Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 23
That night she set up an old stretcher in the kitchen and made herself a bed out of buggy robes and ragged quilts that had been discarded and used as pads on the wagon seat. She used it the next night and the night after that. It was a chilly and uncomfortable bed and on cold nights she had to sleep in all her clothes; but week after week went by and she showed no signs of wishing to leave it. After a few contrite but clumsy attempts at reconciliation, Jerry, too, took the stretcher as a thing accepted and permanent.
A sort of cold respect for each other grew up between them after the quarrel on Christmas day. To both it had been a warning of the abyss toward which they were tending, and they strove to maintain the outer decencies of human intercourse. This was best done by avoiding each other, having little to say and tending strictly to their own affairs, interfering as little as possible with those of the other. After their long siege of violent quarreling and mutual recrimination, this silence that had settled down between them seemed almost like peace. But at meals, over the corn cakes and rank salt hogmeat, they looked at each other with hard, inimical eyes. When they spoke it was in tones flat and dry from which all life had gone. A dreary oppression, dull, heavy and deadening, weighed upon the breasts of both of them, went with Jerry to the field and stayed with Judith as she shambled about the kitchen. When he came in at night from the field she rarely spoke or looked at him. Silently she slapped the corn cakes and fried meat on his plate and they ate in a hostile silence which was not disguised by the prattle and clamor of the children.
The stimulation that had come to Judith out of her determination to have no more children died away as all stimulation must, leaving her listless and slack. Daily she grew more slovenly about her work. More and more her mind turned in upon itself, indifferent to her surroundings, thinking its own thoughts. Through the dismal, shut-in months of late winter and inclement spring she gradually drifted into that way of life, perhaps because it was the only way in which she could continue to endure the burden of existence.
When spring came at last in earnest and the mud dried up, Hat came quite often to visit her and talked glibly of Luke's injustices, of troubles with chickens and geese, of paper patterns and calicoes and the latest bulletins from the "Farm Wife's Friend," and of new songs that she had learned for the violin. She was rather glad of the break these visits made in her monotony and envied Hat her diversity of interests.
Once Hat came over with the triumphant news that she now had a bank account of her own. She had sold the bay mare which was, she declared, her rightful property; and before Luke could get hold of the money had taken it to Clayton and deposited it.
"An' naow," she concluded, "I'll hev sumpin' woth while to think about, seein' haow much I kin put to it."
Once she brushed a spider from her skirt.
"There, naow, Judy, that means a new dress. It's a sure sign. Jes fer that I'll drive into taown to-morrer when Luke's to work an' buy me the goods. Las' week I seen jes the piece I been a-wantin'."
And in truth Hat blossomed that spring in new dresses, frilled aprons and sunbonnets. Preoccupied though Judith was with her own misery, she could not help sensing a change in the bold, dark, childless woman. Her talk consisted mainly of complaints about one thing and another; and yet she gave Judith the feeling that she was especially well satisfied with life and with herself. She seemed more than usually self-assertive and blatant. She peered with more insistent curiosity into all the details of her neighbor's household. Shafts of excess vitality radiated from her and invaded irritatingly the younger woman's languor and listlessness. Often in her presence Judith was seized by a shrinking feeling as though she was a rabbit and a bird of prey was hovering above her. Sometimes a strange look sprang out of Hat's eyes, a look at once questioning, cunning, mocking, and triumphant. It flashed only for the swiftest moment, then retired behind the mask of impassivity with which country people cover their faces.
It was in April that they took Joe Barnaby's wife, Bessie Maud, away to the insane asylum. For a long time she had been given to fits of destructiveness, when she would break dishes, smash window panes and try to tear up the furniture. These fits had of late been more frequent and violent. One day in April she was seized with this urge to destroy, and building a bonfire in the yard had thrown onto it chairs, bedding, and clothes. She had done such things before; but this time her mania had taken a worse turn. Joe, seeing the smoke from the fire and knowing only too well what it meant, had run up just in time to save the baby, which she was about to throw into the flames. That night they took her away to the asylum. It was too bad, the neighbors all told each other. But it wasn't as bad as it would have been a few years earlier when the children were all small. Now Ruby, the eldest girl, was eleven and big enough to cook the meals and take care of the baby; and at last Joe would know what it was to have peace in his house, and that was something.
One Saturday afternoon in May Jerry had gone to town for groceries and was late getting home. When Judith had given the children their supper and they had run away to play she sat on the doorstep to watch the sunset, leaving the flies to swarm over the unwashed dishes. It occurred to her that perhaps Bessie Maud had not been able to draw comfort out of the sunset and the late twitter of birds, and that was why life had gone so hard with her.
The sky was streaked with bands of light cirrus cloud, like sheep's wool washed and teased apart. White and fleecy and ranked in regular rows, they spread out over half the heavens like a great feather fan. Toward the earth they gradually thickened until they formed a solid bank. As the sun sank behind this bank, the light, fleecy clouds, which grew sparser, finer and whiter as they neared the zenith, took on a soft flush that turned the whole western sky into a harmony of faint rose and tender blue.
Jabez Moorhouse, passing with a hayfork over his shoulder, stopped for a few moments' chat; and they looked at the sky together, talking of crops and of rain.
As they looked the faint, frail pink gradually deepened into a richer rose, then glowed for a few passionate moments the color of intense flame. The little delicate shreds high up in the sky were each a slender whiff of spun gold, fine and pure. The under edges of the clouds burned with the amber and scarlet of flame against a background of shaded grays and purples. The grayish purple bank that lay along the horizon was slashed here and there by bright swords of fire. The burning clouds hung low, as if one might reach up and touch them. A rosy flush hung over everything.
It seemed as if no color could be warmer, deeper, richer. And yet incredibly as they gazed it grew before their eyes richer, warmer, deeper, more vivid and intense, more full of living fire, until Judith involuntarily held her breath in sympathy with nature in this her supreme moment.
Short-lived it was, like every other supreme moment. A second after it had reached the height of its intensity it began to fade and fall away into ashes. As if a cold breath had passed over them, the little tendrils of spun gold in the zenith turned almost instantly to gray. Lower down the deeper colors lost their glow more slowly, melting back into the surrounding purple. Soon there was left nothing but a somber interweaving of purple gray and dull magenta.
"It's a heap like a man's life, hain't it," said Jabez, spitting into the grass. "It begins happy an' simple, like them innocent pinks an' blues; then turns flame colored when he grows to be a man an' learns to know the love o' wimmin. But it don't stay that color long. Fust thing you know it's gray, like his hair, what he has left of it. Yaas, Judy, the young time's the on'y time. It's the same in dawgs an' mules, an' the breath they draw hain't no diff'rent from ourn."
Looking at his bowed knees and shoulders, his great seamed hands, his weatherbeaten face and the grizzled locks that curled behind his big ears and straggled over the brick-red creases of his neck, she thought how coarsened was every part of him except the fine, delicate lines about his mouth.
"Hain't life woth livin', Uncle Jabez?" she asked.
He laughed a short, harsh laugh and fell silent.
"Waal, I dunno, Judy," he said at last, meditatively shifting his quid of tobacco. "I reckon it makes a big diff'rence who you live it with an' a bigger diff'rence yet what work yuh lay yer hand to. Both o' them things, as I see it, is a matter of luck. An' if luck hain't with yuh—"
"Luck hain't been with you, Uncle Jabez?"
"Well, I reckon not. When I was a young feller I dearly loved to play on the fiddle. I thought about fiddlin' all day an' dreamed about it all night. But there wa'n't nobody to learn me haow to play, an' I didn't have much chanct to try to learn myse'f, 'cause as soon as I was big enough I had to make a hand in the field same's other boys. I was raised up in one o' the dark counties where they grow the dark terbaccer.
"When I was nineteen I married a purty, light-headed little gal, an' for a while I forgot all about the fiddle. I loved that woman, Judy. I poured out my heart like water for her. After a while I faound out she liked another feller better'n me, an' I told her she'd best go off with him. After she was gone I learned I'd been the laughin' stock o' the whole countryside fer months. I was the last to find out about the other feller. Sech things, you know, Judy, comes to every pair of ears but one."
He paused and looked meaningly at her. She avoided his looks, pulled a blade of ribbon grass and began splitting it between her long fingers.
"Well," he went on, "when I faound that out I took my clothes on the end of a stick an' come over here where nobody knowed me. Since then I've lived a spell with diff'rent wimmin' but I hain't never let none of 'em git a holt on the tender end o' my feelin's. They cud quit me termorrer or hev all the other men they liked fer all o' me. By sech way o' livin' a man gits peace, but not much besides. Wimmin won't stay long with a man that feels that way. Naow, I'm old an' eat my morsel alone, I feel more satisfied than when I had a woman in the house. I kin go an' come when I like, eat when I like, smoke an' drink all I like, set over the stove of evenin's as late as I like, work as little as I like. Sech life suits me purty good."
He paused and looked at her with a fine, sad smile of gentle irony. How delicate, how inexpressibly fine and delicate, she thought, were the lines about his mouth.
"Which would have meant more to you," she asked, "the fiddle or the woman?"
He came and sat down on the step beside her.
"I reckon the fiddle, Judy. The world's chuck full o' wimmin; but a man hain't got but one set o' gifts. If I could a learnt to play the fiddle good I'd like enough forgot her long ago an' loved some other woman. As it was, I couldn't take my mind away from thinkin' about her. An' the kinder hard part of it is, if I saw the woman again to-day she wouldn't mean no more to me than any other woman. On'y the feelin's I had for her then I hain't never been able to forget."
"An' air you glad you're alive right naow?"
"I can't say I hain't, Judy. I reckon livin's made up more out of a lot o' little things than any one big thing; an' there's a heap o' little things I git injoyment out'n. Mebbe there hain't nobody in Scott County likes a smoke an' a chew better'n what I do. Terbaccer an' a quiet back door yard—sun 'ithout no wind—an' my mornin' glories an' rose bushes to look at, them things gives peace and comfort, Judy. Naow, I hain't got no woman araound to sweep me off'n the stoop, I set there through a good many mornin's. I like my coffee an' corncake an' my bit o' fried hogmeat when I git up; an' after it I like my pipe with the blue an' gray streams o' smoke a-driftin' up into a sunbeam an' a-curlin' raound among the little specks o' dust. I like to hear hens sing an' cackle an' watch kittens play an' dawgs stretch theirse'ves in the warm sun an' growl in their sleep a-dreamin' they're nippin' the heels o' caows. I like the fust feel o' spring with frogs singin' in the holler, an' the fust nip o' frost in fall, the smell o' burnin' leaves an' cold, yaller sunsets. You stand a long time in the gray cold an' look at them; an' when you go in it's dark inside an' you make up a fire an' it feels good. I like to see the low sun shine along a field o' young corn in spring an' through a grapevine in September. I like the sound o' rain on the roof an' snow drivin' past the winder when the wind whistles in the chimley. An' when there hain't much outdoors but mud an' clouds I like fire. Fire's a rare fine thing, Judy. Naow I hain't got no woman araound I kin set over it all I like. Sometimes when I set late over the blaze my thoughts runs a bit gloomy; but that hain't the fault of the fire. I git to thinkin' about when I was young an' life was ahead o' me an' I'm like Jerusalem that remembers in the day of her affliction an' her miseries all her pleasant things that were from the days of old. When sech thoughts gits too bitter, there's sumpin that's more comfortin' yet than fire, an' that's whiskey, good strong corn whiskey."
"Why do you drink so much whiskey, Uncle Jabez?"
"'Cause when I got whiskey warmin' my belly I feel like I was really the man I onct hoped I was goin' to be. Hain't that reason enough, Judy? I'm a old man now an' my spirit's broke, an' a broken spirit dries up the bones. I gotta hev a drink now an' then to limber me up. You know the Bible says: 'Give strong drink to him that is ready to perish an' wine onto the bitter in soul. Let him drink an' forget his poverty an' remember his misery no more.'"
The last words vibrated into the gathering night like a melancholy bell.
"Then you air bitter in soul, Uncle Jabez, spite of all the things you enjoy?"
"Yes, Judy, I can't say I hain't."
In the pause that followed he turned his head and looked at her keenly. She was sitting staring out toward the disappearing horizon, her shoulders sagging, her arms hanging limply at her sides. Lassitude physical and spiritual spoke in her blank face and slumping body.
"It makes me feel bad, Judy, to see you go like all the rest of us, you that growed up so strong an' handsome, so full o' life an' spirits. I've watched you sence you was a baby growin' like a pink rosebud, an' then blossomin', so beautiful to see. And now—"
Huskily his voice went silent. He made squares and triangles on the ground with his heel.
"Sometimes I've thought that mebbe if you an' me'd been of an age, an' not me near old enough to be your grandaddy, you an' me together, Judy, might a made sumpin out of our lives, anyway got in a little play along with the grind. Mebbe so, mebbe not. Whichever way it don't do no good to figger about it—ner no harm neither."
He smiled again his fine, dry smile.
After he was gone and she had watched his broad, bowed back disappear down the side of the ridge, she sat looking out across the wide expanse of country to the horizon. The glow of the sunset had faded and there was nothing left but a few broken horizontal bars of pale saffron, backed by gray and lavender. Between her eyes and the saffron bars the long stretch of hills and valleys was sinking swiftly into darkness. They looked at her palely across the gloom-filled distance with a sad, horizontal gaze, sad and level, like her own.
At last she got up abruptly from the doorstep and went into the house and to the bottom shelf in the cupboard where Jerry kept his rarely used demijohn of whiskey. She took out the corncob stopper, poured a few spoonfuls into a teacup and tasted it gingerly. It burned her lips and throat and some of it went down the wrong way. She made a wry face, coughed, gagged, rushed to the water bucket and drank a dipperful of water, then slackly set about gathering up the supper dishes.
She made no further attempt to find the cheer that lay in the demijohn; but as the weeks went by something of Jabez' poise and calm seemed to have settled on her spirit. Often, thinking of their talk and seeing in memory his fine, sad smile, the irritations of the household fell away from her and she seemed as if enfolded in a twilight peace. Having discovered its charm, she began to wear this memory as an amulet.
Through the spring and summer she spent much of her time in the garden and barnyard, leaving the house to clean itself. She raised chickens, geese, and turkeys and even bought a pair of rabbits from Aunt Selina and started a little rabbit colony in hutches built against the south side of the shed. Here the children were happy running about barefoot, digging in little gardens of their own, feeding the geese and chickens and poking carrots and clover into the rabbit hutches; and for the first time in their lives the mother and children moved together in harmony. When Jerry came home from the field and found them in the yard shutting up the broods of little chicks for the night and listened to their excited chatter and prattle, he passed on into the house feeling lonely and morose.
"I reckon I hain't much good here fer anything but to fetch in the money fer the shoes an' groceries," he said to himself, as he splashed the water over his face.
The young fellows were back from the war now—those who had not been killed. Ziemer Whitmarsh came home shell-shocked and good for nothing. He hung about the neighbors' barnyards drooling silly talk and remembering nothing. "What could you expect," everybody said, "when it was in the family anyway?"
"A sword is upon the boasters an' they shall become fools," Jabez Moorhouse was heard to mutter, as he looked after him with a shrug that was half pity, half contempt.
Marsh Gibbs bragged unceasingly about his exploits and his power to turn shot and shell and was listened to with respectful interest until it became known that he had got no further than Panama, where he had done nothing more exciting and dangerous than drive a mule team.
With the return of the men from the war an infectious restlessness and discontent pervaded the barnyards. The talk was all of hard times, of war prices that were not coming down and of the foolishness of bothering with tobacco. Some spoke of moving over into Indiana, others of going to Cincinnati, though few had the courage or money to go beyond talk. There was much robbing of hen roosts and stables and a general and oft expressed feeling among the old folks that things were going from bad to worse.
With August the grasshoppers came in great numbers. Luke Wolf said it was the hard times that brought them. Grasshoppers and hard times, he declared, were never far apart. However they did little to make the times harder, as they could do but small damage to the crops. Tobacco they would not touch and corn was beyond their reach. They were a bit hard on alfalfa and garden stuff, but they made up for it by fattening the geese and turkeys.
It gave pleasure to Judith and delight to the children to tend and watch the little chicks and geese and turkeys as they grew into strong, stocky birds. And at sundown, when they all came up to the roosts, the yard was as crowded and busy as a town on fair day, noisy too with the crowing, quacking and gobbling of the young males who grew daily in self-importance. But as the fall came on and the young turkeys ranged further afield and found abundance of food and grasshoppers, they began to fail to come up for the evening scatter of corn, a tree in the woods often seeming to them a pleasanter roosting place than the barn roof. Judith did not like to have them roosting away from home. She knew that if any of the neighbors happened upon them they would disappear one by one.
Once, when she had not seen them for several days, she left the children with Aunt Selina in the late afternoon and started out to look for them. Loitering through the late glow of the September day she half forgot the turkeys in the pleasure that came to her from asters and goldenrod, red maples, and yellow beeches. Almost without thinking what she was doing she began to stray along the path that led in the direction of the old shanty between the hills.
When she came within sight of the deserted house, the roof of which was just visible above the rank growth surrounding it, she stood for a moment looking across the last red shafts of sunlight that fell toward it through the trees. A half smile of weary cynicism lifted her upper lip, and with a scarcely perceptible shrug she was about to turn away.
Suddenly she drew quickly back behind the trunk of a tree.
Peeping around the tree, like a child playing hide and seek, she saw Hat Wolf appear on the outer edge of the shrubbery that grew about the old house. As she came out, Hat craned her neck and peered cautiously on all sides, scanning carefully the length and breadth of the hollow and the hillsides beyond up to the rim of the sky line. At last, feeling satisfied that no one was looking, she bolted as fast as she could, and her great hips and broad back were soon lost from sight in the nearest thicket.
It was turkeys that usually took Hat away from home. Judith looked around for turkeys. There was not a turkey in sight, nor, strain her ears as she might, could she catch any sound suggestive of their near presence. Perhaps some other business than to see if turkeys were making it a resting place had brought Hat to the old house. Judith had begun to shrewdly suspect what the business might be when she was confirmed in her conjecture by seeing a man emerge from the thicket in the same place that Hat had appeared. He did not peer about as Hat had done but walked away slowly, his head sunk on his breast, his hands plunged deep in his pockets, careless whether he was seen or not. In the dim light she did not recognize him at the first glance. When she looked again she saw that it was Jerry.
A hot wave of anger surged through her, her fists clenched and for the moment her whole being was one great hatred of Hat. Then a dozen conflicting emotions seized upon her, seeking to claim her at the same time. She wanted to run after Hat and spit in her face and call her the names that rose unbidden to her tongue. At the same moment she wanted to run in the opposite direction after Jerry and say to him things that she knew could bring the twitch of agony to his features. This desire had hardly risen in her when it was merged into the impulse to throw her arms about his neck and weep away her storm of struggling passions on his breast. He alone she knew had power to comfort her. But could she go to him for comfort? No, nothing in the world should make her go to him.
For a long time she was unable to gather herself together. Her whole being seemed some inert, passive instrument through which impulses, thoughts and feelings came and went of their own accord without any power of her will to control them. Thoughts of Hat made her clench her fists again and flare with lightning flashes of anger. Thoughts of Jerry brought mingled emotions that, whether she would or not, fought frantically within her. Helplessly she fluttered and struggled like an old rag blown this way and that in some bleak dooryard where the winds meet.
Gradually the struggle weakened, and the old cold oppression closed down upon her, stonier, more inexorable than before. She felt drearily lonely and aloof as on the day when she had run away from the stripping of hog guts. Only this time she did not cry. She seemed to have grown too old and hardened for tears.
As her emotions sank and her mind began to work, she told herself coldly how silly she was to care, how stupid to be surprised, how unreasonable to be angry, how senseless every way she looked at it.
Yet she had to keep on looking at it, turning it over and over in her mind, viewing it from this angle and that angle. If it had been almost any other woman it wouldn't have seemed so bad, she told herself. But Hat! How had he allowed himself to sink so low? She felt herself drenched in a bitter flood of contempt for him—and for herself.
The sun had gone down long ago and it was growing dark when she moved at last from the place where she had been standing. But instead of going toward home, she went on down the hill to the old house and peered in at the gaping black doorway. Yes, it was there, looking just the same, the bed of branches and dry leaves that she and the preacher had made. It was still warm, she had no doubt! And suddenly the walls of the old house rang with a hard, sardonic laugh. Whatever sordid tragedies they had witnessed, and doubtless they were many, the rain-streaked walls had never echoed to an unkinder sound. With a shrug she turned away.
Nevertheless, when she started to open up the stretcher that night to make her bed, she found herself hesitating; and there was a softened moment when she almost fled to Jerry. The impulse passed without her giving way to it, and she continued to unfold the ragged quilts.