Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

The whole day was spent in this way. The men loafed in the barnyard; the children played or hung in semi-boredom about their elders; the women cooked and washed dishes in the house. And when these tasks were done and the kitchen floor swept, they sat down stiffly on straight-backed chairs, smoothed their aprons and talked about the price of calico, the raising of chickens, the recent sudden death of Uncle James Cruikshanks, the stroke that Aunt Jenny Boone had had last week, and other such topics.

The only break in what would seem to an outsider an interminable stretch of tedium was the dinner. This usually consisted of salt hog meat, fried or boiled, potatoes and some other vegetable, followed by a heavy-crusted apple pie or a soggy boiled pudding. If it were summer or autumn there would likely be a big platter of "roastin' ears," sliced ripe tomatoes, or sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar. Everybody ate plentifully and silently, and as soon as the meal was over the men slouched back to the barnyard.

When the sun began to slant low in the western sky, Bill would at last bring the wagon around. Aunt Annie Pippinger would put on her sunbonnet and jacket, and the children, seeing the mules hitched up, would straggle up one by one from their play. There would be a long family gathering about the wagon before the visitors drove off; for nothing having to do with social intercourse is ever done in a hurry in rural Kentucky. They had had all day to talk to each other, and they had repeated the same things many, many times over. It was getting late, too, and there was a long drive ahead of them and all the chores were waiting to be done. But still there could be no hurried leave-taking; there was no precedent for such a thing. So they all stood about the wagon and exchanged some more prophecies about the weather and some more comments on Aunt Jenny Boone's stroke and Uncle James Cruikshank's sudden death. And then there would be a long silence. And at last, in the midst of the silence, Bill would gather up the lines. Then, having allowed a decent interval to elapse, he would give the lines a gentle shake and clear his throat.

"Waal, I guess we'd better be a-hittin' the high places. It'll be dark agin we git home an' the chores'll be to do by lantern light. Is all them young uns in there back, or are we a-leavin' some of 'em behind? Waal, anyway a couple or three more ner less don't make no p'tic'ler odds. Come over all."

"You come agin," the visitees would chant in chorus; and followed by this never failing invitation to return the Pippinger coach and pair would trundle out of the barnyard.

The remaining important factor in the life of the Pippinger children was school. Bill himself like many of his neighbors could neither read nor write, and hence was very firmly convinced of the benefits to be derived from an education and determined that his children should have the best that was to be had. Nothing, therefore, except bad weather, was allowed to interfere with their regular attendance at school. The school was two miles from the Pippinger farm. It was a small, whitewashed, oblong box standing close to the road in the midst of a circle of bare, beaten ground. A grove of stately maples and beeches, fringing the bare spot, made a fine place for "Hide and Seek."

Inside a small pine kitchen table formed the teacher's desk, which stood on a slightly raised platform. There were the usual jackknife-carved double wooden benches and the inevitable lithographs of Washington and Lincoln. Some admirer had contributed a large, impressive print of Roosevelt, which had been given the place of honor immediately over the teacher's desk. A large map of the United States, printed many years previously and much yellowed by age, hung between the windows on one side. These, with the blackboard, were the only mural decorations.

Here Lena Moss, an anemic little girl of eighteen, still a child herself in mind and body, who had been educated for a year and a half at the Georgetown High School, did what she could to drill the three R's into the somewhat blockish heads of about twenty children ranging in years from five to the still tender age of the teacher herself.

Fortunately Lena did not have much trouble with discipline. Her pupils were not, like little city hoodlums, vulgar and boisterous with the life of the streets. Nor were they like the children in smaller towns, who are quite as vulgar and boisterous and are held less in control because their school "system" is perforce less ironly rigid than that in the big cities. Lena's pupils were mostly inbred and undernourished children, brought up from infancy on skim milk, sowbelly, and cornmeal cakes, and living on lonely farms where they had no chance to develop infantile mob spirit. They were pallid, long-faced, adenoidal little creatures, who were too tired after the long walk to school to give the teacher much trouble. The slang, rag, and jazz, which standardize vulgarity in the towns and cities, penetrated to this out-of-the-way corner only as faint, scarcely-heard echoes. The phonograph and the colored "funny sheet" were unknown. Hence, Lena, though she did not know it, had much to be thankful for. The loud munching of apples, the shuffling of feet, the occasional throwing of spit-balls, or exchanging of scribbled notes were the main breaches of a discipline which was never at any time at all rigid. There was one pupil, however, who often gave the teacher a good deal of trouble; and that, strange to say, was a girl. She was Bill Pippinger's youngest daughter, Judith.

Judith was a lithe, active, slim little creature, monkey-like in the agility with which she could climb trees and shin up poles and vault over fences. Her bare, brown toes took hold like fingers. There was something wild and evasive about her swift, sinuous little body, alive with quick, unexpected movements, like those of a young animal. She was like a naughty little goblin that springs up mockingly in your path and before you can reach for it has run up a tree or vanished into the thicket. These characteristics of her body were somewhat contradicted by her face, vivid and bold in color and outline and habitually serious. Her eyebrows were black and straight and rather too heavy; and beneath them her gray eyes were dark, clear, and steady. She had a way of seeming to look through and through you when she fixed you with even a passing glance. These qualities of elusiveness and boldness seemed bafflingly interwoven in her character and made her a hard pupil to deal with. Lena never knew what to expect from her.