Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

"What are we all anyway but flies," she said to herself bitterly.

One morning when it was mild and the sun was shining she went out to clean the rain barrel that had grown slimy with a green scum. Bent over with her head and shoulders in the almost empty barrel, she scrubbed the sides vigorously with the scrubbing brush. When she had finished, her wrists felt weak and shaky. Taking hold of the top of the barrel with both hands she tried to tip it to drain away the dirty water and was suddenly aware that it was too heavy for her. She could not understand it. She had dumped the same barrel many times before with the greatest ease. She struggled with it and for the first time in her life felt herself overcome by a sense of physical powerlessness. Some virtue had gone out of her long, muscular arms trained from childhood to do heavy work. Her breath came in short, quick gasps and she felt her knees weaken and tremble in a way that she had never felt before. When at last she succeeded in tipping the barrel and returning it to its place, she sank down on the ground gasping with exhaustion, her knees weak like water beneath her.

After that whenever she drew a full bucket of water from the well or carried slop to the hogs or stood too long over the churn or the washtub, she felt creeping over her this strange, tremulous sensation of extreme weakness. Countless times before she had known what it was to be tired. But this feeling of sinking knees, of shivering powerlessness was something new, something quite different from anything that she had experienced before in her life.

With it came an increased impatience with the chatter and wrangles of the children, a growing lack of interest in the affairs of the neighbors or even in those of her own household, a desire to retire within herself, to be alone and apart.

Ill luck seemed to love their company that winter and, like a hungry stray dog, would not leave their door. Luke Wolf said it was all because Jerry had torn the shoes from Nip's dead hoofs and later used them in shoeing Tuck.

"Nine times out o' ten," he said to Jerry impressively, "if yuh shoe a hoss with shoes taken off'n a dead animal, he'll die afore the year's out. An' if he don't die some other kind o' bad luck'll foller yuh."

Tuck did not die; but, as Luke had prophesied, other bad luck followed apace. When Jerry hauled the tobacco off to market he was caught in a drenching rain, and hundreds of pounds of what would otherwise have been a fine grade of tobacco were changed to the sort that brings a cent or two a pound. The tobacco should have been covered to protect it against such a contingency. But a tarpaulin is an expensive luxury which few tenant farmers can afford to buy. Most of them use their wives' rag carpets. But Judith had no rag carpet.

When Jerry had paid off the help that he had hired during the year and settled the store bill that had been accumulating for many months and bought some tar paper to nail over the north and east sides of the house, he had a hundred and eighteen dollars left, most of which would have to go to buy another horse. Fortunately the corn crop was a fairly good one that year.

It was a hard winter, a winter of pinching and skimping and doing without, doing without sugar, doing without coffee, doing without even the salt meat to which they were accustomed, for hogs were worth too much to be consumed at home. They had to be sold to meet the exorbitant cost of shoes and overalls and underwear to keep the children warm.

Since the beginning of the war these things had become of very inferior quality. It seemed as if Jerry was always cobbling the boys' shoes and Judith always putting patches on their overalls. And in an incredibly short time their feet were on the ground again and their knees out. Like all the rest of the women, Judith pinched and contrived, tried to make clothes for the children out of old garments that were fit only for the ragbag, made flour sacks into pillow slips and even into underwear and carefully saved the smaller pieces of everything for the bedquilts that were always wearing out and having to be replaced.