"Hog meat an' cakes is plenty good enough fer me," opined Jerry. "If you cook 'em they'll taste to me better'n biled puddin' and cabbage cooked by the Queen o' Sheba. Anyhow we'd otta be glad dad turned loose o' the hogbellies. Most folks eats corn-meal an' coffee three times a day this time o' year."
The strong salt pork and fried corn cakes, washed down by something that Peter Akers sold as coffee, a concoction at once rank and insipid, tasted delicious to their healthy young appetites. Laughs between the bites of corn cake, ecstatic giggles mingled with the salt pork and kisses that spilled the coffee from the cups, glorified their little meal into a feast royal. When it was over, Jerry went back to his plowing; and Judith, having washed up the dishes, put on her sunbonnet and jacket and walked over to see Lizzie May.
Lizzie May had been married to Dan Pooler for over a year. They lived about two miles away on the Dixie Pike in one of Uncle Ezra Pettit's tenant houses. It was a gaunt, two-story box standing bleakly on the top of a hill. Not a tree stood anywhere near and it looked as lonely as a water tank at a desert railway station. Its four weather-grayed sides were turned sullenly to the four winds.
Lizzie May was sitting by the stove sewing carpet rags. Her cotton dress was fastened at the throat with a little brooch of washed gold and imitation jewels, a present from Dan before their marriage; and she was wearing one of the fancy little frilled aprons that she loved to make. She was several months advanced in pregnancy and was not looking well. Her pale, small-featured face showed lines of endurance, and already a look of age was pinching the youthful curves.
"Why, Lizzie May, you don't look a bit pert. What's the matter?" inquired Judith, as she flung her hat and jacket into a chair and sat down opposite her sister. The younger girl's presence seemed to shed a warmth and radiance about the prim little room that enfolded and enhanced everything except her sister sitting coldly opposite her.
"Oh, I dunno. I s'pose it's my condition," answered Lizzie May languidly and a little importantly. "My stomach don't bother me no more; but my back feels weak most all the time and pains me a good deal some days." She launched into a detailed description of her symptoms which Judith, who had scarcely had a pain in her life, could not follow with much sympathy or understanding.
"You need to git out more, Lizzie May," she rallied, "and not hang in the house so much. I'd feel sick too if I stayed around this kitchen as much as you do. You don't hardly never go to dad's any more, an' I s'pose you won't come to see me naow I'm gone to housekeepin'. I'm sure I don't see what keeps you inside here all the time. You hain't got much to do. 'Tain't like as if you had milk to handle an' turkeys to chase."
"Mebbe you don't think I got much to do, but I do," answered Lizzie May, bridling. "You wait till you been a-keepin' haouse yo'se'f fer a spell. Agin I scrub this floor every second day an' polish the stove twict a week an' sweep an' dust an' wash an' iron an' bake bread an' cook the meals an' scour the black off the pans, I don't git much time to go a-gallivantin'."
"But you don't need to scrub the floor an' polish the stove so often. The way you keep 'em shined, anybody'd think you et off of 'em 'stead of off the table. You know what you make me think of, Lizzie May? You act jes like if a little tame rabbit would shet itself in its cage an' never came aout an' then spend all its time a-workin' hard to keep its cage clean."