"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 limplyat 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 ofmoving 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 shaftsof 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 herstorm 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. Whateversordid 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.
The great after war pestilence called "flu" swept across Scott County that fall and winter, sparing neither the old men nor the young virgins. It knocked at many doors, and often where its knuckles had rapped the undertaker hung his bunch of crape. Sometimes the crape was a rusty black, often a rather soiled white. It took away Uncle Jonah Cobb and left Aunt Selina alone with the bees and rabbits. It took one of Joe Barnaby's children and Aunt Abigail's son, Noey, and Evalina, Aunt Maggie Slatten's second youngest girl. It took babies in arms and young men that the war had spared and women with child. It took Uncle Sam Whitmarsh away from his cheerful traffic in dogs and horses.
"It's allus this way," said Jabez Moorhouse. "War an' pestilence goes hand in hand. The bigger the war the bigger the pestilence. The Bible says them that's near at hand'll fall by the sword an' them that's afur off'll die o' the pestilence. We're a hell of a long ways off, but we're a-dyin' o' the pestilence jes the same."
He hunched his shoulders over the stove, feeling suddenly cold.
Once again winter settled down on the wind-shaken little house on the ridge. Judith, peering from the window at the mud and clouds of December, felt the old oppression sink upon her, heavier because so drearily familiar. How many years would it go on, she caught herself wondering.
It was nearly a year since the quarrel. Since then they had treated each other with the chilly politeness of strangers who do not much like each other's looks. In summer when life dragged less oppressively it was not so hard to bear. But now that winter was come her heart sank within her.
Christmas came and went and there was no change.
It was not until after Christmas that the flu came to them. Jerry had a light attack which kept him away from the stripping room for two weeks. Then when he was almost ready to return to work, Andy got it and was followed in a few days by Billy.
"If Annie gets it, it'll likely go hard with her," said Jerry, looking anxiously at the pale, self-contained little girl who was his favorite among the children. "We can't take her to mammy's 'cause dad's got it."
"An' I can't take her to my folks, 'cause Luelly's jes a-gittin' over it."
Judith did what she could to keep Annie away from her sick brothers. But one morning about a week after Billy had been taken sick, when she went to dress the little girl she saw that her cheeks were flushed with fever.
"I knowed there was no gittin away from it," she said grimly to Jerry, as she mixed a dose of castor oil with warm coffee.
On the third day Annie was so much worse that Jerry rode over to Clayton for Dr. MacTaggert.
It was late that night when the doctor's mud-spattered Ford came panting up the long hill and stopped before their door. The little man looked haggard and hollow-eyed from his constant attendance at sickbeds and his long hours of bumping over rutted roads and up and down steep, perilous trails to the tobacco growers' lonely shanties.
"It's pneumonia," he said, as he straightened up from his examination of the child's chest.
The blood sank away from Jerry's face, leaving it a sickly gray color, and he grasped the bedpost to steady himself.
"Can't you see your shakin' the child's bed," said Judith crossly in a grating voice.
The doctor said that she would have to be watched and tended carefully both day and night. Jerry let the tobacco stripping go and stayed at home to help with the nursing. The boys were now well on the way to recovery and beginning to be fractious and noisy. The father and mother took turns atnursing the little girl and trying to keep the boys quiet; and through the night one watched while the other slept.
As Judith sat by the bedside of the sick child that she had begrudged to life before it was born, her heart failed her at the thought that the little one might die. She felt that to see her die, to have her cold little dead body put into a narrow coffin and laid in the frozen ground would be more than she could bear. Her thoughts skirted these images and fled away aghast not daring to face them. Keenly she suffered with the sufferings of the child. When she anxiously watched her breathing hard she felt her own chest racked by tearing pains. She had to summon all the courage that remained to her to enable her to bear the sight and touch of the limp and wasted little body. Never had the child seemed more inextricably bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. She felt herself eager to make any sacrifice if only it would bring the little one back to life and health.
And yet at the same moment that she yearned over the sick child, another set of thoughts, strange and sinister, came forward with startling boldness, thoughts that had come to her at other times and before which she had quailed, as, in the darkness of a wakeful night, one quails before thoughts of approaching death.
Of what use after all that this baby should live? She would live only to endure, to be patient, to work, to suffer; and at last, when she had gone through all these things, to die without ever having lived and without knowing that she had never lived. Judith had seen grow up in the families of the neighbors and among her own kin dozens of just such little girls as this one that had come out of her own body: skimpy little young-old girls, with blank eyes and expressionless faces, who grew into a prim, gawky, old-maidish girlhood and passed quickly from that into dull spinsterhood as Luella had done, or to the sordid burdens of too frequent maternity. Little Annie was just such a one. In every way she was a product of the life that had brought her into being, and that life would claim her to the end.
Why had she been given such a child? It seemed the cruelest irony of chance that had bound her by this strong added link to the sodden life of the soil.
Sitting by the sick child through the long vigils of the winter night, the mother dwelt upon these thoughts, facing them squarely. And following them out to the end they brought her relentlessly to the conclusion that it would be better that the child should die. But having come within sight of this conclusion, she turned with instinctive horror and fled away from it. No, she could not have her baby die. She must not die. And yet better children were dying on every side. Why not hers as well as another's? The mother shrank and quailed, feeling her burden greater than she could bear.
As she struggled with these bitter thoughts, the moon, which had passed the full, looked palely into the lamplit room through the tracery made by a dead grapevine against the uncurtained window and saw her sitting gaunt and hollow-eyed, her sharp elbows propped on her knees and her chin in her hands. Again she restlessly paced the floor or stood by the window looking out and taking no comfort from the dumb stretch of hills and valleys that lay dark and lonely under the waning moon.
When it came Jerry's turn to watch by the baby, he was troubled by no such conflict of feelings. His one thought was that the child must be saved. He loved her with all the tenderness that fathers of his nature give to an only daughter, and he saw in her no defect nor resemblance to any other child. She was his girl and she must not be allowed to die.
For nearly a week the child lay tossing and moaning, seeming to be kept alive more by the hectic flicker of fever than by any more stable vital throb. The mother and father alternated in watching over her, silently doing what they could. They grew pale and red-eyed from lack of sleep, frowsy and unkempt. Above the tense strain of the anxiety that held them in grip, the dark cloud of their estrangement hovered with cold oppression. They rarely spoke except when they had to. At meals they sat opposite each other in gloomy silence. When, as sometimes happened, their eyes accidentally met across thebed of the sick child, they turned hastily away with mutual aversion.
At last, after a long night of feverish tossing, there came a morning when the little one seemed somewhat better. She breathed easier and the fever had sunk away leaving her pale and weak but more like the child that her parents knew. Was this a change for the better? Or might it possibly be one for the worse?
About the middle of the morning Dr. MacTaggert came. As he made his examination of the child the parents stood behind him watching anxiously, but never once casting a glance at each other.
"Why, she's a heap better," he said at last, turning around to them. "There's not much of her, but she seems to know how to hang onto life better than some of the stouter ones. The worst seems to be over now, and I reckon you'll raise her yet if all goes well."
"Judy!" said Jerry, when the doctor had closed the door. The one word was full of many things, like a bubble drifting through sunlight.
She fled to him and fell sobbing into his arms.
When little Annie had recovered and the danger of contagion was well over, Lizzie May came one Sunday to spend the day with her sister, bringing with her Granville and Viola in stiffly starched Sunday clothes and her new husband, Edd Havicus, who handled freight at the Clayton railway station. While Edd and Jerry and Columbia Gibbs and Joe Barnaby sat and whittled at sticks on the sunny side of the barn, the sisters visited together in the kitchen.
Lizzie May looked blooming and happy, and a layer of fat that was beginning to show just a trace of coarseness filled up the wrinkles that had lined her face after Dan's death.
She was continually rushing to the door to make sure that Granville and Viola were not playing in the mud, that they were not in the barn where they might go too near the horses nor anywhere in the vicinity of the horsepond. From the doorway she called out shrill admonitions and threats of future punishment. She found it hard to hide her pride in her own offspring and her disapproval of the dirty faces, muddy overalls and complete lack of manners of Judith's boys. The little girl was better, more clean, and quiet. But even she had not been taught to say "Thank yuh, ma'am," when you gave her a penny or a popcorn ball. If Lizzie May's children were ever negligent in this important matter she always admonished them reprovingly, "Well, naow, what d'yuh say?" and thus drew forth the belated avowal of gratitude. But Judith was shamelessly remiss in all such training. Lizzie May did not know whether it was from laziness or stupidity. She was grieved that a member of her own family should act so.
She was sadly shocked too when she looked about Judith's frowsy kitchen at the stove, innocent of blacking, the pots and pans crusted on the outside with a long accumulation of greasysoot, the floor that needed scrubbing, the smoked-up teakettle and the littered shelves.
"My," she thought with a shudder that almost turned into a shrug, "haow kin she keep a-goin' in sech filth?"
But she would not for the world have said anything; for the longer sisters live apart the more polite they become to each other. And because she wanted to guard against saying anything or looking anything, she chose the safer and much more absorbing topic of her own recently settled home in Clayton. She was voluble and expansive over the new oilcloth in the kitchen, the ingrain carpet in the best room and the set of pink-sprigged dishes that Edd's mother had given her for a wedding present.
"I'm sholy glad I kep' my things an' didn't give 'em away at a auction, Judy. Sech things goes fer nothing when you sell an' costs a heap when you buy. We'd a had lots more expense settin' up housekeepin' if we hadn't a had 'em. Course some of 'em is old fashioned an' not jes what you would choose if you was a-buyin'; but we can't afford yet to have everything to match an' all in golden oak, like young Mrs. Jim Akers. Her things is swell, Judy. Sometimes when I look at the old chair Dan used to set in nights when he come in from the field, I jes can't hardly keep from bustin' out cryin'. An' yet it seems as if things works raound fer the best. Edd's awful steady an' don't never hunt an' hardly never drink. An' it's a heap nicer livin' in Clayton, Judy. No caows to milk nor skimmin' nor churnin' nor botherin' with hawgs an' hens. Sidewalks right to your door so's you don't hev to slush through mud every time you set foot outside. So much easier to keep the kitchen clean, specially with the oilcloth on the floor an' the men not allus trackin' in. Nice neighbors to speak to over the fence or drop in on of an afternoon with yer sewin', an' the store handy to run to, an allus sumpin a-goin' on, an' yer husband drawin' his money regalar every Satiddy night. I dunno haow I ever could go back to livin'," she almost said, "like this," but caught herself in time and ended, "the way I used to."
Judith sat wondering why she could muster up so little interest and why she was not even offended by her sister's airs of superiority, as Lizzie May sang the praises of such urban elegancies as screen doors, garbage cans, and oil stoves.
"An' d'yuh know, Judy," she went on, "I hear there's talk of their startin' a picture show in Clayton. Wouldn't that be fine?"
"It wouldn't make no diff'rence to us," said Judith, smiling a little ruefully. "We're so fur off we'd never be able to git to it."
"Oh, but you must bring the young uns an' stop over night with me," said Lizzie May hospitably. "I got a grand new sanitary bed that his sister give us. All his folks seems to be well fixed. It's a pleasure, Judy, to be amongst people that's refined and has things nice."
Lizzie May seemed indeed to have assimilated the refinements of the town as the sponge sucks water. She was wearing high heeled pumps and nearsilk stockings, a skirt fashionably skimpy, a sweater of brilliant Kelly green and hair that had been put up over night in crimping pins. The mincing precision of her talk and ways had never been so apparent before, and she used the words "toilet" and "sanitary" with the connotations at once malodorous and antiseptic given to these once innocent words by urban Americans.
Judith felt a bit bewildered by all this newness: new clothes, new things, new words. "Toilet" and "sanitary," "swell" and "grand," were words that she had occasionally overheard in Clayton, but they fell strangely from Lizzie May's lips. She realized, with no particular feeling of regret, that the gulf between herself and her sister had widened.
She was glad when Lizzie May and her endlessly trained and endlessly guarded children were gone. Trying to pretend, to be interested in her sister's chatter had made her feel tired and headachy and she lay back in the rocking chair and closed her eyes. What a long time it seemed since she and Lizzie May were children together in the little log house that still stood scarcely more than a mile from where she sat. Howchanged was everything, and yet how unchanged. The same houses and barns stood where she had always seen them, the same people, looking scarcely different, moved in and out. But everything was stark now, bald and bare that in her childhood had been softened by haze, mysterious and beautiful. Beautiful indeed and mysterious the world had seemed then. She called to memory many things out of her happy childhood, the scent of drying tobacco and autumn evenings when they legged it, all five of them, around the clothesline prop, sniffing the winy air like young hounds. There were delirious June mornings, too, when she scampered down the pasture to bring up the cows, and pure April twilights lilac-scented that quickened into being young tendrils of fancy as airy and opalescent as morning gossamer.
How glad and forward looking had been all that time, how forward looking all the thoughts and stirrings and bubblings of youth, always reaching out, reaching out—to what?
Snorting and neighing in the glorious make believe that they were a prancing team, the boys came around the corner of the house trundling a homemade wagon. Annie, driving the wagon, uttered shrill squeals and giggles of delight.
In the half gloom of the kitchen the mother smiled mournfully. It was their day now. But their day too would soon be over, and the question remained unanswered. To what?
She took up the milk bucket and went out to do up the evening chores. When she had fed the hogs and chickens and milked the cows and strained and put away the milk, she sliced some meat for supper and mixed the corncake batter, then sat down to mend a tear in one of Annie's dresses. As she sewed she lifted her eyes often to the window.
From the day that they had moved into the windy little house on the hill, the sunset had begun to reach out hands to her. She had grown into the habit of looking forward to the end of the day. Its approach meant that the waking hours of dismal tasks and constant frets and cares would soon be over, that the whines and wails and wrangles, the scraping of chairs, the tramping of muddy shoes, the whole meaninglessturmoil would come to an end, and for a little while there would be peace. Sometimes, too, there was an hour of quiet for her when the work was done, the children out at play and Jerry not yet come in for his supper. From the westward looking window she could see miles of rolling country that stretched to the long sweep of the horizon. Through the day the prospect did not vary greatly and she had not much time to spend in looking at it. But at sundown the west drew her eyes like a magnet. There, with the passing of the slow months, she saw glow into being and fade away the placid gold and azure sunsets of early summer, the hot, smoldering saffrons of August, the clear wine colors of September and the cold grays and yellows of winter. There, after the rain had poured heavily all day long, she sometimes saw the thick, one-toned pall of the sky lift itself away from a narrow strip of intensely glowing horizon against which distant roofs and treetops made a black landscape fringe sharply silhouetted against the shining river of light. And after a day of squalls and driving clouds, massed storm clouds hung their dark, rainy fringes around lakes of amber and pure apple green.
The cloud pictures fascinated her even more than the water landscapes on the wall; for in them there was infinite variety and change. She saw stately, turreted castles built upon the tops of crags that rose perpendicularly from shining water; and on the other side of the water perhaps a grove of great trees with weirdly twisted limbs. And even while she looked the outlines of the trees changed, the castle dwindled or loomed larger and there was a new picture. When she looked again it was all gone and there was left a peaceful valley with a river winding through it, a little steep-roofed house on the river bank and a church spire in the distance.
Faces, too, came out of the clouds, faces that held her eyes more than the landscapes: droll, exaggerated faces such as she had tried to draw when she was a little girl at school, faces with bulbous noses and bulging foreheads, faces half animal, half human, crafty faces with little fox eyes, great flabby faces like Aunt Maggie Slatten's.
Sometimes too she saw grow out of the clouds great monumental heads, aquiline-nosed and lofty-browed, full of dignity and repose, as solid and eternal looking as though they were of carved rock instead of drifting cloud vapors.
With a pencil and a piece of wrapping paper, she sometimes tried to catch and hold the fleeting faces that most stirred her fancy. She had a little pile of such drawings laid away in the bottom drawer of the dresser.
It grew too dark to sew. She threw aside the half finished dress and stood looking out of the window seeking peace and a something more than peace which she had learned to draw to herself out of the sunset. It had been a soft, springlike day in March with a mackerel sky undecided between rain and shine. Now the western sky was dappled with a gray and silver sunset, like the spread-out wool of old, weatherbeaten ewes backed by the shining fleece of lambs. She went out and stood on the rickety porch. The air was pungent with the smell of damp earth and springing grass. A silvery quiet, pensive but serene, spread from the sky through the soft air, and in the evening silence a returned robin twittered from the top of a tall hickory tree.
Far down the ridge Marsh Gibbs was bringing up Hiram Stone's sheep and lambs to house them in the tobacco barn for the night. The hundreds of woolly backs moving separately yet together made a soft, undulating carpet that grew grayer as the twilight shadows crept over it and at the edges merged imperceptibly with the earth. Mingled with the tremulous bleating of the sheep and the shriller ba-ha-ha of the lambs, the sheep bells tinkled faintly; and dominating all Marsh's long drawn "sheep-ee, sheep-ee," as he led the flock, was not a human-seeming sound, but weird and melancholy, like the cry of some creature born of the twilight. She could not see, but she knew, how trustingly the little lambs ran by their mothers. Soon they would all be at rest in the big barn, safe, warm, and quiet.
In the dooryard she saw the last chickens straggling up one by one, obeying the homing instinct that brought them alwaysat night to the roost. Already the turkeys were perched in a row on the ridgepole of the shed, their big bodies outlined darkly against the sky. Now and then one of them would stretch out its long neck and look warily about to make sure that all was well. The last turkey flew up and joined the line, and with little chirrs of content they settled themselves to sleep. The dog in the corner of the porch sprawled luxuriously, and curled upon her friend's warm flank the cat slept. It was her favorite bed.
Standing wrapped in the growing twilight she felt herself like these humbler creatures an outgrowth of the soil, its life her life even as theirs. Quiet, peace and calm, these things belonged to them, a part of their heritage. These things in less measure her own life had to offer. These things at last she was ready to accept.
Since her reconciliation with Jerry in the joyful moment of their baby's triumph over death a new spirit had entered into her. Meltingly in that moment she had known by what strong ties she was bound to him. Convincingly she had realized the uselessness of struggle. Through the weeks that followed, long thoughts stayed with her as she went about doing her housework and she saw more and more clearly the path that the future laid out before her. Like a dog tied by a strong chain, what had she to gain by continually pulling at the leash? What hope was there in rebellion for her or hers? The boys would grow up to bury their youth in the tobacco field, as Jerry had done. Little Annie would be in years to come a prim and dull old maid like Luella or a harassed mother like herself. Which fate was worse, she asked herself, and did not dare to try to form an answer. She had grown timid about many things since the days of her forthright girlhood. Peace was better than struggle, peace and a decent acquiescence before the things which had to be. At the thought her sunken chest rose a little and the shoulders fell into less drooping lines; and there was a certain dignity in the movement with which she threw a long wrung sheet over her shoulder andstalking with it to the line spread it out to flap in the March winds.
Now, as she stood watching the pale sunset melt into darkness and listening to the distant bleating of the sheep, she told herself again that she was through with struggle and question, since for her nothing could ever come of them but discord. Henceforth she would accept what her life had to offer, carrying her burden with what patience and fortitude she could summon. She would go on for her allotted time bearing and nursing babies and rearing them as best she could. And when her time of child bearing was over she would go back to the field, like the other women, and set tobacco and worm and top tobacco, shuck corn and plant potatoes. Already people were beginning to call her "Aunt Judy." Some day she would be too old to work in the field and would sit all day in the kitchen in winter and on the porch in summer shelling beans or stripping corn from the cob. She would be "granmammy" then.
She felt that she would never again seek estrangement from Jerry. Divided, their life was meaningless, degrading and intolerably dismal. Together there would be if not happiness at least peace and a measure of mutual comfort and sustaining strength by virtue of which they might with some calm and self-respect support the joint burden of their lives. Peace in his house was a gift that she wished to offer him, not out of a sense of duty, but as a free and spontaneous return for his gentle goodness, his devotion to her and her children, his loving disregard of all her shortcomings as housekeeper, wife, and mother. Of this generous bounty she had received without stint, and she felt that at last it had brought forth response in her as grass springs up where warm rains have fallen.
She heard a step and turning her head saw her husband coming up the path. Even in the half darkness her eye, accustomed to all his moods, discerned in his hunched shoulders and heavy gait something more than the daily drag of the soil.
"I got bad news, Judy," he said, as he stepped shamblinglyonto the porch and stood beside her. "They found Uncle Jabez dead in his bed to-day—Aunt Selina found him."
"Uncle Jabez!" was all she could say; and a great void seemed to spread itself around her. Through the void she heard Jerry's voice coming as if from a long distance.
"Yes, it was the flu, I reckon. Nobody hadn't seen him for three four days. An', Judy, I won't never be able to forgive myse'f. Tuesday I was by his place an' he said he wa'n't feelin' a bit good an' strung me out some o' that Bible stuff o' hisn about how the Lord had made his flesh an' skin old an' broke his bones. He looked bad too. He said he reckoned it was the flu. Thursday I was past there agin a-chasin' the roan caow, an' I'd ought to a stopped in, an' I thought of it too. But the caow was a-gittin' fu'ther away every minute an' I kep' on a-goin' after her. An' if I'd on'y a stopped in he might a been saved, an' anyway he wouldn't a died there like a dawg with nobody near to turn a hand for him. It seems awful to think I never went in, don't it, Judy?"
She did not answer. In that moment the manner of his death and Jerry's negligence were nothing to her. All she could think of was that he was dead, that she would never again watch him warm his great hands over her stove, see the fine lines quiver about his mouth and hear the deep bass rumble of his voice, never again listen to his careless singing as he loitered boylike across fields, soaking in the sunshine, tasting the calm of the twilight, stalking giantlike through the light of the moon, and in the dark nights knowing the path with his feet as an old horse knows the road home. In that moment she realized that to know that he was dead was to fill her world with emptiness. What light and color had remained for her in life faded out before this grim fact into a vast, gray, spiritless expanse. Now for the first time she knew what his mere presence in her world had meant to her. The things that remained to her to raise her life above the daily treadmill were the things that she held in common with him: joy in the beauty of the world, laughter and contemplation. These things no one but he had ever shared with her. He had been the onereal companion that she had ever known. Now he was gone and she was alone. A weight like a great, cold stone settled itself upon her vitals; and as she gazed out over the darkening country it seemed to stretch endlessly, endlessly, like her future life, through a sad, dead level of unrelieved monotony.
Jerry came and slipped his arm about her waist, as he used to do in the old days when he and she were lovers.
"It's sad, hain't it, Judy, so many folks we've allus been used to gone, an' all in one winter: Uncle Jonah an' Uncle Sam Whitmarsh—an' now Uncle Jabez." Then after a pause, "But you an' me's got each other yet, Judy."
His arm tightened about her and he bent down and kissed her on the lips.
"Yes," she answered a little huskily, "we've got each other."
In its mercy the darkness hid her face.
He went into the kitchen to wash up. She could hear him lighting the lamp, pouring water into the tin basin and splashing it over his face, while he cheerfully rallied the children who had followed him in from their play. The lighted lamp cast an oblique golden band across the porch. She moved a little to be out of the path of the light and remained standing in the darkness.
"Whatcha got for supper, Judy? I'm most powerful hungry, an' these here young uns is a-diggin' into the cold corncakes like so many wolf cubs."
It was the inevitable summons. In obedience to it she roused herself, as she had done so many times before, and went into the house.
THE END