Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 22
When she was able to be up and around again, she began to be possessed by a great dread and loathing of the thought of the coming on of winter.
One late afternoon in early December, when the thick mud and heavy skies of winter had laid hold upon the country, Jerry came into the kitchen carrying a crooked nail covered with blood and rust.
"Looky here, Judy, what I took out'n the side o' Nip's leg. The damn fool hoss'd done gone an' laid hisse'f daown on it. It was in near up to the head. Where's the turpentine?"
"My, it's an ugly lookin' one. Jes thick with rust, hain't it?" she said, as she rummaged for the turpentine. "Some heats the nail red hot an' sticks it back into the hole."
"I know, but I kinder hate to do it. I'll soak it well with turpentine an' that'd otta fix it. I can't fer the life of me see haow so many old boards with nails stickin' up in 'em gits laid about in the barnyard. All the time I keep pickin' 'em up, more keeps a-comin'. It looks like they growed there. Is that the turpentine? Give it here. The quicker I git it in the better."
He went out, slamming the door violently in his haste.
The wound healed over and Jerry had almost forgotten to worry about it, when about ten days later he noticed that the horse was not acting just like himself. He was nervous and fidgety and there was a stiffness in the injured leg. Looking at the sore he saw that it had broken again and there was a thin trickle of ugly looking matter oozing from it.
The next morning when he went into the stable to feed the horses, Nip was frothing at the mouth. The stiffness had extended to all his four legs, and he held them extended as if to keep himself from falling. He looked at his master with wide, startled eyes that showed much of the whites and from time to time a shiver ran through his body.
Jerry saw himself faced with one of the most serious disasters that can befall a tenant farmer. Without going back to the house for his breakfast, he saddled Tuck and galloped away in search of Doc Beasley, the veterinary.
They came back a couple of hours later riding side by side. As soon as Jerry laid eyes upon the horse, he knew that he was much worse. The shivers had changed to convulsive shudders, and pain and terror looked out of the animal's dilated eyes.
The veterinary, a lean old grayhound with a face of tanned leather, shook his head.
"You'd best put a bullet into him, Jerry, an' have done with it. I cud cure him, but it'd cost yuh more'n what the hoss's woth. That damned antitoxin fer lockjaw's high's hell an' it takes so much fer a hoss 'tain't practical nohaow. If yuh wanta take a chanct on it's helpin' him, I kin give him a shot o' some other stuff that sometimes does the trick. It'll cost yuh five dollars, an' I hain't promisin' that it'll cure him. But onct in a while it does. Anyhaow whether yuh take it or whether yuh don't take it, I won't charge yuh nothin' fer comin' here, 'cause I'm on my way to Joe Patton's sick caow an' I know yuh hain't no millionaire."
"Let's try it, Jerry," implored Judith, who had come into the stable behind the men. "It seems a shame not to let him have one chanct."
"All right, Doc," agreed Jerry a bit huskily. "Go ahead an' try what you kin do. If I had the money I'd feel like tryin' the big cure. But I hain't got the money. So that settles it flat."
The horse doctor cleansed the wound, took a big syringe from his kit satchel, filled it with a yellowish fluid, and gave the horse an injection in the leg close to the wounded spot.
"There," he said as he replaced the syringe, "if he hain't a heap better agin to-morrer mornin' he hain't a-goin' to git no better. Anyhaow, you hain't got the hardest luck there is, Jerry, ole man. Two o' Jim Summerfield's hawgs has got the cholera, an' the whole thirty-odd'll be dead afore the week's gone. So you see you might a had it worst."
With this cold but well meant comfort he was gone.
The next morning when Jerry went into the stable, the horse was down, his jaws were locked and he was writhing in agony. Tuck, tied at a little distance, looked at him with mild, questioning eyes.
He went to the house for his revolver. Judith said nothing. When she saw him take the gun out of the dresser drawer she did not need to ask what it meant. A few moments later she heard a shot and knew that it was all over for Nip.
It was war time and horse hides were worth four dollars or more. So, although he loathed to do it, Jerry skinned the poor animal that for so many years had been his friend and the companion of his labors. When the carcass was skinned he tied a chain about the hind legs, attached the other end to Tuck's harness and, taking the lines in his hand, said, "Git up, Tuck."
Restless and unhappy from the odious smell of blood, the horse started uneasily, shied a little and looked around with dilated nostrils and eyes that showed the whites. Then, seeing his master, hearing his voice and feeling his familiar hand upon the lines, he went forward with his usual steady step, dragging his dead companion.
Judith, watching sadly from the porch, saw the little procession pass across the pasture. It had snowed during the night and the ground was still white. Against the whiteness the dark figures of the man and horse plodded with bowed heads. Behind them trailed a long thing of an evil scarlet color. The front legs stood up stiffly in the air. The inert head and neck, preternaturally long, trailed behind like a snake. Behind the dragging head a dark streak marked its path from the barn.
On the far side of the pasture lay a deep gully. Here Jerry halted Tuck and manœuvered him back and forth so as to get the dead animal as near to the brink as possible and in the position he wanted. Then he unloosed the chain from the hind legs and, using a fence rail as a pry, worked with the carcass until it went crashing over the brink. The noise startled Tuck, who looked around uneasily.
Returned to the stable he sadly salted the hide, while Tuck, surprised to find an empty stable, nickered and whinneyed and waited impatiently for his friend.
The buzzards did the rest.
For days they hung in the air over the gully. From the kitchen window Judith could see them moving on widespread wings. They would circle a while in one spot, then fly off a little distance and circle again, as though loath to give up their habits of search. The motion of these silent creatures, slow and steady, with no perceptible vibration of the sweeping, horizontal wings, was as beautiful as the flight of sea gulls. When they tilted, the sunlight caught the under side of the black wings and turned them gleaming silver. Watching the stately grace, the balanced dignity of their movements as they circled alone in the wide emptiness of the winter sky, Judith felt herself enfolded in a deep sense of calm, as though Nature had laid upon her brow a firm, soothing hand and told her to be at peace. The flight of the birds added beauty and dignity to the thought of death; and for the first time in her life it seemed a thing to be looked upon with calmness. She was affected as she might have been by a Greek tragedy or by Bach's coldly austere music. She felt no sense of shrinking, but rather a solemn uplift of the heart in the thought that some day she too would return to the ground; and that always, when she was no longer there to see it, sunshine in winter would be a lovely thing, and other buzzards, foul smelling birds though they were, would soar and tilt with incomparable grace and stateliness over other dead horses and dead dogs that like her had had their day.
After the buzzards were gone, she was still followed by the thought of death. But it was no longer a beautiful thought. She shrank from it and tried to turn her thoughts to other things.
The horse's death brought them many visits of condolence. The men sat around the stove of an evening and told Jerry just what he ought to have done to save the horse and just what they themselves would have done if the horse had been theirs. Having exhausted this topic, they drifted to other things: the victories over the Germans, the high and ever climbing cost of flour, the scarcity of sugar, the unheard of prices that were being charged for overalls and shoes and stoves and hay forks and wire fencing.
"Waal, if we kin git forty cent a paound fer terbaccer this year, 'twon't pan out so bad," opined Uncle Sam Whitmarsh. "An' eggs an' butter is fetchin' a good price."
"You was allus a joker, Sam," said Columbia Gibbs, spitting into the woodbox. "You know dern well there hain't one of us in twenty'll git forty cent fer terbaccer. Mebbe a few lucky ones'll draw a big price; but the most of us'll be on'y too glad to drive back home with ten or twelve. An' if butter an' eggs is high, they hain't high compared with flour an' coffee. Afore the war I cud drive into taown with five, six dozen eggs an' the same number o' paounds o' butter, an' I cud git me a sack o' flour, a couple o' paounds o' sugar, a paound o' coffee an' a paper o' candy fer the young uns. Naow I take in that same lot o' butter an' eggs an' I can't hardly git me a sack o' dirty flour chuck full o' bran an' middlin's. I gotta go 'ithout the coffee an' sugar an' the young uns has gotta go 'ithout the candy."
He looked about the group clinchingly and made a feint of wiping away the streams of tobacco juice that had begun to dribble from the corners of his mouth.
"I wisht Roosevelt was back in agin," spoke up Gus Dibble. "When he was in the price o' mule colts was a heap better. One year I got fifty dollars fer a mule colt. An' las' year I didn't git but forty fer a better one out'n the same mare. I'd like to see Roosevelt back in."
Two weeks after Nip's death Uncle Amos Crupper received word that his son Bob had been killed, blown to pieces by an exploding shell.
The old man was broken by the news. Bob was his only son, the son of the wife of his youth whose memory he had cherished for twenty years. He wandered about restlessly from neighbor to neighbor, seeking comfort and finding none. As he sat hunched over the Blackford stove, his usually erect shoulders bowed into a semi-circle, it seemed to Judith that winter had descended upon him over night, as snow falls on the hills.
She, too, as she went about her work, kept thinking of Bob—and of death.
The thought that he was dead would waylay her suddenly, startingly, and she would see him as she had known him in life, his lithe, muscular body, his boyish smile, his clear eyes, fearless and dreamy.
Once with a dustrag she slapped a fly on the wall. It fell mashed and mangled to the floor.
It came over her suddenly that he had died like that. With all his health, vigor, and charm, his power to make women love him, he had died like the fly. Some great, pitiless engine of war had mashed these things out of him and left only a few bits of stinking flesh.
"What are we all anyway but flies," she said to herself bitterly.
One morning when it was mild and the sun was shining she went out to clean the rain barrel that had grown slimy with a green scum. Bent over with her head and shoulders in the almost empty barrel, she scrubbed the sides vigorously with the scrubbing brush. When she had finished, her wrists felt weak and shaky. Taking hold of the top of the barrel with both hands she tried to tip it to drain away the dirty water and was suddenly aware that it was too heavy for her. She could not understand it. She had dumped the same barrel many times before with the greatest ease. She struggled with it and for the first time in her life felt herself overcome by a sense of physical powerlessness. Some virtue had gone out of her long, muscular arms trained from childhood to do heavy work. Her breath came in short, quick gasps and she felt her knees weaken and tremble in a way that she had never felt before. When at last she succeeded in tipping the barrel and returning it to its place, she sank down on the ground gasping with exhaustion, her knees weak like water beneath her.
After that whenever she drew a full bucket of water from the well or carried slop to the hogs or stood too long over the churn or the washtub, she felt creeping over her this strange, tremulous sensation of extreme weakness. Countless times before she had known what it was to be tired. But this feeling of sinking knees, of shivering powerlessness was something new, something quite different from anything that she had experienced before in her life.
With it came an increased impatience with the chatter and wrangles of the children, a growing lack of interest in the affairs of the neighbors or even in those of her own household, a desire to retire within herself, to be alone and apart.
Ill luck seemed to love their company that winter and, like a hungry stray dog, would not leave their door. Luke Wolf said it was all because Jerry had torn the shoes from Nip's dead hoofs and later used them in shoeing Tuck.
"Nine times out o' ten," he said to Jerry impressively, "if yuh shoe a hoss with shoes taken off'n a dead animal, he'll die afore the year's out. An' if he don't die some other kind o' bad luck'll foller yuh."
Tuck did not die; but, as Luke had prophesied, other bad luck followed apace. When Jerry hauled the tobacco off to market he was caught in a drenching rain, and hundreds of pounds of what would otherwise have been a fine grade of tobacco were changed to the sort that brings a cent or two a pound. The tobacco should have been covered to protect it against such a contingency. But a tarpaulin is an expensive luxury which few tenant farmers can afford to buy. Most of them use their wives' rag carpets. But Judith had no rag carpet.
When Jerry had paid off the help that he had hired during the year and settled the store bill that had been accumulating for many months and bought some tar paper to nail over the north and east sides of the house, he had a hundred and eighteen dollars left, most of which would have to go to buy another horse. Fortunately the corn crop was a fairly good one that year.
It was a hard winter, a winter of pinching and skimping and doing without, doing without sugar, doing without coffee, doing without even the salt meat to which they were accustomed, for hogs were worth too much to be consumed at home. They had to be sold to meet the exorbitant cost of shoes and overalls and underwear to keep the children warm.
Since the beginning of the war these things had become of very inferior quality. It seemed as if Jerry was always cobbling the boys' shoes and Judith always putting patches on their overalls. And in an incredibly short time their feet were on the ground again and their knees out. Like all the rest of the women, Judith pinched and contrived, tried to make clothes for the children out of old garments that were fit only for the ragbag, made flour sacks into pillow slips and even into underwear and carefully saved the smaller pieces of everything for the bedquilts that were always wearing out and having to be replaced.
As she sat by the little glass lamp of an evening making over flour sacks or mending overalls, her face had not the dull, sullen look that Jerry remembered from other times, but rather a hard, grim, half defiant expression. Watching her covertly his own face took on an ugly look.
More and more, as the days went by, she was confirmed in the stand that she had taken after getting up from her last sickbed. She was through forever, she told herself, with having children and with running any risk of having children. She wanted no more children that she could not clothe, that she could hardly feed, that were a long torture to bear and a daily fret and anxiety after they were born. Her flesh recoiled and her spirit rose in fiery protest against any further degradation and suffering. Too long she had been led along blindly. Now her eyes were open and she would be a tool no more of man's lust and nature's cunning. She would see her path and choose it. She would be mistress of her own body. She would order her future life as seemed best to herself.
It was the imprint of these thoughts that Jerry saw on her face as she sat sewing under the lamp; and the covert looks that he cast at her were ugly and ill omened.
For her there was stimulation mental and physical in such thoughts, and she began to grow stronger. It was this determination stubbornly adhered to and constantly borne in mind that made her arms powerful to rub the coarse clothes up and down on the washboard, that set the dasher thudding against the bottom of the churn more noisily than need be and drew the broom with brisk, emphatic strokes across the floor. When she gathered up the dishes she slapped the plates together with the emphasis of one who is indifferent as to whether they crack or not, and when she cleaned house the dust and feathers flew mightily. At the woodpile she was merciless to the saplings and rotted fence rails that Jerry had dragged up.
Often at the end of a day of such emphatic housekeeping, the old insidious weakness would slip into her bones, her knees would tremble and sink and she would drop with sudden exhaustion into the old rocking chair.
As she lay with her head against the bit of patchwork that was tied to the back of the chair, her eyes, the only parts of her that were not tired, would wander restlessly about the walls and ceiling. The winter before, in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, she had bought for a quarter a bundle of old newspapers and pasted them over two walls and part of the ceiling. She had intended to buy another bundle and finish the job, but had never gone beyond the intention. The papers had pulled apart over the cracks between the boards, they were yellowed with smoke and blotched with rain; but they still displayed their wealth of pictures. There were pictures of society people grinning and squatting on the sand at Palm Beach, pictures of smug, well fed dignitaries of church and state, pictures of business magnates, still smugger, fatter, and more rigorously curried, pictures of kings and generals pompously pinning medals to the coat lapels of heroes of war, well brushed and subdued for the solemn occasion, pictures of dismal, stuffy people who had been given new life by Tanlac or Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, pictures of actresses and movie stars, some simpering and insipid, others with grace and charm diffused over the pure lines of youth, pictures of people who had been killed in automobile accidents, pictures of murderers and the murdered.
Her interest was only mildly stirred by all these pictures of strange people in strange walks of life that she would never tread. They seemed, with but few exceptions, solemn and sodden creatures in no way to be envied. From them her eyes traveled with heightening interest to the streaky discolorations that the rain beating through the walls had made on the papers. There she never failed to find pictures that beguiled the eye and inspired the imagination.
Often when the children were at play out of doors she sat a long time looking at these weird freaks of water. At such times her hectic energy and the determination that lay back of it were gone, and with the graying twilight there came instead dark thoughts of the emptiness and purposelessness of life, of Bob who had died and of the death that lay in wait for her and hers. When the corners grew shadowed and the rats began to peer out of their holes with bright, furtive eyes, she would get up with a heavy sigh and begin to mix the batter for corn cakes.
As the weeks went by her relations with Jerry grew daily more strained. She rarely spoke to him except to call his attention to an empty woodbox or a broken door hinge or a loose board in the floor or the fact that the boys' feet were on the ground. Daily he grew more morose and evil tempered. A brooding animosity looked out of his eyes as he furtively followed her movements about the house. At the least excuse this smoldering fire broke out into the fierce flame of violent and brutal quarreling. The quarrels usually ended by his taking his hat and slamming the door behind him as he went to seek diversion in some neighbor's barnyard. For her there was no diversion. When the quarrel was over neither of them could remember what had caused it.
Christmas brought a truce. By a tacit mutual understanding it was agreed between them that on this day, if only for the children's sake, there should be peace and some measure of goodwill.
The children were up with the dawn, uproariously and gloriously happy over the few ten cent gimcracks that Jerry had brought home the day before and that Judith had stuffed into their stockings. She caught the infection of their happiness, laughed with them over the antics of the Jack in the box and the monkey on a stick, and beguiled them with descriptions of Santa Claus and his swift reindeer, his home built of ice far up in the frozen north, his shop where he and his wife work all year to make playthings for good little boys and girls and his long, exciting gallops over the snow on Christmas Eve.
Having done up his morning chores, Jerry, feeling leisurely and luxurious in clean overalls, stretched himself in the rocking chair and listened contentedly to the prattle of the mother and children, showed the boys how to spin the tops and fell to carving them a whistle apiece to supplement the toys that Santa Claus had brought.
Annie was happy with a doll which she hugged maternally to her bosom, then absent-mindedly dragged about the floor by one leg.
Jerry had killed a hen the day before, and there was a gala dinner of stewed chicken, hominy, sweet potatoes, and a boiled pudding with sauce. They all gorged mightily.
After dinner Jerry took up his hat and strolled out through the barnyard. Judith was left alone with the children, now grown cross and fretful, the litter of broken toys and clutter of dirty dishes.
The dinner had been late, and it was after four o'clock and already growing twilight in the room before she had washed the last greasy pan. When she had finished everything and washed the table and hung up the dishrag, she pushed the frowsy strands of hair back from her face and sank into the rocking chair. Annie began to whimper and, putting her little hand over her stomach, said that she had a pain there. She gave the child a drink of water to help dissolve the colored candy she had eaten, then took her up and rocked her, crooning a song. The boys who had been wrangling all afternoon and constantly appealing to her to settle their differences, now fell to fighting, rolling over and over on the littered floor. She got up and slapped them both smartly.
"Naow, then," she said, administering a last cuff to Billy, "you'd otta think shame to yerse'ves, the way you been a-actin'. You jes set right to work the both of you an' pick up all them things an' put 'em in the box, an' don't let me hear nary word out'n you."
They subsided from loud wails to whimpers, then set to work sullenly picking up the toys and throwing them noisily at the wooden grocery box in which she had tried to train them to keep their things. When they thought their mother was not looking, they angrily nudged and pinched each other. Then, forgetting enmity, they began to make a glorious game of it and threw the playthings in all directions, trying to hit anything but the inside of the box. She tried to tell herself that they were only children having childish fun; but to her irritable nerves they seemed like little fiends. She felt a wild impulse to turn her back on everything, even the sick baby, and flee away along the roads, into the woods, anywhere where there was quiet and peace.
She put up with the turmoil for a while, sitting with closed eyes silently rocking the little girl. To the casual eye she looked passive and acquiescent enough; but her whole body and soul were one strung up tension of screaming protest. It was not until a tin railway car hit her on the side of the head that she got up and slapped both the boys again and reduced them once more to a sullen putting away of the toys.
Jerry lurched into the house, his hat over one eye, smelling of whiskey. He shambled into a seat by the stove, and she knew by the evil looks he cast at her that he was in an ugly drunk, a strange thing for him who was usually silly and good natured under the effects of alcohol. As she caught his glowering eye the smoldering sense of injury that she had been nursing all afternoon flared into hate and fury. If it came to a test of ugliness she could be more than his match, she told herself and her lips set together in grim lines.
Jerry saw the sinister setting of her mouth, and his own face darkened into a black scowl.
Annie had fallen asleep, and she slipped off the child's shoes and outer clothing and carried her into the other room. When she came back the kitchen was almost dark. Jerry still sat by the stove, his head sunk on his breast.
"Air you a-goin' to do the milkin' to-night?" she asked in a dry, dead voice.
"No, I hain't."
She threw on an old cap and jacket, took up the milk bucket with an emphatic rattle and bang and went out, slamming the door so that the house shook.
When she came in again the room was so dark that she could hardly see the outlines of things. The boys had dropped asleep on the old sofa behind the stove. The fire had gone low and the room was chilly. Jerry still sat by the stove, his head sunk lower on his breast.
She lit the lamp, strained the milk and mixed the corn cake batter, then came by the stove to make up the fire. He bulked obstinately between her and the woodbox. For a minute tense with their mutual aversion she stood waiting for him to move.
"Air you a-goin' to move or hain't you?" she asked at last in the same dry, dead voice.
He glanced up at her with a hateful leer, then dropped his head again to his breast.
"I hain't."
For another moment she stood eyeing him with a look of exasperation mingled with cold despisal. Then red fury burst in her and she grasped the handle of the stove lifter.
"You git out o' that chair, you damn filthy haound. Hain't it enough that I gotta spend the hull day scrapin' greasy burnt pans an' puttin' up with them pesterin' young uns, 'ithout havin' you lurchin' in here with a dirty drunk an' plantin' yer carcass right where I wanta git the supper? I hain't in no humor to put up with none o' yer drunken sulks. You git away from this yer stove an' do it mighty quick too."
He did not move nor even glance at her. He bulked big and sullen, a silent affront.
Trembling all over she uttered a scream of rage and swung the stove lifter in fury. It descended sharply on his skull.
With a thick curse he sprang up, wrenched the stove lifter from her hand and flung it to the other end of the room. It fell into a pan of milk and the milk splashed in every direction. Then, grasping her by the shoulders, he began to shake her. He shook her so violently that her teeth chattered and her furious screams of rage came in a shrill tremolo hideous to hear. Like a tigress she struggled in his grasp. If she had had a knife she would have plunged it into him.
Her frenzied struggles drew them close to the wall; and it was the sound of her head beating with a hollow noise against the boards that at last penetrated his drunken fury and brought him to his senses. With the movement of one who drops hot iron, he let fall his hands from her shoulders and fled out into the darkness, leaving the door swinging open behind him.