back in kind when I could.
I was as good as my word-that time, anyhow. One evening that week as we drowsed by the fire, after a supper of salt-crock beans and corn bread, I managed to put away half a jug of that clear-as-water whiskey they made in copper stills in these parts. By the time Ann got to yawning, and James Melton, bone-weary from a day of wagon- building, stumbled off to bed, I was swimmy-headed and beginning to nod off myself.
Ann poked me in the ribs. “Stay awake, Pauline! Tom is coming by any time now.”
The drink had loosened my tongue. “Do I get the bed tonight then?” I asked, grinning up at her.
Her face clouded over, and she raised her hand to slap me, but seeing the look on my face, she let it fall again. “You asked for this,” I said.
“Don’t mean I want to watch it happen, though. Take him along to the barn loft.”
The fire had burned low, and I had been listening to James Melton’s snores for a good while when the door opened on a gust of cold wind, and a shadow fell over the threshold. I glanced over at Ann’s bed, but she was buried deep under the pile of quilts, as still as a hollow log. I’d bet she wasn’t asleep, though. For all that she insisted on this being done, I knew she minded about it. -
I stood up, and wrapped a thick wool shawl around my shoulders, waiting to see if Tom was going to come over to me, but he just stood there in the open doorway. He glanced over at Ann’s bed for a long moment, and then back over at me, jerked his head like he expected me to follow him. Then he backed out, and let the door close softly behind him.
I got up, a little wobbly on my feet, and went out into the yard. The night air was a little milder now that we were well in to March, but there was still enough of a chill to shake the whiskey glow off me. The moon shone like a gold locket through the branches of the white oak tree, and the black shape of the barn loomed before me.
I shivered a little from the wind, but I wasn’t scared. What we was fixing to do-why, I had done it a hundred times before, and Tom Dula didn’t look like the best or the worst of them. I didn’t feel much of anything. Good or bad, I didn’t figure it would last long, and it wouldn’t mean any more to either of us than partnering for a reel at a settlement dance. Less, in fact, for there’d be no one watching us.
I could see him standing just inside the barn, leaning against the wall, and watching me, with a funny half- smile on his face. I wondered if he was happy about getting a roll in the hay, or if it pleased him that I didn’t want to. Some men are like that. I didn’t know what Tom Dula was like, behind that handsome face and the easy smile.
He tried to take my arm, but I shook him off. “Let’s get this over with.”
He held the ladder while I climbed up into the hayloft, but I didn’t bother to thank him for it. If I was to fall and break my neck, it would have done him out of his fun, that was all. He didn’t kiss me, but I could still smell the whiskey on his breath, and I knew that he had been making a night of it somewhere else, before he ever came here. Not a word passed between us. Tom didn’t talk much anyhow, and I didn’t care to make things any more pleasant for him than I had to, so I just hitched up my skirts and lay back in the straw and let him get on with it, hoping the whiskey in my belly would keep me from minding too much.
I spent the few minutes it took him to get done with it wondering what Ann Melton saw in Tom Dula that I never did. Well, I’ve had worse. He wasn’t old or fat or toothless, but the others had given me something for my trouble-a few coins or a drop of whiskey. I reckon he thought he was doing me a favor, being as young and likely- looking as he was. I didn’t get nothing at all from Tom Dula that night, not even so much as a kind word or a thank you. But I smiled and hugged myself in the cold darkness of that hayloft, knowing that I sure as hell gave
I am trying to think back on when I first encountered my other cousin, Laura Foster, but it’s not the kind of thing I’d be likely to remember. Laura Foster wasn’t the sort of girl who sticks in your mind. Had I met her once when we were children, long before the War? Maybe. I remember Ann from those days, running around like a wild Indian, with her black hair flying loose and not a stitch on under her dress, but if one of that horde of barefoot young’uns had been six-year-old Cousin Laura, it had slipped from my memory. I think of her now in the faded colors of early fall, when the green leaves are going yellowish and the fields of goldenrod fade to a muddy brown. That was Laura Foster… small and sallow-skinned, with broom-sedge hair and witch-hazel eyes, so quiet and colorless that if you blinked she might disappear.
She was old Wilson Foster’s oldest girl. We were kin somehow or other, but since I was not a legal child, I never bothered to learn the rights of it. Her daddy tenant-farmed over at German’s Hill, maybe five miles from the Meltons’ and the Dulas’ farms. Laura’s mother took sick and died sometime before the War ended, leaving Laura to look after her three brothers and a baby sister. Well, they didn’t any of them starve to death or die of cholera, and that’s the best that can be said of the care she took of them. Mostly, she went her own way, same as Ann did, except that Ann married young to get out of having to tend to her mama’s brood, while Laura went on living at home in German’s Hill, likely because there was no other place for her to go.
She and Ann, both cousins to me, were chalk and cheese. Where Laura whispered and wavered, Ann carried herself like the Queen of Sheba-all fire and rolling thunder. She burned you where you stood with her bright beauty of tumbling black hair and dark, flashing eyes. By being more alive than anybody else, she squeezed your heart until you never forgot her for an instant. I didn’t say you would love her, though I reckon there was more than one man that did. Wanted her, anyhow. But no woman I ever knew could stand her. She made no pretense of caring a fig for anybody but herself, not even troubling to ask after anybody’s health or family, and when an older woman tried to converse with her, she was bored and she showed it, tapping her foot or gazing about the room, looking for some man to charm or something better to do than be talked at. The women all knew her reputation, too. None of them liked Ann enough to protect her from the scandalmongers, who were only telling the truth, after all. A woman who makes free with any man she pleases has no friends among her own sex, but Ann never cared about that, either. Tom Dula was all the society she ever wanted, and the rest of us she barely tolerated, if she noticed us at all.
I had no more use for the settlement’s old biddies than Ann did, but I took care to keep in with them, because it seemed foolish to make enemies when you didn’t have to. Those respectable old women might be useful one day, though I never tried to make Ann see that. You couldn’t reason with Ann.
She was like pokeberries, Ann was-bright and tempting to look at, but pure poison through and through. I suppose jealousy was part of the reason women hated her so much, but then Ann never took the trouble to make anybody like her. I guess she figured that the sight of her was all she ever needed to give. You never knew which way the wind would be blowing with her. One day she might be all smiles and sweetness, asking after your health and wanting to hold your new baby, and the next day she’d breeze past you on the road, taking no more notice of you than she would a stray guinea fowl.
Since I had to stay in the same house with her, I used to watch her, trying to figure out the rhythm of her moods, for my peace of mind depended upon keeping on her good side. But if there was ever any rhyme or reason to the weather of Ann Melton’s humors, I never found it. I ended up thinking that she was doing it simply to keep folks off balance around her, trying to guess at her mood, as if she was calling the tune. It gave her the upper hand-I worked that out-but I soon decided that I did not care to dance to her fiddling. I began to act just the same whether she behaved fair or foul, and pretty soon I began to see less of her moodiness, though she gave it in full force to everyone else. Except Tom Dula, of course. He always saw the sunny side of Ann.
Or at least, he did until he took up with Laura Foster, come spring.
It wasn’t as if she found out in some underhanded way. Tom never troubled to lie. I always thought he was too lazy to exert himself by trying to remember some falsehood. Besides, he cared as little as she did what anybody
