Often a wind would spring up out of the west as the twilight thickened, and the young Pippingers would run in the face of it, their hair blown back, their arms waving wildly, their voices ringing shrilly into the autumn night: little Valkyries of the hills.
Once, as they were playing a ring game by the barn, a big red moon rose over the brow of the hill and showed their dancing figures silhouetted sharply in black on the barn wall. The weird little shadow figures seemed like a troop of goblin companions that had come to join their play. The more wildly they pranced and threw their arms about, the more reckless and drunken grew the little shadow creatures on the wall, stimulating them in turn to a still greater frenzy of abandon. The wind blew in their faces and brought subtle whiffs of fragrance from the big tobacco barn down the ridge. The other children soon forgot this evening; but to Judith it remained always as one of the exalted moments of her life.
When the children were called in to supper after these autumn orgies, they would come with ruddy cheeks and blazing eyes. Bill, looking about the table, would say with satisfaction: "Them young uns ain't a-lookin' poorly. Guess we won't need to call in the doctor for 'em yet a spell."
The little glass lamp would be lighted in the middle of the oilcloth-covered table; and there would be fried potatoes and a big red platter of sliced tomatoes and roastin' ears steaming hot—a delicious meal!
The winter season was not such a happy one for the Pippinger children. Usually the weather would be warm and pleasant and the roads dry up to Thanksgiving or even later. But then would come the inevitable heavy frosts, followed by thaws and the cold, dismal rains that lasted sometimes for days together. Then the young Pippingers had to stay home from school and time hung very heavy on their hands. They bickered and quarreled and yawned and stared idly out of the window at the drearily falling rain and the dismal expanse of mud that would be there till the April sun dried it up.
Sometimes when the house grew too unbearably dull and small, they threw their coats over their heads and plodded through the heavy mud to the barn to play in the corn fodder and consort with the mules and chickens. It was a great relief to their mother to get them out of the house. Around the barn, the sodden stable dung made a lake of stinking filth and the children had to step very carefully from stone to stone to avoid sinking into it. Inside it was fun for a while to jump about in the clean fodder, to curry the mules and climb on their backs, and to hunt for eggs in the loft and on the top of the beams. But they soon tired of this and trooped back to the house, bringing with them their boredom and a quantity of sticky mud which refused to wipe off on the dirty bit of folded rag carpet before the door.
When the rainy spell was over Mrs. Pippinger heaved a sigh of relief and started them off to school again. Dressed in faded caps and little made-over, outgrown coats, too short in the sleeves and too tight across the chest, they trudged through the mud, glad to be away from the dreary house. When they got to school they were tired to the point of exhaustion; and the mud, which had splashed over their shoe tops, was drying in grayish flakes on their stockings. A tremendous wood fire, built by some of the older boys, blazed in the big box stove and made the room so hot that the children, tired from their long walk and entering that close, heated atmosphere from the chilly freshness of the outdoors, almost fell asleep over their copybooks.
It was worse still as the winter advanced and snow began to fall. The melted snow mixed with the mud and made a thin, oozy, penetrating slush, which usually meant wet feet for the Pippingers. It was not always possible for Bill to provide five new pairs of shoes and five new pairs of rubbers or overshoes with the oncoming of the bad season. And so the shoes were often broken and the rubbers worn into holes in the heels, which gave an easy entrance to the cold winter slush. For this reason and because the air of the schoolhouse was kept so close and overheated, coughs and colds were of very frequent occurrence. The winter, in fact, was one long stretch of barking, sniveling, wheezing, and nose-blowing, with sometimes a more severe attack which kept one or other of the children from school. Mrs. Pippinger always kept on hand in a stone jar a homemade cough syrup consisting of butter, sugar, and vinegar. It did not seem to have any very great curative effect on the coughs and colds; but the children were always glad to take it because it tasted so good.
Then too, as the winter advanced, the pantry and smokehouse grew more and more empty. "Roasin' ears," tomatoes, cucumbers and such garden delicacies were gone with the early frosts. Sweet potatoes, dried out on a shelf behind the kitchen stove, lasted a while longer, but were soon eaten up. White potatoes, cabbage, and pumpkins lasted till about Christmas. After that the frost always got what was left of them, as the Pippingers had no cellar. Christmas, too, saw the last of the apples; for Kentucky is too far south to grow good winter apples. The cured and smoked hog meat hanging in the smokehouse sometimes lasted till spring; but more often it was gone by February. The few jars of jam and cans of peaches and blackberries that Mrs. Pippinger managed to put up through the summer were turned into empty bottles almost before the frost came. Then began a long, lean season of mush and milk for breakfast, corn cakes and drippings for dinner, and corn cakes and sorghum for supper. If Bill could get a job stripping tobacco or shucking corn, there would be some canned goods and a side of bacon from Peter Akers' store. But usually the tobacco was all stripped and the corn all shucked before the lean season came on. Sometimes there was a job of hauling to be had. But the hauling jobs were so few and scattered that they did little more than provide the Pippingers with the occasional sack of flour to make the Sunday and holiday treat of hot biscuit. Bill made special efforts to keep flour in the house, for he did dearly love a light hot biscuit.