Two days later, when they got home from Dan's funeral, she thought on going into the kitchen that it smelled stale. Jerry was outside putting up the horses. She set the baby in the rocking chair and started to make a fire. A puff of acrid wood smoke blowing into her nose seemed all at once to have an intensely disgusting smell. She gripped the corner of the table to steady herself and her features contracted into an expression of mingled rage and horror. She knew that she was with child again.
Wednesday of the following week was hog-killing day for Jerry. Joe Barnaby came over to help him butcher. From the kitchen window Judith could see the men going about getting things in readiness, putting up three sets of crossed poles from which to hang the carcasses, arranging a scraping table, setting up the scalding barrel at a convenient angle and building a fire under a large, flaring iron kettle. It was a gray, frosty morning and they had their caps pulled down over their ears. Their breath came in white puffs.
Inside she had a roaring fire and the wash boiler on the stove to make more scalding water; for the hog-killing kettle that they had borrowed was not a very large one.
"There hain't no day I like better'n hog-killin' day," said Joe, warming his hands over the fire while they waited for the water to heat. "Some folks hates to see butcherin' day come. But I say to dress a hawg clean an' neat is as nice a job as there is a-goin'; an' it's a job a man kin put some heart into, 'cause he knows he hain't throwin' his work away. More'n that, he's got company by his side, an' that means a hull lot."
Joe's long, melancholy face showed its nearest approach to satisfaction, as he went out with Jerry, who had the sharpened butcher knife in his hand.
Judith stood over the wash tub rubbing out children's
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 clothes. The baby crawled about on an old quilt spread on the floor. Billy, as was his three-year-old habit, had been spending his time getting from one mess of mischief into another. His latest adventure had been to fall backward into the slop bucket, from which he emerged with deafening screams. She had had to take off all his clothes from the shirt out and put on clean ones. The dirty clothes had gone to join the others in the tub. The heat and stale smells of the kitchen made her feel faint and sick. Her head swam dizzily. She wished she could go into the bedroom and lie down.
She heard the shrill squealing of the pig as its throat was cut, and, a little later saw Joe and Jerry carrying it to the scalding barrel. Billy in his red cap bobbed excitedly behind. Snap and Joe Barnaby's dog careened alongside, Snap with loud barks of joyous excitement, the strange dog silent and respectful as befitted a dog not on his own ground. Then men came hurrying in for the boiler of hot water.
"Fill her up agin, Judy—not full, jes half," Jerry called back, as he hurried away after bringing back the empty wash boiler.
She threw an old jacket over her shoulders and went out to the well for water. Coming back into the stuffy heat of the kitchen from the fresh, frosty air, the place seemed more foul and stinking than ever. Her stomach heaved tumultuously. Her knees trembled and she sank for a few moments into the old rocking chair.
Through the window she could see the men sousing the hog up and down in the scalding barrel, pulling him half way out, turning him a little and plunging him back again. The steam from the hot water rose up into the frosty air like a cloud of white smoke.
The baby began to cry and she got up wearily and warmed some milk for him, then crumbled a corn cake into it and fed it to him from a spoon. Having put him into dry diapers, she set him back on the quilt and went again to her washing.
The second hog and the third were soon killed, scraped, hung up, and disemboweled. Joe was a hog butcher of much
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 experience and prided himself upon the quickness and neatness with which he could do the work. The three carcasses hung with stiffly spraddled hind legs from the three gibbets, trim, bright, and spotlessly clean against the dun-colored frowsiness of the yard. Snap, puffed up with the pride and arrogance of butchering day, stalked about the carcasses and would not let even a hen approach the enticing little pools of blood that dripped from their noses. When the cat attempted to sniff delicately at one of them, he ran her off onto the nearest fence; and when Joe Barnaby's dog tried to sidle up unobtrusively, he flew at him with bristling hair. Ominous growls alternated with sharp, excited barks.
Suddenly the kitchen door was flung open letting in a cold draught of fresh air, and Joe and Jerry, their coats and overalls streaked with blood, appeared bearing between them a galvanized iron tub full of steaming pig guts. They set the tub down in the middle of the floor with a heavy thump and made for the door.
"You'd better run 'em through quick, Judy, afore they git cold. An' I think there's one that's cut into. Watch out fer it," Jerry called back. He was already outside.
She scowled darkly at the tub, her black brows drawing together. The bluish viscera, bubbling up in innumerable little rounded blobs, filled it almost to overflowing. Bloody fragments emerged along with the masses of intestines. The outside of the tub was daubed and streaked with blood. An unspeakable stench rose from it, mingled with the stale heat of the kitchen and grew every moment denser, more nauseating, more unbearable. She gagged and reeled. Then, with a quick movement of sudden determination, she threw on an old coat of Jerry's that hung beside the door and a faded cap that she wore when she milked or chored about the yard, and went out, slamming the door sharply behind her.
Going swiftly through the yard, looking neither to right nor to left, she passed the two men.
"Where you a-goin', Judy?" Jerry called after her in surprise.
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"I'm a-goin' to git away from that tub o' stinkin' pig guts you set in the kitchen. It kin stay there till it rots afore I'll tech hand to it."
Each word she uttered was hard and sharp, like the point of a nail. She paused not a second in her rapid walk and in a moment was gone from sight around the corner of the shed.
Jerry stood looking at the place where she had disappeared with an expression of dazed bewilderment, changing to annoyance and embarrassment. His pride suffered humiliation at this open affront from his wife before another man.
Joe came magnanimously to the rescue.
"That's jes the kind o' tantrums my woman goes into, on'y worse," he said. "An' she's allus a heap flightier when she's in the fam'ly way. But I never knowed Judy was given to them fits."
"She hain't," Jerry hastened to assure him. "I never knowed her to take on in sech a way afore. She's run guts many a time, like all the wimmin, an' never made no fuss."
"It grows on 'em," said Joe, ominously.
"Well, I s'pose we better pack it out," said Jerry, turning toward the house. "I hain't a-goin' to bother with the guts. There hain't but three four paound o' lard there at best. The pigs was too young to have much fat on their guts. We'll jes take an' heave it out back o' the shed where the hens kin peck it over."
The last sound Judith heard from the yard as she walked away was Snap fighting viciously with Joe Barnaby's dog, who had dared to approach too near to one of the blood pools.
She climbed the hill to the ridge road and walked and walked and walked. She no longer felt at all tired or sick at her stomach. A sense of burning indignation gave her power and energy. She wanted to keep on walking forever and put a longer and longer distance between herself and all that she had left behind: the hot, foul smelling kitchen with its odious tub of guts in the middle, the tub of filthy clothes, the steaming wash boiler, the screaming, insistent children, the men going smugly about with cheeks reddened by the frosty air, and
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 trying to foist upon her the only part of the job that was tedious and hateful. The more she thought about it, the more redly her own cheeks burned with hot anger. She felt as i............