While the cold spell lasted Judith kept keyed up, energetic and irascible. With the thaw she relaxed into an exhausted torpor. As she wearily heaved out the contents of the greasy slop bucket and washed up the floor under it she sighed and her eyelids fell together asking for sleep.
There were war prices for tobacco that year. They ran as high as forty cents a pound. But the summer had been a dry one and the tobacco was light and of poor quality. Much of it, too, had been nipped by an early frost. Jerry thought himself lucky to get a check for two hundred and thirty-six dollars. Out of this he had to pay forty-seven dollars for hired help.
Guss Dibble, whose wife had a new baby, traded his crop for a cow, and considered that he was doing well.
The winter was a constantly recurring round of thaws and cold spells. It lasted far into March. It seemed as if it would never end. At last the change came all of a sudden and it was summer again.
CHAPTER XIX
Coming suavely and benignly after the cruel winter, the warmth fell like a softly enfolding presence. Spring is a gracious season in Kentucky, full of the smell of flowering locusts, of birdsong, and happy mornings. With sunlight falling through open doors and windows, the children playing outside and the baby asleep in her cradle, the house that all winter had been a cluttered, stinking prison became by contrast quiet, spacious, and restful.
Stimulated by the change, Judith cleaned house, raked up the yard, and burned the winter accumulation of rubbish, set out her garden and even planted some seed of sweet peas and nasturtiums about the house. The caressing spring days filled her with a sense of calmness and passive wellbeing.
She never sang or romped any more. She could not rejoice and be glad with these things of nature. But out of her calm torpor she looked at them as through a thin mist and they sank upon her spirit like healing on a wound. She grew very fond of sitting on the doorstep.