When she was able to be up and around again, she began to be possessed
by a great dread and loathing of the thought of the coming on of winter.
One late afternoon in early December, when the thick mud and heavy
skies of winter had laid hold upon the country, Jerry came into the
kitchen carrying a crooked nail covered with blood and rust.
"Looky here, Judy, what I took out'n the side o' Nip's leg. The damn
fool hoss'd done gone an' laid hisse'f daown on it. It was in near up
to the head. Where's the turpentine?"
"My, it's an ugly lookin' one. Jes thick with rust, hain't it?" she
said, as she rummaged for the turpentine. "Some heats the nail red hot
an' sticks it back into the hole."
"I know, but I kinder hate to do it. I'll soak it well with turpentine
an' that'd otta fix it. I can't fer the life of me see haow so many old
boards with nails stickin' up in 'em gits laid about in the barnyard.
All the time I keep pickin' 'em up, more keeps a-comin'. It looks like
they growed there. Is that the turpentine? Give it here. The quicker I
git it in the better."
He went out, slamming the door violently in his haste.
The wound healed over and Jerry had almost forgotten to worry about it,
when about ten days later he noticed that the horse was not acting just
like himself. He was nervous and fidgety and there was a stiffness in
the injured leg. Looking at the sore he saw that it had broken again
and there was a thin trickle of ugly looking matter oozing from it.
The next morning when he went into the stable to feed the horses, Nip
was frothing at the mouth. The stiffness had extended to all his four
legs, and he held them extended as if to keep himself from falling. He
looked at his master with wide, startled eyes that showed much of the
whites and from time to time a shiver ran through his body.
Jerry saw himself faced with one of the most serious disasters that
can befall a tenant farmer. Without going back to the house for his
breakfast, he saddled Tuck and galloped away in search of Doc Beasley,
the veterinary.
They came back a couple of hours later riding side by side. As soon as
Jerry laid eyes upon the horse, he knew that he was much worse. The
shivers had changed to convulsive shudders, and pain and terror looked
out of the animal's dilated eyes.
The veterinary, a lean old grayhound with a face of tanned leather,
shook his head.
"You'd best put a bullet into him, Jerry, an' have done with it. I cud
cure him, but it'd cost yuh more'n what the hoss's woth. That damned
antitoxin fer lockjaw's high's hell an' it takes so much fer a hoss
'tain't practical nohaow. If yuh wanta take a chanct on it's helpin'
him, I kin give him a shot o' some other stuff that sometimes does the
trick. It'll cost yuh five dollars, an' I hain't promisin' that it'll
cure him. But onct in a while it does. Anyhaow whether yuh take it or
whether yuh don't take it, I won't charge yuh nothin' fer comin' here,
'cause I'm on my way to Joe Patton's sick caow an' I know yuh hain't no
millionaire."
"Let's try it, Jerry," implored Judith, who had come into the stable
behind the men. "It seems a shame not to let him have one chanct."
"All right, Doc," agreed Jerry a bit huskily. "Go ahead an' try what
you kin do. If I had the money I'd feel like tryin' the big cure. But I
hain't got the money. So that settles it flat."
The horse doctor cleansed the wound, took a big syringe from his kit
satchel, filled it with a yellowish fluid, and gave the horse an
injection in the leg close to the wounded spot.
"There," he said as he replaced the syringe, "if he hain't a heap
better agin to-morrer mornin' he hain't a-goin' to git no better.
Anyhaow, you hain't got the hardest luck there is, Jerry, ole man.
Two o' Jim Summerfield's hawgs has got the cholera, an' the whole
thirty-odd'll be dead afore the week's gone. So you see you might a had
it worst."
With this cold but well meant comfort he was gone.
The next morning when Jerry went into the stable, the horse was down,
his jaws were locked and he was writhing in agony. Tuck, tied at a
little distance, looked at him with mild, questioning eyes.
He went to the house for his revolver. Judith said nothing. When she
saw him take the gun out of the dresser drawer she did not need to ask
what it meant. A few moments later she heard a shot and knew that it
was all over for Nip.
It was war time and horse hides were worth four dollars or more. So,
although he loathed to do it, Jerry skinned the poor animal that for so
many years had been his friend and the companion of his labors. When
the carcass was skinned he tied a chain about the hind legs, attached
the other end to Tuck's harness and, taking the lines in his hand,
said, "Git up, Tuck."
Restless and unhappy from the odious smell of blood, the horse started
uneasily, shied a little and looked around with dilated nostrils and
eyes that showed the whites. Then, seeing his master, hearing his voice
and feeling his familiar hand upon the lines, he went forward with his
usual steady step, dragging his dead companion.
Judith, watching sadly from the porch, saw the little procession pass
across the pasture. It had snowed during the night and the ground was
still white. Against the whiteness the dark figures of the man and
horse plodded with bowed heads. Behind them trailed a long thing of an
evil scarlet color. The front legs stood up stiffly in the air. The
inert head and neck, preternaturally long, trailed behind like a snake.
Behind the dragging head a dark streak marked its path from the barn.
On the far side of the pasture lay a deep gully. Here Jerry halted
Tuck and manoeuvered him back and forth so as to get the dead animal
as near to the brink as possible and in the position he wanted. Then
he unloosed the chain from the hind legs and, using a fence rail as a
pry, worked with the carcass until it went crashing over the brink. The
noise startled Tuck, who looked around uneasily.
Returned to the stable he sadly salted the hide, while Tuck, surprised
to find an empty stable, nickered and whinneyed and waited impatiently
for his friend.
The buzzards did the rest.
For days they hung in the air over the gully. From the kitchen window
Judith could see them moving on widespread wings. They would circle a
while in one spot, then fly off a little distance and circle again, as
though loath to give up their habits of search. The motion of these
silent creatures, slow and steady, with no perceptible vibration of
the sweeping, horizontal wings, was as beautiful as the flight of sea
gulls. When they tilted, the sunlight caught the under side of the
black wings and turned them gleaming silver. Watching the stately
grace, the balanced dignity of their movements as they circled alone in
the wide emptiness of the winter sky, Judith felt herself enfolded in
a deep sense of calm, as though Nature had laid upon her brow a firm,
soothing hand and told her to be at peace. The flight of the birds
added beauty and dignity to the thought of death; and for the first
time in her life it seemed a thing to be looked upon with calmness. She
was affected as she might have been by a Greek tragedy or by Bach's
coldly austere music. She felt no sense of shrinking, but rather a
solemn uplift of the heart in the thought that some day she too would
return to the ground; and that always, when she was no longer there
to see it, sunshine in winter would be a lovely thing, and other
buzzards, foul smelling birds though they were, would soar and tilt
with incomparable grace and stateliness over other dead horses and dead
dogs that like her had had their day.
After the buzzards were gone, she was still followed by the thought of
death. But it was no longer a beautiful thought. She shrank from it and
tried to turn her thoughts to other things.
The horse's death brought them many visits of condolence. The men sat
around the stove of an evening and told Jerry just what he ought to
have done to save the horse and just what they themselves would have
done if the horse had been theirs. Having exhausted this topic, they
drifted to other things: the victories over the Germans, the high and
ever climbing cost of flour, the scarcity of sugar, the unheard of
prices that were being charged for overalls and shoes and stoves and
hay forks and wire fencing.
"Waal, if we kin git forty cent a paound fer terbaccer this year,
'twon't pan out so bad," opined Uncle Sam Whitmarsh. "An' eggs an'
butter is fetchin' a good price."
"You was allus a joker, Sam," said Columbia Gibbs, spitting into the
woodbox. "You know dern well there hain't one of us in twenty'll git
forty cent fer terbaccer. Mebbe a few lucky ones'll draw a big price;
but the most of us'll be on'y too glad to drive back home with ten or
twelve. An' if butter an' eggs is high, they hain't high compared with
flour an' coffee. Afore the war I cud drive into taown with five, six
dozen eggs an' the same number o' paounds o' butter, an' I cud git me
a sack o' flour, a couple o' paounds o' sugar, a paound o' coffee an'
a paper o' candy fer the young uns. Naow I take in that same lot o'
butter an' eggs an' I can't hardly git me a sack o' dirty flour chuck
full o' bran an' middlin's. I gotta go 'ithout the coffee an' sugar an'
the young uns has gotta go 'ithout the candy."
He looked about the group clinchingly and made a feint of wiping away
the streams of tobacco juice that had begun to dribble from the corners
of his mouth.
"I wisht Roosevelt was back in agin," spoke up Gus Dibble. "When he
was in the price o' mule colts was a heap better. One year I got fifty
dollars fer a mule colt. An' las' year I didn't git but forty fer a
better one out'n the same mare. I'd like to see Roosevelt back in."
Two weeks after Nip's death Uncle Amos Crupper received word that his
son Bob had been killed, blown to pieces by an exploding shell.
The old man was broken by the news. Bob was his only son, the son of
the wife of his youth whose memory he had cherished for twenty years.
He wandered about restlessly from neighbor to neighbor, seeking comfort
and finding none. As he sat hunched over the Blackford stove, his
usually erect shoulders bowed into a semi-circle, it seemed to Judith
that winter had descended upon him over night, as snow falls on the
hills.
She, too, as she went about her work, kept thinking of Bob--and of
death.
The thought that he was dead would waylay her suddenly, startingly, and
she would see him as she had known him in life, his lithe, muscular
body, his boyish smile, his clear eyes, fearless and dreamy.
Once with a dustrag she slapped a fly on the wall. It fell mashed and
mangled to the floor.
It came over her suddenly that he had died like that. With all his
health, vigor, and charm, his power to make women love him, he had
died like the fly. Some great, pitiless engine of war had mashed these
things out of him and left only a few bits of stinking flesh.
"What are we all anyway but flies," she said to herself bitterly.
One morning when it was mild and the sun was shining she went out to
clean the rain barrel that had grown slimy with a green scum. Bent over
with her head and shoulders in the almost empty barrel, she scrubbed
the sides vigorously with the scrubbing brush. When she had finished,
her wrists felt weak and shaky. Taking hold of the top of the barrel
with both hands she tried to tip it to drain away the dirty water
and was suddenly aware that it was too heavy for her. She could not
understand it. She had dumped the same barrel many times before with
the greatest ease. She struggled with it and for the first time in her
life felt herself overcome by a sense of physical powerlessness. Some
virtue had gone out of her long, muscular arms trained from childhood
to do heavy work. Her breath came in short, quick gasps and she felt
her knees weaken and tremble in a way that she had never felt before.
When at last she succeeded in tipping the barrel and returning it to
its place, she sank down on the ground gasping with exhaustion, her
knees weak like water beneath her.
After that whenever she drew a full bucket of water from the well
or carried slop to the hogs or stood too long over the churn or the
washtub, she felt creeping over her this strange, tremulous sensation
of extreme weakness. Countless times before she had known what it
was to be tired. But this feeling of sinking knees, of shivering
powerlessness was something new, something quite different from
anything that she had experienced before in her life.
With it came an increased impatience with the chatter and wrangles
of the children, a growing lack of interest in the affairs of the
neighbors or even in those of her own household, a desire to retire
within herself, to be alone and apart.
Ill luck seemed to love their company that winter and, like a hungry
stray dog, would not leave their door. Luke Wolf said it was all
because Jerry had torn the shoes from Nip's dead hoofs and later used
them in shoeing Tuck.
"Nine times out o' ten," he said to Jerry impressively, "if yuh shoe a
hoss with shoes taken off'n a dead animal, he'll die afore the year's
out. An' if he don't die some other kind o' bad luck'll foller yuh."
Tuck did not die; but, as Luke had prophesied, other bad luck followed
apace. When Jerry hauled the tobacco off to market he was caught in a
drenching rain, and hundreds of pounds of what would otherwise have
been a fine grade of tobacco were changed to the sort that brings a
cent or two a pound. The tobacco should have been covered to protect
it against such a contingency. But a tarpaulin is an expensive luxury
which few tenant farmers can afford to buy. Most of them use their
wives' rag carpets. But Judith had no rag carpet.
When Jerry had paid off the help that he had hired during the year and
settled the store bill that had been accumulating for many months and
bought some tar paper to nail over the north and east sides of the
house, he had a hundred and eighteen dollars left, most of which would
have to go to buy another horse. Fortunately the corn crop was a fairly
good one that year.
It was a hard winter, a winter of pinching and skimping and doing
without, doing without sugar, doing without coffee, doing without even
the salt meat to which they were accustomed, for hogs were worth too
much to be consumed at home. They had to be sold to meet the exorbitant
cost of shoes and overalls and underwear to keep the children warm.
Since the beginning of the war these things had become of very inferior
quality. It seemed as if Jerry was always cobbling the boys' shoes and
Judith always putting patches on their overalls. And in an incredibly
short time their feet were on the ground again and their knees out.
Like all the rest of the women, Judith pinched and contrived, tried
to make clothes for the children out of old garments that were fit
only for the ragbag, made flour sacks into pillow slips and even into
underwear and carefully saved the smaller pieces of everything for the
bedquilts that were always wearing out and having to be replaced.
As she sat by the little glass lamp of an evening making over flour
sacks or mending overalls, her face had not the dull, sullen look
that Jerry remembered from other times, but rather a hard, grim, half
defiant expression. Watching her covertly his own face took on an ugly
look.
More and more, as the days went by, she was confirmed in the stand that
she had taken after getting up from her last sickbed. She was through
forever, she told herself, with having children and with running any
risk of having children. She wanted no more children that she could not
clothe, that she could hardly feed, that were a long torture to bear
and a daily fret and anxiety after they were born. Her flesh recoiled
and her spirit rose in fiery protest against any further degradation
and suffering. Too long she had been led along blindly. Now her eyes
were open and she would be a tool no more of man's lust and nature's
cunning. She would see her path and choose it. She would be mistress of
her own body. She would order her future life as seemed best to herself.
It was the imprint of these thoughts that Jerry saw on her face as she
sat sewing under the lamp; and the covert looks that he cast at her
were ugly and ill omened.
For her there was stimulation mental and physical in such thoughts,
and she began to grow stronger. It was this determination stubbornly
adhered to and constantly borne in mind that made her arms powerful
to rub the coarse clothes up and down on the washboard, that set the
dasher thudding against the bottom of the churn more noisily than need
be and drew the broom with brisk, emphatic strokes across the floor.
When she gathered up the dishes she slapped the plates together with
the emphasis of one who is indifferent as to whether they crack or not,
and when she cleaned house the dust and feathers flew mightily. At the
woodpile she was merciless to the saplings and rotted fence rails that
Jerry had dragged up.
Often at the end of a day of such emphatic housekeeping, the old
insidious weakness would slip into her bones, her knees would tremble
and sink and she would drop with sudden exhaustion into the old rocking
chair.
As she lay with her head against the bit of patchwork that was tied to
the back of the chair, her eyes, the only parts of her that were not
tired, would wander restlessly about the walls and ceiling. The winter
before, in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, she had bought for a
quarter a bundle of old newspapers and pasted them over two walls and
part of the ceiling. She had intended to buy another bundle and finish
the job, but had never gone beyond the intention. The papers had pulled
apart over the cracks between the boards, they were yellowed with
smoke and blotched with rain; but they still displayed their wealth of
pictures. There were pictures of society people grinning and squatting
on the sand at Palm Beach, pictures of smug, well fed dignitaries of
church and state, pictures of business magnates, still smugger, fatter,
and more rigorously curried, pictures of kings and generals pompously
pinning medals to the coat lapels of heroes of war, well brushed and
subdued for the solemn occasion, pictures of dismal, stuffy people
who had been given new life by Tanlac or Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable
Compound, pictures of actresses and movie stars, some simpering and
insipid, others with grace and charm diffused over the pure lines of
youth, pictures of people who had been killed in automobile accidents,
pictures of murderers and the murdered.
Her interest was only mildly stirred by all these pictures of strange
people in strange walks of life that she would never tread. They
seemed, with but few exceptions, solemn and sodden creatures in no way
to be envied. From them her eyes traveled with heightening interest
to the streaky discolorations that the rain beating through the walls
had made on the papers. There she never failed to find pictures that
beguiled the eye and inspired the imagination.
Often when the children were at play out of doors she sat a long time
looking at these weird freaks of water. At such times her hectic energy
and the determination that lay back of it were gone, and with the
graying twilight there came instead dark thoughts of the emptiness and
purposelessness of life, of Bob who had died and of the death that lay
in wait for her and hers. When the corners grew shadowed and the rats
began to peer out of their holes with bright, furtive eyes, she would
get up with a heavy sigh and begin to mix the batter for corn cakes.
As the weeks went by her relations with Jerry grew daily more strained.
She rarely spoke to him except to call his attention to an empty
woodbox or a broken door hinge or a loose board in the floor or the
fact that the boys' feet were on the ground. Daily he grew more morose
and evil tempered. A brooding animosity looked out of his eyes as he
furtively followed her movements about the house. At the least excuse
this smoldering fire broke out into the fierce flame of violent and
brutal quarreling. The quarrels usually ended by his taking his hat
and slamming the door behind him as he went to seek diversion in some
neighbor's barnyard. For her there was no diversion. When the quarrel
was over neither of them could remember what had caused it.
Christmas brought a truce. By a tacit mutual understanding it was
agreed between them that on this day, if only for the children's sake,
there should be peace and some measure of goodwill.
The children were up with the dawn, uproariously and gloriously happy
over the few ten cent gimcracks that Jerry had brought home the day
before and that Judith had stuffed into their stockings. She caught
the infection of their happiness, laughed with them over the antics of
the Jack in the box and the monkey on a stick, and beguiled them with
descriptions of Santa Claus and his swift reindeer, his home built of
ice far up in the frozen north, his shop where he and his wife work all
year to make playthings for good little boys and girls and his long,
exciting gallops over the snow on Christmas Eve.
Having done up his morning chores, Jerry, feeling leisurely and
luxurious in clean overalls, stretched himself in the rocking chair and
listened contentedly to the prattle of the mother and children, showed
the boys how to spin the tops and fell to carving them a whistle apiece
to supplement the toys that Santa Claus had brought.
Annie was happy with a doll which she hugged maternally to her bosom,
then absent-mindedly dragged about the floor by one leg.
Jerry had killed a hen the day before, and there was a gala dinner
of stewed chicken, hominy, sweet potatoes, and a boiled pudding with
sauce. They all gorged mightily.
After dinner Jerry took up his hat and strolled out through the
barnyard. Judith was left alone with the children, now grown cross and
fretful, the litter of broken toys and clutter of dirty dishes.
The dinner had been late, and it was after four o'clock and already
growing twilight in the room before she had washed the last greasy pan.
When she had finished everything and washed the table and hung up the
dishrag, she pushed the frowsy strands of hair back from her face and
sank into the rocking chair. Annie began to whimper and, putting her
little hand over her stomach, said that she had a pain there. She gave
the child a drink of water to help dissolve the colored candy she had
eaten, then took her up and rocked her, crooning a song. The boys who
had been wrangling all afternoon and constantly appealing to her to
settle their differences, now fell to fighting, rolling over and over
on the littered floor. She got up and slapped them both smartly.
"Naow, then," she said, administering a last cuff to Billy, "you'd otta
think shame to yerse'ves, the way you been a-actin'. You jes set right
to work the both of you an' pick up all them things an' put 'em in the
box, an' don't let me hear nary word out'n you."
They subsided from loud wails to whimpers, then set to work sullenly
picking up the toys and throwing them noisily at the wooden grocery box
in which she had tried to train them to keep their things. When they
thought their mother was not looking, they angrily nudged and pinched
each other. Then, forgetting enmity, they began to make a glorious
game of it and threw the playthings in all directions, trying to hit
anything but the inside of the box. She tried to tell herself that they
were only children having childish fun; but to her irritable nerves
they seemed like little fiends. She felt a wild impulse to turn her
back on everything, even the sick baby, and flee away along the roads,
into the woods, anywhere where there was quiet and peace.
She put up with the turmoil for a while, sitting with closed eyes
silently rocking the little girl. To the casual eye she looked passive
and acquiescent enough; but her whole body and soul were one strung up
tension of screaming protest. It was not until a tin railway car hit
her on the side of the head that she got up and slapped both the boys
again and reduced them once more to a sullen putting away of the toys.
Jerry lurched into the house, his hat over one eye, smelling of
whiskey. He shambled into a seat by the stove, and she knew by the evil
looks he cast at her that he was in an ugly drunk, a strange thing
for him who was usually silly and good natured under the effects of
alcohol. As she caught his glowering eye the smoldering sense of injury
that she had been nursing all afternoon flared into hate and fury. If
it came to a test of ugliness she could be more than his match, she
told herself and her lips set together in grim lines.
Jerry saw the sinister setting of her mouth, and his own face darkened
into a black scowl.
Annie had fallen asleep, and she slipped off the child's shoes and
outer clothing and carried her into the other room. When she came back
the kitchen was almost dark. Jerry still sat by the stove, his head
sunk on his breast.
"Air you a-goin' to do the milkin' to-night?" she asked in a dry, dead
voice.
"No, I hain't."
She threw on an old cap and jacket, took up the milk bucket with an
emphatic rattle and bang and went out, slamming the door so that the
house shook.
When she came in again the room was so dark that she could hardly see
the outlines of things. The boys had dropped asleep on the old sofa
behind the stove. The fire had gone low and the room was chilly. Jerry
still sat by the stove, his head sunk lower on his breast.
She lit the lamp, strained the milk and mixed the corn cake batter,
then came by the stove to make up the fire. He bulked obstinately
between her and the woodbox. For a minute tense with their mutual
aversion she stood waiting for him to move.
"Air you a-goin' to move or hain't you?" she asked at last in the same
dry, dead voice.
He glanced up at her with a hateful leer, then dropped his head again
to his breast.
"I hain't."
For another moment she stood eyeing him with a look of exasperation
mingled with cold despisal. Then red fury burst in her and she grasped
the handle of the stove lifter.
"You git out o' that chair, you damn filthy haound. Hain't it enough
that I gotta spend the hull day scrapin' greasy burnt pans an' puttin'
up with them pesterin' young uns, 'ithout havin' you lurchin' in here
with a dirty drunk an' plantin' yer carcass right where I wanta git the
supper? I hain't in no humor to put up with none o' yer drunken sulks.
You git away from this yer stove an' do it mighty quick too."
He did not move nor even glance at her. He bulked big and sullen, a
silent affront.
Trembling all over she uttered a scream of rage and swung the stove
lifter in fury. It descended sharply on his skull.
With a thick curse he sprang up, wrenched the stove lifter from her
hand and flung it to the other end of the room. It fell into a pan of
milk and the milk splashed in every direction. Then, grasping her by
the shoulders, he began to shake her. He shook her so violently that
her teeth chattered and her furious screams of rage came in a shrill
tremolo hideous to hear. Like a tigress she struggled in his grasp. If
she had had a knife she would have plunged it into him.
Her frenzied struggles drew them close to the wall; and it was the
sound of her head beating with a hollow noise against the boards that
at last penetrated his drunken fury and brought him to his senses. With
the movement of one who drops hot iron, he let fall his hands from her
shoulders and fled out into the darkness, leaving the door swinging
open behind him.