July laughed when he noticed her growth, and warned her to have a boy-child. No girl-child for him. He had a lot of projects to carry out when he got a little money ahead, and he would need a son to help him. Mary laughed back and promised, and happiness filled her heart.
Cinder had gone away to town on the river-boat, not very long after the wedding. A good thing. Not that July would ever look at Cinder again or at any other woman on earth but Mary.
The old roof was broken where some of the shingles had rotted, and every day the sun shone through the cracks and fell in bright streaks on the floor, reminding Mary that the roof ought to be mended before the cold winter rains would beat in. The old door sagged and the window-blinds creaked sadly on their hinges. Their time was out, and they ought to be replaced by strong new ones. But July was busy all the week, and when Saturday came he had to pleasure himself after five days of hard work. Sundays were rest days, and to mend a house then would be the unluckiest thing in the world. June offered to fix it, but Mary would not let him at first. She could wait. The old house would shelter them well enough until the days were longer and July’s work lighter.
By Christmas the tide of the year had ebbed very low. The earth lay silent. Buzzards floated aimlessly about in the high still air. Wild ducks filled the marshes with a confusion of quacking and splashing, but the songbirds hopped about sadly, hunting their food and the few notes they sang were low and cheerless. The winds gave the tides little peace but kept the water in the river and the rice-fields ruffled.
Sometimes great, booming, wet gusts came in from the sea, making the trees bend and bow their heads. Icy gales shrieked and howled as they went rushing by, chilling and blighting everything they touched. The willows that bordered the river were bare of leaves and the tall gums and cypresses that towered over everything else in the swamp were stark naked. Winter had come in dead earnest. Mary’s fattening pig was taken out of the pen and killed. June did it. July said the sight of so much blood made him sick, and the smell of the raw meat always killed his appetite for the good sausages and hams. June made quick work of it, then he mended the roof of the house so no drop of rain could beat through.
Mary was heavy, but many tasks to be done kept her days filled from morning until night. A woman who is about to bear a child has a strangely good hand for planting seed; something magic in her touch makes the seed sprout quickly and grow fast and mature in half the regular time. Everybody in the Quarters who planted a winter vegetable garden wanted Mary to drop the seed.
Medicines brewed by a woman at such a time have more strength to cure ailments, and her hearth was kept full of pots holding herbs and roots for remedies, the Quarter people kept always on hand. Even Daddy Cudjoe, the old conjure doctor, brought some of his root teas for her to stir.
July did some things that were hard to understand, but he made a good husband, for she never trusted any woman with him. Not one. The sweet-mouthed ones, the very ones whose mouths would not melt butter, were the very ones July liked best. Mary told him a lot he did not know. One thing was not to trust kind-talking, oily-worded women.
It wasn’t that she herself suspected July of wrongdoing, but it did vex her to think he would want to spend his money or break his night’s rest for the hussies that were always watching for a chance to get a hold on any man.
She begged him not to eat anywhere but at home. It would be so easy for some women to trick him or to cast a spell on him by giving him something to eat. She had always heard that the least little thing works with a man. Once Brer Dee’s wise old dog left home and followed July because July laid a strip of bacon inside the heel of his shoe, yet that dog had sense. Men are strange things. The best and the strongest are weak as water when a charm gets to working on them.
But July was satisfied to stay at home most nights and he seemed to care less about pleasuring himself. Thank God, he thought more of work than of women now.
VII
Christmas Eve was the gayest in years, for the crops had been good, the price of cotton high and money more plentiful than usual. All day the sky had been overcast, but at sunset a keen wind rose from the west and brought out the stars and swept the crisp brown leaves from the cotton stalks down the long straight rows of the field to mix with the leaves that were falling from the trees in the Quarters. Some of them skipped gaily about on pointed tips until they found quiet spots to rest, while others joined small whirling groups and kept going from place to place.
All the doors and windows on the north side of the Quarter houses were shut tight to keep out the cold, but every cabin was brightened by a great fire roaring up its chimney. At one end of the street where a great bonfire gleamed, crowds of little children dressed up in their Sunday clothes were playing, munching apples, sucking sticks of red and white peppermint candy, pulling roasted sweet potatoes out of the hot ashes and slyly slipping in firecrackers to
