At last it rained. It rained all day and all night; and the next day the "season" was on.
With the infinite patience of those who have to humor the caprices of nature in order to wrest a living from the earth, they went over the whole four acres once more. Jerry had kept his tobacco bed well watered and there were plenty of plants.
"Bejasus, if Luke had stole 'em this time," he said to Judith, "I'd a gone daown there an' bust his jaw fer him. On'y reason he didn't steal 'em, he made his bed clost by a spring this year an' he's got lots of his own."
More than two thirds of the plants were dead and had to be replaced.
"They're a bit late," commented Jerry, "but if the season's any good, they'll grow into good terbaccer yet. It don't take terbaccer long to make itsse'f."
It rained several times through June and the plants began to spread out green and lusty. Then with July the weather turned dry again and intensely hot. The clay hillsides baked harder than ever, so hard that the clods were more like stones than lumps of dried earth. Jerry, in an attempt to save his crop by making cultivation take the place of rain, went through his corn and tobacco again and again with the cultivator, then followed the rows of tobacco with his great sharp hoe, loosening up the ground around each plant. Judith tried to help him at this task but had to give it up. The ground was too flinty, the hoe too heavy; and the sickness of pregnancy which was coming upon her for the second time made her arms weak and nerveless.
No rain fell during July; and in blinding light and blazing heat August set in. It seemed to Jerry, who anxiously watched the sky, as though nature, not content with defrauding him out of the fruit of his labors, was amusing herself by making a fool of him and playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. Sometimes the sky would grow overcast and all the signs of approaching rain appear, only to be swept away with the next wind. Occasionally even a light shower would fall, enough to partly lay the dust and irritate the anxious tobacco growers. Then the sky would clear again. Often they would see it raining on the horizon, over near Cynthiana or Georgetown or up toward Cincinnati. But no rain fell to refresh their own thirsty fields. Sometimes on hot afternoons great black storm clouds gathered in the west and rolled up into the sky, then passed away obliquely and disappeared toward the south. Through the heavy, sultry night, when it was hard to get to sleep, heat lightning played incessantly around the horizon. This long continued strain of watching for rain and seeing it approach only to go away again began to wear on the nerves of both Jerry and Judith. They became touchy and irritable and snapped at each other over trifling matters.
Judith tried to keep her garden alive by frequent hoeings. But with the increasing heat and drought it wilted and withered up till there was nothing left but a few dried stalks. They had the milk from their cow, some salt meat left over from the winter before and some dried beans. These with corn meal cakes and coffee made up their daily fare.
By the middle of August wells and cisterns were getting low, and springs and streams were drying up. Some of these latter were already bone dry, with the hoofprints of the cattle that used to drink in them baked hard into the flinty clay. Water for stock was growing scarce. The Blackfords' well was dropping lower every day, and Jerry, afraid that it might go dry altogether, would not let Judith use any of the precious water for washing clothes. When wash day came, he would hook up Nip or Tuck to the cart and drive her and the baby and the tubs and the bundle of clothes to a spring further down the hollow where water was still to be had. The spring was low and the scant water fouled by the feet of cattle; but it had to serve. Here he had put up a rude bench on which to set the tubs, and here, as there was now nothing for him to do in the field, he would help Judith to rub and rinse the clothes through the muddy water and spread them on the grass to dry, while the baby crawled about through the wild weed jungle and grasped with his helpless, chubby hands at butterflies and flecks of sunlight.
These little excursions were not picnics, as they might have been under more favorable conditions. The failure of their crops had cast a gloom upon the young couple which was deepened by the change that had come over Judith. The debilitating effect of the long continued heat added to the nausea and nervous irritability of an unwelcome pregnancy had induced in her a state of body and mind in which, in order to endure life at all, she instinctively closed herself up from it as much as she could. With something of the feeling of a creature of the woods, she sought to shut herself up with her weakness and misery. She plodded through the round of her daily tasks like an automaton. Even to the lifting of an eyelid, she made no motion that was not necessary. Her feet dragged, her eyes seemed as if covered by a film and her face wore a heavy, sullen expression. She avoided meeting people, answered them in monosyllables when they spoke to her, and took no interest whatever in the doings of the neighborhood. When Jerry tried to talk to her, she scarcely looked at him or answered him, until, chilled by her lack of response, he too would fall into gloomy silence. Sometimes when Jerry, in his inexperience with the washing of clothes, did something particularly clumsy and awkward, she would scold him sharply then relapse into her habitual impassivity. When the clothes were dried and gathered up, they rode home in silence, Jerry driving, Judith holding the baby on her lap.