While the cold spell lasted Judith kept keyed up, energetic and irascible. With the thaw she relaxed into an exhausted torpor. As she wearily heaved out the contents of the greasy slop bucket and washed up the floor under it she sighed and her eyelids fell together asking for sleep.
There were war prices for tobacco that year. They ran as high as forty cents a pound. But the summer had been a dry one and the tobacco was light and of poor quality. Much of it, too, had been nipped by an early frost. Jerry thought himself lucky to get a check for two hundred and thirty-six dollars. Out of this he had to pay forty-seven dollars for hired help.
Guss Dibble, whose wife had a new baby, traded his crop for a cow, and considered that he was doing well.
The winter was a constantly recurring round of thaws and cold spells. It lasted far into March. It seemed as if it would never end. At last the change came all of a sudden and it was summer again.
Coming suavely and benignly after the cruel winter, the warmth fell like a softly enfolding presence. Spring is a gracious season in Kentucky, full of the smell of flowering locusts, of birdsong, and happy mornings. With sunlight falling through open doors and windows, the children playing outside and the baby asleep in her cradle, the house that all winter had been a cluttered, stinking prison became by contrast quiet, spacious, and restful.
Stimulated by the change, Judith cleaned house, raked up the yard, and burned the winter accumulation of rubbish, set out her garden and even planted some seed of sweet peas and nasturtiums about the house. The caressing spring days filled her with a sense of calmness and passive wellbeing.
She never sang or romped any more. She could not rejoice and be glad with these things of nature. But out of her calm torpor she looked at them as through a thin mist and they sank upon her spirit like healing on a wound. She grew very fond of sitting on the doorstep.
It was that spring that the United States began to make preparations to send young men to Europe to fight for democracy.
A black wave of fear darkened the sunshine of Scott County when it became known that the United States had entered the war. Gus Dibble's vague apprehensions that the trouble might come their way had incredibly been realized. Out of the mouth of a fool the truth had come, and the impossible had happened. The war had crossed the ocean and was among them and was going to take them away from their homes. A few restless and physically fit young blades like Ziemer Whitmarsh and Bob Crupper found in the news the glorious promise of adventure. A few hailed it as a hope of deliverance from irksome conditions of life. But to most of these simple youths who had never been more than twenty miles away from their own dooryards it brought terror, stark and appalling: terror of the unknown into which they would be dragged from the security of their home cabins and tobacco patches, terror of death and of the unknown after death. In the tired bodies and shrinking minds of these underfed young men there was little to foster a thirst for adventure, still less any feeling of adherence to such a middle class luxury as patriotism. No newspapers nor shouting demagogues came to them with the lies that create and feed an artificial frenzy. For them there were neither crowds nor music nor public acclaim: no showy paraphernalia to hide the stinking carcass of war; only the naked certainty, faced and pondered upon in solitude, that inevitably that dreaded and all-powerful machine known as the law would reach out for them, take them out of their homes, away from the comfort of familiar faces, and place them they knew not where. Knowing nothing of the law and its processes, they feared and respected it beyond all other things. To them it was a god much more real and powerful than the still less known God of the Bible.