"Who's gone by?" he persisted. "I didn't hear no bells."
"No," said Tira. "I don't believe anybody's gone by, except the choppers. It's a proper nice day for them."
The child woke and cried from the bedroom and she brought him out in the pink sweetness of his sleep, got the little tub and began to give him his bath by the fire. As she bent over him and dried his smooth soft flesh, the passion of motherhood rose in her and she forgot he was "not right," and sang a low, formless song. When he was bathed she stood him naked on her knee, and it was then she found Tenney including them both in the livid look she knew. And she saw what he saw. The child's hair was more like shining copper every day, his small nose had the tiniest curve. By whatever trick of nature, which is implacable, he was not like her, he was not like Tenney. He was a message from her bitter, ignorant past. Her strong shoulders began to shake and her hands that steadied the child shook, too, so that he gave a little whimper at finding himself insecure.
"Isr'el," she broke out, "before God!"
"Well," said he, in the snarl she had heard from him at those times when his devil quite got the better of him, "what? What you got to tell?"
"It ain't so," she said, her voice broken by her chattering lips. "Before God, it ain't so."
"So ye know what I mean," he jeered, and even at the moment she had compassion for him, reading his unhappy mind and knowing he hurt himself unspeakably. "Ye know, or ye wouldn't say 'tain't so."
Words of his own sprang up in her memory like witnesses against him, half phrases embodying his suspicion of her, wild accusations when, like a drunken man, he had let himself go. But this he did not remember. She knew that. Shut up in his cell of impeccable righteousness, he believed he had dealt justly with her and no more. She would not taunt him with his words. She had a compassion for him that reached into his future of possible remorse. Tira saw, and had seen for a long time, a catastrophe, a "wind-up" before them both. Sometimes it looked like a wall that brought them up short, sometimes a height they were both destined to fall from and a gulf ready to receive them, and she meant, if she could, to save him from the recognition of the wall as something he had built or the gulf as something he had dug. As she sat looking at him now, wide-eyed, imploring, and the child trod her knee impatiently, a man went past the window to the barn. It was Jerry, gone to fodder the cattle, and Jerry brought Raven to her mind who, if he was obeying her by absence, was none the less protecting her. The trouble of her face vanished and she drew a quick breath Tenney was quick to note.
"Who's that?" he asked her sharply, turning in his chair to command the other window.
"Jerry," she said. Her heart stilled, and she began to dress the child, with her mother's deftness. "He comes a little early to fodder, 'fore he does his own."