thought of him. He was young and handsome, and people seem to find it easy to forgive a man like that.
Tom came over to the house one evening in late March, in time to cadge a bite of supper with us. He sat there by the fire, spooning rabbit stew into his mouth, and, for once, Ann was not all smiles and sweetness. She sat huddled up on the floor next to his stool, holding his cup of water for him, and leaning her body against his leg, smiling into the firelight like a satisfied cat. I had the sewing in my lap, and I was seated in the cane chair, a ways back from the hearth, pretending not to listen to what they were saying.
“Are you coming back later?” she murmured softly to Tom, glancing over at James Melton, who was at the table, nodding in his chair.
Tom sat very still. “Not tonight, darlin’. I’m headed over to German’s Hill in a little bit.”
Ann stiffened, and turned to look up at him. “That’s a long walk on a dark night. What do you want to go over there for?”
“I just feel like it.” He was keeping his voice light, as if the conversation was of no consequence at all, but the air felt the way it does when the leaves turn over on the trees, about an hour ahead of the thunderstorm, and there was that same quiet that comes right before all hell breaks loose.
“Well, you must be fixing to go visit somebody,” said Ann, still speaking so softly that you could have heard a snake rattle in the log pile.
Tom shrugged, and, from the look on his face, I judged he was wishing he had thought up a lie when she asked him, but anybody who had fought his way through Petersburg and lived through a Yankee prison camp does not run from a fight-and maybe that was what Ann liked best about him: that she couldn’t run roughshod over him, like she did over most everybody else. I never saw James Melton cross her once. I worked beside him every day in the fields for months, but I think I knew him less than I ever knew anybody.
Tom was smiling down at Ann, like he was daring her to keep hectoring him, and presently he said, “Why, I didn’t know I had to answer to anybody about where I go and what I do.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I know. You’re going to see my own cousin Laura Foster,” said Ann.
He laughed. “Well, now, she wouldn’t be the first of your cousins that I was acquainted with, would she now, Pauline?”
I glanced up from my sewing and met his eyes with a blank stare. There was a mocking glint to them, and although he was smiling, I didn’t think he was happy about anything.
That flicked Ann raw, though, for she could hardly object to him seeing Laura Foster when she had foisted him off on me not even a month ago.
“After all, Ann, it ain’t like Laura is married or anything, is it?” He was looking over at James Melton, who was still in his chair, awake now, and intent upon mending a harness, and paying us no mind. “It ain’t like we care who beds with who?”
From the way Ann’s eyes glittered, I thought she was going to break out into a storm of weeping, but she just kept staring up at Tom, taking his measure, and finally she shrugged and turned back to the fire. “Please yourself, Tom. I doubt you’ll get much joy out of that stringy little mud hen.”
Tom stood up and set his tin plate on his stool. He patted Ann on the head and winked at me, like I shared a joke with him, “Well, Ann,” he said, heading for the door, “maybe I can teach her a thing or two.”
That night I slept in a pallet on the floor, because Ann’s bed shook with her sobbing.
PAULINE FOSTER
So we hunkered down and waited on spring, and it seemed a long time in coming, and nothing much happened in the meantime. When the weather was foul, James Melton occupied himself with mending shoes. I did the cooking and the washing, and what farm chores there were to be done while the weather held cold.
Once a week, I would plod up the muddy road to the place where the doctor saw his Elkville patients, and I took the bluestone medicine what he give me, but I felt little better for it. Some days I was tolerable and some days worse, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to it. Ann mostly slept the days away under her pile of quilts, or else she paced that cabin like a penned-up bull.
“It would take your mind off your troubles if you was to help me make the biscuits,” I told her one afternoon, when I judged she would wear a path in the plank floor if she was to keep pacing.
She shot me a scorching look with those black eyes of her. “I don’t want to take my mind off it. I want to feel every second of misery I’m having so that I can give it back to Tom with interest when I see him.”
“I thought you said it didn’t mean nothing-him being with anybody else. And, anyhow, it means folk aren’t gossiping about the two of you anymore.”
She snatched up an unmended shoe and shied it in my direction, but she was so wide of the mark that I just stood there and watched it thump against the wall, and fall to the floor.
“I reckon you heard the new gossip,” I said, fixing to hurt her a lot more than that slipper would have hurt me. “They do say that old Wilson Foster caught Tom in bed with Laura the other week, but he’s not so particular as your mama was. The word is that he let them be. Of course, Laura is twenty-one, not fourteen like you was.”
“Tom don’t care,” said Ann, plopping down with her elbows in the flour where I was kneading dough. “Nobody thinks less of a man for doing what comes naturally. More fool the woman that lets him. If Laura thinks he’s going to marry her on account of it, she has another think coming.”
“Unless there’s a baby on the way.”
Ann shrugged. “No telling whose it would be, though. Tom wasn’t her first, not by a long chalk. If you haven’t heard the other tales told about our cousin Laura, then let me tell you I have.”
“Must run in the family,” I said, laughing, because name-calling never bothered me none. “And there are stories a-plenty about you, too, Ann. You and the cattle drovers. They say you’d sell your favors for a jug of whiskey or a scrap of cloth.”
She gave me one of her black looks. “I lived through the War, didn’t I?”
As the days grew longer and the wind quit howling, and the world slowly began to turn green again, I found I was feeling better, and I thought that perhaps Dr. Carter had cured me after all. My rash and my fever went away, and I began to feel less miserable than I had in many a month. I was still a forlorn hired girl, with no prospects and no one to look out for me, but at least I was still young and spry, and the fine weather made it easier to go calling on folk. I didn’t like any of them much, but listening to them talk was better than fetching and carrying for Ann every waking minute. Besides, you never know when some little nugget of scandal will repay you the trouble of listening for it.
One afternoon in late March I was walking up the road in search of something to do besides farm chores, when Wash Anderson hailed me from the edge of the woods. He had a blanket slung across his shoulder, and he was whooping and waving an earthenware jug up over his head, like a damned fool.
I hitched up my skirts, and plowed through the tall grass over to where he was standing. Wash Anderson is another young buck who lives with his widowed mama and his sister Eliza, just down the hill from the Meltons’ place. He hangs around the settlement without being good for much, same as Tom. It’s a wonder these fellows don’t miss the War, as bored as they all seem to be with peacetime, and them never doing any work if they can help it. If I was a man and I had my health again, I believe I’d amount to more than they did. He is an amiable enough fellow, is Wash. Always good for a tune or a jest, and good enough company if you’ve nothing better to do, but he wasn’t a patch on his buddy Tom for looks: round-faced and tow-headed, with a foolish grin, and though he wasn’t yet thirty, he had a gut on him that spoke to his fondness for likker and food. I had no use for Wash Anderson in the ordinary way of things, but I take care never to get on the outs with anybody, and, besides, Wash Anderson brandishing a full jug of whiskey was a tolerable sight.
“What do you want?” I asked him, hands on my hips, and showing him that I wouldn’t put up with any sass from the likes of him.
“How do, Pauline,” he said, making a mock bow, as if I was a fine lady, but the smirk on his face put a sting to
