The boys, greedily devouring their milk and corn cakes and champing valiantly up and down ears of green corn that she had boiled for supper, were hale and ruddy little fellows. But on their baby faces she saw already appearing traces of a look that she had learned to dread, a look that stamps itself upon the faces of those who for generations have tilled the soil in solitude, a heavy, settled, unexpectant look. It seemed cruel that such a look should come upon the faces of little boys long even before their time for doing barn chores. Looking at them she was filled with a vague unhappiness.
When she turned from the boys to the little girl she felt a more poignant sting. Annie was the kind of little girl one sees often in country places and very rarely in towns. She had a puny, colorless, young-old face, drab hair thin and fine, that hung in little straight wisps about her cheeks, a mouth scarcely different in color from the rest of the face, and blank, slate-colored eyes. There was neither depth nor clearness in the little eyes, no play of light and shade, no sparkle of mirth or mischief, no flash of anger, nothing but a dead, even slate color. They were always the same. In their blank, impenetrable gaze they held the accumulated patience of centuries. Looking into these calm little eyes, Judith shrank and shuddered.
At the other end of the table Jerry sat and swilled down numberless cups of strong coffee. When she looked at him she was startled to see the creased hollows under his eyes and the heavy look of toilworn despondence that merged his features into a dull sameness. With a sharp stab of pain she realized that before her eyes he was turning from a boy into an old man. He ate and drank soddenly, bestially, without lifting his eyes, his head sunk between his shoulders. He was beginning to talk in grunts, like old Andy, his father. When after supper he walked across the floor to get a broom straw to pick his teeth, he lurched in his weariness like a drunken man. His legs were bent at the knees, his step in his great plowing boots heavy and dragging.
When she came beside him to put more fried meat on his plate, she let her hand rest upon his shoulder with a caressing touch. He looked up at her quickly, his features suddenly brightened by a smile of surprised pleasure at this unexpected token of her affection. Something about the smile smote her cruelly, something pitiful and heartrending. She felt that she could not bear it. She made haste to go to the smokehouse for another piece of meat; and there amid the hanging sides and shoulders she shuddered convulsively, clenched her hands, and bit into her under lip, struggling against tears.
In the night a strong wind sprang up and the sky grew overcast. In the blackness she lay awake feeling the house rock in the gusts, listening to the rattle of window sashes, the uneasy creaking of doors, the flapping of loose shingles on the roof. A broken molasses jug lying under the edge of the house, caught the wind in its funnel and whistled eerily. The shed door swung on its hinges and banged intermittently as the gusts of wind slammed it violently shut. From time to time a rat scampered the length of the loft over her head.
The baby in the cradle by the bedside, also lying awake, talked to herself, making soft, cooing little noises, delicate little purling sounds as sweet as flower petals. Jerry slept heavily.
Lying between her husband and child, she felt alone, cold and dismal, alone yet inextricably bound to them by something stronger than their bonds of common misery. Their future lives stretched before her dull, drab and dreary, and there was nothing at the end but the grave. She began to cry into the pillow, repressing her sobs so as not to wake Jerry. For a long time she cried in a stifled, bitter, despairing way. As she wept the baby's babblings ceased and she fell into the sleep that in puny children seems closely akin to death. Toward morning Judith, too, fell mercifully asleep, pale from tears and bitter thoughts; and when the ghostlike dawn peered into the little window it saw them all three lying stretched out stark and pallid like corpses.