“That’s my daughter-in-law, the boy’s mother,” said Mrs. Simplicissimus.
I judged the second figure to be a woman of about twenty-eight. She carried a fence-rail on her shoulder. She was straight as an Indian. The old woman said: “That’s my daughter. She was going to marry John Kenton.” The only influences that could have induced a mountain-woman to unburden so much, were the roses, just outside the door, leaping in the wind.
The procession soon reached us. The wood-carrier threw the log into the yard. “There’s firewood,” she sang. She vaulted over the fence, displaying iron-heeled brogans, thick red stockings, and a red-lined skirt. There was a smear of earth on cheek and chin. Her face was a sunburned, dust-mired roseleaf. She swept off her hat. She bowed ironically. She said: “Howdy. What might be your name?”
I did not tell my name.
She fell on her knees. She drank from her hands at the spring. I could feel the cold water warring with the sunshine in her sinews. She would never have done with splashing eyelids and ears, and cheeks and red arms and throat. The rosebushes behind her leaped in the wind. The boy and his mother and the grandmother knelt at that same place and splashed after that same manner. Then the grandmother nudged me.
“Wash,” she said.
I washed.
We climbed into that dove-cote block-house on stilts. We ate like four plough-horses and a colt. We consumed corn-bread and fat pork, then corn-bread and beans, then corn-bread and butter. I ate supper, breakfast, and dinner in three quarters of an hour.
III
A Brief Siesta
Working a farm of fields that stand on edge, without men to help, and without much machinery, makes women into warriors or kills them. The grandmother and mother were no longer women. Even when they caressed the boy their faces were furrowed with invincible will-power. But Lady Iron-Heels still a woman, was confused in the alternative of manhood or death. She was indeed a flower not yet torn to pieces by the wind, greatly shaken, and therefore blooming the faster.