Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

As she sat by the little glass lamp of an evening making over flour sacks or mending overalls, her face had not the dull, sullen look that Jerry remembered from other times, but rather a hard, grim, half defiant expression. Watching her covertly his own face took on an ugly look.

More and more, as the days went by, she was confirmed in the stand that she had taken after getting up from her last sickbed. She was through forever, she told herself, with having children and with running any risk of having children. She wanted no more children that she could not clothe, that she could hardly feed, that were a long torture to bear and a daily fret and anxiety after they were born. Her flesh recoiled and her spirit rose in fiery protest against any further degradation and suffering. Too long she had been led along blindly. Now her eyes were open and she would be a tool no more of man's lust and nature's cunning. She would see her path and choose it. She would be mistress of her own body. She would order her future life as seemed best to herself.

It was the imprint of these thoughts that Jerry saw on her face as she sat sewing under the lamp; and the covert looks that he cast at her were ugly and ill omened.

For her there was stimulation mental and physical in such thoughts, and she began to grow stronger. It was this determination stubbornly adhered to and constantly borne in mind that made her arms powerful to rub the coarse clothes up and down on the washboard, that set the dasher thudding against the bottom of the churn more noisily than need be and drew the broom with brisk, emphatic strokes across the floor. When she gathered up the dishes she slapped the plates together with the emphasis of one who is indifferent as to whether they crack or not, and when she cleaned house the dust and feathers flew mightily. At the woodpile she was merciless to the saplings and rotted fence rails that Jerry had dragged up.

Often at the end of a day of such emphatic housekeeping, the old insidious weakness would slip into her bones, her knees would tremble and sink and she would drop with sudden exhaustion into the old rocking chair.

As she lay with her head against the bit of patchwork that was tied to the back of the chair, her eyes, the only parts of her that were not tired, would wander restlessly about the walls and ceiling. The winter before, in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, she had bought for a quarter a bundle of old newspapers and pasted them over two walls and part of the ceiling. She had intended to buy another bundle and finish the job, but had never gone beyond the intention. The papers had pulled apart over the cracks between the boards, they were yellowed with smoke and blotched with rain; but they still displayed their wealth of pictures. There were pictures of society people grinning and squatting on the sand at Palm Beach, pictures of smug, well fed dignitaries of church and state, pictures of business magnates, still smugger, fatter, and more rigorously curried, pictures of kings and generals pompously pinning medals to the coat lapels of heroes of war, well brushed and subdued for the solemn occasion, pictures of dismal, stuffy people who had been given new life by Tanlac or Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, pictures of actresses and movie stars, some simpering and insipid, others with grace and charm diffused over the pure lines of youth, pictures of people who had been killed in automobile accidents, pictures of murderers and the murdered.

Her interest was only mildly stirred by all these pictures of strange people in strange walks of life that she would never tread. They seemed, with but few exceptions, solemn and sodden creatures in no way to be envied. From them her eyes traveled with heightening interest to the streaky discolorations that the rain beating through the walls had made on the papers. There she never failed to find pictures that beguiled the eye and inspired the imagination.

Often when the children were at play out of doors she sat a long time looking at these weird freaks of water. At such times her hectic energy and the determination that lay back of it were gone, and with the graying twilight there came instead dark thoughts of the emptiness and purposelessness of life, of Bob who had died and of the death that lay in wait for her and hers. When the corners grew shadowed and the rats began to peer out of their holes with bright, furtive eyes, she would get up with a heavy sigh and begin to mix the batter for corn cakes.

As the weeks went by her relations with Jerry grew daily more strained. She rarely spoke to him except to call his attention to an empty woodbox or a broken door hinge or a loose board in the floor or the fact that the boys' feet were on the ground. Daily he grew more morose and evil tempered. A brooding animosity looked out of his eyes as he furtively followed her movements about the house. At the least excuse this smoldering fire broke out into the fierce flame of violent and brutal quarreling. The quarrels usually ended by his taking his hat and slamming the door behind him as he went to seek diversion in some neighbor's barnyard. For her there was no diversion. When the quarrel was over neither of them could remember what had caused it.

Christmas brought a truce. By a tacit mutual understanding it was agreed between them that on this day, if only for the children's sake, there should be peace and some measure of goodwill.