WEEDS
BY
EDITH SUMMERS KELLEY
[Illustration: Logo]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
WEEDS
CHAPTER I
Bill Pippinger was counted to be as good a neighbor, as bountiful a
provider and as kind a husband and father as was to be found in the
whole of Scott County, Kentucky, according to local standards of
goodness, kindness and bountifulness. He had never been known to refuse
a neighbor the loan of anything that he owned, from his pocket knife to
his team of mules. He was prompt with neighborly assistance whenever
there was any big job to be done, such as a smokehouse to move or a hog
to butcher. If he saw his neighbor's ox or his ass fallen down by the
way, he heeded the Bible injunction, of which he had never heard, not
to hide himself from them, but surely to help his brother to lift them
up again. And if he saw his brother's ox or his sheep go astray, he
brought them again unto his brother; for he was one of the few strictly
honest farmers in Scott County. Unlike most of his neighbors, too, he
was a man of peace. He never sought a quarrel and always avoided one if
possible. He had never in his life pulled a gun on a man, an unusual
record for a native of rural Kentucky, brought up from boyhood in the
time-honored tradition that the pulling of guns is a manly sport.
His wife had little cause for complaint against him, for he hardly
ever got drunk oftener than once a month at the Georgetown Court Day.
He saw to it that there was always, or at least nearly always, at
least one fat hog in the pen waiting to be butchered at Thanksgiving
or Christmas. He aimed every spring to raise enough corn so that there
would be plenty to feed the hens, to fatten his hog or hogs and to
furnish material for the daily cornmeal cakes until next season's crop
came on. If Bill did not always succeed in this laudable endeavor, the
blame was not laid at his door by his neighbors and certainly not by
himself. If there came a dry spell that withered up the corn just as
it was filling out in the ear, it wasn't Bill's fault. And if a rainy
season set in and kept the ground so wet that he couldn't get into the
patch with a cultivator, it was none of his doing if the weeds grew so
fast that they soon overtopped the corn. Bill was not the inventor of
weeds nor of their nefarious habit of growing faster than corn. Under
such circumstances reflections like this gave him much peace of mind
and spiritual comfort. There was considerable satisfaction in being
able to shift the blame onto the Almighty; and there was still further
repose of spirit in the thought that no effort of his own weak, human
frame could undo the damage done by the will of that all-powerful
being. If the corn crop was light, it was light, and that was all there
was to it; and there would be that much less corn to shuck out and that
much less fodder to haul in.
There were of course other matters pertaining to the farm over which
Bill could exercise more control than he did over the rain supply. On
these latter his mind could not repose with the same peaceful abandon;
hence he did not concentrate upon them. The fences that needed mending,
the manure that ought to be hauled out, the brush that should be cut
out of his pasture to give the grass a chance to grow: these things
preyed more or less upon Bill's mind, but he did not allow them to
annoy him too constantly. After all, he told himself, there was just so
much that one man could do on a place. A man couldn't be hauling out
manure and cutting brush and mending fence all at the same time; and
there was no use in worrying because everything was not kept up to the
top notch. Besides, a fellow had to have a little rest now and then and
a chance to visit with his neighbors, or what use to be alive at all?
Bill dearly loved to rest and visit. They were his favorite pastimes
and indeed about the only ones that the circumstances of his life
offered to him. To sit on a rail fence or a hitching post with a
chew of tobacco in his cheek, a bit of wood in his left hand and a
jack-knife in his right, and pass the time of day with all and sundry
who happened by, was as much as Bill asked of life. Whether the place
was his own barnyard or Jim Townsend's blacksmith shop or Peter Akers'
general merchandise store in Clayton made no particular difference to
Bill so long as he could sit and chew and whittle and talk. He was
built long and rickety, nondescript of feature, but with a bright
twinkle of humor and kindliness in his gray eyes; and his tall,
narrow-chested figure was a frequent sight about the lounging places of
Clayton.
The main trouble with Bill was that along with nine-tenths of the rest
of humanity, he had missed his calling. He was by nature a villager,
not a farmer, and the great regret of his life was that he had not
been a blacksmith. He had mastered the trade through sheer love of it
and had become the best of non-professional blacksmiths. He shod his
own horses and the horses of all his neighbors, asking them nothing in
return but the pleasure of their company while he worked. To have a
little shop of his own in the village whither the farmers would come
from six or seven miles around, bringing their horses and all the news
and gossip of the neighborhood, that had always been Bill's unrealized
dream. Chance, however, that wayward arbiter of the fates of all of
us, by making Bill the son of a farmer and the husband of a woman who
had inherited a farm, had spoiled a good blacksmith to make a poor
farmer. It did not occur to him to repine or cry out against his lot or
consider himself in any way a blighted being on this account. He merely
cast a momentarily envious eye upon Jim Townsend, the blacksmith,
whenever he happened to see him, and went on farming--after a fashion.
He was a gentle, kindly and sociable soul, and the good will of his
neighbors meant more to him than anything else on earth except his
family.
His family consisted of his wife and five children. Aunt Annie
Pippinger, a small, inconsequential woman in the early forties, was
all one color, like an old faded daguerreotype. She may have had some
claims to prettiness in the days when Bill courted her; but they had
long since gone, leaving her a bit of drab insignificance. Crawford,
the eldest boy, was surprisingly handsome and quite as surprisingly
indolent of mind and body. The twins, Luella and Lizzie May, were
thin, sickly-looking little girls. Lizzie May was pretty in a pale,
blond, small-featured way. Luella had a long, pale face, drab hair and
dull gray eyes; and her mouth hung open as though she had adenoids.
Judith was the third girl, born two years after the twins. After her
there was an interval of four years marked for Aunt Annie Pippinger by
two miscarriages and a stillborn infant. At the end of this interval
a child was born who grew into a chubby, round-eyed, stupid-looking
little boy named Elmer.
These children played and quarreled and made discordant, schoolyard
noises in the dooryard of a little, three-room shanty standing upon
forty-seven acres of heavy clay land which Aunt Annie Pippinger had
inherited from her father. The front yard had been plowed up at some
time or other but never planted to anything; and the result was a
plentiful crop of ragweed, yarrow and pink-blooming soapwort. Two or
three rose bushes clung to the broken picket fence and made it gay in
June; and by the front door there was a large bush that bore beautiful
creamy roses, tinged in the bud ever so slightly with delicate pink. By
the back porch a lilac bush as tall as a small tree made April fragrant
for the Pippingers.
The back dooryard was beaten bare and hard by the playing feet of
children and the dumping of endless tubs of soapsuds and pans of
dishwater. A discarded cookstove lying on its side against the back
wall of the kitchen, formed the nucleus for a pile of rust-eaten pots
and pans. Beyond the bare spot, a fringe of mustard, ragweed, and
burdock reached to the picket fence. Along this fence a dozen or so
stalks of hollyhock bloomed in summer gorgeously pink and scarlet
against a blue sky. The smoke house and the back house occupied
opposite corners of this yard, a well worn path through the weeds
leading the way to each.
A stone's throw beyond the picket fence stood the barn, a structure
that had been in need of repairs these many years, and part of the roof
and sides of an old wagon shed. Here, too, was the horsepond, overhung
by a big weeping willow, and a small corral that Bill had built for
the milking of the cows. Beyond rose a grassy slope dotted with locust
trees. A few straggly apple and peach trees, mostly sprung from seed,
grew here and there in odd corners.
The Pippinger farm, like all the rest of the land immediately about it,
consisted of hills sloping more or less gently into each other, so that
there was no level ground to be found anywhere. This was characteristic
of the whole of Scott County. Everywhere there were hills: steep hills
and gentle hills, high hills and low hills, plowed hills, and grassy
hills and weed-covered hills, but always hills. These hills sometimes
ran in long ridges across the land with hollows on each side and other
hills sloping up from the hollows. The only level land was the narrow
strips at the bottoms of these hollows made by the washing down of soil
from the hills.
A great deal of otherwise good land was spoiled in this way. If the
hills were kept in bluegrass or sweet clover, they "stayed put." But
when they were plowed for corn or tobacco and afterward left to grow
up in weeds, the heavy rains cut deep gullies in their sides and
washed the good soil to the bottom. This was the case with most of the
Pippinger acres. There was only a small amount of land left that was
smooth enough to be plowed for corn. Ever since the family had moved
onto the place, which was when Crawford was a baby, Bill had talked
about how he was going to "stop up them gullies an' put in sweet
clover." But each year the gullies wore deeper and each year Bill
talked less about reclaiming them. There was still enough pasture,
however, for two cows, Roanie and Reddie and a team of gray mules that
answered, though sometimes reluctantly, to the names of Tom and Bob.
Scratching and cackling hens made the barnyard lively; there were
geese on the horsepond; and a few turkeys ranged in the surrounding
fields and grew fat on the corn and alfalfa for miles around.
This was the center of the universe for the Pippinger children. Here
they played the games that they had learned in the schoolyard: "Blind
Man's Buff," "Tag," "Tom, Tom, pull away," and "Little Sally Waters."
They made playhouses in fence corners where they treasured up bits of
colored glass and stones glittering with mica. They hunted for the eggs
of hens that had stolen their nests. They stalked the turkeys to find
out where they were laying the precious turkey eggs. They stood around
their mother as she churned and with greedy little fingers scraped off
the spattered blobs of butter as they appeared on the dasher stick
and the churn top. When house-cleaning time was come and their mother
had the front room carpet out on the line, they crept in between its
dusty folds and crawled gleefully up and down making the mild April
evening vibrant with their shouts and laughter. They gathered wild
raspberries and blackberries in summer and in autumn hickory nuts and
black walnuts. They brought up the cows for the milking and exemplified
the phrase, "Straight from producer to consumer," by milking into their
own mouths. They made dandelion chains in spring and burr baskets in
autumn and scattered the silky fluff of ripe milkweed pods into the
sunny autumn air. They held buttercups under each other's chins to see
if they liked butter. They quarreled over the possession of playthings
and other subjects of childish dispute. Sometimes they fought savagely
and kicked each other's shins and made vigorous attempts to scratch and
bite, then ran crying and complaining to their mother.
A radius of some eight or ten miles about the farm formed their entire
world. Within this circle was Clayton, the source of groceries, candy
and Christmas toys, as were also the homes of the various grandparents,
aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom they visited. Almost every Sunday,
and sometimes on a week day, Bill would hitch up Tom and Bob to the
spring wagon as soon as the morning chores were done, and the whole
family, dressed in clean denim and starched calico, would jog away
over the winding dirt road to the home of one or other of their kin for
an all-day visit. The parent Pippingers sat on the seat in front, which
was padded with a couple of old patchwork quilts; and the children made
themselves comfortable seats in the thick straw of the wagon body.
So they would drive out into the sunshine, up hill and down hill,
across rickety wooden bridges, around gentle bends and sharp turns,
past corn patches and tobacco fields and long stretches of land grown
up in weeds and brush; through little groves of second growth maple
and hickory, past old log houses and weathered frame shanties and big
tobacco barns and occasional large, more or less pretentious dwellings
surrounded by lawns, till they came to grandad's or Aunt Abigail's or
Cousin Rubena's, and there halted for the day.
It was not considered necessary to warn relatives that on such and
such a day they were to receive seven all-day visitors. Such an idea
had never occurred to Bill or his wife or any of their connections.
The Pippingers themselves received many such guests, and were quite as
glad to be visited as to visit. There was no sin greater than the sin
of being stingy with your time, your food, or your work. To intimate by
word, deed, or look that visitors were not welcome was unthinkable in
the social circle in which Bill's family and their kin moved.
When the visiting Pippingers reached their destination, whether it
was grandad's or Aunt Abigail's or Cousin Rubena's, the procedure was
always the same. Everybody, men, women, and children, came out to
the wagon to welcome the visitors. There would follow a few moments
of general kissing, handshaking, comments on the weather, and mutual
inquiries concerning health. Then the men unhitched, put up the
mules, and retired to the barnyard to chew, whittle, and exchange
silence-punctuated views on the three main topics of common interest,
the weather, the crops, and the neighbors. The children straggled after
them or ran to the wagon shed to see the new litter of puppies or
started a game of "Hide and Seek" in the dooryard. Aunt Annie Pippinger
went with the womenfolk back into the house, where, having laid aside
her sun-bonnet and jacket, she immediately started to scrape potatoes,
cut string beans, peel apples, or otherwise help with the preparations
for dinner.
The whole day was spent in this way. The men loafed in the barnyard;
the children played or hung in semi-boredom about their elders; the
women cooked and washed dishes in the house. And when these tasks
were done and the kitchen floor swept, they sat down stiffly on
straight-backed chairs, smoothed their aprons and talked about the
price of calico, the raising of chickens, the recent sudden death of
Uncle James Cruikshanks, the stroke that Aunt Jenny Boone had had last
week, and other such topics.
The only break in what would seem to an outsider an interminable
stretch of tedium was the dinner. This usually consisted of salt hog
meat, fried or boiled, potatoes and some other vegetable, followed by a
heavy-crusted apple pie or a soggy boiled pudding. If it were summer or
autumn there would likely be a big platter of "roastin' ears," sliced
ripe tomatoes, or sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar. Everybody
ate plentifully and silently, and as soon as the meal was over the men
slouched back to the barnyard.
When the sun began to slant low in the western sky, Bill would at last
bring the wagon around. Aunt Annie Pippinger would put on her sunbonnet
and jacket, and the children, seeing the mules hitched up, would
straggle up one by one from their play. There would be a long family
gathering about the wagon before the visitors drove off; for nothing
having to do with social intercourse is ever done in a hurry in rural
Kentucky. They had had all day to talk to each other, and they had
repeated the same things many, many times over. It was getting late,
too, and there was a long drive ahead of them and all the chores were
waiting to be done. But still there could be no hurried leave-taking;
there was no precedent for such a thing. So they all stood about the
wagon and exchanged some more prophecies about the weather and some
more comments on Aunt Jenny Boone's stroke and Uncle James Cruikshank's
sudden death. And then there would be a long silence. And at last, in
the midst of the silence, Bill would gather up the lines. Then, having
allowed a decent interval to elapse, he would give the lines a gentle
shake and clear his throat.
"Waal, I guess we'd better be a-hittin' the high places. It'll be dark
agin we git home an' the chores'll be to do by lantern light. Is all
them young uns in there back, or are we a-leavin' some of 'em behind?
Waal, anyway a couple or three more ner less don't make no p'tic'ler
odds. Come over all."
"You come agin," the visitees would chant in chorus; and followed by
this never failing invitation to return the Pippinger coach and pair
would trundle out of the barnyard.
The remaining important factor in the life of the Pippinger children
was school. Bill himself like many of his neighbors could neither read
nor write, and hence was very firmly convinced of the benefits to be
derived from an education and determined that his children should have
the best that was to be had. Nothing, therefore, except bad weather,
was allowed to interfere with their regular attendance at school.
The school was two miles from the Pippinger farm. It was a small,
whitewashed, oblong box standing close to the road in the midst of a
circle of bare, beaten ground. A grove of stately maples and beeches,
fringing the bare spot, made a fine place for "Hide and Seek."
Inside a small pine kitchen table formed the teacher's desk,
which stood on a slightly raised platform. There were the usual
jackknife-carved double wooden benches and the inevitable lithographs
of Washington and Lincoln. Some admirer had contributed a large,
impressive print of Roosevelt, which had been given the place of honor
immediately over the teacher's desk. A large map of the United States,
printed many years previously and much yellowed by age, hung between
the windows on one side. These, with the blackboard, were the only
mural decorations.
Here Lena Moss, an anemic little girl of eighteen, still a child
herself in mind and body, who had been educated for a year and a half
at the Georgetown High School, did what she could to drill the three
R's into the somewhat blockish heads of about twenty children ranging
in years from five to the still tender age of the teacher herself.
Fortunately Lena did not have much trouble with discipline. Her pupils
were not, like little city hoodlums, vulgar and boisterous with the
life of the streets. Nor were they like the children in smaller towns,
who are quite as vulgar and boisterous and are held less in control
because their school "system" is perforce less ironly rigid than that
in the big cities. Lena's pupils were mostly inbred and undernourished
children, brought up from infancy on skim milk, sowbelly, and cornmeal
cakes, and living on lonely farms where they had no chance to develop
infantile mob spirit. They were pallid, long-faced, adenoidal little
creatures, who were too tired after the long walk to school to give
the teacher much trouble. The slang, rag, and jazz, which standardize
vulgarity in the towns and cities, penetrated to this out-of-the-way
corner only as faint, scarcely-heard echoes. The phonograph and the
colored "funny sheet" were unknown. Hence, Lena, though she did not
know it, had much to be thankful for. The loud munching of apples, the
shuffling of feet, the occasional throwing of spit-balls, or exchanging
of scribbled notes were the main breaches of a discipline which was
never at any time at all rigid. There was one pupil, however, who often
gave the teacher a good deal of trouble; and that, strange to say, was
a girl. She was Bill Pippinger's youngest daughter, Judith.
Judith was a lithe, active, slim little creature, monkey-like in the
agility with which she could climb trees and shin up poles and vault
over fences. Her bare, brown toes took hold like fingers. There was
something wild and evasive about her swift, sinuous little body, alive
with quick, unexpected movements, like those of a young animal. She was
like a naughty little goblin that springs up mockingly in your path
and before you can reach for it has run up a tree or vanished into the
thicket. These characteristics of her body were somewhat contradicted
by her face, vivid and bold in color and outline and habitually
serious. Her eyebrows were black and straight and rather too heavy;
and beneath them her gray eyes were dark, clear, and steady. She had
a way of seeming to look through and through you when she fixed you
with even a passing glance. These qualities of elusiveness and boldness
seemed bafflingly interwoven in her character and made her a hard pupil
to deal with. Lena never knew what to expect from her.
Without doubt the troublesomeness of Judith was partly due to the fact
that she was better fed than most of the other children. Bill was one
who never stinted his children in their food if he could possibly help
it. When there was a shortage he let it affect his own plate. The
Pippingers were not so saving as most of their neighbors; they did not
take every ounce of butter to the village store to sell at fifteen
cents a pound. Eggs, too, were not entire strangers to their table. The
fact of comparatively good nourishment did not, however, explain away
all of Judith's bad conduct; for the other Pippinger children, fed on
the same fare, were model pupils in the school. There was something
then in the girl's own inherited nature that made her different from
her brothers and sisters and from the docile, mouse-like little girls
and boys who sat beside her on the school benches.
In backwoods corners of America, where the people have been poor and
benighted for several generations and where for as many generations
no new blood has entered, where everybody is cousin, first, second,
or third, to everybody else for miles around, the children are mostly
dull of mind and scrawny of body. Not infrequently, however, there
will be born a child of clear features and strong, straight body, as
a reminder of earlier pioneer days when clear features and strong,
straight bodies were the rule rather than the exception. Bill Pippinger
had two such children, Crawford and Judith. Crawford was, like many of
the good-looking children of the neighborhood, merely an empty shell.
He had inherited the appearance of some pioneer ancestor without any
of the qualities of initiative and energy that had made him a pioneer.
Judith, however, was quite different. Sometimes when she was bringing
up Roanie and Reddie from the pasture at a fast trot or driving the
mules out of the cornfield with much whooping, arm-waving, and bad
language, Bill, watching her dynamic, long-legged little figure, would
say with a sort of restrained admiration: "Land, that little gal's got
life enough for a dozen sech--too much life, too much life for a gal!"