Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

So Judith stayed at home and looked after the house and the chickens and the vegetable garden and tended the baby, while Jerry did the field work in the corn and tobacco. When there was a rush of work he hired Elmer or his own brother Andy.

The baby claimed most of Judith's attention. It was astonishing that so small a creature should make such heavy demands. Nursing him, bathing him, washing for him, rocking him when he cried, remaking his cradle, changing his diapers, taking him up and laying him down, washing for him again, changing his diapers again, rocking him again, nursing him again, putting him back in the cradle again occupied her days and part of her nights in a round of small activities which, after the novelty wore off, began to fret her like the tug of innumerable small restraining bands.

It was not that she took less interest in the baby. Instead he became each day more engrossing. In her scarcely outgrown childhood she had never cared much for playing with dolls; but this live doll that laughed and cried and gripped her fingers with its tiny hands and looked so ridiculously like Jerry was the most fascinating of playthings. The fascination, however, did not extend to his diapers, his clothes always accumulating in the washtub, his insistent demands night and day for her continual presence at his side and for all sorts of constantly recurring small attentions.

But dislike her bondage as she might, she was his slave. Miraculously this little newcomer who a few short weeks ago had been nothing to her but a burden of the flesh, now occupied with undisputed assurance the position of the most important thing in her life. Everything was for the baby. His health and comfort were the only things that really mattered. All the activities of her life centered about him. He was her first thought in the morning and her last care at night. When she came back into the house after working in the garden or feeding the hogs and chickens her first step was toward the cradle. He was always in her thoughts. She could not let her mind dwell upon the desolate vacancy that would be left if he should be snatched away from her. And yet she became daily more irritated and harassed by the constant small cares that his presence demanded of her.

Sometimes, to break the monotony and loneliness, she would take the baby on one arm and walk across fields by the short cut to Lizzie May's or down into the hollow to Hat's or up along the pike to her father's. There she would visit for a while, returning in time to do up the evening chores and get Jerry's supper. She often walked many miles in this way, carrying the baby on her hip.

On Sundays Jerry would hook up and all three of them would drive off to spend the day at her father's or at his father's or at the home of one or other of their many relatives. Judith looked forward to these Sundays. She who had always despised visiting was now glad to escape from the tedium and monotony of home into the comparatively refreshing atmosphere of other people's kitchens and dooryards. There she would sit and string beans or peel apples and talk with the women of the house about chickens and babies and the sicknesses and deaths and scandals of the neighborhood, clutching eagerly at these tattered scraps of other people's lives, as they fluttered past her in the idle and haphazard talk.

Soon, however, it was no longer possible to go visiting every Sunday. The summer passed; and the early fall, warm and calm and caressing, the full blown flower of the year, faded quickly into late fall with its cold, driving rain, keen winds, and sodden depths of mud. After Thanksgiving there were very few days when the weather was such that she could take the baby out.

So she stayed in the house with him long gray day after long gray day and plodded through the dismal daily round of dish-washing, clothes-washing, cooking, sweeping, nursing, and diaper changing. Each day was exactly like the one before it. Each day the demands of the baby and the rest of the household were precisely the same. Even the cooking allowed of no variation; for now that winter was come, there were just four things in the pantry: coffee, corn meal, dried beans, and hog meat, with perhaps an occasional cabbage or squash that by some miracle had escaped the frost. From as far back as she could remember she had been accustomed to this winter scarcity and had never minded it much before. Now she found herself continually longing for something new, something different to eat, not so much from starvation of body as of spirit.

Through the winter months the sun rarely shone and for days together the rain dripped dismally down the window panes and filled the dreary little house with its monotonous murmur. From the window she could see nothing but twinkling tawny puddles, slick, tawny mud, the outbuildings gaunt and black in the rain and above and beyond them the unchanging lines of the hills.