At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church
surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the
ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy,
clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the
church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he
drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood
under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several
times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once he
locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house and
stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered
cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court and
fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his humiliation.
To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them
largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about in
dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks in
the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of the
army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl of ten
this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were thrown on
their own resources and ran the house in their own way.
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