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
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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."
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
