Chickens -- Fiction; Farms -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States -- Fiction
"Yes," I answered as I drew his head down and pressed it to my breast,
hoping that he might hear the chant on my heartstrings. I think he did
hear.
"I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Come!"
he made response, as he slipped from my arms and away into the darkness,
leaving me alone with only the mother now for company. She licked my arm
with a warm, rough tongue, and I came back into my own body and led her to
the barn and supper.
There are two kinds of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's
heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about
all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the
other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her
circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had
both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made him and Matthew
and father completely unhappy, lost ten pounds, and was sent to a rest-cure
for temper. The next morning after Adam gave me the cow and calf and
passionate embraces out in the orchard I began to work like six women, and
what I did to Elmnest not ten women could have accomplished in as many
days.
I weeded the whole garden and I picked three bushels of our first peas,
tied up sixty bunches of very young beets with long, tough orchard grass,
treated fifty bunches of slender onions the same way, half a dozen of each
to the bunch, and helped Bud Corn-tassel load a two-horse wagon with them
and everything eatable he could get out of Aunt Mary's garden. Then I got
up at two o'clock in the night and fed the mules so Bud could start at
half-past two in order to be in the market at Hayesville long before the
break of day, so as to sell the truck at the very top of the market to the
earliest greengrocers. I gave Bud coffee and bread and butter and drove the
team down to the gate while he went ahead to open it. I stood up while I
drove, too, because Bud had not had room to put a seat in for himself and
expected to stand up all the way to town. Talk about Mordkin and Pavlova!
To stand up and drive a team hitched to a jolt-wagon over boulders and
roots requires leg muscles! I hope I will be able to restrain myself from
driving the team into market some day, but I am not sure I can. With the
eggs and the "truck" Bud brought back sixteen dollars, eleven of which were
mine. I bought a peck of green peas for myself from myself and ate most of
them for dinner by way of blowing in some of the money. Then the chant on
my heartstrings speeded me up to white-washing all the chicken
paraphernalia on the place, and I dropped corn behind Rufus' plow for a
whole day, even if it was to produce food for the swine. I went to bed at
night literally on time with the chickens. I could only stay awake to kneel
and reach out the arms of prayer and enfold Pan to my heart for a very few
seconds before I vaulted into the four-poster and tumbled into the depths
of sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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