Weeds (Kelley)/Chapter 6
They had a long, beautiful fall that year. The warm, still sunny days followed each other week after week without a break, until it seemed as if there could never be wind again nor rain nor snow. In the mornings when Judith stepped out into the yard the grass was covered with flimsy gossamer webs encrusted with dewdrops, each one a rainbow in the sun. The beds of geraniums and the bank of scarlet sage along the stone wall seemed to grow each day a richer red. The morning glory vines over the back porch were full each morning with fresh bloom. In colors from faint blue to deep purple, from pale pink to rich rose, delicately veined and gleaming faërily with dew, they lifted up their frail cups to the sun that in a few hours would bring them death. Judith loved to look at the morning glories; yet they gave her a feeling of sadness. They were very silent, these mornings. No birds spilled music into the sunshine. Only a few crows cawed over distant fields. It had been a bountiful year and maturity and plenty were on every hand. The geese, the turkeys, and the chickens were full grown and the proud young males were fat and ready for the market. The hogs in the pen were getting all they could eat. Often they were too lazy to stand up to eat and munched their corn lolling luxuriously on their haunches. Much of their time they spent in sleeping. When they awoke they stretched, snorted, and rolled blissfully in the mud and straw, feeling the warmth of the sun on their bodies and the satisfying comfort of a full belly. By Thanksgiving they would be ready for the butcher's knife. There was a great abundance of tomatoes, cabbages, pumpkins, cornfield beans, everything that flourishes in the good clay soil of Scott County. Corn had been good and the cribs were full. Tobacco had been extra good and Uncle Ezra's great barns were packed to the doors and filled the air about them with exotic fragrance.
There was much pickling, preserving, and canning done in Aunt Eppie's kitchen, for she hated to see anything go to waste. The savory smell of catsup and chili sauce in the making and of vinegar cooking with spices to pickle the pears and peaches streamed out of the door and whetted the appetite of passers-by. It was impossible for Aunt Eppie's family to consume all these bottled delicacies during the winter. Hence her cellar was crowded with the accumulation of many years. Still she insisted on making more each year. When the plenitude of peaches or grapes or cucumbers was so great that it was a human impossibility to can them all, she gave of her surplus to the tenants, grudgingly, yet with a certain Lady Bountiful pleasure in bestowing favors, and always with many admonitions as to the sin of improvidence.
"It's a sin for sech things to go to waste," she would say. "I'm sure I've give away twenty bushel this year if I've give one. An' all the tenants could have 'em jes as plentiful as us if they'd only plant 'em an' tend 'em. I do think it's a shame for folks to live like hawgs from hand to mouth an' never plant a tree ner a bush ner hardly a tater to put in their mouths. Jes look at all these tenant houses! Not a fruit tree ner a berry bush ner hardly as much as a row o' beets an' cabbages! The shiftlessness of some folks is sech that it's a wonder the Lord A'mighty don't send a plague on 'em."
As the weeks went by Jerry began to follow Judith with his eyes and to think about her when she was not in sight. She seemed to have become all at once a much more interesting person than the little black-haired tomboy that he had played and quarreled with ever since he could remember. One October evening when he came up from work and Judith was in the barnyard milking, he lingered about after putting up the horses, pretending to tinker with the harness. It was past the time to go home and he was hungry as a bear; but something held him. Judith got up from the red and white cow and went to the Jersey, the milking stool in one hand, the bucket in the other. Jerry followed her with his eyes. She had on an old blue cotton dress with a long tear in one sleeve and her arms and neck were bare. Her arms and neck looked very beautiful to Jerry.
When she had finished milking the Jersey she got up, kicked the milking stool over toward the fence where the cows would not step on it, and turning to go to the house saw Jerry still pretending to work with the harness.
"Well, Jerry Blackford, hain't you got started fer home yet! Haow long d'ye think yer mammy'll keep yer supper hot fer ye?"
"Till I git there," answered Jerry, coming up beside her.
The horses, as soon as the harness fell from them, had gone at once to the horsepond and taken a long, satisfying drink, then trotted back to the barn to munch the good alfalfa hay that Jerry had pitched down for them. It had been a warm, lazy day. The sun had just set and the evening was still, blue and luminous. Three two-year-old colts that had been brought up for the night, feeling the stimulation of the cool air, began to frolic about the barnyard. They began by rolling in the loose straw and chaff, turning over and over on their backs and waving their hoofs foolishly in the air. Then one colt scrambled to his feet and raced to the gate, the others after him. Back they came from the road gate to the other gate leading into the field, then round and round the barnyard snorting and neighing, their heads and tails high, their manes flowing, their hoofs pounding rhythmically, their beautiful, strong, sleek bodies taut with the joy of the gallop. The work team, having eaten a good supper, trotted out from the barn and joined in the fun with as much zest as the colts.
In the middle of the barnyard stood Charlie, Uncle Ezra's old white mule. He was too old to do much work and was usually left out at pasture. To-night Uncle Ezra had brought him up because he was going to use him in the morning to help haul in corn fodder. Being old and white, he always looked rough and dirty; and he had an ugly bare spot on one shoulder where the harness had rubbed off the hair. His under lip had grown loose and flabby and sagged down, giving his face a sullen look. Isolated by his age and his kind, he stood perfectly motionless, his knees bent like those of an old man, his head low, his haunches slack, his whole body sagging, and took not the least notice of the horses galloping about him. In joyous madcap career they raced in front of him, behind him, all around him; but he neither stirred nor raised his head.
"That's haow folks is when they git old," said Jerry, looking meditatively at the ancient beast.
"Yaas, an' ain't he for all the world like Uncle Ezry? Seems to me them two has growed to look alike, they bin so long together."
"The colts hates him 'cause he's old and 'cause he's a mule," mused Jerry, "an' he hates the colts 'cause they won't leave him have no peace."
Judith had taken from the pocket of her dress a stub of green crayon and begun to draw on the whitewashed fence post. Jerry watched her and saw the profile of Uncle Ezra appear in green on the white post, then beside it the profile of Charlie the mule. She had skilfully modified the features just enough to best bring out the points of resemblance.
"See, hain't they like as twins? They're both the same dirty gray color, both got the same hangin' under lip an' hook nose an' the same big ears."
"An' both is deaf as posts," laughed Jerry.
Judith had her back to him admiring her handiwork. He wanted to lean forward and kiss the white nape of her neck. Instead, he turned about and started off for home. ······· A little before Thanksgiving there came a cold, heavy rain, then a blighting frost that killed the morning glories and the geraniums and blackened everything in the garden except the beets and cabbages. A strong, cold wind blew the trees bare in a single night, and the whole aspect of the world was changed. Two days ago it had been summer. Now it was winter.
It was not so pleasant for Judith at Aunt Eppie's after the cold weather came. Driven in for warmth from the deserted and windswept barnyard, she found little to interest her in the stuffy, overheated kitchen or the bare, cold bedroom that she shared with Cissy. As the days grew colder, the sitting room took the place of the porch. Here a hideous product of modernity known as a "base burner" was pressed into service. It stood on a square of ornamental zinc placed over the rag carpet and kept clean and shiny by Cissy's floor rag. It was covered with knobs and scrolls and glorious with polished nickel. All around its fat belly it had several rows of little mica windows. When a fire was lighted in this gorgeous crematory and fed with a bucket of cannel coal, mined in the neighboring state of West Virginia, it made the room so hot that Judith had to gasp for breath.
As the days grew colder, Uncle Ezra spent more and more of his time sitting silently with his feet on the fender of the majestic base burner.
The afternoons were short now, and it was night long before the chores were done. The last thing at night Judith had to milk the cows, feed the pigs and calves and shut up the chickens. When at last she came in shivering out of the dark and cold, there was no steaming hot coffee waiting to hearten her, no bacon sizzling in the pan, no biscuits fluffy and fragrant from the oven. The deserted kitchen was bleak in its chilly neatness and a leftover meal was coldly set forth on the table in the sitting room: cold vegetables and bacon left from dinner, cold biscuits and corn cakes, cold water and cold skim milk to drink, a cheerless and uninviting spread. This had been Aunt Eppie's custom from the beginning of time, and there was never any breach in its observance. As soon as the great base burner of the sitting room was put into operation, the kitchen fire was allowed to go out immediately after dinner, and it was not lighted again until next morning. Aunt Eppie, in explaining this custom, always made a great deal of the fact that it saved work for Cissy. What of course it did save was fuel. A tiny lamp set in the middle of this chill-inspiring table irritated the eyes with its feeble glare and served only to make darkness visible. Aunt Eppie possessed a large, round-burner lamp with a polished nickel bowl and a "hand painted" china shade. This lamp was a present from one of her married children. She prized it greatly but never lighted its oil-consuming wick except when she had visitors of importance.
When the silent and cheerless supper was over and the dishes gathered up and washed, everybody went immediately to bed.
"Never be out o' bed at eight ner in at five," was Aunt Eppie's oft repeated motto; and winter and summer this rule was rigidly observed. In the bitter winter mornings as well as in the radiant dawns of summer, the whole family turned out at a quarter to five. They ate breakfast by lamplight. Then while Cissy and Judith washed the dishes, Aunt Eppie and Uncle Ezra sat over the base burner waiting for daylight. With no light in the room but the glow from the mica windows of the stove, the two old people sat in unbroken silence, slaves to their lifelong habit of thrift.
The dreary monotony of this manner of life soon palled upon Judith and she decided to leave Aunt Eppie's service.
"I'm a-goin' back home nex' Satiddy, Aunt Eppie," announced Judith, when one Saturday evening she received her dollar as usual.
"What, a-goin' home, Judy! There hain't nuthin fer you to do at home, an' you won't be earnin' a cent of money. What's the idee of a-goin' back home?"
Judith looked straight at Aunt Eppie with her dark, level eyes.
"I'm a-goin' home 'cause I want to," she said with unashamed simplicity.
"You'd best stay right where you are," advised Aunt Eppie. "Look at Cissy that's been a-workin' for me so long, haow well fixed she is. She's got money loaned out an' a-bringin' her in five per cent interest. You could do jes as well as her if you'd be willin' to stay here an' tend your work, 'stead o' goin' off an' a-loafin' round yer dad's place an' finally a-marryin' some good-fer-nuthin tenant farmer. You'd best stay here, Judy, an' learn to be a good thrifty housekeeper like Cissy."
Aunt Eppie said this last with a certain clinching finality, as though it had been quite decided that Judith was to stay. A more timid and impressionable girl might have been influenced. But Judith, heeding only her own inner promptings, could be neither tempted nor bullied by Aunt Eppie. When the following Saturday arrived she collected her dollar, packed her satchel, climbed onto a wagon that was passing on the way back from Sadieville and was jolted toward home.
Aunt Eppie looked after her with an aggrieved expression.
"That's jes haow it allus is," she remarked to the faithful Cissy, as they turned back together into the kitchen. "They hain't got no notion what's good for 'em. You no sooner get 'em trained into your ways than they're up an' gone. Thankless an' shiftless—all of 'em."
She went back to her sewing in disgust, meditating bitterly that they would now have to pay a male hired man four times what they had been paying to Judith.
Judith was glad to get back to the humbler but warmer atmosphere at home, and the folks were glad to have her back. She made Bill and the boys roar again and slap their sides with delight when she imitated Aunt Eppie's shriek of terror at the fear of the poorhouse. She spread out on the table her accumulated wealth amounting to sixteen dollars; and delighted the twins with a present of three dollars each to buy them stuff for a new dress. To Elmer she gave a dollar to buy him a popgun and reserved the rest of the money to spend riotously on clothes for herself.
"An' we'll all have new dresses for the party," exulted Lizzie May. "Poolers is a-going to have a party Christmas Eve an' we're all bid to go. But we'll have to hurry to git the dresses done."
Unable to wait a minute longer, the girls drove to Clayton first thing next morning and selected the material for their dresses. They chose cotton voile as being the prettiest, most party-like material to be had for the sum that they were able to spend. Lizzie May selected a delicate pink. Luella's choice was a medium blue with darker blue shadow bars running through it. Judith's was a red and white check. They were delighted and voluble over their purchases. They felt gay and festive and full of holiday spirit, like boarding school girls on a visit home. On the way home they all tried to talk at once and laughed so much that Tom and Bob, disturbed by the unusual hilarity behind them, kept looking around inquiringly trying to see what was going on. As they jolted at a fast trot past the Pettit place, Aunt Eppie peered out of the kitchen window.
"There goes them Pippinger girls, an' I'll bet they've spent most every cent Judy's earned while she's been here," she said to Cissy, turning away from the window with her heavy money sigh. "It beats me haow extravagant an' shiftless folks kin be. They don't seem to ever have a thought that there's another day a-comin'."
That very afternoon the girls started to make their dresses. They could hardly wait to eat and wash the dishes.
On Christmas Eve, when they were dressed ready for the party, they felt somehow like different beings, as though they were not workaday people at all but ladies who had always worn new, fluffy dresses, white stockings, and shiny shoes.
It was a drive of three miles to the scene of the party. Then the mules had to be hitched to a fence post at the top of the ridge and the remaining quarter of a mile made on foot. The descent into the hollow where the Pooler house stood was too steep and narrow to attempt with a wagon at night. Tom Pooler, the father of Lizzie May's sweetheart, was a tenant of old Hiram Stone and lived in one of Hiram Stone's tenant houses. Like most of the other tenant houses in Scott County, it was built close to the acres of tobacco land with which it belonged. Proximity to the main road was a matter not taken into account.
By the light of two lanterns the Pippingers proceeded on foot down the steep, scarcely marked wagon track that led to the house, the girls carefully holding up their skirts and stepping daintily so as to avoid the mud. The night was mild and bright with stars. As they walked a light wind blew in their faces and the dead leaves rustled under their feet. As they approached the house, they saw light shining not only from the windows but from many little square chinks in the walls. The reason for these little golden squares of light dated back to the building of the house several years before. Tom Pooler had made an arrangement with Old Man Stone's overseer to build the house if Stone would supply the lumber. The overseer supplied green lumber. Tom set to work briskly to build the house and soon completed the twelve by fourteen packing case which in that locality is called a house. All went well until the green boards began to shrink. Then Tom approached his landlord's manager in this wise:
"Whatcha gimme green lumber to build that 'ere house fer? The boards is shrunk naow so's a man might jes as well be a-livin' in a corn crib. You could throw a dawg through any o' them there cracks atween them shrunk boards. You'll have to gimme some more lumber to fix it, else I hain't a-goin' to stay on there nary week."
The overseer grudgingly supplied another load of lumber, with which Tom set to work to make the house tight and shipshape. This time he nailed the boards crosswise. They turned out to be as green as the first lot; and in a few months they had shrunk away from each other, leaving the house dotted with little square holes. "I'll fix that," said Tom to himself one Sunday morning, and started toward the corn crib. He soon came back with a wheelbarrow load of corn cobs and started to drive them into the holes and break off the ends. For an hour or so he worked busily driving in cobs and breaking off the ends. When he was called to dinner he surveyed the results of his work and saw that he had mended only a small patch of the great chequered expanse still gaping with holes. In the afternoon he began again, but with diminished energy. Along toward four o'clock the weariness of well doing suddenly came upon him. There were too many holes.
"Aw, hell, let 'er go the way she is," he muttered disgustedly, and felt in his pocket for another chew of tobacco.
It was to this house of many little golden windows that the Pippingers were now coming in the darkness. Arrived at the door, they turned their lanterns low and set them beside several other low-burning lanterns that stood in a little cluster against the house wall. Pushing open the door and entering without knock or ceremony, they found themselves in a stifling hot room crowded with people. The dim glare of two small kerosene lamps seemed a brilliant illumination after the darkness of outside; and for a moment they were dazzled.
Addie Pooler, the eldest girl, came forward and escorted Judith and the twins to a shedlike leanto back of the house where the Pooler boys slept and which was now doing duty as a dressing room. Here the four youngest Pooler children were already asleep all in one bed, two at each end, under a quilt roughly constructed of various sized pieces of dark colored goods cut from the less worn portions of men's old coats and trousers. Several sleeping babies were disposed here and there about the room on improvised beds made of overcoats or lap-robes. The girls put their coats and scarves on another large bed already piled with outdoor clothing, patted their hair a little in front of the small, face-distorting mirror over the chest of drawers, and followed Addie back into the kitchen.
Here the party was not yet under way. The women and girls and small children of both sexes were sitting or standing self-consciously about the walls. For the most part they sat bolt upright and stared straight ahead of them. Now and then they eyed each other covertly. Sometimes a woman would speak to her neighbor in a hushed voice and thus start up a small whispered conversation; but of general talk there was none. Almost all of them, daughters and mothers alike, were painfully thin, with pinched, angular features and peculiarly dead expressionless eyes. The faces of the girls wore already an old, patient, settled look, as though a black dress and a few gray hairs would make them sisters instead of daughters of the older women.
Tom Pooler, the host, a little man, red-faced and choleric like a bantam fighting cock, the possessor of a tremendous ego, sat in a round-backed armchair by the stove and spat tobacco juice into the wood box. His feet in heavy gray cotton socks were comfortably extended upon the fender. He was the center of a group of older men who stood and sat about the stove spitting tobacco juice and discussing the same things that they always did. The young men were nowhere to be seen. They were all standing outside with the lanterns.
All at once the door flew open and Jabez Moorhouse came in with his fiddle.
Jabez was in the best of spirits. He had taken a drop before he started, had had several pulls from the bottle on the way over to keep out the cold, and was feeling in holiday spirit. He was much in demand at gatherings like these on account of his ability to play the fiddle and call off the dances; and his response was usually a ready one. But he never went without a flask of good corn whiskey in his pocket to blur his eyes and his mind and nimble his fingers and his feelings.
"Waal, naow, gals, whatcha doin' here anyway? Settin' all raound solemn, like you was to a buryin'?"
He opened the door and held it open while he called out into the darkness:
"Hi there, you backward young fellers! Air you a-goin' to set aout on the doorstep with the dawgs all night? Come along in here an' pick yer gals fer the fu'st dance."
They came pouring in, elbowing and shoving each other and uttering loud guffaws to cover their embarrassment. They were healthier and less angular than the girls and the look of premature age had not been stamped upon their features.
"Naow then, you good lookin' gals, git up onto the floor; an' if a partner don't pick you, you pick a partner. This here is leap year anyway. Besides it's allus the wimmin that picks the men, though they try to make out it hain't. I say every gal that wants to git a good man step out onto the floor. An' every gal that wants to stay a old maid keep a-settin' by her mammy."
Nobody was offended by the crassness of Jabez' exhortation. It was what they had all been waiting for. This crude joviality and the smell of corn whiskey that was beginning to pervade the atmosphere soon cured the young fellows of their bashfulness, and there was much pulling and pushing of the girls from their seats, which they pretended to wish to retain.
Jabez had stationed himself in a corner and was tuning his fiddle.
"Naow then, all aboard! Form a line daown the middle; a lady an' a gent, a lady an' a gent. Gents to the right, ladies to the lef'. Swing yer partners."
He broke into the tune of one of the square dances familiar in that neighborhood, and the feet of the young men and girls followed him. Awkwardly and haltingly enough they stepped the first figure. The girls, with their angularities sticking out of their skimpy, ill-fitting dresses, moved at first as though from the pulling of wires. The young men slumped and floundered, lost their partners and got tangled up in the chain of dancers and had to be untangled again. As they warmed to the music, however, the feet lightened, the arms limbered, and self-consciousness was forgotten.
The men about the stove kept the fire well stoked and the room grew hotter and hotter, especially to the dancers. Dance followed upon dance. Tobacco smoke and the fumes of corn whiskey filled the stale air. The cheeks of every one were blazing from the heat and closeness. The children in the chairs were all asleep, leaning against their mothers. The older men in the corner by the stove watched the dancers and talked and spat tobacco juice into the wood box. They spat so much tobacco juice that the wood was covered with it. Fortunately it was the spitters who had the job of putting the wood into the stove, so it was their own affair. For the dancing girls in their slippers and light dresses, their feet and hearts beating time to the music, the spit encrusted wood box did not exist. With the beautiful ability of youth to ignore the ugly and sordid, however near at hand, they danced and laughed and coquetted with their partners, feeling in this their hour far removed above the humdrum of their lives.
The two prettiest girls in the room were Bill Pippinger's daughters, Lizzie May and Judith. Lizzie May, with her pale pink dress, cornsilk hair and small, dainty features, made one think of a wild rose. Dan Pooler could not take his eyes from her and insisted on being her partner in every dance, until toward the end of the evening the two disappeared entirely from the dancing floor. Judith in red and white shone in her dark loveliness like a poppy among weeds. Something more than her beauty set her apart from the others: an ease and naturalness of movement, a freedom from constraint, a completeness of abandon to the fun and merrymaking, to which these daughters of toil in their most hectic moments could never attain. Somehow, in spite of her ancestry, she had escaped the curse of the soil, else she could never have known how to be so free, so glad, so careless and joyous.
This difference from the other girls singled her out for comment more than once; and the comment was always adverse, less from maliciousness than from lack of comprehension; although envy, naturally enough, was not absent.
"My sakes, Judy Pippinger'd otta think shame to herse'f," whispered Jenny Whitmarsh to Esther Pooler, "the way she goes on with the fellers!"
"If Judy's poor mammy was alive, she wouldn't like to see her a-goin' on in that way," sighed Aunt Mary Blackford to Aunt Maggie Slatten. "That way o' carryin' on ain't a-goin' to bring her to no good."
The men about the stove had by this time passed the bottle several times and were filled with good feeling and reminiscences, as they watched the dancers passing in a far-off blur. The young men too had occasionally slipped aside to enjoy a swig with a companion, and were becoming bolder and more demonstrative in the dance. From time to time the talk of one of them slipped past the bounds of the decent and caused the cheeks of his partner to flush still redder.
As they danced the old game of "Skip to ma Loo," everybody sang noisily:
Dad's ole hat an' mam's ole shoe,
Dad's ole hat an' mam's ole shoe,
Skip to ma Loo, ma da'lin'.
In the pauses of the dance, the voices of the men about the stove could be heard growing louder and more vociferous, as the bottles became lighter.
I'll git another one better'n you,
I'll git another one better'n you,
Skip to ma Loo, ma da'lin'.
Aunt Nannie Pooler, a wizened, bent little woman, the mother of eleven, now began to spread out the refreshments on a table in a corner. Some of the older women got up and assisted her. The Poolers were noted for their improvidence and their lavishness in entertaining. Soon the table was spread with layer cakes, cookies, corn cakes and plates of cold fried chicken. The smell of bad coffee boiling on the stove had permeated the room for some time. It was now poured into cups, mugs, bowls, glasses, anything that would hold liquid, and the guests invited to step up and partake.
"Yaas, we eat at our haouse," Tom Pooler's voice could be heard saying loudly. "An' anybody comes in our doors, neighbor or stranger, goes away with his belly full."
"Whose hencoop d'ye reckon old man Pooler reached this fried chicken out'n?" asked Edd Whitmarsh of young Bob Crupper, when the two had retired to the back stoop to enjoy chicken washed down by a swig of whiskey.
"Whosever it was he had 'em fed fat," answered Bob, devouring a piece of the breast with great satisfaction. "I sholy do love a fat chicken. I kinder hope the joke was on Uncle Ezry."
With the leg of a chicken in one hand and a corn cake in the other, Jabez, now blissfully intoxicated, stood beside the table and rallied the girls as they came up. Most of them were too excited to care for food and Jabez knew it.
"Waal naow, Judy, my gal, hain't you a-goin' to do nothin' but nibble at a half of a wing, like you was a mouse on a pantry shelf? I seen you a-dancin' that fast an' a-laughin' that hard, a body'd think you'd be clean wore out an' a-needin' vittles. If you'd worked that hard at the washtub, I'll bet you'd be a-wantin' to eat a' right."
Judith's cheeks were scarlet and her dark eyes blazing. She looked at him from under her straight black eyebrows with the peculiar level gaze of hers. Even in the excitement of the moment there was something calm and critical, almost cold in that clear, unwavering look. She had always resented the self-appointed privilege of the old to make sport of the young.
"When you was seventeen did you eat hearty at parties, Uncle Jabez?"
Jabez did not notice the question. "Land, Judy," he said meditatively, "it makes a body feel old to see haow quick you young uns grows up. It seems like only day afore yestiddy you was a little brat a-crawlin' raound on the kitchen floor. When I'd step into yer dad's to see about borryin' a tool or gittin' shoes put onto a hoss, I'd have to walk careful to keep from settin' my foot daown on yuh. An' naow here ye be a tall, growed young leddy; an' if there's a handsomer gal in Scott County I'd like to have her showed to me."
Just then Jerry Blackford came up, grabbed Judith on both sides of her red and white checked waist and whisked her away to another corner of the room.
The music and dancing began again after Jabez had finished his chicken leg and ended in a wild, helter-skelter scramble, the young men chasing the girls around and around the room, catching them and kissing them with loud, resounding smacks. The girls exchanged slaps for kisses, and the sound of female fingers ringing on male cheeks peppered the air.
"Young folks to the wall; ole folks to the middle," called out the voice of Jabez. "This is dad's an' mammy's turn naow. Step out here you ole timers an' show the young uns haow we used to dance when we was lads an' gals."
Tom Pooler could be heard pulling his shoes out from under the stove.
"Yaas, by gollies, let's show 'em haow we done a barn dance. We hain't so stiff with rheumatics but what we kin step a figger yet, hey, Nannie?"
The other men about the stove shambled after Tom to the middle of the floor. The older women, exhorted by their daughters and husbands, were at last persuaded to forsake their chairs and join the circle.
Although nearly all of the "old folks" were under fifty and most of them in the thirties and forties, it was a scarecrow array of bent limbs, bowed shoulders, sunken chests, twisted contortions, and jagged angularities, that formed the circle for the old folks' dance. Grotesque in their deformities, these men and women, who should have been in the full flower of their lives, were already classed among the aged. And old they were in body and spirit. It was only on such rare occasions as this that the stimulation of social feeling and corn whiskey incited them to try to imitate with Punch and Judy antics the natural gaiety of youth.
"Yaas, we'll teach 'em haow to step a dance," cried Andy Blackford, the father of Jerry, floundering into the wrong place in the chain and grabbing the wrong partner with his great, seamy, wart-covered hands. "This is haow we done it in the old days, hain't it, Aunt Susie?"
The skinny, dried-up, little women in their black dresses and white aprons did not get much enjoyment out of the dance. There was neither lure nor mystery about the other sex for them any more; and they were disgusted and nauseated by the foul whiskey breath that spewed out upon them from their partners' mouths. The thought of the hard-earned money thrown away upon said whiskey did not tend to make them more cheerful. They went through the dance as they had gone through everything else since childhood, as a matter of course, because the circumstances of their lives demanded it of them.
Toward the close of the dance, Tom Pooler fell sprawling upon the floor. The drink had gone to his legs as well as to his head. He took the fall as an unwarranted insult to his dignity and scrambled to his feet flushed with whiskey, importance and indignation.
"I tell ye, I'm a baar in the woods, I am. Nobody don't dass say nuthin to Tom Pooler that he don't wanta hear—not Ezry Pettit ner Hiram Stone ner none of 'em. I don't take no sass from nobody no matter haow much land they got. I bet I cud lick any man in Scott County. I tell ye I'm a baar in the woods."
"You shet up yer mouth, ye dern ole fool an' don't git to quarrelin' in yer own house. Whatcha drink all that whiskey fer?" admonished Aunt Nannie in a loud whisper close to his ear. He glared at her with small, fiery, bloodshot eyes, like an angry old boar at bay. She met the glare firmly and calmly. Under her cold gaze that had restrained him so many times before he calmed down. But for a long time he kept muttering to himself: "I'm a baar in the woods, I am. Yaas, sir, I'm a baar in the woods."
The young people had paid no attention to the dancing of their elders. They had slipped away into corners and were absorbed in their own affairs.
The party was over with the old folks' dance. There was much sorting out of clothing, wrapping up of sleeping babies and shaking of older children to get them wide enough awake to walk to the wagons. No one told the host and hostess that they had enjoyed themselves; such things went without saying. When the Pippingers were all ready to start and had at last selected their own lanterns out of the bewildering cluster by the door, Lizzie May was not to be found anywhere. They waited and called. By and by she appeared around the corner of the house; she had been saying good-by to Dan. She seemed flustered and excited.
After they had reached the wagon and were driving along the ridge road, they heard Jabez, who was striding home across fields, singing ebulliently as he walked:
Raccoon on the graoun';
Raccoon says, "You son of a bitch,
Throw them 'simmons daown."
The night was still, mild and bright with stars. There was a clean smell of earth and dried leaves. The song came across the fields out of the darkness, rich, clear and mellow. A soft, cool wind blew in their heated faces; and the stars twinkled down through the tracery of bare treetops.
"Ain't Uncle Jabez awful!" sighed Luella, snuggling down into the straw. "He kin play the fiddle good; but land he does use sech langridge."
"Oh, don't think yerse'f so nice, Elly," snapped Judith, who had loved the sound of the singing. "His langridge hain't no worse'n other men folks'. On'y the song hain't true, 'cause a coon kin climb a tree jes as good as a possum any day."