CHAPTER XXV
When little Annie had recovered and the danger of contagion was well over, Lizzie May came one Sunday to spend the day with her sister, bringing with her Granville and Viola in stiffly starched Sunday clothes and her new husband, Edd Havicus, who handled freight at the Clayton railway station. While Edd and Jerry and Columbia Gibbs and Joe Barnaby sat and whittled at sticks on the sunny side of the barn, the sisters visited together in the kitchen.
Lizzie May looked blooming and happy, and a layer of fat that was beginning to show just a trace of coarseness filled up the wrinkles that had lined her face after Dan's death.
She was continually rushing to the door to make sure that Granville and Viola were not playing in the mud, that they were not in the barn where they might go too near the horses nor anywhere in the vicinity of the horsepond. From the doorway she called out shrill admonitions and threats of future punishment. She found it hard to hide her pride in her own offspring and her disapproval of the dirty faces, muddy overalls and complete lack of manners of Judith's boys. The little girl was better, more clean, and quiet. But even she had not been taught to say "Thank yuh, ma'am," when you gave her a penny or a popcorn ball. If Lizzie May's children were ever negligent in this important matter she always admonished them reprovingly, "Well, naow, what d'yuh say?" and thus drew forth the belated avowal of gratitude. But Judith was shamelessly remiss in all such training. Lizzie May did not know whether it was from laziness or stupidity. She was grieved that a member of her own family should act so.
She was sadly shocked too when she looked about Judith's frowsy kitchen at the stove, innocent of blacking, the pots and pans crusted on the outside with a long accumulation of greasy soot, the floor that needed scrubbing, the smoked-up teakettle and the littered shelves.
"My," she thought with a shudder that almost turned into a shrug, "haow kin she keep a-goin' in sech filth?"
But she would not for the world have said anything; for the longer sisters live apart the more polite they become to each other. And because she wanted to guard against saying anything or looking anything, she chose the safer and much more absorbing topic of her own recently settled home in Clayton. She was voluble and expansive over the new oilcloth in the kitchen, the ingrain carpet in the best room and the set of pink-sprigged dishes that Edd's mother had given her for a wedding present.
"I'm sholy glad I kep' my things an' didn't give 'em away at a auction, Judy. Sech things goes fer nothing when you sell an' costs a heap when you buy. We'd a had lots more expense settin' up housekeepin' if we hadn't a had 'em. Course some of 'em is old fashioned an' not jes what you would choose if you was a-buyin'; but we can't afford yet to have everything to match an' all in golden oak, like young Mrs. Jim Akers. Her things is swell, Judy. Sometimes when I look at the old chair Dan used to set in nights when he come in from the field, I jes can't hardly keep from bustin' out cryin'. An' yet it seems as if things works raound fer the best. Edd's awful steady an' don't never hunt an' hardly never drink. An' it's a heap nicer livin' in Clayton, Judy. No caows to milk nor skimmin' nor churnin' nor botherin' with hawgs an' hens. Sidewalks right to your door so's you don't hev to slush through mud every time you set foot outside. So much easier to keep the kitchen clean, specially with the oilcloth on the floor an' the men not allus trackin' in. Nice neighbors to speak to over the fence or drop in on of an afternoon with yer sewin', an' the store handy to run to, an allus sumpin a-goin' on, an' yer husband drawin' his money regalar every Satiddy night. I dunno haow I ever could go back to livin'," she almost said, "like this," but caught herself in time and ended, "the way I used to."