Through the hubbub of this sordid bacchanalia the young couple drove in cold and sullen aloofness and passed out into the heavy silence of the country.
Jerry had a fine bed of tobacco plants that year and together he and Judith set out four acres. Now that the baby was weaned, Judith could leave him with Luella or Aunt Mary while she worked in the field. Her help was badly needed this year, for Jerry had no money left to pay a hired hand. She was glad to do this, for even setting tobacco was a change from the dreary sameness of the household. At a cost of oozing rivers of sweat, of untellable weariness, stiffness, lame backs, and aching necks and hands worn almost to bleeding, the four acres were set at last and they sighed with relief.
"Naow if there on'y comes a good rain," said Jerry, "they'll git a start."
But the good rain did not come. Day after day the sky was cloudless, the flame of the sun clear and hot. Day after day the hard clay hillsides baked harder and the tobacco plants shrank into themselves, turned from green to gray, from gray to brown, shriveled and dried up and blew away in dust.
"Gawd, hain't it discouragin'!" Jerry would say, looking darkly at the clear, blue expanse of sky.
At last it rained. It rained all day and all night; and the next day the "season" was on.
With the infinite patience of those who have to humor the caprices of nature in order to wrest a living from the earth, they went over the whole four acres once more. Jerry had kept his tobacco bed well watered and there were plenty of plants.
"Bejasus, if Luke had stole 'em this time," he said to Judith, "I'd a gone daown there an' bust his jaw fer him. On'y reason he didn't steal 'em, he made his bed clost by a spring this year an' he's got lots of his own."
More than two thirds of the plants were dead and had to be replaced.
"They're a bit late," commented Jerry, "but if the season's any good, they'll grow into good terbaccer yet. It don't take terbaccer long to make itsse'f."
It rained several times through June and the plants began to spread out green and lusty. Then with July the weather turned dry again and intensely hot. The clay hillsides baked harder than ever, so hard that the clods were more like stones than lumps of dried earth. Jerry, in an attempt to save his crop by making cultivation take the place of rain, went through his corn and tobacco again and again with the cultivator, then followed the rows of tobacco with his great sharp hoe, loosening up the ground around each plant. Judith tried to help him at this task but had to give it up. The ground was too flinty, the hoe too heavy; and the sickness of pregnancy which was coming upon her for the second time made her arms weak and nerveless.