Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 5
For a while it was very dismal and lonely in the Pippinger household. Bill continued to send the children to school and made shift to do the housework as best he could in his slovenly male fashion. When the little Pippingers got home from school in the gathering dusk of the gray winter afternoon, there was no mother briskly baking fragrant cookies or frying corn cakes and sizzling strips of sowbelly. The untidy kitchen, already in twilight, was usually empty, with Bill choring about the barn or away doing a day's work somewhere in the neighborhood. If he happened to be in the kitchen, he sat hunched over the stove in a half stupor, his quid of tobacco in his cheek, his eyes fascinated by the gleams of fire that could be seen through the open sliding draught in front. The twins, now become the housekeepers of the family, would bustle about, polish the lamp chimney and light the lamp, brush the ashes from the stove and the hearth with the turkey feather duster, sweep up the floor and get together the evening meal. Judith helped, but only under direction. She had to be told to run and fetch the side of bacon, to get out the mixing bowl and big spoon for the corn cake batter, and to wash the milk strainer, which Bill had not washed clean in the morning. Elmer and Craw generally went with their father to help milk and do up the barn chores; and Judith went too whenever she could slip away from the twins.
On Saturdays the twins, with Judith's somewhat reluctant help, cleaned house thoroughly, repairing with feminine housewifely zeal the ravages of a week of slipshodness. They polished the stove, scrubbed the table and the floor, dusted the shelves, swept the bedrooms, beat the dust out of the rag mats, and hung out the bedding to air. Sometimes when they were busily at work, Bill would come into the kitchen, glance about and ask, "Where's your—?" then leave the question unfinished, suddenly remembering that she was not there and never would be there again. He had always been in the habit of asking for her this way whenever he came in and did not see her at once.
As time went on and the March sunshine warmed the earth into life, Bill became more cheerful. Everything takes heart in the spring; and Bill too felt the warmth of the sunshine in his bones. Like his children, like Tom and Bob and the cows and the geese and the chickens and the grass under his feet, he lifted up his face to the light and breathed deep of the warm, sweet air. He stretched, yawned, shook from him the heaviness and lethargy of winter, and felt once more that it was good to be alive. On those rare, delicate days in March when the earth is full of a promise of spring, a promise more intoxicating than any fulfilment, he whistled and sang again as he trudged round and round the field in the long furrow getting the ground ready for the new corn crop. So the shadow of death passed from the Pippinger family.
All his thoughts now were of his children, all his planning was for them. They were in school, all five of them; but Craw and the twins would graduate this year. After that everything would be easier. Craw would be at home to help him on the farm and the twins would keep house. Then with Craw's help he would get the farm back into good shape again. The land was good; and if he could once get the washes filled up so that it could be plowed, he and Craw would raise as good a crop of tobacco on it as Uncle Ezra Pettit or old Hiram Stone or any of that lot that felt themselves so much better than other folks because they had the time and the money to keep their ground in shape to raise good tobacco. Yes, Bill would show them all right. In the cool, invigorating March air and heartening sunshine he felt himself filled with a boundless zest for work and achievement.
Things went better with the Pippinger family after the twins were through school. Little women already, with a natural zest for housekeeping, they polished the milk pans, cleaned the cupboards, churned the butter and washed and rinsed and blued the clothes, all the time clacking cheerfully about their work and about the new dresses they were making and the coats they were planning to have before winter came on and the new shoes they would get when dad got paid for his last job of hauling and the Fair at Cynthiana, to which they were all going, dad having promised each of them a quarter to spend. Already, too, they had a nose for gossip and loved to talk about the neighbors and their doings. Again and again they told each other how stingy Uncle Ezra Pettit was and how meanly the Pettits lived in spite of their big house and all their land and money.
Judith was such poor help about the house that the twins soon stopped bothering with her and did the work themselves, only insisting that she look after her own clothes and take her turn at washing the dishes, a job that none of them enjoyed. These tasks done, she was left free to follow her father about the barnyard or run the woods and fields. Soon, however, because she was not lazy and took a deep interest in the farm animals, she made herself useful by taking over most of the out-of-door chores. She brought up the cows and milked them, fed the pigs, took care of the little chicks and saw that all the broods were cooped for the night. She hoed in the garden and kept the rows of beans and turnips thrifty and free from weeds. Like a lynx following its prey, she stalked the turkey hens and found their nests; and she would go out in any kind of storm to save the tender little turkeys from the wetting that would be their death.
Living so intimately in the life of the barnyard, the mysteries of sex were not mysteries at all to her, but matters of routine to be dealt with in the same matter-of-fact fashion in which you slopped the pigs or tied the mules to the hitching post. She knew all about the ways of roosters with hens. She saw calves born and testicles cut from squealing pigs, from young bulls to change them into fat steers and from young stallions to make them tractable in harness. These things interested her, but not more so than other barnyard activities. She was strangely free from precocious interest in sex matters. At school she ignored the small dirtiness that lurks wherever many children are gathered together.
From her own and the neighbors' barnyards Judith had picked up all the profanity and obscenity that is a part of the life of such places, and she used it freely, joyously and unashamedly. Bill's mild remonstrances, "What kind o' talk is that for a little gal?" and the horror of the twins had no effect upon her.
"I should suttenly think shame to myse'f, Judy, if I was you," Lizzie May would say, "to talk that air way. What makes you go fer to do it?"
"Well, Craw talks that way, an' the Blackford boys does, an' dad does too when he's with other men. I ain't no diff'rent from them."
"In course you're diff'rent; you're a gal."
"Well, anyway, I don't feel like one," Judy would answer unrepentantly.
If she could have put into words what she vaguely felt, she would have said that the language of the barnyard was an expression of something that was real, vital and fluid, that it was of natural and spontaneous growth, that it turned with its surroundings, that it was a part of the life that offered itself to her. The prim niceness of the twins, suitable enough to them in the world that they were making for themselves, was for her a deadening negation of life. To have to be correct and decent in her speech was the same as being forced to sit motionless on a straight-backed chair in the front room when she was consumed with a longing to run and jump and whoop and chase the dog and play at "Hide and Seek" around the barn.
Craw was at home now and able to help his father. But the plans that Bill had made in the invigorating coolness of early spring did not bear much fruit. It was one thing to plan work and quite another thing to do it when the dog days came and the sun baked the hillsides. Then as he hoed out weeds or followed the cultivator in the heat of the day, and the sweat rolled down his body in scalding streams, he felt less enthusiastic about raising a big tobacco crop. Indeed, the task of reclaiming the farm was so big and formidable that it would have discouraged a much more energetic man than Bill. It was easier to do jobs of hauling and the like, and so make enough money to pay the store bill. Bill had always been partial to jobs of hauling. This also suited Craw, whose mind was of the routine sort, incapable of planning or grasping any enterprise however small. Craw was sixteen when he left school, a big, good-looking, good-natured, well developed fellow, but slow as a tortoise. He could follow the plow or drive a team or do any simple task assigned to him, but of initiative he had none. With Craw's help Bill increased his acreage of corn considerably and hauled out his long accumulated barnyard manure onto the corn field, thus getting a much better yield. But neither of them broached the subject of raising tobacco. Craw, growing rapidly stronger and bigger, soon began to "work out," and earned his seventy-five cents a day from Uncle Ezra Pettit or old Hiram Stone or any of the neighboring tobacco planters who wanted a hand. He was a good, steady, plodding worker, and the neighbors who employed help soon learned to call upon him. Proud in the possession of money, he liked to patronize his sisters, and brought them home occasional presents of scented soap, white muslin shirtwaists and imitation jewelry for the pleasure of listening to their excited squeals of delight and feeling male and superior. Pretty soon he got to going with a girl; and after that he never brought his sisters anything.
It was a matter of great wonder and amazement to Bill how quickly the children grew up. Up to Annie's death he had regarded them as mere babies. After that they seemed to become young men and women all of a sudden. Two years after their graduation from school the twins were wearing long dresses and putting up their hair; and Lizzie May had a "feller" coming to see her every Sunday. She had known him all her life, but had become friendly with him at a party the winter before. His name was Dan Pooler and his folks lived over near Dry Ridge. He came in a red-wheeled buggy which he had carefully washed down and polished the day before; and he and Lizzie May would drive forth grandly. Lizzie May was very proud of her swain's good looks and store clothes and of the shiny, red-wheeled buggy. When Craw guffawed and spoke of him as "Dam Fooler," and when Judith teased her wickedly about him, she became very indignant and haughty.
Judith, too, was rapidly growing up. She had become such a tall, straight, handsome girl, with such strong, free gestures and such a ringing, careless laugh, that Bill's heart swelled with pride when he saw people turn to look after her on the streets in Clayton. She was learning, too, to smile at the young men, and practising whenever occasion offered the arts of banter and coquetry.
She began to develop an interest in clothes, and brought to the neat, but uninspired dressmaking of the twins a sense of form, color, and picturesqueness.
"You know, Lizzie May, you ought to wear soft, sleazy things an' have 'em nice an' full. Get a blue voile—not a real light blue, but that there new Alice blue. You'll have to send off for it to get the right color. An' make it with the waist crossing in front an' a real full skirt an' a sash tied in a big bow at the back. Then you'd look so nice that Dan Pooler'd jes have to ast you whether he wanted you or not."
"You shet up an' tend yer own business, Judy," Lizzie May answered. Her uncertain relations with Dan were making her somewhat irritable. But she heeded the suggestions about the dress and followed them out as best she could.
"An' I'm a-goin' to have me a new petticoat that won't be like nobody else's petticoat," Judy went on. "I thought it out las' night afore I went to sleep. I'm a-goin' to get some red turkey cotton, real bright, an' have it in points all araound the bottom an' make three black French dots in each point. I bet when you two see it you'll both want one like it."
"You'd better be thinkin' of havin' yo'se'f a warm jacket agin the time winter comes on," said Luella half reprovingly yet betraying more than a gleam of interest in the prospective petticoat.
"I'm a-goin' to have braown ve'vet collar an' cuffs on my new jacket," put in Lizzie May.
So they would sit together stitching and planning and chattering happily over their few yards of cheap cotton goods.
The mail order catalogues had of late years come to take a large place in the lives of the Pippingers and their neighbors, much to the disgust of Peter Akers, whose store was shrinking instead of growing. They were a source of endless interest to the girls, especially the twins. In the winter evenings when the lamp was lighted they would bring these enormous books to the table and turn the endless pages, never tiring of the pictures of slim, simpering, abundant-haired young women arrayed in coats, suits, sweaters, dresses, aprons, nightgowns, corsets, chemises, union suits: every kind of garment that goes upon the female figure. The gorgeous colored pages held them longest and often caused Lizzie May to gasp with admiration and envy.
"My, I wish I was as pretty as that and had that blue silk dress!" she sighed, pointing out the object of her envy to Luella.
"Oh, land, you're much better lookin' than that gal, Liz!" Judy exclaimed, looking over her shoulder. "She's got an awful smirk!"
Lizzie May, though not entirely convinced, patted her blond hair with a gratified expression.
Bill and the boys looked at the pictures of men in overalls and work shirts, tools, wagons, buggies, harness, and farm machinery. Sometimes Craw would hesitate over the pages of ladies in underwear, then blush furiously and turn quickly to the mowing machines if he thought that any one was noticing him.
The books served many purposes, all and more than does the daily newspaper in homes where the newspaper enters. The old ones were used to light fires, to wrap up winter pears, to paste over broken window panes or cracks in the wall. In the backhouse they did duty as toilet paper. And Craw, beginning to smoke cigarettes, wrapped the crumbled native leaf in a bit of the margin and puffed away with the air of one conscious that he has attained man's estate.
It was about this time that Judith and the twins took to using tooth brushes. But the boys, exhorted to do likewise, poohooed such vanities.
"Mebbe you gals needs to hoe out your teeth," Craw would say condescendingly, "but my mouth's clean, same's the rest o' my insides."
The summer that Judith was sixteen she came home from Sadieville one afternoon in a state of excitement.
"What d'ye think I'm a-fixin' to do, dad? I'm a-goin' over to Aunt Eppie Pettit's to work out. Aunt Eppie come out to the road as I was a-drivin' past an' she ses would I like to come over to her place to work. She's got hired hands a-eatin' there, and four cows to milk, an' she ses there's too much work for Cissy an' would I come for a spell. She snapped her false teeth at me a time or two, but I didn't mind. I 'member haow when I was little I used to think she was a-goin' to bite me; but now I ain't a-skairt of her. So I told her, yes, I'd come; an' I'm a-goin' to git a dollar a week. Elmer's plenty big enough to do my chores, so I kin be spared easy enough."
She said air this almost in one breath. Bill, who had been chopping stove wood, stood with one foot on the chopping block and looked at her with a mixture of surprise and disapproval.
"Pshaw, Judy," he exclaimed, spitting disparagingly into the chips. "What do you want to be a-goin' there fer? I wouldn't if I was you. My gal don't need to go a-emptyin' nobody's slops, let alone old Ezra Pettit's. I wouldn't do no sech thing."
"Oh, but I'm a-goin', dad. I told her I'd come. Craw works out an' earns money, an' I want to earn some money too. If I stay there ten weeks I'll have ten dollars, an' that'll buy me my clothes an' shoes fer the winter."
Bill saw that she was quite determined, so he made no further opposition. A couple of days later he drove her and her satchel of clothes over to Aunt Eppie's place, which was about a mile and a half away on the road toward Sadieville. The road they traveled was known as the Dixie Pike. It was the main highroad between Cincinnati and Lexington. Before the Civil War it had been the coach road between these two cities; and the very old folk still told tales of prancing three-team coaches and gay horseback parties galloping by. Now one met mostly the wagons and buggies of tenant farmers, with an occasional automobile or a covered wagon occupied by gipsy folk or horse traders.
The house of the Pettits was a long, white, rambling, leisurely looking place with green shutters and a wide porch supported by square white pillars. It had been built in ante bellum days for people of a leisurely habit of life. It stood some distance back from the road, and between the road and the house stretched a neat bluegrass lawn dotted with flower beds and shade trees. A low stone wall separated the lawn from the roadside. From the rear came the cackle of hens, the cooing of doves and the scream of a peacock. Basking in the morning sunshine the place looked gracious and peaceful.
Bill reluctantly deposited his daughter and her satchel at Aunt Eppie's gate.
"Don't take no lip from nobody, Judy. You've allus got a home to come back to," he advised, as he turned the mules' heads toward home.
Judith swung briskly up the flat stone walk, through the chinks of which grass was growing, then around by the little side path to the kitchen door. Here she found Cissy rolling pie crust on a floury baking board. She and Cissy were old acquaintances. Judith sat down by the table and they chatted together till Aunt Eppie came in.
Cissy was a middle-aged woman of spare figure, dull eyes, neatly combed hair and blurred, nondescript features. There was nothing about her to notice or remember. Some explanation for this lack of personality might be found in the fact that she had been working for the Pettits since she was nineteen years old. During that time she had never had as much as a mild flirtation with any man, nor had she ever been further from the Pettits' kitchen than Sadieville. For over twenty years the life of Aunt Eppie's household had been her life. She had gone there a timid young orphan girl; and in the unbroken routine of these twenty years had become a dull middle aged drudge. Each week she had received her dollar, and she was reported to have money "loaned out." Judith looked at her and thought of this report and envied Cissy. Her young mind perceived nothing of tragedy in Cissy's long years of celibacy spent in the routine of a stranger's kitchen. The only thought that passed through her head as she sat there in her radiant youth was: "My, if I only had all that money she's saved, wouldn't I have me nice clothes!"
Aunt Eppie bustled into the kitchen and was pleased to find Judith.
She was a tall, large-featured, bony woman and had a protruding chin and a wrinkled, thin-lipped mouth that shut together with the strong, swift motion of a snapping turtle. The click of her false teeth lent realism to this motion and caused her to strike terror into the hearts of small children toward whom she tried to be affable.
"Well, naow, that's a good gal to come like you said you would," she condescended. "So often these hired hands promises to come an' that's the last you see of 'em. Cissy, you take her up to your room an' show her where to put her things. She might as well sleep with you an' save dirtyin' up two pairs o' sheets, let alone the wear an' tear on 'em. An' after that she can he'p you git the apples ready fer the pies an' shell the peas and scrape the taters fer dinner. An' mind you, scrape an' not peel 'em, Judy, 'cause they're jes new out o' the ground. It's a sin to waste the best o' sech taters by peelin' 'em."
With the adaptability of youth Judith drifted easily enough into the life of the Pettit family. She left most of the indoor work to the patient Cissy and busied herself with the cows, the chickens, the turkeys and the garden, as she had done at home. She and Cissy did most of the work. Aunt Eppie believed herself to be still a hard worker, but in reality she spent most of her time bustling from one place to another bossing the girls, Uncle Ezra, and the farm hands. She was always nosing out all sorts of small, neglected matters and calling them to the attention of the neglecter.
"Ezry, don't you fergit to fix that garden fence this mornin'," she would shout into Uncle Ezra's ear at breakfast. "The hens is a-gittin' in an' a-eatin' into the hearts of all my beets."
"An' Judy, don't fail to coop up all the settin' hens when you gather up the eggs. I don't want to raise no more chicks this year. What with the price of eggs so low it don't hardly pay to feed hens." She sighed heavily. Any mention of money loss, real or fancied, always brought this sigh to her lips.
When she was not busy directing the other members of the household, she read the "Country Gentleman," whose rosy tales of phenomenal success on the farm excited her interest and envy, made log cabin blocks for bedquilts or cut and sewed carpet rags. She already had carpets enough to keep the whole house thoroughly padded for at least a quarter century, but she could not bear to see the rags go to waste.
She was one of the few remaining members of the old "first families" of Kentucky. Her haughty aquiline nose, broad brow and penetrating eyes showed that she had intellect and breeding. In the old days, several decades before the Civil War, her father had purchased hundreds of acres in Scott County for twenty-five cents an acre. He cleared the land, realized about a hundred dollars an acre out of the timber and still possessed his hundreds of acres of fine clay loam, virgin soil, only needing the seed to produce enormous crops of almost anything. So he became rich and built this leisurely white mansion. The war brought disaster and poverty. Aunt Eppie's father was one of the few landed proprietors who did not move away but remained to begin life over again as a poor farmer. In the school of penury, Aunt Eppie, applying her superior intellect and energy, proved to be all too apt a scholar. She learned not only to be saving but to be niggardly and penurious.
Uncle Ezra had been one of Aunt Eppie's father's hired hands. He was of much commoner clay than his wife and with age had become a mere clod. Almost as deaf as one of his own well planted fence posts, he heard nothing nor cared to hear. He spoke rarely and in half articulate grunts. His one thought in life had always been how to get the most out of his land, which was not his, but Aunt Eppie's, as she was not slow to remind him when the occasion arose. Now that he was too old to work hard he spent his days puttering about the fields and the barnyard watching, always watching. He had the reputation of being the hardest man to work for in the whole of Scott County and he paid the lowest wages.
Once in a while Aunt Eppie's brother, Hiram Stone, ate a meal in the house. He was a spare, silent man. Since his wife's death many years before he had lived attended by one old servant, in the big, rambling house on his estate. Nobody quite knew how he passed his days. He had been seen to read, to cultivate a little patch of vegetables and flowers, and to smoke meditatively on the back porch. In his youth he had been sent away to college. He always employed an overseer and had very little to do with his tenants. Nobody ever called him "Uncle Hiram." This was because he lived his life to himself and his life was not their life. He was not niggardly and interfering like Uncle Ezra and many of the other landlords. He allowed his tenants to keep a cow and pasture it on his land. He put no limit to the number of their chickens and turkeys. Yet the tenants distrusted and avoided him. They would rather work under Uncle Ezra, because he was one of themselves and they understood him.
It caused Aunt Eppie endless worry and chagrin to see the way her brother mismanaged his land. The overseer was letting it all, she said, and the tenants did as they liked and stole from him before his very face. It was a shame and a disgrace.
She said as much to him time and again. But he went his own way. He treated her always with politeness and deference and only smiled gently and enigmatically when she nagged him. The smile drove her to distraction.
Though the Pettits owned over a thousand acres of good land and lived in a house of seventeen rooms and were said to have money in all the banks in Scott County, their way of life was not different in any essential from that of their tenants. It was even more stark and barren and sordid than most, for in the humbler homes there was sometimes love and fun, and here there was neither. The meals were eaten in dull silence except when Aunt Eppie remembered something that somebody hadn't done or when the hired girls and farm hands, who ate from the same oilcloth as their employers, got to sparring with each other.
Two hired hands ate at the dinner table, but got their breakfasts and supper at home. These were Jabez Moorhouse and Jerry Blackford, second son of Andrew Blackford, who owned a small farm next to the Pippingers. Jabez, who, when not drunk, usually held his peace, rarely spoke at the table except to ask for another portion of string beans or to have the sorghum pitcher passed to him. When he raised his head from his plate his rather vague blue eyes seemed to be either turned inward or looking at something a long distance away. Jerry, who had come successfully through his cat-torturing period, had grow into a quiet, decent, clean appearing young fellow, blond and ruddy like David of old and good to look upon in his strong young manhood. He was not more given to conversation than Jabez.
Fortunately for Judith the blight of bareness and dullness that lay over Aunt Eppie's household did not extend to the barnyard. There the morning sunlight fell as goldenly as in princes' courtyards. The geese were as dignified, the turkeys as proud, and the hens as busy as any others of their kind, and Judith enjoyed ministering to their needs and watching their ways.
The turkeys, fifty odd of them, had been little fellows when Judith came, with flat tortoise bodies and long necks, and Aunt Eppie let them wander at will among the beets and cabbages. Whenever they saw a bug or a fly they darted forth these long necks with a quick, snakelike movement and rarely failed to catch their prey. Soon they grew too big to be allowed in the garden and roamed the alfalfa and corn fields for their food. As they grew toward maturity sex divided them into two groups. The female turkeys kept together in a small, silent band and devoted themselves mainly to the business of eating, while their brothers preferred to loaf in the barnyard. A spot speckled with light and shade under a row of locust trees was their favorite promenade. With their tails spread fan-shape, their wing feathers scraping the ground, their heads and necks brilliantly blue and red and the little wormlike appendage above their beaks inflated and pendulous they would pace grandly up and down with a slow, dignified movement. The sun, striking along their satiny backs, made their feathers gleam with changing tints of rose, gold, green, and copper.
When they grew tired of the parade they loved to slip away and steal food that they knew was not intended for them. Aunt Eppie's grapes and peaches were their favorite tidbits. While feeding on these delicate morsels they talked to each other with little congratulatory gulps of delight like water gurgling out of the neck of a bottle. Then Judith would run and chase them out of the orchard, and they would all stretch out their necks at her and gobble together in indignant chorus.
It seemed a pity that so much beauty, pride, and joy in life should go to tempt the cloyed palate of some smug bishop or broker who had, compared with the soul that had lately animated the bit of white meat on his plate, but a poor notion of what it was to love, to play, and to enjoy the sun and the fruits of the earth.
"It's a shame fer folks to eat sech critters," Judith thought one blue September morning, as she watched the turkeys parade under the locust trees.
She had been slopping the pigs and was leaning on the railing of the hogpen looking at the turkeys beyond. A female turkey that had strayed from her sisters was among them and trying to make her escape. Each time that she made a move to go away, the young Toms for pure devilishness would intercept her by stepping in front of her, like a pack of village boys teasing a little girl. When she at last made her escape and flew back to her sisters, they all reached out their necks and gobbled after her derisively. Jerry and Jabez, starting out to the field where they were cutting tobacco, came and leaned for a few moments on the railing beside Judith.
"Do you know what them young Toms reminds me of?" said Judith, looking at Jerry with an eye not entirely free from the self-consciousness of sex. "They make me think of a pack o' fellers a-standin' raound the street corner in Clayton or Sadieville of a Sunday afternoon dressed in their good clothes, a-swellin' up their chests an' a-cranin' their necks after every gal that goes by, an' then a-blabbin' together about her after she's gone a-past. They'd otta think shame to theirselves for bein' so vain an' idle. There's the turkey hens all out in the field a-eatin' corn so they kin grow up quick an' lay eggs an' make more little turkeys, so Aunt Eppie an' Uncle Ezra kin have more money to put in the bank. That's haow a turkey'd otta act, 'stead of enjoyin' his own vain life."
She laughed and looked quizzically at Jerry.
Jerry had no rejoinder to make. He was not quick at repartee. But he was young, healthy, and handsome; and as he looked from the turkeys back to Judith, the smile on his lips and the answering look in his eyes made words an impertinence. Jabez looked at the turkeys and at the boy and girl and laughed an amused, indulgent laugh. He was fifty-five and had long known the way of a turkey in the sun and the way of a man with a maid.
"The young Toms'll be cut off in the pride o' life," he said in his rich, sonorous voice, "an' jes as well for them that they air. An' the turkey hens'll live to raise up families. An' the families they raise'll repeat the same thing all over agin, an' so on world without end. Amen. Solomon was right when he said there's no new thing under the sun, an' that which has been is that which is a-goin' to be. An' yet each new batch takes as much interest in livin' as if they was the only ones that had ever lived an' was a-goin' to keep on livin' forever. It's the same with folks. Hain't that so, Jerry?"
Jerry had not heard a word of what Jabez had said and Jabez knew he hadn't. He had slyly filched two hairpins out of Judith's hair, had stuck them behind his ears and was pretending to march away with them.
"You gimme back them hairpins, Jerry Blackford. I've got on'y five an' my hair won't stay up with three. You'd best hand 'em over, 'cause I kin give you a black eye quick as look at you."
She tried to get hold of Jerry's wrists. Jerry got hers instead and they struggled together laughing. After a while he let go of her wrists and allowed her to capture the pins.
"You'd best git along to work," she cried, flushed and sparkling. "Uncle Ezry'll be out here in a jiffy an'll want to know why you ain't to field."
"Yaas, the old groundhog'll be diggin' out afore long," grumbled Jabez. "Come on, Jerry, folks has gotta have their terbaccer. Judy, you go in an' tell Cissy to cook us a dern good dinner."
As Judith turned away from the hogpen, bucket in hand, she almost ran into a lean, spry old man, who had come up silently behind her, his steps making no noise on the scattered straw and chaff of the barnyard.
"Howdy, Uncle Sam. Haow's Aunt Sally?"
His face darkened slightly. "Oh, she keeps smart. Is Uncle Ezry anywheres hereabouts?"
"He's mos' likely in the kitchen warmin' his feet," said Judith. "Every mornin' he has to warm his feet the longest time afore he'll step outdoors. He sets there with his sock feet on the oven shelf, an' sets an' sets. An' Cissy has to go raound him every time she wants to git to the cupboard. She says sometimes she thinks he's never a-goin' to git up an' go aout where he belongs. I'm glad my feet ain't allus a-cold."
"That's haow you young uns allus is," answered Uncle Sam. "No feelin's for the sufferin's of the old." It was plain from Uncle Sam's way of speaking that he did not class himself among the aged.
"Andy Blackford was a-tellin' me that Uncle Ezry had some alfalfy hay he wanted to git shet of 'count of needin' the barn room. I'm a bit short o' hay this year an' I thought I'd come daown an' see if I couldn't make some sort of a deal with him."
By this time they had reached the kitchen door. Uncle Sam stepped inside and found Ezra, as Judith had predicted, sitting with his feet on the oven fender, his suspenders down, his long gray face set and motionless. He turned his head as Uncle Sam darkened the sunny doorway.
"Waal, Sam."
"Waal, Ezry. Purty weather we're a-havin'. I hain't seed a purtier September since '83, the fall afore the coldest winter we ever had to my knowin'. An' this summer's crops is the best there's been this nine year. Corn's made an' terbaccer's made; but we'll be needin' a good rain soon to freshen up the pastures."
Uncle Ezra did not hear a word of any of this, so he grunted for answer in a non-committal manner. His feet being now roasted to a turn, he fished out his congress shoes from under the stove and drew them on slowly and methodically. Then he got up, hitched his suspenders over his stooping shoulders, took down his hat from its peg by the side of the door, and stepped out into the sunshine followed by his visitor.
The two old men passed out of the garden gate and walked across the barnyard side by side.
"I hearn you had a part spiled stack of alfalfy hay you was a-wishin' to git shet of, Ezry."
Uncle Sam said this not in his former conversational tone, but in a loud shout close to Ezra's ear; for it was intended to be heard.
"Part spiled nuthin! There hain't a leaf of it spiled. It's all good, clean alfalfy. On'y reason I want to sell it, I got plenty hay this year, an' I'm a-goin' to be needin' the room in the terbaccer barn."
"I hearn it was part spiled," shouted back Uncle Sam with brazen conviction. "Anyway, let's have a look at it, Ezry."
The two men, the one with bent back and plodding legs, the other almost as straight and spry as a youth, walked side by side down the ridge path to Uncle Ezra's biggest tobacco barn. To the right of them lay Ezra's gently rolling blue-grass pasture dotted with cattle and sheep. To the left stretched his dark green alfalfa fields, his corn, ripe and ready to be cut, and his field of ripe tobacco, the broad, tropical looking leaves now turned to a rich golden color. Part of the field was already bare; and in the distance Jerry and Jabez could be seen going down the rows with their sharp tobacco knives. With one stroke they split the stalk of each plant, with the other they severed it from the root. The cut plants drying on the tobacco sticks set at intervals along the rows, trailed limply, waiting to be hauled in.
Arrived at the tobacco barn, they found the alfalfa stacked in a close-packed pile in one corner.
"Why, there hain't much hay here!" shouted Uncle Sam, kicking disdainfully into the pile. "It's loose as kin be. There hain't no weight there. It wasn't tromped when it was put in. I bet I cud haul the whole thing away in two loads."
"Two loads!" snorted Uncle Ezra. "Why, Sam Whitmarsh, there's a good seven ton o' hay there if there's a paound. It's packed close as it kin be packed."
Uncle Sam kicked into the hay and succeeded in finding near a crack in the wall a small mildewed spot.
"It's spiled, Ezry, same's I said it was," he shouted triumphantly. "Look ye here! All along these cracks the rain's beat in an' spiled it. An' there's no tellin' haow far that there mildew goes. Spiled alfalfy hain't no good fer nuthin'."
"Now, Sam, there ain't no use in your a-talkin' on like that," said Uncle Ezra in the tone of one who deals with facts. "You know well nuf there hain't but a handful of it in that corner that's been teched by rain."
"An' see here," went on Sam, "this hay must o' laid two or three days afore you raked it. Why, half the leaves is off. An' I bet it had a rain onto it, too, while it laid on the graound. Look what a dark color it is. Good alfalfy hain't that color."
"It didn't lay ner it didn't see no rain," exclaimed Uncle Ezra, his voice harsh with indignation. "You know yerse'f, Sam, I cut an' hauled that hay latter part of las' July; an' there didn't a drop o' rain fall after the ninth. The alfalfy's a good color if ye see it in the light."
"Looks to me like it's a bit woody," mused Uncle Sam, rubbing a scrap between his thumb and forefinger. "An' here's seed on some of it. You was a bit late a-cuttin' this hay, Ezry."
"Naow, Sam Whitmarsh, you know well's I do, I cut this here hay in the bloom." Uncle Ezra's hands were beginning to tremble with exasperation. "Why, I 'member you come by one Friday when we was a-cuttin' an' you said what fine alfalfy that was."
"Haow do I know this is the same alfalfy, Ezry?" queried Uncle Sam, darting a swift look from his keen blue eyes. "Don't look to me like it is. An' I see jes lots o' weeds through it, too. Part of it hain't good fer nuthin but beddin'. Well, Ezry," with the tone of one coming at last to the crucial point, "what're you a-askin' for it?"
There was a long, ruminating pause. The subject of price could not be approached without deliberation befitting its importance.
"Waal," hesitated Uncle Ezra at last, "you've said every dirty thing you kin think of to say about the hay. But the hay's good hay jes the same; an' you know it well's I do. An' if I had a place to put it I wouldn't sell you nary pound of it fer no money. But bein' as haow I gotta have the room in the barn, I'll take forty-five dollars, an' you do the haulin'. An' that's dern cheap hay I'm a-offerin' you."
"Cheap, Ezry! Before you'll git anybody to give you forty-five dollars fer that there little mangerful o' spiled hay, your new barn'll fall to pieces from old age. An' I guess neither you ner me'll be here to see that happen, Ezry. Be reasonable now, Ezry. You know there hain't but a ton an' a half there. I'll give you twenty dollars fer this here little handful o' hay a-laying before us. An' that's a-payin' you twict over."
"Twenty dollars!" shrieked Uncle Ezra. "Why, there's seven good ton o' hay there. An' hay's worth sixteen dollars a ton at the cheapest. I ain't wishin' to give the hay away. If every leaf of it was spiled it'd be worth more'n that to me to put under my grapes an' peach trees."
"All right, Ezry. Like enough you'd best use it fer that. 'Tain't no good fer nuthin but manure an' beddin' anyway. I don't know as I'd want to bother hookin' up to haul it away."
Uncle Sam made as though to leave the barn.
Ezra weakened. He was very anxious to get rid of the hay; he needed the barn at once for his tobacco. And buyers for hay, he knew too well, were not to be readily found at this time of year. Also he knew from sad experience the effect of alfalfa upon tobacco when the two were left in the same barn together. He had been prepared to make some sacrifice; but he shrank from making the sacrifice that Sam demanded of him. Because, what would Aunt Eppie say?
He turned away shaking his head with a final movement, as though negotiations were ended. But Uncle Sam, casting at him a searching, sidewise glance, saw the look of irresolution pass across his face.
"You won't take twenty, eh, Ezry? Then what will you take?"
There was a long pause.
"Waal, I'll take thirty."
The four words dragged themselves with the greatest reluctance from Uncle Ezra's lips.
There was another long pause. Uncle Sam spat deliberately, took a fresh chew of tobacco, and looked out across the landscape meditatively through the big barn doors.
"I tell ye, Ezry," he said at last with great deliberation. "Nobody hain't a-buyin' hay this time o' year. An' if you leave the hay here an' put yer terbaccer in, the terbaccer'll like enough heat an' spile. An' even if it don't heat an' spile, it'll turn dark, sure's yer shirt's on yer back. An' you know what price dark terbaccer fetches. Naow, Ezry, seem' we've allus been good neighbors together, I'm willin' to split the diff'rence with ye. Twenty-seven fifty I'll pay ye right here in cold cash. Will ye take it?"
Uncle Ezra looked beaten and utterly miserable. "Oh, I s'pose so," he grunted at last.
Uncle Sam had come prepared to clinch matters. He pulled out from his hip pocket a roll of bills, selected two tens, a five, and a two; then fished around among his loose change till he found a fifty-cent piece, and laid the whole in Uncle Ezra's reluctant, yet eager, hand.
Aunt Eppie was waiting anxiously for the result. She had watched the men set out together.
"Did he buy it, Ezry?" she queried excitedly, as soon as her husband appeared in the dooryard.
"Yump."
"Haow much did he give fer it?"
"Twenty-seven fifty."
"Twenty-seven fifty! Do you mean to tell me, Ezry Pettit, you sold that five ton o' good hay fer twenty-seven dollars an' fifty cents, an' hay worth sixteen dollars a ton if it's worth a dollar! The poorhouse is where we'll all end up if that's the way you're a-goin' to go on!"
"Waal, I had to git shet of it; an' nobody's a-buyin' hay naow."
Uncle Ezra was too sick at heart to enter into a quarrel. He walked away as the easiest way of ending the argument, disgusted at the unreasonableness of womankind.
Uncle Sam, the veteran bargain driver, was as gratified as a boy who has just traded a watch that won't go for a shotgun that will. It was a feather in his cap to get the better of old Ezra Pettit. He bragged about it far and near and received congratulations from all the neighbors. There was nobody for ten miles around who did not enjoy a joke at the expense of Uncle Ezra. Being a wag, Uncle Sam could not resist the temptation to get some fun out of his deal. So he hauled the hay away in many lightly-piled loads, craftily built to look much larger than they really were. These loads got on Aunt Eppie's nerves. When the eleventh load trundled by the kitchen window, she shrieked hysterically: "Well, Ezra, ye might as well lock the doors an' pull daown the blinds! The poorhouse is the place fer us! There goes Sam Whitmarsh with another load o' hay!"
Judith tittered immoderately behind the pantry door. But Cissy, being a serious and right-minded servant and a stranger to a sense of humor, felt deeply concerned at the loss of her master and mistress, considering it in some degree her own.