Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

With the return of the men from the war an infectious restlessness and discontent pervaded the barnyards. The talk was all of hard times, of war prices that were not coming down and of the foolishness of bothering with tobacco. Some spoke of moving over into Indiana, others of going to Cincinnati, though few had the courage or money to go beyond talk. There was much robbing of hen roosts and stables and a general and oft expressed feeling among the old folks that things were going from bad to worse.

With August the grasshoppers came in great numbers. Luke Wolf said it was the hard times that brought them. Grasshoppers and hard times, he declared, were never far apart. However they did little to make the times harder, as they could do but small damage to the crops. Tobacco they would not touch and corn was beyond their reach. They were a bit hard on alfalfa and garden stuff, but they made up for it by fattening the geese and turkeys.

It gave pleasure to Judith and delight to the children to tend and watch the little chicks and geese and turkeys as they grew into strong, stocky birds. And at sundown, when they all came up to the roosts, the yard was as crowded and busy as a town on fair day, noisy too with the crowing, quacking and gobbling of the young males who grew daily in self-importance. But as the fall came on and the young turkeys ranged further afield and found abundance of food and grasshoppers, they began to fail to come up for the evening scatter of corn, a tree in the woods often seeming to them a pleasanter roosting place than the barn roof. Judith did not like to have them roosting away from home. She knew that if any of the neighbors happened upon them they would disappear one by one.

Once, when she had not seen them for several days, she left the children with Aunt Selina in the late afternoon and started out to look for them. Loitering through the late glow of the September day she half forgot the turkeys in the pleasure that came to her from asters and goldenrod, red maples, and yellow beeches. Almost without thinking what she was doing she began to stray along the path that led in the direction of the old shanty between the hills.

When she came within sight of the deserted house, the roof of which was just visible above the rank growth surrounding it, she stood for a moment looking across the last red shafts of sunlight that fell toward it through the trees. A half smile of weary cynicism lifted her upper lip, and with a scarcely perceptible shrug she was about to turn away.

Suddenly she drew quickly back behind the trunk of a tree.

Peeping around the tree, like a child playing hide and seek, she saw Hat Wolf appear on the outer edge of the shrubbery that grew about the old house. As she came out, Hat craned her neck and peered cautiously on all sides, scanning carefully the length and breadth of the hollow and the hillsides beyond up to the rim of the sky line. At last, feeling satisfied that no one was looking, she bolted as fast as she could, and her great hips and broad back were soon lost from sight in the nearest thicket.

It was turkeys that usually took Hat away from home. Judith looked around for turkeys. There was not a turkey in sight, nor, strain her ears as she might, could she catch any sound suggestive of their near presence. Perhaps some other business than to see if turkeys were making it a resting place had brought Hat to the old house. Judith had begun to shrewdly suspect what the business might be when she was confirmed in her conjecture by seeing a man emerge from the thicket in the same place that Hat had appeared. He did not peer about as Hat had done but walked away slowly, his head sunk on his breast, his hands plunged deep in his pockets, careless whether he was seen or not. In the dim light she did not recognize him at the first glance. When she looked again she saw that it was Jerry.

A hot wave of anger surged through her, her fists clenched and for the moment her whole being was one great hatred of Hat. Then a dozen conflicting emotions seized upon her, seeking to claim her at the same time. She wanted to run after Hat and spit in her face and call her the names that rose unbidden to her tongue. At the same moment she wanted to run in the opposite direction after Jerry and say to him things that she knew could bring the twitch of agony to his features. This desire had hardly risen in her when it was merged into the impulse to throw her arms about his neck and weep away her storm of struggling passions on his breast. He alone she knew had power to comfort her. But could she go to him for comfort? No, nothing in the world should make her go to him.

For a long time she was unable to gather herself together. Her whole being seemed some inert, passive instrument through which impulses, thoughts and feelings came and went of their own accord without any power of her will to control them. Thoughts of Hat made her clench her fists again and flare with lightning flashes of anger. Thoughts of Jerry brought mingled emotions that, whether she would or not, fought frantically within her. Helplessly she fluttered and struggled like an old rag blown this way and that in some bleak dooryard where the winds meet.