Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

"I done heard it was a-coming' this way," hazarded Gus Dibble timorously. "Did any o' you folks hear it was a-comin' this way? If it comes this way, they say we'll all hev to go into it."

Gus Dibble was a skinny, pallid fellow with very bad teeth. He had a wife and two small children and tried to raise tobacco to support them. He also had consumption, asthma, and a hernia.

"Aw, what kind of a notion hev you got, Gus?" scoffed Bob Crupper, who from association with his father had become enlightened. "Don't you know you gotta go acrost the ocean to git to where they're a-fightin'?"

"I dunno," answered Gus, humbly and vaguely. "All I know is they said it was a-comin' this way."

For Judith Blackford and the rest of the women in the solitude of their isolated shanties life moved on as stagnantly as usual, except that the heat and the scarcity of water made it somewhat more disagreeable and difficult. For them there was no such thing as change nor anything even vaguely resembling a holiday season. Families must be fed after some fashion or other and dishes washed three times a day, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. Babies must be fed and washed and dressed and "changed" and rocked when they cried and watched and kept out of mischief and danger. The endless wrangles among older children must be arbitrated in some way or other, if only by cuffing the ears of both contestants; and the equally endless complaints stilled by threats, promises, whatever lies a harassed mother could invent to quiet the fretful clamor of discontented childhood. Fires must be lighted and kept going as long as needed for cooking, no matter how great the heat. Cows must be milked and cream skimmed and butter churned. Hens must be fed and eggs gathered and the filth shoveled out of henhouses. Diapers must be washed, and grimy little drawers and rompers and stiff overalls and sweaty work shirts and grease-bespattered dresses and kitchen aprons and filthy, sour-smelling towels and socks stinking with the putridity of unwashed feet and all the other articles that go to make up a farm woman's family wash. Floors must be swept and scrubbed and stoves cleaned and a never ending war waged against the constant encroaches of dust, grease, stable manure, flies, spiders, rats, mice, ants, and all the other breeders of filth that are continually at work in country households. These activities, with the occasional variation of Sunday visiting, made up the life of the women, a life that was virtually the same every day of the year, except when their help was needed in the field to set tobacco or shuck corn, or when fruit canning, hog killing, or house cleaning crowded the routine.

Late in August, when the tobacco and corn were past saving, the rains came in floods and filled up the wells and cisterns, set the creeks to running again, washed great gullies in the plowed hillsides and refreshed the thirsty pastures.

There followed a lean fall and winter. There was no corn to fatten hogs; so the tenant farmers had to get rid of what hogs they had. The hogs, being lean and forced upon the market, brought only a poor price. The stunted, half filled out nubbins that the corn fields had produced that year were all carefully saved to make into meal for household use. The hens, too, had to go; for hens are too greedy-natured to keep through a time of scarcity. Jerry bundled them into a coop and took them to Clayton and sold them for thirty-five cents apiece, all but a dozen or so which Judith insisted upon keeping "for company," as she expressed it. These scratched and ranged for a living, and kept alive, though they laid never an egg.

Jerry dug his potatoes, most of them not much bigger than marbles, a slow and disheartening task; and Judith cooked them, while they lasted, with the skins on, so that no part of them might be wasted. They were greenish and bitter; but when they were all gone they were sorely missed. The few dried beans and peas that had managed to come to fruit before the dry spell caught them were carefully pulled and shelled and stored away. Hickory nuts and black walnuts were gathered and spread out on the floor of the loft to dry. There were no blackberries that year and only a few stunted apples. Jerry searched through the woods looking for stray apple trees that had sprung up from seed, and brought home an occasional bushel or so of wormy runts. These Judith made up into apple butter which she stored away in crocks and jars.

By January all these things were gone and there was nothing left but some corn.

Work by the day was hard to get; for there were many more men than jobs, and would continue so until the spring rush came on. Jerry fretted at his forced idleness and was always on the watch for a chance to earn a day's wages. When he managed to pick up an occasional job, he bought flour for biscuits, canned salmon or a piece of bacon. Then there was a feast royal. These feasts, however, were widely scattered oases on a great desert of corn meal. This had to be eaten without milk; for there was not much food for the cow, and the small amount of milk she gave was all taken by the baby.