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 tedium and 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 "Farm Wife'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 and dreamy, 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 whispered that 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.