After the baby's birth the routine of life in the little house in the hollow fell along quite different lines. Judith no longer went with Jerry to the field to hoe or top tobacco. The baby could not be left alone in the house. Judith sometimes wished to leave him for an hour or two so that she could give Jerry a little help when work was pressing. But he would not hear of it.
"S'pose he took a fit while you was gone, Judy. Or s'pose a rat should come."
"But he don't never have fits. An' we hain't got rats this summer. They're all over to Hat's place since that big yaller cat come here."
"But sumpin might happen to him, Judy. You can't never tell. I'll make shift to git along. If anything happened to him we wouldn't never be able to forgive ourselves. Besides you got plenty nuf to do, now you got him to take care on."
So Judith stayed at home and looked after the house and the chickens and the vegetable garden and tended the baby, while Jerry did the field work in the corn and tobacco. When there was a rush of work he hired Elmer or his own brother Andy.
The baby claimed most of Judith's attention. It was astonishing that so small a creature should make such heavy demands. Nursing him, bathing him, washing for him, rocking him when he cried, remaking his cradle, changing his diapers, taking him up and laying him down, washing for him again, changing his diapers again, rocking him again, nursing him again, putting him back in the cradle again occupied her days and part of her nights in a round of small activities which, after the novelty wore off, began to fret her like the tug of innumerable small restraining bands.
It was not that she took less interest in the baby. Instead he became each day more engrossing. In her scarcely outgrown childhood she had never cared much for playing with dolls; but this live doll that laughed and cried and gripped her fingers with its tiny hands and looked so ridiculously like Jerry was the most fascinating of playthings. The fascination, however, did not extend to his diapers, his clothes always accumulating in the washtub, his insistent demands night and day for her continual presence at his side and for all sorts of constantly recurring small attentions.
But dislike her bondage as she might, she was his slave. Miraculously this little newcomer who a few short weeks ago had been nothing to her but a burden of the flesh, now occupied with undisputed assurance the position of the most important thing in her life. Everything was for the baby. His health and comfort were the only things that really mattered. All the activities of her life centered about him. He was her first thought in the morning and her last care at night. When she came back into the house after working in the garden or feeding the hogs and chickens her first step was toward the cradle. He was always in her thoughts. She could not let her mind dwell upon the desolate vacancy that would be left if he should be snatched away from her. And yet she became daily more irritated and harassed by the constant small cares that his presence demanded of her.
Sometimes, to break the monotony and loneliness, she would take the baby on one arm and walk across fields by the short cut to Lizzie May's or down into the hollow to Hat's or up along the pike to her father's. There she would visit for a while, returning in time to do up the evening chores and get Jerry's supper. She often walked many miles in this way, carrying the baby on her hip.
On Sundays Jerry would hook up and all three of them would drive off to spend the day at her father's or at his father's or at the home of one or other of their many relatives. Judith looked forward to these Sundays. She who had always despised visiting was now glad to escape from the tediumand monotony of home into the comparatively refreshing atmosphere of other people's kitchens and dooryards. There she would sit and string beans or peel apples and talk with the women of the house about chickens and babies and the sicknesses and deaths and scandals of the neighborhood, clutching eagerly at these tattered scraps of other people's lives, as they fluttered past her in the idle and haphazard talk.
Soon, however, it was no longer possible to go visiting every Sunday. The summer passed; and the early fall, warm and calm and caressing, the full blown flower of the year, faded quickly into late fall with its cold, driving rain, keen winds, and sodden depths of mud. After Thanksgiving there were very few days when the weather was such that she could take the baby out.
So she stayed in the house with him long gray day after long gray day and plodded through the dismal daily round of dish-washing, clothes-washing, cooking, sweeping, nursing, and diaper changing. Each day was exactly like the one before it. Each day the demands of the baby and the rest of the household were precisely the same. Even the cooking allowed of no variation; for now that winter was come, there were just four things in the pantry: coffee, corn meal, dried beans, and hog meat, with perhaps an occasional cabbage or squash that by some miracle had escaped the frost. From as far back as she could remember she had been accustomed to this winter scarcity and had never minded it much before. Now she found herself continually longing for something new, something different to eat, not so much from starvation of body as of spirit.
Through the winter months the sun rarely shone and for days together the rain dripped dismally down the window panes and filled the dreary little house with its monotonous murmur. From the window she could see nothing but twinkling tawny puddles, slick, tawny mud, the outbuildings gaunt and black in the rain and above and beyond them the unchanging lines of the hills.
She borrowed Hat's books and her copies of the "FarmWife's Friend" and read them through. But she could not get from them the mental stimulation that they had afforded to Hat. Instead of opening to her the door of romance, they seemed only flat, silly, and unreal. She was sure that no such people had ever existed. She had never cared much for reading any of the books that had fallen in her way. She got more satisfying entertainment from drawing pictures of the dog, the cat, and the chickens in the dooryard. She tried again and again to draw the baby, but could not make the picture look like him. She drew the view from the little kitchen window as it appeared from every position in the room. With each step that she took the view was a different one. But all the pictures had one thing in common: the sweep of hilltop lining itself against the sky. She amused herself by piecing these pictures together and making the whole line of hills that bordered the hollow on the window side.
She was glad when Jerry came home at night, and ran to meet him, listening eagerly to his talk of what had happened in the field or the stripping room. She devoured greedily his tale of how Luke and Hat had got into a quarrel about which of them was to light the fire in the stripping room; and how he, coming in in the midst of the quarrel, had settled it by lighting the fire himself. But Hat and Luke had not seemed to consider it settled, for they had not spoken to each other all day long.
When Jerry came home from his trips to town to buy sugar and coffee and get the corn ground at mill, she listened with the most lively interest to his rendering of the news gathered at Peter Akers' store. Young Jim Patton's wife had left him for the fourth time after a quarrel in which it was said that he had tried to use the hay fork and she the butcher knife. Ziemer Whitmarsh, driving home from a drinking bout over near Dry Ridge, had been arrested on the triple charge of abusing his horse, using profane and obscene language, and disturbing the peace. There had been a shooting affair over at Sadieville. A nigger had been killed and two white men wounded. Nobody seemed to know just how the trouble had started.Black Joe, a half witted nigger of the neighborhood, had been caught stealing Uncle Sam Whitmarsh's chickens. And Uncle Sam, with a buggy robe clutched over the shirt and drawers in which he had nabbed the thief, had appeared at Constable Seth Boone's door at one o'clock in the morning, covering the frightened nigger with his gun.
Sometimes Luella came to spend the day with her and dandled the baby and helped Judith with the housework or with some piece of sewing. Luella was only twenty-two; but already she was taking on many of the looks and ways of an old maid. Lizzie May never came; she was entirely taken up with her own family concerns. Sometimes Hat dropped in, bringing the latest copy of the "Farm Wife's Friend" and her most recent tale of wrongs at Luke's hands, or old Aunt Selina Cobb slipped in and sat for the afternoon, patching an already much patched shirt for Uncle Jonah. Aunt Sally Whitmarsh, who lived in the nearest house on the pike, wended her way across the fields once in a while and brought up to date the news and rumors of the neighborhood from far and near; for Aunt Sally was a great hand to collect gossip.
Sometimes Judith felt a bit creepy as she looked at Aunt Sally. Could it be that this calm featured, self-contained woman who sat placidly mending drawers for Uncle Sam and telling the news as dispassionately as if she were the personal column of a country weekly, had sown the seed of insanity in more than one of her children? Judith thought of Bessie Maud over in Black Creek Hollow and wondered if it could really have come through Aunt Sally.
Once young Bob Crupper drew rein in the dooryard; and instead of hallooing from the horse's back, flung himself from the saddle, tied the horse to a fence post and came striding toward the house. He was a tall, strongly built young fellow, handsome like his father and with his father's fearless and dreamy eyes.
"Is Jerry hereabout?" he asked, standing holding the knob of the open door in his hand.
"No, he's strippin'," answered Judith, looking up from her sewing. "You'll find him in the strippin' room."
"I wanta see him 'bout buyin' that little crop I raised on Uncle Ezry's place," explained Bob. "I hain't hardly got enough to make it wuth my while to haul it, an' I'll let it go cheap. There hain't a lot of it, but what there is is durn fine terbaccer."
"Mebbe he might buy it," said Judith. "He hain't got a big crop this year. Anyway, you'll find him in the strippin' room."
Bob made no move to go immediately in search of Jerry. Instead he closed the door that he had been holding open and made a step into the room.
"Bin cold this last few days, hain't it," he said, scratching up under his cap. "But the wind don't git you daown here in the holler. It blows mean up our way."
Something made Judith glance up swiftly from her sewing; and she caught Bob's eyes, which had been gazing at her neck and the curve of her right shoulder. When she raised her eyes he turned his away and fixed them on the woodbox.
"I see Jerry leaves you plenty wood to keep warm with," he said, with a short, embarrassed laugh.
"Yes, it's more'n some men does. Hat Wolf's allus a-kickin' 'cause Luke leaves her most o' the wood to chop."
"Well, the big heifer might as well be a-choppin' wood an' a-usin' up some o' that extry fat she's got. Naow a gal like you's too fine an' purty to chop wood."
She cast a swift glance at him.
"That's easy fer you to say, Bob Crupper, seein's you don't hev to chop my wood. If I was your wife or sister you'd think diff'rent, no matter if I was as good lookin' as the Queen o' Sheba."
"I dunno haow good lookin' the Queen o' Sheba was," answered Bob, emboldened by this rallying. "But I do know you're the best lookin' gal this side o' Georgetown."
He took a step nearer, and she could smell the whiskey on his breath, which she had not noticed before.
"I'd feel proud to chop wood fer you, Judy."
"Seein's you don't hev to," she flashed back. "I notice men is allus proud to do things fer wimmin if it's sumpin they don't hev to do. You'd better git along an' see to sellin' yer terbaccer crop."
Something brisk and decided in her manner made him take a step backward toward the door. But the whiskey gave him a little courage.
"I hain't a man that goes araound talkin' private to other men's wives," he began desperately, in a pompous, whiskey fuddled voice.
"You mean you air," countered Judith, getting up from her rocking chair. "You take yerse'f along about yer business, Bob Crupper."
The sharp and quite decided tone of her voice made him take another step backward and open the door. She gave him a push which sent him over the threshold and slammed the door in his face. Peering out of the little window, she saw him kick his horse in the ribs and gallop away. As she watched him out of sight she suddenly saw him standing by Wolf's wagon shed talking to Luke. He turned and looked at her, said something to Luke, and the two men laughed. She resented the look and the laugh and felt angry and insulted by his recent quite uninvited advances. Yet deeper seated and longer lasting than the anger and the feeling of insult, there was a sense of pleasurable excitement. Her neck and right shoulder were still warmly conscious of the bold gaze of his eyes. She looked at herself in the glass and saw that her cheeks were glowing—not entirely with anger. It was a long time before her neck and shoulder could forget how they had been looked at; and she was not sure that she wished to have them forget.
"Did Bob Crupper come to the strippin' room to see about your buyin' his terbaccer crop?" she asked, when she and Jerry were at supper that night.
"No. Was he here?"
"Yes. He come by on that big roan mare o 'hisn. I told him he'd find you in the strippin' room."
"I wouldn't mind takin' a risk on a small crop if I cud git it reasonable," mused Jerry.
Sometimes old Jonah Cobb, bent almost double, would walk silently into the house and sit for hours. Just why he came Judith did not know, for he hardly ever opened his mouth. He had been a tenant farmer ever since any one could remember. Now in his old age he still made every year a weak attempt to raise a little tobacco. Each spring he would prepare a bed; and when the setting season came he and Aunt Selina might be seen in the first gray of the dawn trudging out to set their plants. The dusk of the long spring day would be closing in before they struggled homeward again, he plodding a few steps behind. The result of their labors never amounted to more than a mere handful of tobacco. They occupied a one-room tenant house which Hiram Stone had long allowed them to consider their own. Here they kept some chickens, half a dozen rabbits, and a few hives of bees. Of late years Uncle Jonah had devoted a good deal of his attention to the bees and had come to consider himself quite a bee man. Almost every time that he opened his mouth it was to speak of bees. He would sit in Judith's kitchen for half an hour or more without opening his lips except to spit into the woodbox, and at the end of his period of silence would say abruptly:
"Bees needs salt same's sheep or cattle. A man otter salt his bees every so often."
After another twenty minutes he would break the silence by saying:
"Sorghum makes good feed for bees in winter."
Sometimes old Amos Crupper, the father of Bob, came in after supper and spent the evening sitting by the stove talking of wars and rumors of wars. The old man was tall, large and broad-shouldered, full of health and vitality. He had a massive leonine head, covered with a shock of thick gray hair, which he held erect in soldierly fashion. His eyes were fearless anddreamy, like those of his son Bob. He always looked clean and wholesome and was circumspect about his tobacco spitting.
He was a veteran of the Civil War and loved to talk of those far off days when as a youth of twenty he had toted a musket in defiance of what was for him the right. In a deep bass voice vibrant with chest resonance he would tell again and again in the same words stories of the events of the war that had made the deepest appeal to the simple nobility of his nature: stories of romance of devotion and of heroism.
When he was not talking about the war he talked about the virtues of his dead wife. Late in life he had made a second marriage with a sister of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, Aunt Amanda Baxter, herself a widow of long standing. He remained, however, an unwilling victim. In the neighbors' houses he talked continually about the beauty and sweetness of his first wife, alluding to her always as "My wife." He never spoke disparagingly of Aunt Amanda, but when he had occasion to mention her it was always as "That woman I'm a-livin' with naow."
Uncle Amos was fond of Jerry and Judith and spent many hours of undisturbed quiet sitting by their stove talking of the old war and of the wife of his youth.
Once in a while Joe Barnaby came over to get away from the thick atmosphere of home. Joe was a son-in-law of Uncle Sam, having married one of the latter's nine children, Bessie Maud by name. Bessie Maud had not spoken to her mother and father since the occasion of a quarrel which had occurred shortly after her marriage. That was eight years ago. She had also quarreled with several of her brothers and sisters and stopped speaking to them. Such long sustained family feuds were common enough in Scott County where slight grievances dwelt upon in solitude grew like a rolling snowball. But of late years Bessie Maud's temper had become so uncertain and her habit of mind so strongly anti-social that few even of the near neighbors ever went near her house. It was whisperedthat she had always been a little off. It was in the family, the neighbors said, and it was on Aunt Sally's side. Aunt Sally's father, old Abe Beasley, had been "queer," and so had several of her other relatives on the father's side. And of Aunt Sally's children there were others besides Bessie Maud who showed traces of the taint.
Although Joe was but little over thirty, his hair was streaked with gray, his chest sunken, his features drawn and pinched, his face clouded with a dull misery. How much of this was due to his having to provide for so many babies, to his affliction of chronic rheumatism, and to his domestic troubles nobody could say. The neighbors all felt sorry for him, but nobody was heard to waste any pity on Bessie Maud.
The visitor that Judith liked best to see push open the door was Uncle Jabez Moorhouse. Often the others wearied or annoyed her if they stayed too long. She always knew what they were going to say; and the men nursing the stove got in the way of her cooking. Uncle Jabez was the only one of them all who might say or do the unexpected. When he came in at the door, something of the outside came in with him; and as he stood spreading out his great hands over the top of the stove or sat and smoked meditatively by the oven door, it seemed to her as though a warmth and radiance reached out to her from his great, ungainly body. He was often silent, sometimes weary and cynical, rarely merry through these dismal winter months. Yet whatever his mood, she felt the same emanation from his presence: a heartened feeling, as if the pulse of life had grown stimulatingly strong and full.
Once when they were alone and he had been sitting silently by the stove for a long time, he said, re-crossing his legs:
"You know why I like to come an' set here, Judy? It's 'cause it's as good to me as a half pint o' whiskey in my belly."
The winter dragged slowly to a close, and on its heels came an early spring to hearten the mud-bound tenant farmers. The March winds and warm April sunshine dried up the mud and the shanties were no longer prisons.
"I've a mind to go to Georgetown nex' Court Day," said Jerry one April morning at breakfast. "I'd kinda like to see haow hosses is a-sellin' this spring."
"Let's both go," chimed in Judith eagerly. "I'd love to go. I hain't bin no place all winter; an' I hain't bin to Georgetown but onct in my life."
"But haow about the baby?"
"Luelly'll take care of him. Or we kin take him over to your mammy."
"I was countin' on ridin' over with Joe Barnaby. If you go we'll have to drive the cart an' let Joe ride by hisse'f. Why do you want to go, Judy?"
"For the same reason you wanta go," she flashed angrily. "Because I'm sick o' doin' allus the same thing every day."
Jerry tried to assume an expression of male dignity and importance.
"I'm goin' fer to see haow hosses is a-sellin'," he said.
"As if you need to go fer that! You know well nuf you kin ast anybody that's bin there. An' anyway you don't need to know; you hain't a-buyin' no hosses. Why don't you tell the truth? You wanta go fer a holiday; an' I wanta go fer a holiday. So we'll both go."
"All right. Have it yer own way," said Jerry. He had the air of making a concession, and he looked disturbed and annoyed.
On the evening of the great day, Jerry and Judith took the baby and his bottles over to Aunt Mary Blackford, who was only too glad to have charge of the little darling. Judith felt as happy and excited as though to-morrow was to be her wedding day. She was unrestrainedly voluble even to Aunt Mary. When she and Jerry got home, they scrubbed themselves in the washtub, laid out their clean clothes, and went to bed, setting the alarm for two o'clock.
When they heard the alarm clock's noisy ting-a-ling, they jumped out of bed as eagerly as two children on Christmas morning. It was one thing to get up early to set tobacco and a much easier thing to get up early to make a trip to Georgetown. They had breakfast and did up the morning chores by lamp and lantern light; and it was still night, with no light but that of the stars when Jerry tied the lantern underneath the cart and they clambered in and started Nip up the steep path that led to the ridge road.
The path was full of the smell of damp earth and growing grass, mingled from time to time with the heavy scent of flowering locust trees. As they swung out onto the smooth pike, the first rays of the sun came slanting across the fields, casting long morning shadows. To Judith there was something vastly exhilarating about this driving out of the night, out of the creeping gray, out of the dimly growing twilight into the full blue and gold glory of the morning. She had a sense of infinite freedom and gaiety, as though the whole world had become a holiday place. It was the first time that she had been away from the baby since he was born eleven months before. Out of pure exuberance she began to sing:
Oh, the bumblebee is a busy bird,He bumbles all araoun',He sucks the honey off'n the flowerAn' puts it in the graoun'.
Oh, the bumblebee is a busy bird,He bumbles all araoun',He sucks the honey off'n the flowerAn' puts it in the graoun'.
Oh, the bumblebee is a busy bird,He bumbles all araoun',He sucks the honey off'n the flowerAn' puts it in the graoun'.
Oh, the bumblebee is a busy bird,
He bumbles all araoun',
He sucks the honey off'n the flower
An' puts it in the graoun'.
Jerry too whistled with joy of the spring morning. But it did not mean to him what it did to Judith. His nature did not respond to the stimulation of natural things; and he had not been shut up in the little house in the hollow all winter. To him the drive was only a little more enjoyable than many other recent drives; and the sway of the cart, the rattle of the wheels and the rhythmic pounding of Nip's hoofs did not mean to him, as to Judith, a triumphal progress.
She was wearing a new dress of white with tiny red dots, and a sunbonnet that she had cunningly contrived out of a big red bandana handkerchief. Under the red sunbonnet her dark yet delicate beauty glowed like the silken flame of a poppy.
Standing back behind its two gloomy hemlock trees, the little shanty in which Jabez Moorhouse lived was brightened into silver gray by the morning sunshine and smoke was pouring from the chimney. A few hens scratched about the door, and a white-breasted collie sunned himself on the step and looked intelligently about. Jabez was in the yard chopping wood to feed his morning fire. Half of his shirt tail hung out of his overalls, as it nearly always did, and his head and hairy chest were bare. He paused in his chopping as the cart came rattling gaily along the road and waved his hand to the young couple, who waved back to him. After they had passed he stood watching the retreating cart till it disappeared around a bend in the road.
A strange thought suddenly took possession of Judith. She found herself wishing that it was Uncle Jabez who was sitting beside her instead of Jerry. Together she and Uncle Jabez would notice all sorts of things; and they would point them out to each other and laugh and wonder and enjoy the beauty and strangeness of the world. Jerry was different. For a moment she felt cold and dreary.
As they trotted past Uncle Ezra's long white mansion, they glimpsed Cissy's face pressed close to the little kitchen window.
Jogging along toward Clayton, they saw the smoke of breakfast fires curling up in white columns and vanishing into the blue. About the houses that they passed dogs were barking, roosters crowing, and hens cackling. Men were leading horses to water, women milking, and children picking up chips around the chopping block.
"I'll bet Joe's most there by this time," said Jerry, as they swung out of Clayton. "He said he was a-goin' to leave at midnight so's to be there fer the fust tradin'. Funny the way he does. He hain't never got the money to buy nuthin, an' he hain't got much to trade with neither. An' yet he don't hardly miss a Court Day in a year; an' he's baound to be there fer the fust dog shootin'. An' Gawd, haow he does drink! He says it helps him to fergit his troubles."
"It looks like Bessie Maud don't git much chanct to fergithertroubles."
"Well, she makes 'em fer herse'f."
It was about nine o'clock when they pulled up in the main street of Georgetown and gave Nip a drink from the fountain. They had traveled a little over twenty miles.
"We'll tie up in there," said Jerry, nodding sidewise in the direction of a grassy back street. "It's a nice, quiet place to eat our lunch, an' there's grass fer Nip."
Judith sprang out of the cart and together they started out to see the town.
Trading was already in full swing. The main street was lined on both sides by buggies and spring wagons, with here and there an automobile. The side streets, too, were quickly filling up, as farmers' rigs of various kinds came rattling into town looking for a place to tie up. Riders galloped along the street, sometimes leading one or more horses behind them. And in a vacant lot that flanked one of the hotels a human ring had formed itself around a group of restive mountain cattle in the midst of which a sun-browned young fellow was gesticulating and talking loudly. From this ring one could see the back quarters of the hotel piled with heaps of boxes, crates, old lumber, and refuse swarmed over by flies. From theinevitable large pile of scrap iron and tin cans, a few as yet unrusted surfaces reflected the sun's rays like mirrors.
The street in front of the hotel was thronged with a crowd of men wearing, not the clothes they put on for funerals, but something a little better than the clay-caked overalls of daily wear. The swinging doors of the bar were already active on their limber hinges, and a smell of beer oozed out into the street, carrying a suggestion of kegs and coolness.
As they passed these swinging doors, Joe Barnaby came out, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
"Howdy, there, yo'all. You jes come?"
"Jes tied up," said Jerry.
"Me I bin here this two hours past. There's bin some mighty smart tradin' a-goin' on. Two bunches o' maounting cattle sold dirt cheap. If I had a place o' my own I'd like to git me a few head o' them maounting cattle an' slick 'em up with good feed an' mate 'em to a short horned bull. They'd sell good when they come fresh, an' there'd be money in it. But anybody can't do nuthin 'ithout capital. The young uns eats up everything I kin make fast's I make it. So there you are. 'Ithout land or capital a feller goes raound year after year the same old turns, like a squirrel in a cage, an' comes back at the end right where he started from."
It was not at all like Joe to make so long a speech; and both of his listeners looked at him a little surprised. The smell of mingled beer and whiskey on his breath gave the explanation.
Georgetown could boast of a population of only a scant five thousand. But with the crowded streets and the bustle and activity of Court Day, it was a metropolis to these dwellers in lonely hollows. The three strolled along, looking curiously at the people they met and being looked at by them in turn. It was an excitement to see so many of their kind at once. Most of these people wore in their eyes and about their mouths that look of vague, mild blankness characteristic of country people in Kentucky. The attention of every one was divided between the crowds and the shop windows, in which the Georgetown tradesmen had cunningly placed on view such articlesas they considered would most appeal to the Court Day crowds. The hardware merchants had taken their lawn mowers, carpet sweepers, and phonographs to the back of the store, and displayed instead rows of cheap, tin-plated wash-boilers, gray enameled sauce pans, sheep shears, tobacco knives, hoes, rakes, shovels, and cheap butcher knives. The windows of the dry-goods stores were full of overalls, corduroy trousers, work shirts, apron ginghams, and sleazy but bright colored calicoes. The two druggists had withdrawn their tooth brushes, toilet soaps, and cosmetics, and vied with each other in a tempting array of patent medicines, nursing bottles, sheep dips, and veterinary remedies.
The Town Hall, where the Court sat, showed unusual signs of activity. Boys swarmed over the stone steps; and one of the two policemen of the town walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the entrance. From time to time some one would hurry up or down the steps. More likely than not such person was baldish, parchment skinned, dressed in a rusty black suit, and carrying a leather satchel.
On every side there was uproar. Horses whinneyed and neighed, wheels rattled, small boys yodeled for joy of the crowds and excitement. From every direction came the sound of men's voices proclaiming loudly in the familiar phrases of the horse trader the virtues of the animals that they had to sell or trade.
Listening to the peans of the traders, one would be led to believe that all the horses for sale or trade were splendid animals, young, healthy, vigorous, and docile. A glance around, however, belied this impression. Very few conformed in any way with the descriptions of their enthusiastic would-be vendors. There were old horses with hanging heads and sagging haunches, bowed like an old man at the knees and shoulders. There were vicious horses, with evil, suspicious eyes and ears that they laid back ominously. There were weak, spindly horses, with no breadth to their backs and haunches that sloped away into nothing, like the shoulder of a ringleted mid-Victorian female. There were old race horses, once good forthe track, now good for nothing whatever. There were horses with clumsy, ill-shaped legs and awkward feet, that could hardly raise one hoof without setting it down on another. There were horses, naturally of good disposition, which had been made irritable and vicious by bad training. There were horses with all sorts of bad habits. There were horses with the heaves, horses with ringbone, spavin, stringhalt, and a dozen other equine diseases and defects.
The really good horses were very few in number; because a good horse can readily be sold near home and for a good price. The farmer used Court Day as an occasion for trying to get rid of the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the aged.
Everybody knew this; and yet everybody who had a little money in his pocket and many who had none at all, bought and traded horses on Court Day. It had become a passion which swayed in spite of reason, like the lure of the lottery or the seduction of the gaming table. Horse trading, with the drinking which accompanied it, was to these lonely tobacco growers their one joyful extravagance. It was their dissipation, their romance, their single oblation to the god of life and joy.
Around the corner of a side street, the Blackford party glimpsed Uncle Sam Whitmarsh in conversation with a lithe young man wearing a broad felt hat over a face that betokened life in the open air. Each man was holding the bridle of a horse. Coming up to see what it was all about, they found that a trade was in progress.
Uncle Sam was never so taken up with a trade that he had no time for his friends. He beamed a welcome on his good neighbors and his son-in-law.
"Howdy, Jerry. Howdy, Joe. Waal, Judy, you're a-lookin' like a rose in May. You don't mind a old man like me tellin' yer wife she's handsome, do you, Jerry?... No, stranger, the mare's too light. I hain't got no youst for her no more'n a hen has for teeth."
The horse that Uncle Sam held by the bridle was a heavily built iron gray work horse apparently about twelve years old.He was a bit clumsy looking, but on the whole sound and healthy in appearance.
The stranger's horse was a beautiful cream colored mare with large, intelligent eyes, small ears, a gracefully arched neck and slim yet strong looking legs, the very perfection indeed of shape and proportion. Not even a track horse could be daintier in appearance. Uncle Sam tried to look at the animal with disdainful indifference; but for all his experience in the art of dissimulation, he could not keep out of his eyes a covert gleam that glinted of admiration and coveteousness.
"I'd suttenly never dream o' lettin' her go under a hundred," the young trader was saying. "But I jes can't take her a step fu'ther 'ithout shoes, an' I hain't got the money to git her shoes. I've had hard luck lately, stranger. Gawd, what hard luck I've had! Many a time this past month my three babies hain't had all they cud eat; an' me an' my wife has gone hungry fer days together. The two linin's o' my pocket has got to know each other good these past weeks. Lookit the shoes I got on, willyuh? I can't git shoes fer myse'f, let alone fer the mare."
Uncle Sam looked down at the shoes and saw that they were badly scuffed and that the young man's foot was bulging from a slit in the leather on the side of one of them. A good deal of the stitching on the other one had come loose; and it was laced with a shaggy scrap of binder twine. Whether the soles were through or not Uncle Sam could not see.
"An' lookit my shirt. It's the on'y shirt I got, I swear it is; an' it hain't a-goin' to cover my nakedness much longer."
He turned around with a broad grin and showed a long slit over the shoulder blade, through which his healthy, sun-browned skin shone with a satiny sheen.
"Naw, even if she didn't have nothin' the matter with her feet, the mare's too light. I hain't got no youst fer her."
Uncle Sam took a sidewise step, spat over the edge of the curb, and made as if to jump into the saddle.
"I tell yuh, an' I'd swear it on the Holy Book, there hain't a thing the matter with them there front feet. The poor beast'sfootsore, that's all's wrong with her. If you'd come from Williamstown this mornin' 'ithout shoes, wouldn't you be dead on yer feet? Gawd, them rough, stony roads is hard on a good shod hoss, let alone one that hain't got no shoes at all. I wouldn't think o' tradin' fer that awkward lout o' yourn, not fer a minit if it wa'n't he's new shod. I gotta be on the road to-night agin, an' I gotta have a hoss that kin travel along."
"Naw, she hain't nuthin to me. She's too light."
"But look what a beauty she is! Wouldn't you be praoud to drive a hoss like that? Wouldn't yer wife be praoud to drive her? Lookit the color of her. Look haow she holds her head. Lookit them round haunches. Lookit them slim, dainty legs. If she hain't sound an' perfect in wind an' limb you kin take this las' shirt off'n my back."
"Naw, I can't use her."
Uncle Sam made another move toward the saddle.
"I'll let you have her for twenty-five dollars boot. Bejasus, that's givin' her away. But what kin a man do when his pocket's flat? A baby kin have the best of him."
For about the twentieth time Uncle Sam looked into the horse's mouth and assured himself again that she was in very truth only five years old. Then he carefully ran his practised hand down each of her legs, feeling for bumps and finding none. Then he meditatively scratched his head.
"Waal, I tell yuh, stranger," he said, after a long period of deliberation. "I hain't got a passell of use fer the mare; but I'll give yuh five dollars boot. That's the best I kin do."
After a great deal of further parley, they compromised on ten dollars boot. Uncle Sam took two five dollar bills out of his well worn billfold and handed them to the trader, put his own saddle and bridle on the cream colored mare, wished the young man the best of luck, and the trade was made.
By this time it was getting on toward noon, and they went to the place where they had left the horse and cart to eat their lunch. Joe and Uncle Sam accompanied them, unfolding the lunches that they had brought in their coat pockets; and the four made a festive picnic meal together, supplementing whatthey had brought from home with peppermint drops and ginger snaps contributed by Uncle Sam, who was always a free spender on holiday occasions.
As they were eating, Uncle Sam entertained the little company with the tale of how he had that morning started out from home with a pocket knife and by a series of successful trades ended by possessing a fine new Colt automatic. He drew the revolver out of his pocket and caressed its smooth surfaces with his finger tips, a satisfied smile spreading over his foxy, fun-loving, and kindly face.
"The knife wa'n't a heap o' good," he said in his deliberate drawl. "So I up an' swapped it fer a dawg. I knowed I'd sholy have trouble gittin' the dawg back home, me bein' on hossback; so I traded him fer a watch. I had a purty good notion the watch wa'n't no timekeeper; so I traded it to Tom Pooler fer hisn that I knowed was a good un. Then I traded the watch fer a shot gun. It was a good shot gun; but I got two shot guns home; so I looked raound till I faound this here trade. She's a beauty an' she's jes the same as new."
He fondled the blue metal of the little death dealer with loving fingers.
"An' that's a rare beauty of a little animal I got yonder," he went on, nodding sidewise toward the cream colored mare. "When she gits shoes on her feet, she'll be fine as a fiddle. All in all, I'm praoud of to-day's tradin'. Some folks, 'specially wimmin, thinks a trader lives a idle life. But I tell yuh, tradin' hain't sech child's play. It takes hard work an' stickin' at it—an' it takes injinooity."
Uncle Sam's eyes turned meditatively inward and reposed upon himself, apparently not ill pleased with what they saw there.
"An' that there young feller thinks he's got a work hoss off'n me," he went on, musingly rubbing his lean chin with his lean hand. "Howsomever, 'twa'n't me that clipped the harness marks onto him. It was Edd Patton done it after he faound the hoss wouldn't work nohaow. All I done was jes to keep 'em trimmed a little."
After the meal was over, the three men sauntered away on manly pursuits, their steps leading them in the direction of the swinging bar door; and Judith was left to gather up the remains of the meal. As she was doing this, she saw the young man who had just traded with Uncle Sam come up and join the party belonging to a covered wagon which had tied up a few yards away. They were evidently his wife and three children; and the five ate dinner together, boiling coffee and frying bacon and eggs over a little gipsy fire of twigs and chips built between two large stones. The young trader seemed to be in high spirits and laughed and played light heartedly with the children. He recognized Judith as the young woman who he had seen standing by while he was trading; and frankly admiring her youthful good looks, he cast several bold glances in her direction, which his wife tactfully pretended not to notice.
After the meal was over, he went away again. Judith, giving herself up to an after dinner feeling of pleasant languor, sat on the grass under the big beech tree and watched the three little girls as they played house with a piece of board for a table and a handful of flat pebbles for dishes. Their mother, a faded, harassed looking woman, who was probably in the late twenties, although she looked much older, gathered up the broken egg shells and threw them on the fire, washed the gray enameled mugs and plates and put them away in the covered wagon. The three little girls were named Curlena, Sabrina, and Aldina. The faded mother, when she had occasion to speak to the children, called them by these names in a way which suggested that she derived pleasure from the sound of the long, euphonious, and unusual appellations.
After dinner lethargy does not last long in the young; and Judith soon grew tired of sitting idly under the tree. She got up, shook out her skirts, felt to make sure that she still had her little purse in her pocket, and started toward the town.
As she passed the covered wagon she paused; for country people do not go by each other without a word of greeting.
"Howdy, ma'am. You come from far?"
"From Williamstown this mornin', ma'am. My husband's a hoss trader an' he follers the court days. We're most allus on the road."
"You like the road?"
"No, ma'am. My husband likes it well enough; but I hain't never cared fer the road. It's a hard life—'specially with three young uns; an' you can't have things much better'n what the gipsies do. 'Tain't so bad purty weather like this; but then comes rains an' we have to take to somebody's barn, an' sometimes stuck there fer four or five days hand runnin'. It's hard then to dry the young uns' clothes an' to git any kind o' warm cooked food fer 'em. An' if they was to fall sick, I dunno what I would do. I'm allus glad when winter comes an' we have to go into lodgings somewhere. But 'tain't like havin' your own home."
"Would you rather your husband was a farmer?"
"'Deed I would, ma'am," answered the woman eagerly. She seemed to be glad to have some one of her own sex to talk to. "There hain't nothin' I'd like better'n to have a little home o' my own an' never have to move out'n it. I'd have flowers in the yard an' lace curtains on the front winders; an' I'd keep my three little gals dressed nice an' have a white cloth on the table. But seems like folks hain't in this world to git what they want, 'specially wimmin. Well, it's the men that has to earn the livin', an' I s'pose they gotta do it the way seems best to 'em."
She sighed resignedly.
Judith felt sorry for the woman. To some extent she could understand her point of view. It was as if sister Lizzie May, with all her finnicky little housewifely instincts, had fallen to be the wife of a wandering horse trader. She herself thought the life would be a jolly one, if one had no babies.
She turned away with a word of good-by and went on into Main Street, where she made delightful explorations in the dry-goods stores. Here in the dim coolness that smelt alluringly of new cotton goods, she wandered around with other backcountry women, fingering this and admiring that and looking lingeringly at the things that she was not able to buy.
Most of these women were stolid-faced, ungainly, flat-footed creatures, even the young ones wearing a heavy, settled expression, as though they realized in a dim way that life held nothing further in store for them. Some carried babies on their hips or had older children peeping shyly from behind their skirts, overawed by the strange surroundings. They looked at and fingered the pretty voiles, ginghams, and summer silks, then bought unbleached muslin, dress lengths of calico and spools of white cotton thread.
Judith bought some bright calico for dresses for the baby, and a piece of embroidered white muslin to make him a bonnet and a Sunday dress. Then, not being able to resist a certain pretty flowered muslin gay with pink rosebuds, she bought enough of it to make a dress for herself.
As she was loitering along Main Street looking into the shop windows, Bob Crupper came up from behind and looked at her admiringly with his boyish eyes.
"Hey, Judy, what you a-doin' here in the big taown?"
"Same thing you're a-doin', I reckon: a-loafin' an' a-idlin' an' a-spendin' what little money I got."
"Yaas, I expect that's about what we're all a-doin'," said Bob, and walked along beside her.
Now and then they saw in the crowd the familiar face of some one from their neighborhood; and Judith was conscious each time of a certain constraint in the look and greeting of these people, which would not have been there if she had been alone. Since her marriage she had begun to learn that a married woman cannot appear in the company of any man other than her husband without "making talk." She looked at the people she knew, from under her heavy eyebrows, with a challenging boldness that was half amusement, half irritation.
In front of the Town Hall they met Jerry, who turned and joined them. She caught the same expression on Jerry's face. This look which had caused her only a vague annoyance when seen on the faces of the neighbors, brought a surge of quickanger, when she saw it sneaking out of Jerry's eyes; and she began to joke and banter with Bob in a hectic way quite unbecoming to a married woman of the tobacco country. Her gaiety sent Jerry into a fit of the sulks; and he walked along beside them silent and glowering. The more he sulked and glowered, the more feverishly Judith laughed and joked. The smell of whiskey, that powerful stimulant of the male propensities, was strong on the breath of both the young men, and was in a great measure responsible for Bob's animation and Jerry's sullenness. Judith, however, was not intoxicated, and did not know enough about the effect of alcohol to make it an excuse for her husband's behavior. Under her levity there lurked a growing spirit of quite sober and very cold appraisal.
When they reached the place where Nip and the cart were waiting, the young horse trader had come back and was busy greasing his wagon and making other preparations for pulling out. He looked at Judith again but not quite so boldly, out of respect for her husband's presence.
Obeying that magnetism which draws people of the same sex together, the three men gathered in a little knot beside the trader's wagon and began to talk about horses, saddles, and guns. Judith went over to the woman, who had spread a gunny sack on the grass and was sitting on it mending one of her little girl's dresses, and they began to talk of babies, of cooking, and patterns for pieced bedquilts.
As the woman prattled scarcely heeded at her side, Judith felt stirring strongly within her a deep exaltation. The break in the deadening monotony of her days had affected her like a strong stimulant and she was keenly alive to things, tasting deliciously the full savor of life. She had forgotten her irritation at Jerry. All her perceptions seemed strangely sharpened. Her eyes took delight in noting niceties of tone and line and color, things for which she had no words but which were becoming with each year of mental growth more pregnant with suggestion.
She was so taken up with the delight of gazing about that she hardly noticed that Joe Barnaby had passed by andbeckoned Jerry away, probably for the purpose of some further communion of spirits over the bar. Still less did she observe that after Jerry's departure the two men beside the covered wagon looked several times in her direction and dropped their voices to a very low tone. The trader's wife prattled on.
Suddenly and quite without warning, the whole scene went black before her. Against this blackness certain words stood out bright red. Her ear had caught only these few words; but they made the meaning of the whole sentence just spoken by Bob Crupper quite unmistakable.
When the black melted and she could see again, she felt herself tingling all over as if pricked by a million needles. She looked sidewise at the trader's wife to see if she had heard. The woman was running on about how hard it was to keep children in garters, too busy with her own chatter to notice anything said by anybody else. Judith knew that she was spared this much at least. She got up, made a stammered excuse about something that she had forgotten to buy, and almost ran from the hateful place.
She did not go toward the town, but in the direction of the deserted back streets. Among these she walked, at first with feverish haste, stumbling over clods and stones; then more slowly, as her rage and burning sense of insult subsided into dejection and misery. As she walked, she went over certain things in her mind. She saw Bob Crupper and Luke Wolf standing in easy attitudes by the spring wagon down in Hat's hollow. Bob said something to Luke, who turned and looked at her, and the two men fell to laughing together. She remembered certain looks from Luke that she had accidentally caught while they were stripping tobacco. She could see his little pig eyes squinting at her above his fat red cheeks. She called to mind all the details of Bob's visit to the house in the hollow. She remembered other things: whispers, looks, dark sayings that she had thought nothing of at the time; but that now flashed out of the past with vivid and sinister significance. She saw again the looks of the people that she had met on the street that afternoon while walking beside Bob. They wereall too clearly explained by these few words that her ear had inadvertently caught and that now seemed to be burnt into her brain. It was the talk of the neighborhood, then; and there was only one person who could have betrayed the secret. It was desperately hard for her to force herself to this conclusion; but she made herself admit that it was the only one possible. That spirit in her which gave her eyes their level, searching look, which made her see through the flimsy shams and hypocrisies and self-deceptions of the people about her, forced her to look at her own situation with the same undeviating gaze.
She wandered about through sleepy, grass-grown back streets and lanes drowsing in the hot afternoon sunshine and deserted as a graveyard. She met nobody but an old man hobbling with the aid of two crutches. She had a feeling that the old man looked at her as if he knew and blushed furiously when she accidentally met his eye.
She took no note of the passing of time, and did not see that the shadows had begun to grow long, when she heard Jerry's voice anxiously calling her name and immediately after saw him appear around the corner of a fence.
"Hey, Judy! What the devil?" In his tone was the irritation which follows upon relieved anxiety. "Where you bin a-hidin' to? I bin a-lookin' all over taown fer you. I was beginnin' to think sumpin'd happened you."
Without waiting an instant, she turned upon him and accused him of what he had done. Even while she accused him, she felt herself buoyed up by a quite unreasonable hope that he would be able to deny her charge. The sight of him had for the moment restored her confidence in him. The moment, however, was a short one. Instantly she saw by his face that it was true, unbelievably but inexorably true. He stood before her sheepish, contrite and ashamed.
"Why did you do it?"
She flashed the words at him as if each one was a sword.
"Judy, I was drunk. It happened a long time ago, afore we was married; an' it was about the one time in my life I bindrunk enough not to keep my tongue in my head. Even so I could a bit it off soon's I'd said it."
She turned without a word and started to walk back toward the town. Disgust, like an avalanche of dirty dish water, put out the clear flame of her anger. The one thought left in her mind was that she was going back only because she had to go where the baby was. Jerry came up beside her and tried to take her hand; but she snatched it away and put it behind her back.
"Judy, it ain't sech adreadfulthing," he pleaded. "Course I hadn't otta done it, an' I wouldn't if I hadn't been drunk. But if you knowed haow most men is, an' haow they brag about everything like that, an' oftentimes when there hain't a bit o' truth in it, you wouldn't think so hard of me for one little slip."
He went on in this way, stumblingly trying to convince her that he was not a monster. But his pleadings fell on deaf ears, hard, young, intolerant ears that had learned from life no principles of judgment, yet were all too eager to judge. It was impossible for Jerry, out of his small experience of life and with the few words at his command, to tell her how deeply rooted in the young male is the urge to publish abroad his sexual achievements. She felt only that he was low, vile, and contemptible, no better than his cronies, the drunken young loafers whom he had, with such an unspeakable lack of delicacy, taken into his confidence, and who had been busy ever since rolling her secret on their dirty tongues. She loathed the whole odious pack of them, Jerry more than the rest. She walked on beside him silent and cold, without answering a word. Being able to make no impression on her with his pleading, Jerry too fell into sullen silence, musing on how hard she was. He felt chilled by a feeling that she was far away, that she did not belong to him, that she never had and never would belong to him as he did to her. A bitter feeling of estrangement and mutual distrust grew out of the silence like a dividing wall.
Turning the corner, they came upon Uncle Sam talking toJoe Barnaby and holding the bridle of a stolid, heavily built plow horse, not over young, but healthy and tough looking and apparently good for many more years of useful labor.
"What's went with the purty mare?" asked Jerry, trying with poor success to make his voice sound natural.
"She's changed hands, bless her shapely carcass," laughed Uncle Sam. "This here is one time when the old man was trimmed good, Jerry. After I left here, I took her over to John Hornby, the blacksmith, to git her shod, an' he ses to me:
"'Sam,' ses he, 'you're jes about the eleventh sucker that's brought me that there mare to hev her shod through this past winter an' spring. I'd jes as leave steal stovewood out'n a widder's back yard, Sam, as charge yuh money to put shoes on the feet o' that there animal.'
"'What's wrong with her?' I asks, anxious like.
"'What's wrong with her is she hain't no good fer nothin' whatever. She's track horse stock, but I wouldn't back her agin a mud turtle. She's part paralyzed in them there front legs. Everybody buys her thinks she's footsore; but after they've kep her a spell they find she's got a footsoreness that don't wear off. She's a purty animal an' it's a pity she's that way. But that's the way she is.'
"'Thanks, John,' I ses. 'I allus knowed you wuz a friend o' mine.' An' I leads the mare away.
"Twa'n't twenty minutes after I'd left the blacksmith's shop afore I had her traded fer this feller. He hain't no beauty, an' he hain't no fancy saddle hoss; but he's a hoss I kin use on my place. An' when I hain't got use fer him, I kin allus trade him easy. He's a good, solid, dependable beast, hain't you, Dobbin?"
He patted the horse's gray neck affectionately.
The sun was beginning to slant low in the sky, and a cool late afternoon breeze had sprung up. Carts and buggies and spring wagons rattled through the streets on their way toward the open country; and horsemen cantered past them, going inthe same direction. Uncle Sam mounted his plow horse and with a farewell wave of the hand trotted ponderously away with the rest of the procession.
Jerry and Judith followed in the cart. As they passed through Main Street they were greeted by pervasive scents of stale beer and whiskey. The ground was littered with lunch wrappings, egg and peanut shells, and banana skins. The crowd had thinned out. Most of the family parties had already started for home; and of the unattached males who remained some were reeling and lurching about the sidewalk noisy with drunken laughter and ribaldry, others stood propped up against a hydrant or a telegraph pole, portentously solemn and self-important, arguing in declamatory fashion with companions as ridiculously drunk as themselves. Here and there a little knot had formed about men who were quarreling over some fancied grievance, their angry voices rising harsh and ominous as the whiskey seethed in their fuddled brains and they strode threateningly nearer each other and gripped the handles of the revolvers in their pockets.
Through the hubbub of this sordid bacchanalia the young couple drove in cold and sullen aloofness and passed out into the heavy silence of the country.
Jerry had a fine bed of tobacco plants that year and together he and Judith set out four acres. Now that the baby was weaned, Judith could leave him with Luella or Aunt Mary while she worked in the field. Her help was badly needed this year, for Jerry had no money left to pay a hired hand. She was glad to do this, for even setting tobacco was a change from the dreary sameness of the household. At a cost of oozing rivers of sweat, of untellable weariness, stiffness, lame backs, and aching necks and hands worn almost to bleeding, the four acres were set at last and they sighed with relief.
"Naow if there on'y comes a good rain," said Jerry, "they'll git a start."
But the good rain did not come. Day after day the sky was cloudless, the flame of the sun clear and hot. Day after day the hard clay hillsides baked harder and the tobacco plants shrank into themselves, turned from green to gray, from gray to brown, shriveled and dried up and blew away in dust.
"Gawd, hain't it discouragin'!" Jerry would say, looking darkly at the clear, blue expanse of sky.
At last it rained. It rained all day and all night; and the next day the "season" was on.
With the infinite patience of those who have to humor the caprices of nature in order to wrest a living from the earth, they went over the whole four acres once more. Jerry had kept his tobacco bed well watered and there were plenty of plants.
"Bejasus, if Luke had stole 'em this time," he said to Judith, "I'd a gone daown there an' bust his jaw fer him. On'y reason he didn't steal 'em, he made his bed clost by a spring this year an' he's got lots of his own."
More than two thirds of the plants were dead and had to be replaced.
"They're a bit late," commented Jerry, "but if the season'sany good, they'll grow into good terbaccer yet. It don't take terbaccer long to make itsse'f."
It rained several times through June and the plants began to spread out green and lusty. Then with July the weather turned dry again and intensely hot. The clay hillsides baked harder than ever, so hard that the clods were more like stones than lumps of dried earth. Jerry, in an attempt to save his crop by making cultivation take the place of rain, went through his corn and tobacco again and again with the cultivator, then followed the rows of tobacco with his great sharp hoe, loosening up the ground around each plant. Judith tried to help him at this task but had to give it up. The ground was too flinty, the hoe too heavy; and the sickness of pregnancy which was coming upon her for the second time made her arms weak and nerveless.
No rain fell during July; and in blinding light and blazing heat August set in. It seemed to Jerry, who anxiously watched the sky, as though nature, not content with defrauding him out of the fruit of his labors, was amusing herself by making a fool of him and playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. Sometimes the sky would grow overcast and all the signs of approaching rain appear, only to be swept away with the next wind. Occasionally even a light shower would fall, enough to partly lay the dust and irritate the anxious tobacco growers. Then the sky would clear again. Often they would see it raining on the horizon, over near Cynthiana or Georgetown or up toward Cincinnati. But no rain fell to refresh their own thirsty fields. Sometimes on hot afternoons great black storm clouds gathered in the west and rolled up into the sky, then passed away obliquely and disappeared toward the south. Through the heavy, sultry night, when it was hard to get to sleep, heat lightning played incessantly around the horizon. This long continued strain of watching for rain and seeing it approach only to go away again began to wear on the nerves of both Jerry and Judith. They became touchy and irritable and snapped at each other over trifling matters.
Judith tried to keep her garden alive by frequent hoeings.But with the increasing heat and drought it wilted and withered up till there was nothing left but a few dried stalks. They had the milk from their cow, some salt meat left over from the winter before and some dried beans. These with corn meal cakes and coffee made up their daily fare.
By the middle of August wells and cisterns were getting low, and springs and streams were drying up. Some of these latter were already bone dry, with the hoofprints of the cattle that used to drink in them baked hard into the flinty clay. Water for stock was growing scarce. The Blackfords' well was dropping lower every day, and Jerry, afraid that it might go dry altogether, would not let Judith use any of the precious water for washing clothes. When wash day came, he would hook up Nip or Tuck to the cart and drive her and the baby and the tubs and the bundle of clothes to a spring further down the hollow where water was still to be had. The spring was low and the scant water fouled by the feet of cattle; but it had to serve. Here he had put up a rude bench on which to set the tubs, and here, as there was now nothing for him to do in the field, he would help Judith to rub and rinse the clothes through the muddy water and spread them on the grass to dry, while the baby crawled about through the wild weed jungle and grasped with his helpless, chubby hands at butterflies and flecks of sunlight.
These little excursions were not picnics, as they might have been under more favorable conditions. The failure of their crops had cast a gloom upon the young couple which was deepened by the change that had come over Judith. The debilitating effect of the long continued heat added to the nausea and nervous irritability of an unwelcome pregnancy had induced in her a state of body and mind in which, in order to endure life at all, she instinctively closed herself up from it as much as she could. With something of the feeling of a creature of the woods, she sought to shut herself up with her weakness and misery. She plodded through the round of her daily tasks like an automaton. Even to the lifting of an eyelid, she made no motion that was not necessary. Her feet dragged,her eyes seemed as if covered by a film and her face wore a heavy, sullen expression. She avoided meeting people, answered them in monosyllables when they spoke to her, and took no interest whatever in the doings of the neighborhood. When Jerry tried to talk to her, she scarcely looked at him or answered him, until, chilled by her lack of response, he too would fall into gloomy silence. Sometimes when Jerry, in his inexperience with the washing of clothes, did something particularly clumsy and awkward, she would scold him sharply then relapse into her habitual impassivity. When the clothes were dried and gathered up, they rode home in silence, Jerry driving, Judith holding the baby on her lap.
Beat upon by the fierce heat and the hard, white light, the face of the country took on every day more of the appearance of drought. Each day vegetation shrank and the exposed surface of bare, caked earth increased. Corn dwindled and yellowed and bluegrass turned dry and brown. The alfalfa stretched its deep roots far down into the soil and managed to keep its rich dark green color, but grew never an inch. The roads lay under a thick coating of this fine powdery dust, soft as velvet to bare feet. When a wagon or buggy passed along it traveled hidden from sight by its own dust and left a diminishing trail behind like a comet. Hens held their wings out from their bodies and panted in the deepest shade of the barnyard. In the pastures cattle and sheep stood all day under trees; and even horses rarely ventured forth into the full glare of the sun. In the evening when the sun slanted low and a grateful coolness stole across the fields, all these creatures, like their human brothers, shook off the torpor of the heat and began to feel more like themselves. The hens scratched for a living among the chaff and dung. The sheep and cattle, banded together after their kind and with their heads all turned in one direction, cropped the scant bluegrass. The horses, aristocrats of the pasture, went apart by themselves, scorning the company of these humbler creatures.
The tobacco plants, owing to their sturdy weed nature, lived through the heat and drought; but they might as well havedied, for their leaves were as thin as paper. By the middle of August the tobacco growers, including even Jerry, had given up all hope of getting a crop that year.
With the failure of their crops, every day became Sunday for the men; and they began to visit in each other's barnyards. Different degrees of success, with the inevitable accompaniment of work, self-seeking, greed, jealousy, and disappointment, would have divided them. But the universal bad luck brought them into community of spirit and ushered in an era of neighborliness and good feeling. Lounging on the shady side of each other's barns, whittling aimlessly at bits of stick, chewing straws and tobacco, the men talked about the springs that had gone dry and those that were going dry, inquired about the state of each other's wells and cisterns, and complained about how far they had to drive their cattle to water. They compared notes on the subject of prickly heat and other skin rashes, and talked of the hotness of beds at night. Uncle Jabez Moorhouse quoted copiously from his one book on the subject of drought, a favorite topic with the prophets, and all the old men called to mind former dry years, citing chapter and verse as to the exact date of the arid year, the time the drought began and the number of weeks it had lasted. The calendar for the past fifty years was thoroughly gone over from this point of view and each dry year carefully compared in all respects with the current one. There was matter here for much discussion and argument among the older men, their memories often telling stories that were widely at variance with each other.
The first days of August brought news that sent a buzz of excitement through the groups of barnyard loungers. Although there was no newspaper to carry it, this news flashed rapidly into even the innermost recesses of Scott County. The most unschooled tobacco grower living in the loneliest hollow did not have to wait long for its arrival. The more advanced and intellectual, who subscribed to a religious or agricultural monthly, got the tidings long before the next issue of their magazine was dropped in the rural mail box. The magic word war is powerfully and swiftly winged and scorns modernmethods of broadcasting. Standing about the coldly monumental August stove, the loiterers in Peter Akers' store spat into last winter's sawdust and talked over the news that the Cincinnati-Lexington train had brought. Driving homeward in their several directions, they pulled up alongside of every passing wagon.
"Hey, d'yuh know there's a big war on?"
At home they told their wives, their neighbors, everybody who passed by the house.
Having done this, they had, however, told all they knew. The words Germans, French, Russians, floated about in the air, but to most of the tobacco growers meant nothing whatever except that the war was a long way off. There was, however, a general realization that it was a big one, that somewhere far away the world was in great turmoil and excitement. The outermost ripples of this excitement shivered through Scott County.
The women inquired anxiously as to the likelihood of their sons and husbands having to go to war. Their fears relieved on this vital point, they poohhooed the whole matter and went on about their housework, instantly transferring their attention to matters of real importance, such as the rendering out of hog fat and the patching of overalls.