It seemed that winter as if the spring would never come, as if there would never be an end to the arid routine of corn meal mush and coffee for breakfast, corn meal cakes and coffee for dinner, and coffee and corn meal cakes for supper. March dragged its weary length into what seemed more like a year than a month. February had been full of mild, springlike days, days of strengthening sun and greening grass that had cheered the hungry tenant farmers into hopes of an early spring. But March closed down grim and inexorable. Bitter winds blew all day under a cold, gray sky, a dead, frozen sky, all one blank, even tone of pale gray, dreary and disheartening. They dried up the tender grass that had been springing in sheltered places. They whirled the fine dust of dried clay about the barns and houses. They pierced like knife blades through worn-out underwear and sleazy cotton dresses and threadbare jackets and made the doing of barnyard chores a shrinking misery.
There were not many chores. Judith had only her cow to milk and care for and her hens to feed. Often, however, she had wood to chop; for Jerry was busy now with the spring plowing and was not so attentive to the woodpile as he had been during their first year together. When she had finished these chores, she fled back into the house as a woodchuck scuttled to the protection of his hole. The bitter, dust-laden wind seemed to suck the moisture from her skin and from her very bones. She felt as bleak, dry, desolate, and soulless as the landscape. Looking out of the little window at the bare garden patch where she had planted a few onion sets and some seed of lettuce and radishes, and which as yet showed no hint of green, she felt dismal, hungry, and hopeless.
During these last weeks of the winter, she grew daily paler and more listless. It was time for the baby to be born, and
[Pg 208]
 she was heavy with a great lethargy, as if the life within her, in its determination to persist, were slowly and steadily draining her, leaving her body nothing but a shell, a limp, nerveless, irritable, collapsing shell.
She understood now why snakes and woodchucks crawled into their holes in winter. She wished she had a hole to crawl into, a hole where there were no meals to cook, no fire to keep going, no fretful child to pacify—a nice, dark, quiet hole where nobody ever came and where she could curl up and be at peace.
Little Billy was a strong, stirring, loud-voiced, and self-willed child. Often when his clamorous demands became too much for her nerves, she would slap him savagely and force him to blubber into silence, gasping and choking and catching spasmodically at the heaving surges of breath that rose in him like tidal waves. He learned to be afraid of her in these moods and would sidle away and hide under the bed or behind the stove till the storm had passed, peering out at her with scared, watchful eyes, as a puppy watches the foot that has just kicked him. In such moments she hated them both, the born and the unborn, two little greedy vampires working on her incessantly, the one from without, the other from within, never giving her a moment's peace, bent upon drinking her last drop of blood, tearing out her last shrieking nerve.
Sometimes she would give way to one of these fits of irritation when Jerry was in the house; and he would rush to intervene and save the child.
"Why do you act so mean to the young un, Judy?" he would demand, his voice harsh with anger.
"Mebbe you'd act mean too if you was shet up with him all day long, like you was in a jail."
Her mouth set into hard lines, and her level brows contracted darkly.
When she said such things he always looked at her in a puzzled, hurt, and somewhat impatient way.
She no longer looked forward to Jerry's homecoming at night. When he came in from the day's plowing, tired but
[Pg 209]
 still ruddy and vigorous in spite of his diet of corn meal, she felt more dragged out and irritable than ever. Out of her own weakness and nervelessness she grew to hate his ability to relax, his aura of excess vitality, that strong, male vitality of which she was becoming the victim. After a day at the plow he could still whistle and sing, fling the baby to the ceiling or ride him on his back about the kitchen. His thoughtless, boyish good humor made her feel hard, bitter, and morose.
While he took his ease in the evenings, she went about the kitchen silently, fried the corn cakes, and made the coffee, washed the grime from the baby's hands and face, and fed his milk and corn cake. After they had eaten, she would wash the dishes and undress the baby and put him to bed. Then she would come back and sit by the little lamp darning socks or mending rompers or putting great, coarse patches on the knees of overalls.
Sometimes Jerry, looking at her under the light of the lamp and noting the tense, drawn look on her pale features, would fume within himself with impotent rage. He blamed it all on the lack of proper food. Things were in a hell of a mess, he told himself, when a man could work from sun-up to sundown and not be able to give his wife even the food she needed. He felt himself burning with a fierce anger against the order of things which prevented him from giving her anything she could ask for. He wanted to be the source of all good things for her and for her children; and here he was scarcely able to keep the breath in her body. It never for a moment occurred to him that she could ever want anything which he could not supply if he were only given a decent chance. Yes, he was placed in a nice hell of a hole, he told himself. But of course this was one year in a hundred. His corklike optimism reasserted itself. Everything would be all right as soon as the new crop came on.
In bed he would put his arm over her protectingly.
"Things'll be a heap better, Judy, soon's garden truck begins to grow."
And she would sigh lightly, glad of the comfort of the bed
[Pg 210]
 and his warm, muscular arm, and fall into a deep, exhausted sleep.
It was on one of these bleak, windswept March days that the second baby was born, a surprisingly fat and healthy little boy, whom they named Andrew after Jerry's father. His health and vigor, however, had been obtained at the expense of his mother. For days after his birth she lay half unconscious, scarcely moving a finger, hardly lifting an eyelash.
"The girl must have nourishment," said Dr. MacTaggert. "Milk."
So Jerry scurried around and found where he could get a half gallon of milk a day without immediate payment; and at once she began to revive. He slaughtered one of the precious hens; Luella, who had come to take charge, made chicken broth which Judith sipped while the rest of the family gorged ravenously on the meat. The neighbors came bringing out of their great scarcity little delicacies for which in many cases their own mouths were watering: a pot of peach jam or a little jar of apple butter or a few new laid eggs. Aunt Selina brought a block of honey in the comb; and Jabez came carrying the first young onions and the first tender leaves of lettuce which he had grown under a window sash in a sheltered spot against his kitchen wall. To Judith, now rapidly growing stronger, these bits of green tasted better than anything else. Such succulence and flavor in the young onions! She had known every spring what it was to be hungry for green things; but young onions had never tasted so delicious before.
After the first half conscious days of exhaustion, she began to enjoy her convalescence. The strained tension of the long winter months was gone and already almost forgotten, and it was good to stretch luxuriously in bed and give way to the weakness which ignores all cares and responsibilities. Aunt Mary had taken little Billy over to stay with her. Luella was full of quiet competence. The new baby slept most of the time, and the house was still and orderly. Sunk in the utter relaxation that follows upon childbirth, she felt at first that
[Pg 211]
 there could be nothing more delicious than to lie motionless on her back and look lazily through the window at the slope of hillside, listen to the song of the returning birds, the cheerful cackle of the hens, the barking of the dog, and the subdued sounds made by Luella as she moved about quietly and adequately in the kitchen.
Soon, however, she grew restless with returning vitality and was glad to sit propped up with pillows and mend little Billy's clothes or sew on a dress for the new baby.
Sometimes she would ask Luella to bring her a pencil and a piece of paper; and using a pine shingle for a drawing board, she would amuse herself by sketching faces, some human, some animal, some half and half, as she had used to do when she was a little girl at school. Luella, looking over her shoulder, was scandalized.
"Why do you draw sech ugly things, Judy? It's a shame, when you kin draw so good, you don't draw sumpin purty an' nice. I wisht you'd draw me a nice pitcher in colors fer to hang on my wall."
"All right. There's some in the cupboard drawer, that Jerry bought for Billy to mark with."
Luella brought more paper and a handful of colored crayons; and Judith, not much interested, but rather curious to see how it would turn out, drew a picture in colors: A little house, a bit of rail fence, an apple tree in blossom, a hill rising steeply behind. Then she took another sheet and drew a large bunch of pink roses. Luella was delighted with the pictures, especially the roses.
"My, haow kin you draw 'em so good, Judy! Naow that's what I call nice work. I'm a-goin' to put frames on 'em an' hang 'em in my room."
Luella carried away the pictures in triumph, and Judith went on drawing her heads.
In a few weeks there was an abundance of garden "sass." The season was as bountiful as the year before it had been stingy. It rained and the sun shone hotly and the seeds in Scott County's fertile clay soil stirred, reached up their heads
[Pg 212]
 to their God, like millions of little sunworshipers and covered the earth with green.
Weeds grew too, tender and succulent from abundant moisture and rapid growth. They were easy to get rid of if they were attacked in time. One stroke of the hoe killed hundreds of them. Lying on the moist, steaming earth in the fierce heat of the sun, they shriveled and dried up in a few hours. But if they were allowed to live, they grew with incredible rapidity into great, tough giants and overtopped the vegetables in no time.
Judith spent all the time that she could spare from the babies and the house working in her garden, chopping out the weeds while they were still young and tender, hilling up the potatoes, hoeing the rows of lusty beets and beans and turnips, training the pole beans to climb on their poles and tying up the tomato vines to stakes. She liked this work. She liked the feel of the hot sun on her back and shoulders, the smell of the damp, warm earth. Some magic healing qualities in sun and earth seemed to give her back health, vigor, and poise. When she had hoed in the garden for an hour or two, she felt tired from her exertions, for her strength had only partly returned after the b............