Barren Ground

A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store
and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she
watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an
impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.

Bare, starved, desolate, the country closed in about her. The last train
of the day had gone by without stopping, and the station of Pedlar's Mill
was as lonely as the abandoned fields by the track. From the bleak
horizon, where the flatness created an illusion of immensity, the
broomsedge was spreading in a smothered fire over the melancholy brown of
the landscape. Under the falling snow, which melted as soon as it touched
the earth, the colour was veiled and dim; but when the sky changed the
broomsedge changed with it. On clear mornings the waste places were
cinnamon-red in the sunshine. Beneath scudding clouds the plumes of the
bent grasses faded to ivory. During the long spring rains, a film of
yellow-green stole over the burned ground. At autumn sunsets, when the
red light searched the country, the broomsedge caught fire from the
afterglow and blazed out in a splendour of colour. Then the meeting of
earth and sky dissolved in the flaming mist of the horizon.

At these quiet seasons, the dwellers near Pedlar's Mill felt scarcely
more than a tremor on the surface of life. But on stormy days, when the
wind plunged like a hawk from the swollen clouds, there was a quivering
in the broomsedge, as if coveys of frightened partridges were flying from
the pursuer. Then the quivering would become a ripple and the ripple
would swell presently into rolling waves. The straw would darken as the
gust swooped down, and brighten as it sped on to the shelter of scrub
pine and sassafras. And while the wind bewitched the solitude, a vague
restlessness would stir in the hearts of living things on the farms, of
men, women, and animals. "Broomsage ain't jest wild stuff. It's a kind of
fate," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say.

Thirty years ago, modern methods of farming, even methods that were
modern in the benighted eighteen-nineties, had not penetrated to this
thinly settled part of Virginia. The soil, impoverished by the war and
the tenant system which followed the war, was still drained of fertility
for the sake of the poor crops it could yield. Spring after spring, the
cultivated ground appeared to shrink into the "old fields," where scrub
pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafras as inevitably as autumn
slipped into winter. Now and then a new start would be made. Some thrifty
settler, a German Catholic, perhaps, who was trying his fortunes in a
staunch Protestant community, would buy a mortgaged farm for a dollar an
acre, and begin to experiment with suspicious, strange-smelling
fertilizers. For a season or two his patch of ground would respond to the
unusual treatment and grow green with promise. Then the forlorn roads,
deep in mud, and the surrounding air of failure, which was as inescapable
as a drought, combined with the cutworm, the locust, and the tobacco-fly,
against the human invader; and where the brief haryest had been, the
perpetual broomsedge would wave.

The tenant farmers, who had flocked after the ruin of war as buzzards
after a carcass, had immediately picked the featureless landscape as
clean as a skeleton. When the swarming was over only three of the larger
farms at Pedlar's Mill remained undivided in the hands of their original
owners. Though Queen Elizabeth County had never been one of the
aristocratic regions of Virginia, it was settled by sturdy English
yeomen, with a thin but lively sprinkling of the persecuted Protestants
of other nations. Several of these superior pioneers brought blue blood
in their veins, as well as the vigorous fear of God in their hearts; but
the great number arrived, as they remained, "good people," a
comprehensive term, which implies, to Virginians, the exact opposite of
the phrase, "a good family." The good families of the state have
preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic
fiction, and the Episcopal Church. The good people, according to the
records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have
preserved nothing except themselves. Ignored alike by history and
fiction, they have their inconspicuous place in the social strata midway
between the lower gentility and the upper class of "poor white," a
position which encourages the useful rather than the ornamental public
virtues.