Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

In the half gloom of the kitchen the mother smiled mournfully. It was their day now. But their day too would soon be over, and the question remained unanswered. To what?

She took up the milk bucket and went out to do up the evening chores. When she had fed the hogs and chickens and milked the cows and strained and put away the milk, she sliced some meat for supper and mixed the corncake batter, then sat down to mend a tear in one of Annie's dresses. As she sewed she lifted her eyes often to the window.

From the day that they had moved into the windy little house on the hill, the sunset had begun to reach out hands to her. She had grown into the habit of looking forward to the end of the day. Its approach meant that the waking hours of dismal tasks and constant frets and cares would soon be over, that the whines and wails and wrangles, the scraping of chairs, the tramping of muddy shoes, the whole meaningless turmoil would come to an end, and for a little while there would be peace. Sometimes, too, there was an hour of quiet for her when the work was done, the children out at play and Jerry not yet come in for his supper. From the westward looking window she could see miles of rolling country that stretched to the long sweep of the horizon. Through the day the prospect did not vary greatly and she had not much time to spend in looking at it. But at sundown the west drew her eyes like a magnet. There, with the passing of the slow months, she saw glow into being and fade away the placid gold and azure sunsets of early summer, the hot, smoldering saffrons of August, the clear wine colors of September and the cold grays and yellows of winter. There, after the rain had poured heavily all day long, she sometimes saw the thick, one-toned pall of the sky lift itself away from a narrow strip of intensely glowing horizon against which distant roofs and treetops made a black landscape fringe sharply silhouetted against the shining river of light. And after a day of squalls and driving clouds, massed storm clouds hung their dark, rainy fringes around lakes of amber and pure apple green.

The cloud pictures fascinated her even more than the water landscapes on the wall; for in them there was infinite variety and change. She saw stately, turreted castles built upon the tops of crags that rose perpendicularly from shining water; and on the other side of the water perhaps a grove of great trees with weirdly twisted limbs. And even while she looked the outlines of the trees changed, the castle dwindled or loomed larger and there was a new picture. When she looked again it was all gone and there was left a peaceful valley with a river winding through it, a little steep-roofed house on the river bank and a church spire in the distance.

Faces, too, came out of the clouds, faces that held her eyes more than the landscapes: droll, exaggerated faces such as she had tried to draw when she was a little girl at school, faces with bulbous noses and bulging foreheads, faces half animal, half human, crafty faces with little fox eyes, great flabby faces like Aunt Maggie Slatten's.

Sometimes too she saw grow out of the clouds great monumental heads, aquiline-nosed and lofty-browed, full of dignity and repose, as solid and eternal looking as though they were of carved rock instead of drifting cloud vapors.

With a pencil and a piece of wrapping paper, she sometimes tried to catch and hold the fleeting faces that most stirred her fancy. She had a little pile of such drawings laid away in the bottom drawer of the dresser.

It grew too dark to sew. She threw aside the half finished dress and stood looking out of the window seeking peace and a something more than peace which she had learned to draw to herself out of the sunset. It had been a soft, springlike day in March with a mackerel sky undecided between rain and shine. Now the western sky was dappled with a gray and silver sunset, like the spread-out wool of old, weatherbeaten ewes backed by the shining fleece of lambs. She went out and stood on the rickety porch. The air was pungent with the smell of damp earth and springing grass. A silvery quiet, pensive but serene, spread from the sky through the soft air, and in the evening silence a returned robin twittered from the top of a tall hickory tree.

Far down the ridge Marsh Gibbs was bringing up Hiram Stone's sheep and lambs to house them in the tobacco barn for the night. The hundreds of woolly backs moving separately yet together made a soft, undulating carpet that grew grayer as the twilight shadows crept over it and at the edges merged imperceptibly with the earth. Mingled with the tremulous bleating of the sheep and the shriller ba-ha-ha of the lambs, the sheep bells tinkled faintly; and dominating all Marsh's long drawn "sheep-ee, sheep-ee," as he led the flock, was not a human-seeming sound, but weird and melancholy, like the cry of some creature born of the twilight. She could not see, but she knew, how trustingly the little lambs ran by their mothers. Soon they would all be at rest in the big barn, safe, warm, and quiet.