looked at them as through a thin mist and they sank upon her spirit like healing on a wound. She grew very fond of sitting on the doorstep.
It was that spring that the United States began to make preparations to send young men to Europe to fight for democracy.
A black wave of fear darkened the sunshine of Scott County when it became known that the United States had entered the war. Gus Dibble's vague apprehensions that the trouble might come their way had incredibly been realized. Out of the mouth of a fool the truth had come, and the impossible had happened. The war had crossed the ocean and was among them and was going to take them away from their homes. A few restless and physically fit young blades like Ziemer Whitmarsh and Bob Crupper found in the news the glorious promise of adventure. A few hailed it as a hope of deliverance from irksome conditions of life. But to most of these simple youths who had never been more than twenty miles away from their own dooryards it brought terror, stark and appalling: terror of the unknown into which they would be dragged from the security of their home cabins and tobacco patches, terror of death and of the unknown after death. In the tired bodies and shrinking minds of these underfed young men there was little to foster a thirst for adventure, still less any feeling of adherence to such a middle class luxury as patriotism. No newspapers nor shouting demagogues came to them with the lies that create and feed an artificial frenzy. For them there were neither crowds nor music nor public acclaim: no showy paraphernalia to hide the stinking carcass of war; only the naked certainty, faced and pondered upon in solitude, that inevitably that dreaded and all-powerful machine known as the law would reach out for them, take them out of their homes, away from the comfort of familiar faces, and place them they knew not where. Knowing nothing of the law and its processes, they feared and respected it beyond all other things. To them it was a god much more real and powerful than the still less known God of the Bible.
It was the most timid among them who developed the boldness of desperation and dared to hide themselves from the recruiting officer. They dropped out of sight, fled away to the hill country. Often they were brought back ignominiously and given a year in jail. Sometimes they were never heard of again.
For the most part, the young men shambled mechanically about the barnyard and behind the plow, trying with indifferent success to cultivate stoicism, afraid of being thought cowards, waiting in cold terror until their time should come.
Fear and hate lay at the hearts of the mothers. And having fewer pretenses to keep up than their sons and less respect for vested authority, they gave free voice to their feelings. Mothers whose sons had been caught in the draft said hard and bitter things behind the backs of the more fortunate ones whose offspring had escaped. There was weeping into midnight pillows, there was terror and dismay, envy, and hard suspicion.
Elmer, the second oldest Gibbs boy, shot himself in the foot while he was out hunting. Nobody knew why or what he was hunting at that time of year. He was lamed for life, so Dr. MacTaggert said; but he didn't have to go.
Marsh, his elder brother, was all agog to get into the fray. He had been listening to the talk of Bob and Ziemer; and being something of a braggart like his father, he had begun to lust for military adventures.
One afternoon when he was plowing near by, he took refuge in the Blackford kitchen from a heavy thunderstorm. From time to time, as he sat close to the door, he cast a swift glance at Judith who stood by the table ironing a Sunday shirt for Jerry. When she went to the stove to change her iron, he followed her movements with eyes that peered furtively from under the brim of his frayed straw hat.
"Well, Marsh," she said, "I hear you're a-goin' into the war."
His face brightened.
"You betcha. Me an' Bob an' Ziemer is a-goin' to clean 'em up good."
"An' what you a-goin' to fight for, Marsh?"
"I dun—" He checked the word before it was out of his lips. "What we a-goin' to fight fer? Why, fer our rights, o' course. An' we're a-goin' to lick 'em, too, the hull lot of 'em."
"Haow do you mean, the hull lot of 'em? Who all air you a-goin' to lick?"
"Why, all them furriners o' course: the Germans an' the Turks an' the Eyetalians an' the French an' the whole lousy shootin' match."
Among the women a few bright particular spirits like Aunt Eppie, who had no sons of an age to come within the selective draft, burned with righteous zeal against the Hun. And as the tigress is more fierce and pitiless than her male companion, so the hatred in the hearts of these women burned with a more cruel, intense, and implacable fury than a man's heart is able to sustain. Aunt Eppie, who had gloried in her neutrality before the United States went into the war, considering the belligerents all equally despicable and trifling, now could not find enough words of praise for the Allies, nor heap sufficient ignominy on the Germans. When Aunt Eppie spoke of the unspeakable Hun and the idolatrous Turk, her cold gray eyes flashed with the steely gleam of a scimiter, her false teeth came together with a fierce click, like a rat trap closing down on an unfortunate lover of cheese, and her imperious, bony knuckles rapped the table with a sound as suggestive of finality as the driving of nails into a coffin.
Jerry's mother, Aunt Mary Blackford, was another who was consumed with the fires of hate. At any mention of the enemy Aunt Mary's personality changed from kittenish to tigerish. It was an uncanny thing to see this small, frail woman, so given over to the service of others, so devoted to her husband, her sons, and her grandchildren, so kind and friendly toward her neighbors, turn into a spiteful, vicious virago at the mere mention of people of whom she knew nothing whatever. As the cat's claws are sharp and pitiless, so something hard, cruel, and implacable stretched itself at this crisis out of Aunt Mary's velvet exterior. Her blue eyes, ordinarily mild and childlike, could flash with as cold a gleam as Aunt Eppie's gray ones. Her mouth could shut in lines as hard and pitiless. Her baby-like hands, fluttering in excited anger, seemed to Judith even more savage claws than Aunt Eppie's imperiously tapping knuckles. The younger woman felt something akin to hate rise in her own breast as she turned coldly away from Aunt Mary's demonstrations of righteous indignation.
"I reckon," she said, looking with coolly level eyes at her mother-in-law, "if you'd been born a German you'd be the fust one to hate us Americans same's you're a-hatin' the Germans naow. An' either way there'd be about as much sense to it."
Aunt Mary bridled fiercely under Judith's cold gaze.
"Well, I'm thankful I hain't one o' them that's without no nat'ral human feelin's," she spat out, then was silent, unable to find words to express her irritation and chagrin. The atmosphere was dense with the intensity of the two women's dislike for each other.
"When times like these comes, they show up folks in their real nater," sniffed Aunt Mary, after an angry pause.
"Yes, they do," answered Judith, with cold incisiveness.
Jerry, the only true devotee of peace, was made miserable when his wife and his mother sparred about the war. He shifted uneasily and looked from one to the other with dumbly beseeching eyes, like those of a gentle dog.
One morning when she was churning on the porch, Bob Crupper sauntered around the corner of the house.
For some time he hung about, talking of this and that: last night's rain that would bring the tobacco beds along, the new flagpole that they had just set up in the school yard, the big price that the sheep men were going to get for their wool. As he talked, he sat on the edge of the porch and whittled aimlessly at a stick or trundled a toy wagon up and down the porch floor with his hand.
At last, after a silence broken only by the thump of the dasher in the churn, he roused himself and stood up.
"Well, I must be a-goin'. I'm off to-night for the trainin' camp. So I'll say good-by."
She released the dasher and gave him her hand. He took it in his which was large, firm, and warm. His face twitched with embarrassment.
Suddenly she felt his face close to hers and heard his voice in a quick, hoarse whisper.
"Judy, mebbe I won't never see you agin. I'm agoin' to hev one kiss anyway afore I go."
She felt herself melting into his arms as he kissed her on the mouth long and passionately. The next moment he was gone.
Her hands trembled as she took hold of the dasher again. Had she kissed him back or had she not kissed him back, she wondered. For a long time her lips burned from his kiss, as once before her neck and shoulder had burned from his look.
In June the neighborhood was thrown into a flutter of excitement by the coming of two evangelists. People said that they were from a little sect in the hill country. They stopped with Uncle Joe Patton, who was himself a religious man and a total abstainer, and they were to hold their meetings in Uncle Joe's house. All the neighbors were urged to attend the meetings.
Jerry was again working beyond his strength. He was determined to have a big tobacco crop this year. It was whispered that the price of tobacco would go sky high on account of America being in the war. He was becoming grouchy from the strain of overwork. Judith, with three babies to care for, could give no help.
"I hain't a-goin' to be drug to none o' their godforsaken meetin's," he said testily to Judith, when she mentioned the evangelists. "I'm too damn tired nights to do anything but turn in. But there hain't nothin' to keep you from goin' if you've a mind. I'll be here in the house with the young uns. All I ast is don't wake me up when you come home."
The thought of the evangelists piqued Judith's curiosity. Her life was easier now that summer had come; and her peaceful apathy was beginning to be stirred by slight tremors of returning interest in things. She had never listened to an evangelist since that half forgotten night when she was ten. She decided to go.
On the way she called for Hat. She knew that Hat would be going. As she expected Hat was preparing to start and had made elaborate toilet preparations. She had frizzed her hair so that it stood out violently on all sides, and she was wearing a stiffly starched pink calico dress. Under the dress Judith glimpsed the red petticoat.
Luke, in his sock feet, stretched luxuriously in an old rocker.
"I reckon you two is spilin' fer sumpin to do," he said, giving them a swift disdainful glance, as he spat into the woodbox. "An' if them lousy preachers'd foller the plow a spell or do a little wrastlin' on the end of a shovel through the day, they wouldn't be so spry about draggin' the wimmin out nights."
"Aw, shet up," returned Hat. "I guess seekin' the Lord nights is jes as good as huntin' foxes anyway. You don't need to hand out no lip."
They walked across fields to the Patton home, each carrying a lantern, for there was no moon. The night was warm and sweet with the smells of summer. Blackberry bushes reached sharp tentacles out of the dark and made Hat gather her precious dress more closely about her.
"I wisht the meetin's was held anywheres but at Patton's place," she fretted. "It's so durn hard to git to, an' when you git there it's so lonesome lookin' it seems like it's hanted. The old folks all says it's hanted. It gives me the chills."
They crossed one creek on a plank and another on a log. Hat's great bulk teetered uneasily on the log and she thought of her clean dress and white stockings.
"Durn hard place to git to," she muttered.
The light wind was balmy and full of woodsy fragrance. In one place a whiff from a flowering alfalfa field came to them on the warm air heavy and sweet.
In a corner of a pasture their footsteps startled some sheep invisible in the darkness. A shivery sound of the movement of many soft bodies and then the patter of innumerable small feet told them that the sheep had scampered away. A few who had become separated from the main flock bleated inquiringly. The others answered: "This way, sisters, this way."
Judith felt strangely stirred and elated. It was an adventure, this coming out into the warm, soft, fragrant night. She thrilled to hear the sheep pattering away into the darkness calling to each other.
A rough wagon track down the side of a steep hill covered with brush and stunted trees brought them to the clearing about the Patton house. It was a tall old house built of heavy logs that had once been whitewashed. It rose corpselike in the dim light of the stars. Small dark windows piercing the thickness of the logs looked out from the pallid walls like eyes.
The house was hemmed in on every side. On the north, from which they had approached it, the hill rose abruptly. East and west the woods crept almost to the doors. On the south was Stony Creek, a torrent in winter, a wide, half dried up river bed in summer. Wagons to get to the place must either come down the steep hill or ford the river. The house was shaded by aged gray willows. Of evenings it was swathed in vapors from the river bed.
There was a vague story whispered about the place: a story of one of those atrocious murders that occur from time to time in out-of-the-way places, where solitude and the emptiness of life teach the mind to brood. Such morbidly brooding minds sometimes flare out into sudden, grim passions, craving the sacrifice of blood.
Such a story was told about the Patton place. Perhaps it had a basis of fact. Perhaps it was only a myth grown out of the sinister appearance of the house and the dark-crannied minds of the tobacco growers. It was old and vague and told with many variations.
"Land alive, but it's a pesky, shivery place," complained Hat. "An' it's damp an' dirty, too. I despise sech a place. I wouldn't live here fer no money."
Light shone from one window of the Patton house, and several low-burning lanterns stood by the door. They added their own to the gleaming cluster and pushed open the door.
Uncle Joe Patton was praying. In the half light cast by a tall, thin glass lamp with a tiny wick, a dozen or so women and perhaps half a dozen men knelt upon the floor before planks laid from chair to chair. Two dogs sat at respectful attention and one was curled up under the table. A large black cat slept on the flattened patchwork cushion of the only rocking chair in the room. The heavy beams of the low ceiling, blackened with smoke and hung with cobwebs, seemed to absorb into their gloom the light of the small lamp.
Uncle Joe's prayer was long and meandering, like all his talk. He was a very old man, and like many other old men harped constantly upon a certain few things, saying them over and over again, each time as impressively as if they were quite new to the patient listener. He addressed the Lord in like manner. His voice rumbling along in the level monotone appropriate to prayer was as drowsy as the humming of bees over a clover field. Judith, who had been standing at the washtub most of the day, caught herself nodding into sleep as she knelt at the end of one of the planks.
She was roused from one of these dozes by Uncle Jabez's dog poking his moist nose into her face; and she began to peer about from under her sunbonnet in quest of the two strangers. She found them easily enough; but their heads were so devoutly bowed in prayer that there was nothing of them to be seen but backs and shoulders. She saw Hat's eyes traveling in the same direction as her own, and encountered the bored gaze of Uncle Jabez and the twinkling gray eyes of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, who was taking a look around after having consulted his watch.
She dozed a little; and when she roused herself and fell to peeping again she caught an exchange of looks between Abbie Gibbs and Ziemer Whitmarsh.
Aunt Jenny Patton, who suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to put the yeast into the rising of bread, rose at this moment and slipped unobtrusively into the back kitchen. The cat in the rocking chair yawned and stretched, then curled again deliciously. Still Uncle Joe droned along. The kneelers stirred more and more uneasily trying to relieve their cramped legs and aching knees.
At last, when they had almost lost hope, Uncle Joe droned to an end; and they all stood up with sighs of relief and were led into a hymn. The two evangelists and Jabez Moorhouse were the only ones who really sang. The others made vague, inarticulate sounds, took breath gaspingly and quavered uneasily into silence. Uncle Joe, in an aged tremolo, tried hard to follow, but was like a dog that has lost the scent. And summons and prayers shall be o'er;
When the harvest is past and the summer is gone,
And Jesus invites us no more.
The evangelists were both rather good singers, and Jabez had a sonorous bass. The tune went wailing to the smoky rafters, wistful and melancholy.
During the hymn Judith and everybody else gazed curiously at the evangelists.
They were farmer folk like herself she knew by the sure intuition with which people know their own kind. One was tall and flimsy of body, with a receding chin, bulging eyes light blue in color, prominent teeth and a large Adam's apple. She seemed to have seen him before or somebody like him. He made her think of a fish. He looked innocent, kindly, and stupid.
The other was shorter and more compactly built. There was nothing remarkable about his face or figure except that he had strange, arresting eyes that seemed to smolder with a dark, inward flame. The eyes fascinated her. Again and again she felt her own drawn toward them. Twice during the singing she met his gaze and turned away her own abashed and in confusion.
When the singing was over, the evangelist with the strange eyes began to preach a sermon, taking as his text the words, "Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." As soon as he began to speak, she knew that his voice matched his eyes. It was glowing, fiery, and under the fire rich with tenebrous depth. He talked about sin and the wrath to come, the raging fires of eternal damnation and the worm that never dieth. As he talked the smoldering glow of his strange eyes burst into flame. The familiar cant phrases of revivalist exhortation falling glibly from his tongue took strength and color from the fire of his dark fanaticism. In the dim light he seemed to grow larger. A potent magnetism issued from him and held the listeners spellbound.
At the end of his discourse he swept them into a hymn.
Almost persuaded. Doom comes at last.
Almost can not avail.
Sad, sad the bitter wail.
Almost is but to fail.
Almost—but lost.
The music, lovingly hugging the words, combined with the rankling pain of remorse and the bitterness of despair the iron clang of inevitable doom. Of its kind the hymn was a masterpiece. During the singing the simple tobacco growers and their wives, not used to spiritual stimulation, looked vaguely troubled, flustered and ill at ease.
When the hymn was over and the preacher sat down the spell was broken. Virtue seemed to have gone out of him. With all his fervor he had uttered nothing but strings of stock phrases used by every ranter about hell fire. They had heard it all before. When the glow of his personality no longer enfolded them, his listeners were left empty-minded and their thoughts reverted instantly to their own affairs, to the kitchen, the barn, and the tobacco field.
Judith did not ponder upon what the preacher had said. For her hell fire had no terrors. Her spirit was of a pagan soundness that shed such tainted superstitions as a duck's down sheds water. But she could not forget the man's darkly glowing eyes and darkly vibrant voice. Through the thick gloom as she walked home she saw the eyes burning before her, heard the voice vibrating through the fragrance of the summer night.
"Ouch!" exclaimed Hat, "if I hain't done gone an' stuck my foot into a mud hole. An' me with white stockin's on, too. Drat the durn lantern, it don't give light enough fer a flea to go to bed by."
In the same spot where it had greeted them before came a whiff from a flowering alfalfa field, not clover nor heliotrope, but a mixture of the intensest sweetness of both, subtle, and disquieting.
"Say, Judy, don't you think the short feller was good lookin'? An' what was it about his eyes—an' his voice, too? I dunno—sumpin."
All the way home Hat talked about the preacher's good looks, about Luke's slovenliness, a new dress that she was making, and a sunbonnet pattern that she had made up herself out of her own head. Through her unheeded patter of talk Judith saw the strange eyes looking at her out of the darkness, heard the dark voice vibrating in the fragrance of the summer night.
On the way home Amos Crupper said to Sam Whitmarsh in his deep chest tones:
"Waal, that there was a fine sermon the young feller preached—a strong, powerful sermon. I like to listen to a good sermon an' read the news about the war. It makes a man feel like life hain't all but jes plantin' an' diggin' taters an' hoein' terbaccer."
"Yaas," agreed Uncle Sam, "sech things livens a feller up a bit an' makes him realize this life hain't all. I hearn you was needin' a buggy hoss, Amos. I got the finest little mare—dark bay—awful purty color—six year old no more, an' I'd—"
"No, Sam, she hain't fer me," Uncle Amos interrupted him smiling genially. "I knowed that there little mare when Pete Akers had her, an' I know she's twelve if she's a day an' she's had the heaves since she was little more'n a colt. You fix her up with a little dose o' birdshot to cover up them heaves an' take her to Georgetown on Court Day. You'll be able to trade her good an' mebbe put a little piece o' money in yer pocket."
On the way home Jabez Moorhouse, walking somberly alone, thought how his life had been wasted.
"I cud a made a preacher," he said to himself, "or a congressman or a jedge or learnt to play the fiddle good if I'd on'y had a chanct. But all my life I hain't done nothin' but dig in dirt. An' all the rest o' my life I'm a-goin' to keep right on a-diggin' in dirt."
He spat tobacco juice into the grass and uttered his favorite exclamation of disgust. It was a phrase of his own contriving, a rich verbal arabesque of profanity and obscenity cunningly inwrought.
Having thus partly relieved his feelings, he took a long pull from a bottle that he always carried in his pocket.
After several long pulls he felt much better and sang into the night a ballad with the oft-recurring refrain:
"You can't have my daughter without the gray mare."
On the way home Ziemer Whitmarsh overtook Abbie Gibbs, who had purposely hung behind the other members of her family, wound his arm about her slim, consumptive waist and drew her aside from the path.
On the way home Joe Barnaby and young Marsh Gibbs hesitated where a road making gang who were widening the pike to Georgetown had left their roller and other tools by the side of the road.
"D'yuh know what I spied Gus Dibble a-doin' the other day?" said Joe in a tone of infinite disgust. "I seen him a-stealin' a log chain out o' these here fixin's. What d'yuh think of a feller'd steal a log chain, hey?"
Joe himself had for many years eked out his small means by doing jobs of lumber hauling and was hence amply provided with log chains.
"I dunno," mused Marsh. "Mebbe he needed the log chain. I know I need a new shovel awful bad, an' they've riz up awful high in price since the war come on. That there long-handled one over there is jes the kind I was a-wantin'."
He looked wistfully at the shovel.
"Oh, well, of course a shovel's diff'rent," Joe hastened to assure him. "If I wanted the shovel I'd take it along 'f I'z you. The dod gasted road comp'ny kin buy more. 'Tain't like takin' anythin' off'n a neighbor."
"That's so," agreed Marsh, taking loving hold upon the handle of the shovel.
"The young uns lost my last pair o' pliers yestiddy," confided Joe. "I made the little buggers look everywhere fer 'em, but o' course they didn't find 'em. Hardware's awful high these days. I never knowed hardware to be so high. I reckon I'll jes slip this pair into my pocket, an' nobody'll know where they went to 'cep you an' me, hey, Marsh?"
"Sure," agreed Marsh heartily, as he shouldered the shovel. "You might's well have 'em as any other night walker. Durn careless of 'em to leave these small things lyin' about anyway. Serve 'em right if they hain't here when they come back."
When Judith crept into bed beside Jerry and closed her eyes inviting sleep, she saw the burning eyes of the evangelist looking at her out of the darkness.