Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 20
A Few weeks before the arrival of the Evangelists, Hat had sent away a dime and a two cent stamp to certain parties who had advertised in the "Farm Wife's Friend" that for that sum they would teach you how to develop your personal magnetism and to exert it in such a way that you could control the people with whom you came in contact and make them do whatever you willed that they should do. She received in answer a typewritten letter informing her that hers had been one of the very few letters received by them which indicated beyond a doubt that the writer was a person possessed of a tremendous amount of latent magnetism, a mighty force with untold possibilities of being turned to the owner's advantage. For ordinary people the fee for further instruction was ten dollars. But for her, with her intensely interesting personality and wonderful latent power, they would make the exceptionally low rate of three dollars. For this trifling sum her special case would be taken up and studied in the minutest detail by the greatest specialists of the world, all of them congregated for this important purpose in Toledo, Ohio.
The letter brought to Hat's bosom considerable conflict of impulses. She was flattered and thrilled to know that she was the possessor of an interesting personality full of great magnetic power. In a vague way she had always suspected something of the sort. Now of course she knew for sure. She pondered upon the advantages that the use of this magnetic influence would bring. Of course her first exercise of it would be upon Luke, to make him change his socks oftener, eat less disgustingly at the table, get up first and light the fire in the morning, and chop the stove wood instead of going off and leaving it for her to do. She would also influence him to be fairer in money matters and let her have her just share of what she earned and put it into a bank account in her own name. Since her marriage her disputes with Luke on the subject of the division of their money had been frequent and heated.
Having reformed Luke in this way, she was by no means sure that she would be entirely satisfied with him. She was ready to be convinced that there were nicer men in the world than Luke. Her thoughts rambled away into shadowy and devious paths, imagining lovers of many sorts. With this great power in her possession what avenue in life would be closed to her?
But three dollars! It was too much! How could she bear to take three whole dollar bills and put them into an envelope and send them away? With a two cent stamp or a dime or even both it was different. But three whole dollars! She thought of all the finery that three dollars would buy if she had a mind to spend the money on finery. She thought of all the eggs that she would have to take to Peter Akers' store to get three dollars. No, she just couldn't send away three dollars.
But the idea of having her personal magnetism developed was too fascinating a subject to be easily forgotten. She figured and pondered, almost sent the three dollars a dozen times, but could not bring herself to the final mailing of the letter.
On the day after the first revival meeting, Hat found in her mail box another letter from the cultivators of personal magnetism which fairly made her heart bleed. It began:
"Dear Harriet Wolf: If my own sister had failed to answer my letter, I could not have felt more disappointed than I was at not hearing from you. Many a night I have lain awake thinking of the tremendous power in your extremely interesting personality which is being wasted, thrown away, scattered to the idle winds."
It went on for two and a half typewritten pages in the most personal and poignant manner. Hat could hardly keep from shedding tears of mingled gratification and self-pity. She was a stranger to the devious ways of the advertising business; and the mimeographed form letter, with her own name so skilfully inserted that it took a trained eye to tell it from the rest of the type, was to her a personal missive from one overflowing heart to another. Besides, the price was reduced fifty cents. For two dollars and fifty cents, if she acted quickly, she could now have her personal magnetism developed.
As she walked home from the mail box through the sweet June weather she thought of the dark eyed evangelist and of her own great undeveloped possibilities. She was stirred by a feeling that life was on the point of opening out for her. She decided to send away the money.
At home she got out the two dollars and fifty cents from a secret place in which she kept such money as she could manage, by various roundabout methods, to get out of Luke's hands, and dropped it into a jar on the clock shelf ready to buy a money order when she met the rural mail carrier next day. But by the next day her ardor had cooled to such an extent that the money looked too good to part with. She put it carefully back into the secret place.
After the second revival meeting she arrived at the conclusion that it was her duty to give a party to make the strangers feel at home.
"It looks like it's up agin me," she said to Judith, with something of the air of a martyr, "seein' nobody else hain't come forrard. O' course the fixin' an' bakin'll come kinder heavy on me, bein' as haow it's terbaccer choppin' time. So I wouldn't mind a bit if you brung along a little cake or sumpin like that to he'p me aout."
She must have thrown out the same subtle suggestion to all the invited guests, for few of the women came without a package in their hands.
The party, as seemed fitting, opened with prayer and a hymn and partook throughout of the nature of a prayer meeting. Out of respect for the preachers there was no dancing, neither were there any boisterous kissing games. The men lounged in the kitchen handy to the stove and woodbox and talked about the war. The women sat about in little groups in Hat's best room and from time to time broke the heavy silence by isolated remarks about babies, sicknesses, and the best ways of rendering out hog fat. Even the men talked in subdued tones; and over everything there was a hushed atmosphere of restraint and respectful decorum. Nothing disturbed the decent calm but occasional giggles and titters from the young and unmarried who had a tendency to disappear in couples.
Hat, who entertained her guests with several songs, accompanying herself on the violin, avoided the more jaunty and jiglike airs of her repertoire and sang instead a doleful ballad of many stanzas, the gist of which is contained in the following two:
I became your happy bride,
Changed a mansion for a cottage
To dwell by the waterside.
But no happiness I see,
For to-night I am a widow
In the cottage by the sea.
Though her voice was a bit strident and her fiddling rather noisy and vigorous for the conveying of these soft sentiments, the listeners, especially the women, seemed none the less deeply touched at the poor young woman's loss of both her man and her mansion.
As she sang she sought more than once with her bold, dark glances the magnetic eyes of the more attractive of the two preachers. Her chagrin was great and very poorly concealed when toward the close of the song about the unfortunate young lawbreaker, she saw the glance that she coveted traveling straight toward Judy Blackford who sat in a corner with her hands folded in her lap looking strangely demure and more than usually beautiful. The eye of jealousy is quicker than the eye of love to perceive beauty. Hat glared and in deep bitterness cursed the fate that had not given to herself outward charms in keeping with her qualities of soul. She wished that she had sent away the two dollars and a half.
Out of respect for the guests of honor, very little whiskey flowed at this party. The small amount of drinking that went on was done surreptitiously from pocket flasks in the dark of the outer night. The beverage served with the cake was water.
"It's pure," Hat boasted proudly, as she passed it about in tumblers, goblets, teacups, and jelly glasses. "We got the best well this side o' Sadieville."
When the guests had washed down their pieces of stack cake with this innocent and economical drink, they began to think about going home. As Judith was tying on her sunbonnet, she glimpsed under the bed where Hat had hastily shoved them, the corners of several cakes.
"Her an' Luke'll live on stale cake fer the nex' month," she whispered to Jerry.
The two young preachers stationed themselves at the door and shook hands with all the "friends" as they passed out. And though the handshakes were a bit solemn and prayermeetinglike, they were kindly meant. When it came Judith's turn to take the hand of the preacher with the strange eyes, she felt herself hesitating. Then, having given him her hand, she withdrew it hurriedly and passed out. She felt Hat's searching eyes fastened upon her. Her fingers tingled and her heart thumped as she climbed into the cart and sat down beside Jerry. She was glad of the darkness, for she knew that her cheeks were in a flame.
A compelling fascination lured her again and again to the revival meetings. There through the meaningless droning of the prayers, the wail of the hymns and the exhortations of the evangelists, she sat in a half hypnotized state conscious only of a pair of darkly burning eyes, a darkly vibrating voice. Not once but many times during the service her fascinated gaze met that of the preacher and swerved from it, confused and abashed. Once, by an effort of will, she met his look with her own dark, level gaze and did not turn her eyes aside. He started and turned abruptly away; and in the dim light she thought she saw a dark red flush pass across his face.
Having found that she had this power, she was constantly prodded by the urge to exercise it. She knew nothing about self-discipline. All her life she had known no guide but her impulses. Now as always she followed where they pointed. It was not mere coquetry, but an irresistible force stronger than herself that made her dart her level, penetrating glance like a keen sword into the dark turmoil of the evangelist's smoldering eyes. He winced as if the sword had pierced him. Through her temples the blood pounded tumultuously. She was seized with a delirious, half frenzied joy. She held her breath so that she would not scream. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Hat.
Once they sang an old fashioned hymn, now rarely heard in churches:
Only to lie at his feet,
A broken and empty vessel
That the Master's use may meet.
Empty that he might fill me
As forth to His service I go,
Broken and unencumbered
That His light through me may flow.
When the evangelist sang he gave his whole soul to the singing. His breast heaved with more than the expansion of his lungs. His strange eyes dilated and burned. An aura of ecstasy welled out from him. He was a man transfigured and beyond himself. The tune, unutterably wistful and rich with passionate longing, surged through the little room. With music, the only tongue that can voice passion, it spoke mightily to the two who had ears to hear. It throbbed in Judith's temples, in her heart, in all the arteries of her body. Irresistibly she sought the eyes of the evangelist. This time he did not turn away. A shaft of dark fire reached out to her from his transfigured face, bold, compelling, and masterful; and it was she who with a hot blush dropped her gaze to the floor. By a lucky chance Hat was not there that night.
In the darkness of the summer night he overtook her on the way home. All the way she had been listening for him. She knew that he would come. He came up with her where the alfalfa field spilled its subtle fragrance into the warm night air. His arms about her were strong and imperative. His hands were hot. His kissing mouth was insatiable. With an ecstasy transcending anything that she had ever felt in her life, she yielded herself to his passion.
She moved through the succeeding weeks in an unquiet trance, treading not upon hard earth, but upon some substance infinitely buoyant and elastic. She scarcely knew that she washed and milked and churned and worked over butter, that she cooked and swept and hoed in the garden and dressed and fed the children. She performed these tasks as one drives a horse through a pitch black night, leaving the lines slack and letting the animal feel his way. Her body, well broken to household routine, went forward by itself without guidance of the mind. From daylong labors done in this way she came forth strangely fresh and unwearied.
Always she was intensely conscious of her body, deliciously aware of the roundness of her arms, the softness and whiteness of her breasts, the slim grace of her ankles. Never before had she given such things more than a passing thought. In other times when she had thought about the appearance of her body it had been in relation to new dresses. Now the beauty of her body lived and moved with her continually, a part of her consciousness. She gazed long into the little looking glass at her cheeks, radiant with a warm flush, her eyes softly luminous. Something of the cool, level quality had gone out of the eyes leaving a deep radiance. Looking into the glass she laughed little soft, shivery laughs and felt the blood rise tingling into her cheeks.
Sitting on the doorstep to peel potatoes or shell peas, she stretched her slim, brown, bare feet out into the sunshine and looked at them with eyes that saw their beauty. She twisted a strand of her lustrous black hair about her finger, made it into a glittering curl and dangled it in the sunlight with a foolish little laugh.
In the yard not far from the kitchen door stood a rose bush, a poor, battered, stunted thing, scratched and nipped by the hens and broken back again and again by straying hogs and calves. Nothing was left of it but a few spiny stalks almost denuded of leaves. On one of these stalks she had noticed a red bud swelling.
One morning when she came to the door she saw that the bud had blossomed into a rose, not a frail pink blossom, but a silken, scarlet thing with a great, gold heart, heavy with dew and fragrance. Gorgeously it flaunted on its distorted stem. Against the drabness of the dooryard, now bare with summer drought, it flamed rich and vivid. She knelt on the ground beside the rose and smelled of its perfume. Inhaling the fragrance and looking into the deep richness of the scarlet leaves, she felt carried beyond herself with a great uplifting of the heart. Tears from some strange, hidden source welled into her eyes.
After its one rose had shed its leaves, the little bush, discouraged by the drought and the continual pecking of the hens, dried up and leveled itself with the ground.
Fearful of shrewd looks and whispering tongues, she did not go often to the meetings. They had other places of rendezvous. One was a deep hollow pungent with the smell of mint, where the creek splashed over moss covered stones and a weeping willow trailed its gray leaves in the water. Here on the hottest July afternoon the overhanging boughs of many trees and saplings made a green coolness. The place seemed remote as a cave until one day Uncle Jonah Cobb came along the little cowpath that bordered the creek. They heard him pushing aside the branches that grew across the unfrequented path and had time to dive back into the underbrush. Half blind and more than half deaf, he took his slow way through their little bower and, like an old ox whose neck bends by second nature to the yoke, never once lifted his head.
"I wonder was Uncle Jonah ever young?" she whispered, when he was safely out of hearing.
After that she would never go there again. The place seemed as open as a public square, as bare to the world as a housetop. She could never think of it without seeing Uncle Jonah plodding through it, his eyes fixed on the ground, a long blue patch on the back of his gray shirt, his denim trousers, much too large for him, hitched half way up his back by his greasy galluses.
Hemmed in between two steep hills and smothered in brush that had grown up about it was the shell of an old shanty that had been forsaken of man as long as Judith could remember. Near it was neither wagon track nor cowpath. Nobody ever came that way. On the floor, streaked and stained by many rains, they made themselves a resting place of cedar boughs and last year's leaves.
Mocking birds had built that year in the locust trees by the horsepond. How many she did not know. Perhaps there was only a pair or two, but it sounded like a dozen. She could see their pert little gray and white bodies darting about in the branches. Sometimes one of them would perch on a fence rail or the rooftree of the smokehouse and flirt his long tail saucily as he preened his feathers. These little choir boys to Pan, in whose small bodies the spark of life burned with such an intense flame, who lived only to love and to sing, kept the air vibrant almost all day long with their insistent, soul disturbing melodies. For a few hours the noonday sun lulled them into luxurious rest and a deep quiet fell, treacherously haunted by erotic echoes. The meadow larks that sang over and over again at regular intervals their one slender ripple of song were with their few guileless notes like poor little parlor singers beside these great masters of bird opera. There was no sound in the language of birds that they could not make. They chirped, chirred, trilled, twittered, caroled, ran again and again through all the scales a bird's voice ever compassed. Just to show what they could do, they imitated with perfection of accuracy the song of the finch, the robin, the meadow lark. Then, soaring far beyond the compass of these humble singers, burst forth rapturously into such floods of melody that the sunlight seemed filled with a rain of bright jewels. With delirious abandon to love and joy, the music welled from their little throats, palpitatingly, delicate, piercingly sweet. The enraptured rush of it, the sudden turns of it, the mad surprises of it penetrated Judith's being and swayed her like the master passion of which they were the voice.
They did not often sing in the night. But once a wakeful wooer sat on the ridgepole of the smokehouse and poured into the white moonlight floods of wild melody. For a long time Judith stood at the window looking out at the dim sky with scarcely a star showing and the world lying blanched and black under the light of the full moon. The locust trees by the horsepond looked dark and mysterious. The shadow of the smokehouse gable lay sharp and black against the whiteness of the yard. On the ridgepole she could just distinguish the little dark speck whose music thrilled the night. She leaned her head on the window sill and felt herself melting, dissolving away into music and moonlight.
All at once the bird stopped singing and a silence fell like the hush before doom. She shivered in her thin nightgown and crept back into bed. Sobs were rising in her throat. She tried to stifle them in the pillow; but her whole body shook in the grip of the hysteria.
Jerry stirred uneasily in his heavy sleep of exhaustion.
"Don't cry, Judy," he murmured sleepily, winding his arm about her. "Things'll come out all right."
It was blackberry season and she had a good excuse for leaving the children with Aunt Selina. Aunt Selina was genuinely glad to have them. Like most other back country women she was ready with glib lies to suit any occasion. But Judith knew that she was not lying when she said: "Fetch 'em over soon agin, Judy, the little darlin's." The old woman dearly loved the company of children. She chirruped and twittered to the baby and prattled in an unending stream to the two boys as they followed her about while she fed the chickens and tended the rabbits and hoed the cabbages and the rows of beans. She loved to put cookies into their chubby little grimy hands and twists of sugared popcorn in the pockets of their overalls. She had a sweet tooth herself, so she nearly always had such things about the house. They were near of an age, all four, and happy together.
He would meet her on the edges of the pasture slopes where the blackberries grew and help her fill her tin bucket with the large, juicy berries. Here in the embrace of the sun the earth swooned with midsummer heat. Bees drowsed over the patches of steeplebush. Here and there tall stately stalks of ironweed lifted their great crowns of royal purple. The scent of flowering milkweed distilled out into the hot sunshine was heavy and sweet. Heavier and sweeter was the smell of purple alfalfa blossoms blown across the pasture in warm whiffs.
As they strayed about over the close cropped grass among the brambles and dock and patches of steeplebush, they spoke to each other scarcely at all. Only sometimes when he came beside her, he gripped her hand in his which was strong and dark. When the berry bucket was full he drew her unresistingly down between the steep hills to the old shanty.
Through these hot summer weeks she felt small need of sleep. When in the half light of the early morning she and Jerry took their milk buckets and went through the yard to the cowlot, she felt awake, alive, a creature of the morning. She thrilled to the feeling of newness, of life born again, that stirs through a summer dawn.
As the summer advanced, an uneasiness that was something other than erotic unrest began to assail her. She tried to dismiss it, to ignore its existence, to lose herself in the old preoccupations. Untiring as a weasel intent upon the blood of chickens, it kept coming back upon her with stealthy persistence. She knew that it was trying to awaken her from her dream. She did not want to be awakened; yet more and more surely she realized that the waking hour was at hand. When she looked into her mirror she met a cool, level gaze looking calmly out at her through radiance that was growing dim. The blood no longer rose warmly into her cheeks.
At first the dark-eyed stranger had power to charm away this disquieting intruder and bring the dream back. For this she sought him out at all times and places, unmindful of the tongue of slander, forgetting prudence, forgetting everything but the desire to be kept within her dream. He felt gratified at first, as a man is gratified by evidence of his power to attract. Then, fearing whither her recklessness might lead, tormented too by fears and dark conflicts that were an outgrowth of his nature, but had no part in hers, he tried to show her the folly of her lack of discretion. When he began to do this she was filled with bitter contempt for what she called his cowardice. She looked at him grimly, with a hard light in her eyes, and knew that she must surely awaken.
She began to go less often to look for berries; and the little shanty between the hills saw them more and more rarely. When they met in the pasture lands she was sullen and irritable. He too gloomed and grouched.
One day when she saw him coming toward her in the blackberry patch, her eyes instead of seeking his fell upon the lower part of his face. It was not a bad face as the faces of men go; but of a sudden it seemed to her revoltingly stupid, sullen, and almost bestial. She restrained a mad impulse to fling out her arm and slap it with the back of her hand.
The blackberry season was nearly over, and the berries were becoming few and scattered. They ranged far searching for the luscious fruit. She kept as far away from him as she could. Something about his presence seemed to make the air stuffy.
He picked into a little folding cup that he was in the habit of carrying in his pocket. When he brought the cup full of berries and emptied it into her bucket, she looked at him with cold, sardonic eyes.
When the bucket was half full she took it resolutely on her arm.
"You don't need fer to pick no more," she said coldly. "I'm a-goin' back home naow."
He looked at her at first beseechingly. Then a look of relief spread over his features.
"It's best so," he muttered huskily. But he turned and walked beside her.
"Fall'll soon be a-comin' on," she said. "See that there maple branch is red a'ready. That there one big branch allus turns red in August, long afore the others."
He quoted from one of his hymns:
And Jesus invites us no more.
She was mastered by a cruel desire to make him suffer.
"I shouldn't reckon Jesus'd invite you," she scoffed, "after the way you bin a-actin'. Hain't you askairt you'll roast in hell fire forever for the way you bin a-doin'? An' you with the face to keep on standin' up an' preachin' diff'rent all the time!"
He started violently, as though she had thrust a knife into him where it could hurt the most. The struggling demons of lust and religious fanaticism that made for themselves a battle ground of his wretched body and spirit looked at her out of his darkly smoldering eyes. It was a look to call forth pity. But she was not in a mood to feel pity.
"God forgive me and save me from you," he groaned, covering his face with his hands, "you scarlet woman!"
She laughed derisively.
"Huh, I reckon I hain't no scarleter'n what you air. An' anyhaow I don't feel scarlet, an' you do. I don't do things I'm ashamed o' doin', an' I hain't a bit askairt o' hell fire neither."
He turned and fled away from this monstrous creature, this cold and sinful woman who knew neither fear nor shame.
She laughed a mocking laugh; then turned toward him suddenly, overpowered with deep disgust.
"I couldn't stummick to swaller the dirty berries you picked," she called out, and threw the berries after him, with the swift motion of a spiteful little quarreling schoolchild. Then she walked away and never once looked back.
For weeks she had been struggling against this unseen force that she knew was trying to awaken her from her dream. She had been edging away from the thought of waking, shivering with apprehension. Now that she knew herself broad awake, she felt of a sudden glad, bold, and strong. A sense of freedom, of relief from some clinging burden that had grown clogged and foul, passed through her like a strong wind that scatters cobwebs and made her breath deep and lift her head high in the sunlight. Swinging the empty bucket with happy abandon, as a child its dinner pail, she strode with long, free steps across the pasture and along the ridge road, delighting in the sun and the sweet air, feeling clean, sound, and whole, her mind untroubled by regrets, unsullied by the slightest tinge of self-abasement.
In Aunt Selina's clean-swept dooryard she called for the children and went on toward home walking like some primal savage woman with movements scarcely less strong and free for the weight of the baby on her arm. The boys, half carrying, half dragging the empty bucket, frolicked about her in circles.
At supper that night she looked about at her family as though she were seeing them for the first time after an absence. As is usual after absence, she liked them all better, felt more kindly disposed toward them and more solicitous for their welfare. Also she saw them more clearly as with the eyes of a stranger.
The boys, greedily devouring their milk and corn cakes and champing valiantly up and down ears of green corn that she had boiled for supper, were hale and ruddy little fellows. But on their baby faces she saw already appearing traces of a look that she had learned to dread, a look that stamps itself upon the faces of those who for generations have tilled the soil in solitude, a heavy, settled, unexpectant look. It seemed cruel that such a look should come upon the faces of little boys long even before their time for doing barn chores. Looking at them she was filled with a vague unhappiness.
When she turned from the boys to the little girl she felt a more poignant sting. Annie was the kind of little girl one sees often in country places and very rarely in towns. She had a puny, colorless, young-old face, drab hair thin and fine, that hung in little straight wisps about her cheeks, a mouth scarcely different in color from the rest of the face, and blank, slate-colored eyes. There was neither depth nor clearness in the little eyes, no play of light and shade, no sparkle of mirth or mischief, no flash of anger, nothing but a dead, even slate color. They were always the same. In their blank, impenetrable gaze they held the accumulated patience of centuries. Looking into these calm little eyes, Judith shrank and shuddered.
At the other end of the table Jerry sat and swilled down numberless cups of strong coffee. When she looked at him she was startled to see the creased hollows under his eyes and the heavy look of toilworn despondence that merged his features into a dull sameness. With a sharp stab of pain she realized that before her eyes he was turning from a boy into an old man. He ate and drank soddenly, bestially, without lifting his eyes, his head sunk between his shoulders. He was beginning to talk in grunts, like old Andy, his father. When after supper he walked across the floor to get a broom straw to pick his teeth, he lurched in his weariness like a drunken man. His legs were bent at the knees, his step in his great plowing boots heavy and dragging.
When she came beside him to put more fried meat on his plate, she let her hand rest upon his shoulder with a caressing touch. He looked up at her quickly, his features suddenly brightened by a smile of surprised pleasure at this unexpected token of her affection. Something about the smile smote her cruelly, something pitiful and heartrending. She felt that she could not bear it. She made haste to go to the smokehouse for another piece of meat; and there amid the hanging sides and shoulders she shuddered convulsively, clenched her hands, and bit into her under lip, struggling against tears.
In the night a strong wind sprang up and the sky grew overcast. In the blackness she lay awake feeling the house rock in the gusts, listening to the rattle of window sashes, the uneasy creaking of doors, the flapping of loose shingles on the roof. A broken molasses jug lying under the edge of the house, caught the wind in its funnel and whistled eerily. The shed door swung on its hinges and banged intermittently as the gusts of wind slammed it violently shut. From time to time a rat scampered the length of the loft over her head.
The baby in the cradle by the bedside, also lying awake, talked to herself, making soft, cooing little noises, delicate little purling sounds as sweet as flower petals. Jerry slept heavily.
Lying between her husband and child, she felt alone, cold and dismal, alone yet inextricably bound to them by something stronger than their bonds of common misery. Their future lives stretched before her dull, drab and dreary, and there was nothing at the end but the grave. She began to cry into the pillow, repressing her sobs so as not to wake Jerry. For a long time she cried in a stifled, bitter, despairing way. As she wept the baby's babblings ceased and she fell into the sleep that in puny children seems closely akin to death. Toward morning Judith, too, fell mercifully asleep, pale from tears and bitter thoughts; and when the ghostlike dawn peered into the little window it saw them all three lying stretched out stark and pallid like corpses.