Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

That spring they moved to another house close to several acres of fresh tobacco ground. Tobacco exhausts the soil in about three years and has to go through a renovating period. An old couple who aimed to raise only a patch of corn and perhaps an acre of tobacco moved into the house that they had left.

Lizzie May had taken her children and gone back to live with her father; and Jerry had thought of taking Dan's old house. But Judith did not feel that she could go to live in the house to which Dan had been brought home dead.

The house to which they moved was less than a mile from the one they left. It was built of pine boards roughly nailed together and neither sealed nor plastered. It had three bare, box-like rooms and a rickety back porch floored with boards many of which had rotted away from the nails that once held them. When you stepped on one end of these boards, the other end flew up into the air. The house stood on the top of a rather high ridge and commanded a broad view. Near it there was neither tree nor shrub; but there was a little clump of locust trees by the horsepond. Like Dan's old house it was bare, stark, and open to the sky.

A large and very dirty family of Pattons had lived there the year before. They were probably distantly akin to Uncle Joe Patton, although both families disclaimed all relationship. Judith spent days cleaning up the house and yard. The walls and ceiling of the kitchen were dark with soot and pendulous with dust webs. The floor was sticky with a long accumulation of grease and grime. Frying pan spatterings and the splashings from dish pan and wash basin showed just where the furniture of the Patton family had stood.

The yard was littered with rags, broken boards and old iron; and scraps of baling wire tripped the unwary foot.

She threw the old iron and baling wire into a pile behind the backhouse, and raked up the rest of the rubbish into several heaps of which she made bonfires to the delight and excitement of Billy, who hovered perilously near to the licking flames.

When it was all done there were still left many traces of the former occupants. In the packed dirt of the yard, old floor rags that had been trodden into the ground were continually coming to light. When she took hold of them to pull them out a rotted fragment came away in her hand and the rest clung obstinately to the dirt in which it was embedded. Billy, too, was continually crawling under the house and triumphantly dragging out filthy scraps of overalls, old shoes, stiff, and moldy, frayed fragments of straw hats, ghastly skeletons of corsets, eaten with mildew and rust, but preserving faithfully the shape of the female form that they had once embraced, old, rust-eaten shovels, broken rat traps, and the frowsy stubbs of ancient brooms.

These things she poked into the stove when Billy was not looking or relegated to the old iron scrap pile behind the backhouse. But the child was always bringing out more. It was an enticing mine of treasures.

As in almost all the other tenant houses, the windows were few and small, set high in the wall and placed without the slightest regard for comfort, convenience or symmetry. From the outside the house looked like a weathered packing case into which some one had sawed at random two or three small holes.

In spite of the dark rooms and the bare surroundings, Judith liked it better than the little house in the hollow. It was open to the wind and sky. From the tiny windows she could see far off. In the morning the first ray of sunlight brightened the top of the ridge; and at the end of day the sunset filled the house like a presence.