then. She was bitterly disappointed, as if
this, she thought, smiling a little to herself, was the only day there
was. She might as well wash blankets. She went to the bedroom to slip
off her dress and put on a thick short-sleeved apron: for Tira was not
of those delicate-handed housewives who can wash without splashing. She
dripped, in the process, as if, Tenney used to tell her in the first
days of their marriage, she got in all over. In her bedroom, with the
sweet air on her bare arms and the robins calling and the general tumult
and busy ecstasy outside, she stopped to wonder. Could she take the baby
and slip out by the side door, and come back in time to fry Tenney's ham
for dinner? No, it wouldn't do. He would be in for a drink, or the cow
shut up in the barn with her calf would "loo" and he would wonder if
anything was happening to them. A dozen things might come up to call him
back. She would wash blankets. Then she saw the baby, through the
doorway, sitting where she had put him, on the kitchen rug, and a quick
anger for him possessed her.

"In that hot kitchen," she said aloud, "when there's all outdoors!"

She dragged one of the blankets from the bed, ran out as she was,
bare-armed, bare-necked, and spread it on the grass in front of the
house.

"It's goin' to be washed anyways," she placated the housewifely instinct
within her, and she ran in for the baby and set him on the blanket. One
heart-breaking thing about this baby who was "not right" was that there
were no answers in him. She had tried all the wiles of motherhood to
show him how she loved him, and coax him to respond, not so much in
actual sentience to her as a baby's rejoinder to the world he could see
and touch. He had no answers. But this morning when the sun fell warmly
on him and the breeze stirred his coppery hair, he did, it seemed, hear
for an instant the voice of earth. He put out his fat hands and gurgled
into a laugh. Tira went mad. She was immediately possessed by an
overwhelming desire to hear him laugh again. She called to him, in
little cooing shouts, she stretched out her arms to him, and then, when
he would not be persuaded even to turn his head to her, she began to
dance. Perhaps after the first step she really forgot about him. Perhaps
the mother ecstasy ran into the ecstasy of spring. Perhaps, since she
could not answer the lure of the woods by running to them that morning,
the woods ran to her, the green magic of them, and thr