She was wild and hysterical in her grief. Her face swollen and distorted with weeping, she flung herself upon one or another of her sisters, aunts, and cousins, sobbing out to them again and again her anguish and desolation.
"Oh, Judy, Judy, what's a-goin' to become o' these poor little young uns 'ithout no daddy? He was allus that sorry fer little orphans. He never thought how soon his own'd be orphans. Oh, oh, oh!"
"He was too good," she kept saying in her calmer moments. "That's why he was taken away. He was too good."
She had never entertained nor voiced such a sentiment during his life. But now she said it and believed it too.
In a far corner of the kitchen Aunt Nannie Pooler sat and mourned softly for her dead boy.
"He was too good," sobbed Lizzie May, burying her face on Aunt Selina's bosom. "Oh, Aunt Selina, he was too good."
Tears streamed down the old woman's leathery cheeks. She had seen many die, but yet death was not an old story. She could still weep as in the days of her youth.
With each new arrival who came to offer her tribute of sympathy to the widowed girl, she went over it all again with convulsive sobs and fresh bursts of weeping.
"It's better she talks," whispered Aunt Mary Blackford to her neighbor. "Some jes sits an' thinks. An' them's the ones that feels it most."
Some of the women busied themselves doing Lizzie May's work for her. They sent one of the men to milk the cow; and when the milk was brought in strained it and put it away. They washed and dressed and fed the children, wiped the stove clean and swept the floor. They made coffee and offered a cupful to Lizzie May, telling her that it would do her good. She tried to drink it, but her throat refused to swallow.
She could not keep still a moment. When she was not pouring out her grief to some newcomer she wandered restlessly here and there about the kitchen. Everything she saw reminded her of Dan and brought forth new bursts of anguish.
"There's his work cap. Oh, Luelly, he hung it on that nail. An' naow he won't never take it off agin."
"Oh, Aunt Abigail, it was Dan put up them shelves. He made that there little table. He used to whistle so happy when he was a-fixin' things araound the house. Oh, I can't think he won't never whistle agin."