Читать книгу Weeds - Edith Summers Kelley - Страница 5

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But with the growth of this harmony with natural things, Judith developed a constantly growing tendency to clash with the life of the school and the home kitchen and the kitchens of the various relatives with whom the Pippingers visited. She was considered by her aunts and other female relatives "a wild, bad little limb," and her contempt for the decent and domestic scandalized them more and more as she grew older. Lena Moss could not for her life understand how it was that Judith had learned to read and write and figure better than almost any other child in the school; for she was anything but studious. In fact she never seemed to pay the slightest attention to her studies. She flatly refused even to try to learn Lena's long and carefully prepared list of all the counties and county towns in Kentucky; and the battles of the Revolutionary and Civil wars, with their accompanying dates, found no lodgment in her mind. Instead of applying herself to these, she munched apples, chewed slippery elm and sassafras, stared idly out of the window, bedeviled the child who sat in front of her, cut folded bits of paper into intricate designs or drew pictures on her slate, the desk, the seat, the floor, the back of the pinafore of the girl in front, any available space within her reach.

These pictures were the curse of Lena's existence. They were to be found everywhere: on the desks, the walls, the floor, the blackboard, the window casings. Outside they decorated the whitewashed wall of the school building, the tops of big flat stones, the fences, the trunks of trees where the bark had been stripped away, every place where a piece of chalk or a bit of black crayon could function.

The pictures, invariably of human beings or animals, were usually comic, satirical or derisive. That they showed great vigor and clarity of vision would have meant nothing to Lena even if she had known it. They were, in her phraseology, "not nice!" They were frequently disrespectful. The morning after the visit of the county superintendent, a large picture in white chalk was found on the blackboard wickedly caricaturing the features of that august personage. The picture was done in profile and exaggerated irreverently the large, bulbous nose, the receding forehead, and the many chins reaching around to a fleshy, pendulous ear. Poor Lena was hard put to it to find a way to control this unruly member of her school. Having much less force of character than her pupil, the advantage of years and vested authority availed her little.

When asked why she had done thus and so, Judith's almost invariable reply was: "Cuz I had to."

"Judy, why hain't you a better gal at school?" Bill asked one morning, trying to look sternly at his favorite daughter across the mush and milk. "Lizzie May says the teacher has a heap o' grief with you. Why don't you mind the teacher, Judy?"

"I do mind her, dad—all I can," Judith returned without looking up. She had the syrup pitcher in her hand and was absorbed in pouring sorghum onto her plate in a very thin stream. Presently she set the pitcher down and handed the plate across the table to her father.

"There, dad, ain't that a good mule? I drawed 'im with the blackstrap. Lizzie May couldn't draw a mule like that."

"Ner I don't want to neither," put in Lizzie May disdainfully. "You otta see, dad, sech pitchers as she draws all raound the school, an' makes fun of everybody: the teacher an' the sup'rintendent an' her own relations an' all. She'd otta think shame to herse'f!"

Bill was proud of his girl's ability to draw, but felt it his duty to discourage her choice of subjects, seeing that the same seemed to be so universally condemned.

"What makes you draw them kind o' pitchers, Judy?" he asked.

"Cuz I want to," replied Judith a little sullenly. "I see things; an' when I see 'em I want to draw 'em."

"O law, she don't see no sech things, dad! Haow kin she? Nobody else sees 'em!" exclaimed Lizzie May, outraged. "Why, the idea of her sayin' she sees sech things!"

"Aw, shet up, Liz, an' tend yer own business!" snapped Judith, flushing red with sudden anger. "Jest cuz you don't see nuthin don't mean nobody else does."

She pushed her chair back from the table and began to gather together her school books, slamming them on top of each other with angry energy. Bill said no more; he was not a disciplinarian.

"It's your turn to wash the dishes, Judy," reminded Luella, who was busy helping her mother put up the midday lunch. "Lizzie May washed 'em yestiddy an' I did 'en day before."

"Why don't Craw have to take his turn washin' dishes?" inquired Judith, who was still nettled from the recent argument.

"Craw's a boy. Boys don't wash dishes," adjudged Luella in a tone of dead finality.

"I don't see why he hadn't otta," continued Judith, as she slapped the plates together. "Far's I c'n see he ain't no good fer nuthin else."

The subject of this conversation, engaged in his favorite occupation of doing nothing in a rocking chair by the stove, looked at his sisters with a mild, impartial eye and said nothing. He was safe and aloof in his masculinity.

"Land, hain't that a nice pattern this platter is burned into, Elly!" exclaimed Judith, examining a small platter which she had just picked up from the table. "Look here at all the nice squares an' di'monds—an' all jes as even!"

"I don't see nothing nice about it," said Luella with a half glance at the platter. "It's burned so's it won't never come white agin. It was you done that, Judy, puttin' it in the oven with them slices o' hog meat on it an' fergittin it till the grease was all burnt into smoke. An' sech a stink as it made when mammy opened the oven door! A person could hardly git their breath."

"Well, I like it anyway," said Judith cheerfully. "It's a good thing somebody likes these old, cracked-over plates, cuz most all of 'em is cracked over. I have lots o' fun lookin' at 'em an' seein' all the diff'rent patterns they git burnt into."

"Yes, an' that's why it takes you so long to wash up the dishes. If you don't hurry you're a-goin' to be tardy for school. The rest of us is a-fixin' to start naow, an' you'll have to run to ketch up."

"I ain't a-goin' to ketch up if I don't want to," returned Judith. "An' if I'm tardy, you hain't got no call to be a-frettin' yo'se'f."

This sort of bickering between Judith and her sisters went on daily in the Pippinger home and increased as the children grew older. Luella and Lizzie May, good, right-minded, docile little girls, looked down upon Judith from the height of two whole years of seniority and felt it their duty to try to make her as good, right-minded and docile as themselves.

There was a half-story attic above the three ground rooms occupied by the Pippingers, and this attic was the girls' bedroom. Here the three slept together in a big wooden bed made all of twisted spirals. The bed had a straw tick and in winter many thicknesses of patchwork quilts. In summer one quilt was enough and often too much; for the windows were small and the roof low; and on hot, breathless nights no air seemed to enter. In summer the bedbugs came out of the walls and Aunt Annie Pippinger saturated the bed once a month or so with kerosene and corrosive sublimate, the odor of which lingered for many days after the application. Between the windows stood an old cherry chest of drawers which had once been a handsome piece of furniture, but was now much scratched and scarred by hard usage. Each girl had one of the three drawers, and here they kept their clothes and treasures.

Luella and Lizzie May had each a pincushion of silk patchwork in the then popular "crazy" style, and fatly stuffed with bran. Luella had a box the lid of which was encrusted with small shells surrounding a red velvet pincushion shaped like a heart. In this box she kept carefully folded bits of silk, velvet and lace; locks of hair cut from the heads of all her relatives, wrapped in tissue paper and labeled with the name of the grower, glass beads, fancy buttons, Christmas cards, pressed flowers, small empty scent bottles and the like. Lizzie May had a similar accumulation but hers was housed in a box with a colored picture on the lid. This picture showed a young lady dressed in a very low-necked pink satin evening gown and a white fur muff and scarf, adjusting a pair of skates on pink satin slippers in the midst of a snowy winter landscape powdered with frosting to make it more realistic. Lizzie May liked this picture very much. She often took out the box just to gaze at the lovely pink satin evening gown, the delicate hands and the pink satin slippers.

Poor Judy had no such treasure box. She often looked at her sisters' collections with envious eyes and wished for as much as two minutes together that she too had some nice things. Somehow she had never been able to collect things. Her drawer contained nothing but her little old frocks and underwear and holey stockings thrown together in a tousled heap, and perhaps a few pine cones and clam shells and odd pebbles that she had picked up from time to time.

There were several colored pictures on the walls, mostly calendars of previous years, much fly-specked and yellowed on the edges. One of these, an advertisement for some kind of corset, represented the upper two thirds of a young woman with bright pink cheeks and golden hair, attired in a chemise and a straight-front corset and holding an Easter lily in her hand. On one side of the chest of drawers was an old, much faded chromo showing a child with a tremendously large head, dressed in skin-tight red satin breeches and pale blue coat with lace ruffles in front looking at a kitten which was playing with a pink ball on the floor. This picture was enclosed in a frame the ends of which stuck out beyond the picture, forming little crosspieces at each corner. On the floor were several pieces of frayed rag carpet and before the bed an oval braided rag mat.

Luella and Lizzie May spent a good deal of their time in this sanctum, "redding up," looking over their treasures, exchanging confidences and sewing patch-work blocks. But Judith hardly ever went into the room except to go to bed. She liked her father's company and her father's occupations better than those of her sisters. She stood at his side and watched him as he nailed the bright new shoes with the bright new horseshoe nails onto the hoofs of Tom and Bob. When he said, "Whoa!" she said "Whoa!" with a faithful echo of his tone and inflection. She loved to hear the cheerful strokes of the hammer and watch the sparks fly from the piece of old railroad iron which Bill used as an anvil. When he stretched a piece of wire fence she was there to hand him the wire stretchers, the pliers, the hammer, the staples. And whenever he mended spots in the old rail fence she caused Bill much inconvenience by insisting on lifting one end of each rail. She liked to watch and help him when he had a job of carpentry to do, a bench to make, or a shelf or some new chicken coops for the spring broods. She ran and fetched the hammer, the nails, the brace, and bit. She held the ends of boards while he nailed them, dragged up more boards; and all the time she watched eagerly. As he worked Bill chewed tobacco and whistled and now and then broke out into a rather tuneless attempt at a song: