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 greasy soot, 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. How changed 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 meaningless
turmoil 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 always at 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 and stalking 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 shamblingly onto 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 one real 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