But when the door had closed behind her visitor the smile vanished and a look of empty weariness settled upon her face. It seemed as though Aunt Maggie still sat in the room and with her all the other stuffy old women of the neighborhood. Their prying eyes leered at her out of the gloomy corners. From their presence issued a stifling and oppressive aura.
When Jerry came in he found her sitting slackly in the old rocking chair, her long hands hanging limp like dead things.
After the baby's birth the routine of life in the little house in the hollow fell along quite different lines. Judith no longer went with Jerry to the field to hoe or top tobacco. The baby could not be left alone in the house. Judith sometimes wished to leave him for an hour or two so that she could give Jerry a little help when work was pressing. But he would not hear of it.
"S'pose he took a fit while you was gone, Judy. Or s'pose a rat should come."
"But he don't never have fits. An' we hain't got rats this summer. They're all over to Hat's place since that big yaller cat come here."
"But sumpin might happen to him, Judy. You can't never tell. I'll make shift to git along. If anything happened to him we wouldn't never be able to forgive ourselves. Besides you got plenty nuf to do, now you got him to take care on."
So Judith stayed at home and looked after the house and the chickens and the vegetable garden and tended the baby, while Jerry did the field work in the corn and tobacco. When there was a rush of work he hired Elmer or his own brother Andy.
The baby claimed most of Judith's attention. It was astonishing that so small a creature should make such heavy demands. Nursing him, bathing him, washing for him, rocking him when he cried, remaking his cradle, changing his diapers, taking him up and laying him down, washing for him again, changing his diapers again, rocking him again, nursing him again, putting him back in the cradle again occupied her days and part of her nights in a round of small activities which, after the novelty wore off, began to fret her like the tug of innumerable small restraining bands.
It was not that she took less interest in the baby. Instead he became each day more engrossing. In her scarcely outgrown childhood she had never cared much for playing with dolls; but this live doll that laughed and cried and gripped her fingers with its tiny hands and looked so ridiculously like Jerry was the most fascinating of playthings. The fascination, however, did not extend to his diapers, his clothes always accumulating in the washtub, his insistent demands night and day for her continual presence at his side and for all sorts of constantly recurring small attentions.