The yard was littered with rags, broken boards and old iron; and scraps of baling wire tripped the unwary foot.
She threw the old iron and baling wire into a pile behind the backhouse, and raked up the rest of the rubbish into several heaps of which she made bonfires to the delight and excitement of Billy, who hovered perilously near to the licking flames.
When it was all done there were still left many traces of the former occupants. In the packed dirt of the yard, old floor rags that had been trodden into the ground were continually coming to light. When she took hold of them to pull them out a rotted fragment came away in her hand and the rest clung obstinately to the dirt in which it was embedded. Billy, too, was continually crawling under the house and triumphantly dragging out filthy scraps of overalls, old shoes, stiff, and moldy, frayed fragments of straw hats, ghastly skeletons of corsets, eaten with mildew and rust, but preserving faithfully the shape of the female form that they had once embraced, old, rust-eaten shovels, broken rat traps, and the frowsy stubbs of ancient brooms.
These things she poked into the stove when Billy was not looking or relegated to the old iron scrap pile behind the backhouse. But the child was always bringing out more. It was an enticing mine of treasures.
As in almost all the other tenant houses, the windows were few and small, set high in the wall and placed without the slightest regard for comfort, convenience or symmetry. From the outside the house looked like a weathered packing case into which some one had sawed at random two or three small holes.
In spite of the dark rooms and the bare surroundings, Judith liked it better than the little house in the hollow. It was open to the wind and sky. From the tiny windows she could see far off. In the morning the first ray of sunlight brightened the top of the ridge; and at the end of day the sunset filled the house like a presence.
All that summer, with the unwelcome baby growing in her body, she was tart and irascible and closed herself up morosely from Jerry and his affairs. She showed no interest in his work in the field. She never asked him about his corn and tobacco or made any offer to help him. When he came in with a story of a broken plowshare, strayed cattle that had got into his corn, fences that the sheep had broken down, she showed no interest nor sympathy. In the chill of her indifference he too grew sullen and irritable.