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Ebook has 1760 lines and 114839 words, and 36 pages

the most endearing of pet names, always died. Beautiful, fuzzy, amber-colored caterpillars, treated in like manner, always died. The little girl, sitting meditatively chin on hand, wondered vaguely why all her efforts should be followed by such a curse of blight and disaster. One day she heard, coming nearer and nearer, the sound of sharp, shrill voices and harsh, staccato laughs which she recognized at once as those of boys. Peering through the tall weeds, she saw coming along the road the two Blackford boys, Jerry and Andy, who lived about half a mile farther along. They had with them a small, forlorn, white kitten, which, after the manner of boys, they were amusing themselves by torturing. Just as Judith looked, Andy gave its tail a sharp tweak; and the miserable little thing whined piteously and looked about in a feeble, watery-eyed fashion, for a way of escape. Then Jerry caught up the little creature by its limp tail and whirled it around and around in the air, shouting inarticulately, like the young savage that he was.

When Judith saw the hapless plight of the kitten, a spirit of uncontrollable horror and rage born of horror entered into her. The mother feeling, an instinct which rarely showed itself in her, would not let her see this little animal tortured. Her face blazed scarlet, her eyes flashed with a wild glitter, her long arms and legs grew strong and tense. She dropped her basket, leapt the picket fence and rushed upon the boys like an avenging Fury, her knife in her hand.

The "Oh's" that Lady Macbeth uttered as she walked in her sleep were not more full of tragic horror than were Judith's as she brandished her knife to right and left in a frenzy of tumultuous emotions. Her long black pigtails, tied at the ends with bits of red grocer's twine, bobbed wildly in the air. Barefooted and bareheaded and wearing a faded and torn blue calico dress, she was yet in spirit a very queen of tragedy as she lunged with her kitchen knife and called down imprecations upon the heads of Jerry and Andy.

Her fury daunted the boys. They had had differences of opinion with Judith before and they knew how she-devilish she could be when angry. They had had experience of her biting, scratching, kicking, and hair-pulling as well as of the hard blows of her strong little clenched fists. While dodging one of the lunges of the knife, Jerry let go of the cat; and Judith instantly snatched it up and stood at bay, the knife poised in one hand, the cat in the other.

"Naow then, one of you jes dass come near here an' I'll run this knife right in yer guts! See if I don't!"

Jerry and Andy showed some sense of the value of discretion. They made no step forward, but stood where they were and bandied compliments.

"You wait till we git ye comin' home from school, ye little slut!" threatened Andy.

"Guess I'll wait a spell, too," retorted Judith, sticking out a viperish red tongue. "I'm not a-skairt of you ner ten more like ye. I can lick any kid in yer family; an' my father can lick yer father, too."

"Oh, can he so?" mocked Jerry. "Mebbe he'd better come over an' try!"

"He don't need to. He wouldn't dirt his hands to touch yer greasy ole dad. But he could if he had a mind to."

"I know sumpin 'bout you! Ah ha, I know sumpin 'bout you!" caroled Jerry derisively.

Judith had begun to lose interest in the verbal encounter.

"Aw shet up yer dirty mouth!" she snapped disgustedly, as she crawled back into her own yard through a hole in the picket fence.

The boys went on down the road walking backward, their fingers to their noses, calling after her in diminishing chorus.

"Cowardly kids! Cowardly kids! Cowardly kids!" returned Judith scornfully, until the enemy voices could no longer be heard.

When she got back to the house she set down her basket by the kitchen door, carried the kitten into the kitchen and got it a saucer of milk. Its eyes were bleared and abject in expression, its sharp little bones almost stuck through its dingy white fur; and its discouraged little tail, tangled with burrs, drooped pitifully.

Judith examined the frail joints of its legs and was immensely relieved to find that none of them were broken. Their intactness seemed to her a miracle; for they were so thin and small and delicate that it seemed as though the slightest blow or pressure would crush them. She shuddered as she felt these fragile joints; and through her whole body there surged a great ocean of tenderness and pity for this defenseless little creature. She experienced a vague, but overwhelming sensation of its pitiful helplessness against all the great, cruel powers of nature, which seemed to be conspiring against it. A clumsy foot, a slamming door, the fall of a flatiron from her mother's ironing board: these and a thousand such could cruelly mangle its frail body and even crush out its tiny spark of life. With a blank, painful, discouraged ache in her heart, Judith wondered vaguely why the whole world should be so rough and cruel and hazardous a place for kittens and minnows and all small, unbefriended things. She did not know that she was precociously experiencing the feeling of many a young mother who, with the birth of her helpless firstborn, feels in one overwhelming rush all the tragedy of weakness in a world where the weak must acquire strength or perish.

The very ugliness of the little thing endeared it to her; for it was a pitiable ugliness, an ugliness born of hunger and ill-treatment. Tenderly she stroked its mangy little head and vowed that she would take care of it and stand between it and the cruel world all the days of its life.

In the morning as soon as she awoke her thoughts flew to the kitten. She scrambled into her clothes and ran out into the yard, glancing about the empty kitchen as she passed through. For a long time she searched in vain and was beginning to think that the kitten had wandered away when of a sudden down at the foot of the hill she stopped in amazement and horror. Here in the heavy clay land beside the creek was a little pool that she had hollowed out the day before and into which she had put four live minnows. The flowers that she had planted around it had all wilted and fallen over. Some were lying flat on the muddy ground, some trailing lifeless in the water. Their bright yellows and purples and pinks had all faded into a common drab. On the edge of the water sat the white kitten. And even as she gazed with horror-dilated eyes it fished up a live minnow with its paw and crunched it mercilessly between its small, strong jaws. In a dazed, half-hearted way Judith looked down into the water of the pond and saw that there was now nothing there--nothing alive--only the pebbles and mosses and half dead water plants.

Silently she turned and ran away, far, far away from the unspeakable kitten and the dead flowers and the empty pool and all the hideous horror of it.

From that day she never again felt the same poignancy of distress at the sight of suffering and death among animals. As she grew more intimately into the life of the woods and the fields and the barnyard she learned to take for granted certain laws of nature which at first had seemed distressingly harsh and cruel. She became resigned to the knowledge that the big fishes eat the little ones, that the chickens devour the grasshoppers, that Bounce, the gentle and affectionate, would kill rabbits and groundhogs whenever he could get hold of them: that in all the bird and animal and insect world the strong prey continually upon the weak. It was hard at first to see Minnie's whole litter of kittens but one dropped into a bucket of water and drowned and to watch her father lead off to the butcher the calf that for two months she had been feeding and petting. But these things happened so often, and the law of the survival of the fittest was so firmly established a part of the life of the farm that she soon learned to accept it with equanimity. She might have been slower in learning this lesson if she had been given to self-deception. But she could never lull her sensibilities with this so commonly used opiate. She insisted upon standing over the bucket in which the kittens were drowned and upon knowing exactly what was going to happen to the calf. Soon she discovered that however many little fishes were eaten there were always plenty more; that an endless number of birds and butterflies and grasshoppers sang and fluttered and jumped through the summer days regardless of the depredations of their enemies; that there were always more kittens and calves being born. Without putting the thought into words or even thinking it, but merely sensing it physically, she knew that in the life of nature death and suffering are merely incidentals; that the message that nature gives to her children is "Live, grow, be happy, and obey my promptings." The birds and chickens and grasshoppers all heard it and Judith knew they heard it. Judith heard it too. As she trotted to school in the clear, sun-vibrant air of the early morning, or brought up the cows through the sweet-smelling twilight, or picked blackberries on the edge of the sunny pasture, nature kept whispering these words in her ear. It is given to few civilized human beings to ever hear this message. Perhaps in that generation Bill Pippinger's girl was the only human being in the whole of Scott County who heard and heeded these words: "Live, grow, be happy, and obey my promptings."

For a number of reasons religion never became a part of Judith's life. The Pippingers were not a church-going family nor were many of their neighbors. The consolations of religion were sought more by the village people who had no morning and evening chores to do and were handy to the churches. A deep-seated, if rather vague respect remained, however, in the mental make-up of these country folk for the religion of their fathers. An ill-defined fear, a dim hope, and a few inhibitions remained of the once more vigorous religious life. Judith sensed these things as she grew into girlhood; but they could find no foothold in the healthy vigor of her spirit.

Once when she was ten years old, she went with the rest of the family to a camp revival meeting where the preaching evangelist described with lurid language and fear-compelling inflections the last judgment day and the tortures of an eternal damnation in a hell burning forever with fire and brimstone. The task of browbeating an ignorant audience was apparently one that the preacher enjoyed mightily; for he went at it with tremendous vigor and zest. At times his voice sank to an awe-inspiring whisper, then rose to a demoniac shriek as he sought to bully and terrify his hearers into a state of nerve collapse. Judith listened with eyes that showed more and more of the whites. The lurid pictures were printed instantly on the sensitive plate of her keen imagination. She took the preacher seriously, literally, which fortunately few in the audience appeared to do. She looked around at their stolid, peaceful faces and felt somewhat reassured. Perhaps it wasn't true after all.

On the way home she asked her father if what the preacher had said was true.

"Waal, I reckon it is an' it ain't," answered Bill, spitting over the side of the wagon. "Mebbe Uncle Ezra Pettit is a-goin' to the hot place. An' I kinder hope he is--not wishin' 'im no bad luck. An' Sam Whitmarsh'll like enough pull up there too. Lord knows he's done enough dirty tricks to deserve to fry good, an' on both sides. An' Uncle Ezry'll be mad whichever place he goes, 'cause he'll have to leave his money an' his land behind. But anyhow me ner mine hain't a-goin' to no hot place, ner nobody else that tends their own business. Git up, Bob! Lord love them mules, they're a-comin' to be slower'n the seven year itch."

Her father's unconcern greatly allayed Judith's apprehensions; but the picture drawn by the evangelist was too fresh and vivid to be forgotten at once. That night Judith dreamed that the end of the world had come. Portentous curtains of black, like a hundred thunder storms in one, hung from the sky. Stabbing the blackness came one sharp arrow of crimson light, glowing, intense, and awe-inspiring. Slowly and dreadfully the arrow lengthened, widened, gathered blinding light and burning heat. The judge of the world was coming in his majesty to sit upon the judgment seat. People rushed from their houses and tried to hide in haystacks, under piles of old lumber or in the rooted-out holes beneath hogpens. Judith herself, with a despairing realization that the worst had really happened and that the world would never again be peaceful and sunshiny, ran out into the dooryard. At that moment the air was split by a terrible blast from Gabriel's trumpet. The blast woke Judith and turned out to be only her father passing the window and blowing his nose onto the ground between his thumb and forefinger.

It was an immense relief to Judith to find that it was only a dream, that the sun still shone and the birds sang and her mother was frying corncakes for breakfast and Craw was chasing the big black hog out of the yard and everything was going to be the way it was before.

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."

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