Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

On the third day Annie was so much worse that Jerry rode over to Clayton for Dr. MacTaggert.

It was late that night when the doctor's mud-spattered Ford came panting up the long hill and stopped before their door. The little man looked haggard and hollow-eyed from his constant attendance at sickbeds and his long hours of bumping over rutted roads and up and down steep, perilous trails to the tobacco growers' lonely shanties.

"It's pneumonia," he said, as he straightened up from his examination of the child's chest.

The blood sank away from Jerry's face, leaving it a sickly gray color, and he grasped the bedpost to steady himself.

"Can't you see your shakin' the child's bed," said Judith crossly in a grating voice.

The doctor said that she would have to be watched and tended carefully both day and night. Jerry let the tobacco stripping go and stayed at home to help with the nursing. The boys were now well on the way to recovery and beginning to be fractious and noisy. The father and mother took turns at nursing the little girl and trying to keep the boys quiet; and through the night one watched while the other slept.

As Judith sat by the bedside of the sick child that she had begrudged to life before it was born, her heart failed her at the thought that the little one might die. She felt that to see her die, to have her cold little dead body put into a narrow coffin and laid in the frozen ground would be more than she could bear. Her thoughts skirted these images and fled away aghast not daring to face them. Keenly she suffered with the sufferings of the child. When she anxiously watched her breathing hard she felt her own chest racked by tearing pains. She had to summon all the courage that remained to her to enable her to bear the sight and touch of the limp and wasted little body. Never had the child seemed more inextricably bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. She felt herself eager to make any sacrifice if only it would bring the little one back to life and health.

And yet at the same moment that she yearned over the sick child, another set of thoughts, strange and sinister, came forward with startling boldness, thoughts that had come to her at other times and before which she had quailed, as, in the darkness of a wakeful night, one quails before thoughts of approaching death.

Of what use after all that this baby should live? She would live only to endure, to be patient, to work, to suffer; and at last, when she had gone through all these things, to die without ever having lived and without knowing that she had never lived. Judith had seen grow up in the families of the neighbors and among her own kin dozens of just such little girls as this one that had come out of her own body: skimpy little young-old girls, with blank eyes and expressionless faces, who grew into a prim, gawky, old-maidish girlhood and passed quickly from that into dull spinsterhood as Luella had done, or to the sordid burdens of too frequent maternity. Little Annie was just such a one. In every way she was a product of the life that had brought her into being, and that life would claim her to the end.