Deep Summer by Gwen Bristow Page B

and the boxes standing around because there was no place to put the things that were in them, and the bag of cornmeal with a cockroach crawling over it, and a line of ants winding over the floor, and the firelight making everything look red. She had jerked up the coverlet in a spasm of agony, but though she had had a vague sensation of something stinging her ankles she had paid no attention till now, when she saw them and cried out:
    “There’s ants all over me, Angelique!”
    Her voice trailed off. Angelique saw the ants and rushed to get them off her, but there were hundreds of them and a moment later Judith knew why they were so thick.
    A raindrop splashed on her arm, and a fine spray coming through a break in the wall peppered her forehead. She remembered that she had heard it raining for some time but had hardly noticed. But now in the moments between the pains she began to understand that the rain was coming down in a torrent, tearing up the flimsy patches in the roof and washing the mud from between the logs of the wall. The ants on the floor were circling a puddle. The ants in the bed were stinging her arms and legs. The rain was dripping on her, and this time of year there was not even a mosquito bar over the bed to keep some of it off. She was jerking with torture, and Philip was out in the forest. A cockroach with wings crept through a chink in the wall and then, terrified at the sudden firelight, flew up and struck her in the face.
    She screamed then. She shrieked over and over, calling Philip, and begging Angelique to help her. Angelique shoved at the bed to move it from under the leak. She brought wet cloths and tried to wash the ants off Judith’s legs. Pulling out the sheets, she emptied the ants into the fire, but there were more of them than she could fight. The rain poured in through the roof and ran out again through the cracks in the floor. The flying cockroaches buzzed around the bed. Sometimes one of them plopped against the wall and fell down. Judith shrieked for Philip, but it was daybreak when Philip returned, wet, cold, conscience-stricken and slightly drunk, for he had sat in a tavern till long after dark and the rain had bogged the trail so that it had taken him seven hours to make the journey home.
    He heard Judith’s screams above the beat of the rain. At the cabin door he leaped out of the wagon and rattled the bolt, calling who he was. Angelique slipped the bolt and he went in, dripping. Judith raised halfway up from the bed, crying out, “Philip! Get these things off me!” But for a moment he could not move.
    The bed was in the middle of the room. Angelique had torn holes in the corners of a blanket and tied it over the bedposts to make a shelter, for the rain was coming in through a dozen places in the roof of the cabin.
    He went over to the bed. In the firelight Judith’s face was yellow with agony. The sheets were off and there were damp spots on the moss mattress. The quilt Angelique had put over her was tossed to one side, lined with ants, and there were streaks of ants crawling over Judith’s arms and legs. She looked up at him and through her clenched teeth he heard her say, “Please get them off me, Philip!”
    “I’ll take care of you,” said Philip. He scraped the ants off her with his hands and threw the quilt on the puddled floor. “Judith,” he exclaimed as he worked over her, “can you understand me? Do you forgive me for leaving you like this?”
    She nodded. Philip lifted her up and brushed the ants off her. He picked up a cockroach from the mattress and crushed it between his fingers. Angelique had not been strong enough to raise the legs of the bed, but Philip held them up one by one and made her set each leg in a pot of water to prevent any more ants crawling up from the floor. He picked them off Judith’s arms and legs as fast as he could. At last he sat by her and wiped the lines of sweat off her face, helplessly watching the muscles of her neck knot like