Fearful of shrewd looks and whispering tongues, she did not go often to the meetings. They had other places of rendezvous. One was a deep hollow pungent with the smell of mint, where the creek splashed over moss covered stones and a weeping willow trailed its gray leaves in the water. Here on the hottest July afternoon the overhanging boughs of many trees and saplings made a green coolness. The place seemed remote as a cave until one day Uncle Jonah Cobb came along the little cowpath that bordered the creek. They heard him pushing aside the branches that grew across the unfrequented path and had time to dive back into the underbrush. Half blind and more than half deaf, he took his slow way through their little bower and, like an old ox whose neck bends by second nature to the yoke, never once lifted his head.
"I wonder was Uncle Jonah ever young?" she whispered, when he was safely out of hearing.
After that she would never go there again. The place seemed as open as a public square, as bare to the world as a housetop. She could never think of it without seeing Uncle Jonah plodding through it, his eyes fixed on the ground, a long blue patch on the back of his gray shirt, his denim trousers, much too large for him, hitched half way up his back by his greasy galluses.
Hemmed in between two steep hills and smothered in brush that had grown up about it was the shell of an old shanty that had been forsaken of man as long as Judith could remember. Near it was neither wagon track nor cowpath. Nobody ever came that way. On the floor, streaked and stained by many rains, they made themselves a resting place of cedar boughs and last year's leaves.
Mocking birds had built that year in the locust trees by the horsepond. How many she did not know. Perhaps there was only a pair or two, but it sounded like a dozen. She could see their pert little gray and white bodies darting about in the branches. Sometimes one of them would perch on a fence rail or the rooftree of the smokehouse and flirt his long tail saucily as he preened his feathers. These little choir boys to Pan, in whose small bodies the spark of life burned with such an intense flame, who lived only to love and to sing, kept the air vibrant almost all day long with their insistent, soul disturbing melodies. For a few hours the noonday sun lulled them into luxurious rest and a deep quiet fell, treacherously haunted by erotic echoes. The meadow larks that sang over and over again at regular intervals their one slender ripple of song were with their few guileless notes like poor little parlor singers beside these great masters of bird opera. There was no sound in the language of birds that they could not make. They chirped, chirred, trilled, twittered, caroled, ran again and again through all the scales a bird's voice ever compassed. Just to show what they could do, they imitated with perfection of accuracy the song of the finch, the robin, the meadow lark. Then, soaring far beyond the compass of these humble singers, burst forth rapturously into such floods of melody that the sunlight seemed filled with a rain of bright jewels. With delirious abandon to love and joy, the music welled from their little throats, palpitatingly, delicate, piercingly sweet. The enraptured rush of it, the sudden turns of it, the mad surprises of it penetrated Judith's being and swayed her like the master passion of which they were the voice.
They did not often sing in the night. But once a wakeful wooer sat on the ridgepole of the smokehouse and poured into the white moonlight floods of wild melody. For a long time Judith stood at the window looking out at the dim sky with scarcely a star showing and the world lying blanched and black under the light of the full moon. The locust trees by the horsepond looked dark and mysterious. The shadow of the smokehouse gable lay sharp and black against the whiteness of the yard. On the ridgepole she could just distinguish the little dark speck whose music thrilled the night. She leaned her head on the window sill and felt herself melting, dissolving away into music and moonlight.
All at once the bird stopped singing and a silence fell like the hush before doom. She shivered in her thin nightgown and crept back into bed. Sobs were rising in her throat. She tried to stifle them in the pillow; but her whole body shook in the grip of the hysteria.
Jerry stirred uneasily in his heavy sleep of exhaustion.
"Don't cry, Judy," he murmured sleepily, winding his arm about her. "Things'll come out all right."
It was blackberry season and she had a good excuse for leaving the children with Aunt Selina. Aunt Selina was genuinely glad to have them. Like most other back country women she was ready with glib lies to suit any occasion. But Judith knew that she was not lying when she said: "Fetch 'em over soon agin, Judy, the little darlin's." The old woman dearly loved the company of children. She chirruped and twittered to the baby and prattled in an unending stream to the two boys as they followed her about while she fed the chickens and tended the rabbits and hoed the cabbages and the rows of beans. She loved to put cookies into their chubby little grimy hands and twists of sugared popcorn in the pockets of their overalls. She had a sweet tooth herself, so she nearly always had such things about the house. They were near of an age, all four, and happy together.