PAULINE FOSTER
March finally wore out, and the fields got green again, but all that meant to me was that I’d be working in the fields as well as doing all the household chores. It made it easier to walk the mile or so to a neighbor’s place to visit a spell, when I wasn’t too tired of an evening to manage it. My fever never did come back, though, and that rash I’d had when I came here had faded away altogether, so I began to think that Dr. Carter’s bluestone cure had done its work. He said I had to keep going to see him, though. Some ailments, he said, were like flies in winter-just because you didn’t see any around didn’t mean they were gone for good.
“I don’t think you are well, Pauline,” he told me, when he gave me my latest dose of medicine. “And I think you might still be able to pass this disease to someone else if you were intimate with him.”
“Oh, I’ll be careful,” I told him. I meant I’d take care in deciding who it was I wanted to infect. Sometimes I felt like that angel with the flaming sword that drove Adam and Eve out of Eden: I had a God-sent weapon that would bring death to ever who I chose.
“We have not seen so much of Tom Dula lately,” I said to Ann one afternoon. I had spent all day planting corn in the field with James Melton, and when I got in, stiff-backed and bone-weary, Ann had told me to wash her bed sheets before I started on supper. I couldn’t refuse for fear of losing my situation, but I figured I owed her a little pain in return, so while I was making biscuits to go with the stew, I made that remark about Tom, as innocent I could make it sound, knowing it would be salt in her wound, and glad of it.
Ann stiffened for a moment, but then she made her voice light, and she said, “Well, it’s planting time. Everybody around here has plenty to do right now.”
I snickered. “Reckon he’s planting something, all right. Over at Wilson Foster’s.”
Ann slapped me hard, leaving a white handprint on my cheek from the flour. I just smiled at her and went back to kneading the biscuit dough. She wiped her hands on her skirt, but she just kept standing there. Her nose got red, and I saw one solitary tear leak out of the corner of her eye and slide down her cheek.
Finally she said, “He don’t care nothing about Laura Foster.”
“Well, in case his mama ever dies, I reckon he’ll need somebody to look after him. He might be giving some thought to that. Besides, a marriage seldom comes about on account of what a man wants. If I was you, Ann, I’d be studying about what Laura wants.”
Ann picked up a ball of dough and began to roll it around in her hand. Then she squashed it flat on the flour cloth and pressed down hard with her palm. “It ain’t like he has anything to offer anybody,” she said.
“I couldn’t say,” I said, taking care to keep my voice light and indifferent. “But her mother is dead, leaving a passel of children and Wilson Foster himself needing to be looked after. No love lost between Laura and her father, from what I hear. Now if it was me, I reckon I’d take just about any opportunity to get shut of all those young’uns and an ornery father who used me as a house servant. Did you not find yourself in that self-same situation when you were fifteen?”
She gave me a stricken look then, and I knew I had hit the mark. Ann had married James Melton to get away from a fractious parent and a home life of toil. She must have known as well as I did that Tom Dula was a deal more appealing to a young girl than old sobersides Melton had ever been. Maybe Laura Foster had precious little to gain by marrying Tom Dula, but what did she have to lose?
“It won’t change anything,” said Ann, pounding another biscuit into the floured cloth. “Tom would never.”
I took the dough away from her and rolled it back into a ball. “I expect you’re right,” I said, keeping my eyes on my work. “Just because he’d have a place of his own, and somebody making him dinner, and waiting to warm his bed, there’s no call to think he wouldn’t want to hang around here, on the off chance that your husband will drop off to sleep.”
Ann edged me away from the table. “Go see her, Pauline. Tonight. After supper. Just pass the time with her this evening and see if you can tell what’s on her mind. She may be mixed up with somebody besides Tom.”
“Go see her?” I laughed. Ann never thought about anything but what she wanted. “Why, she lives all the way over in German’s Hill. Even if I was to stop there only long enough to say how-do and drink a cup of water, I doubt if I could make it back here by sun-up.”
Ann stamped her foot. “But I want to know what she’s up to! I can’t rest until I do. Why don’t you go tomorrow after midday and walk over there? I’ll tell James to let you.”
I thought it over. The prospect of a walk over to see my other Foster cousins was a pleasant thought for me, if the day was fine, and if I had to indulge in tale-bearing at Ann’s bidding, I reckoned it would be worth it. Besides, I was curious to see for myself how the land lay between Tom Dula and Laura Foster. I might be stingy with the truth when I got back to Ann, but I’d like to know for my own satisfaction. No use to make it easy on her, though.
“I’ll be awful tired tomorrow, Ann. You know I ain’t well to begin with. I don’t know… to make a long walk over to German’s Hill, and then to have to walk all the way back here, and get up at the crack of dawn and cook breakfast…”
Ann stuck out her lip. “I suppose I could give you a hand with the morning chores, then. But you had better find out something worth telling when you get there, Pauline. If you go over to Wilson Foster’s and spend the evening getting drunk and sleeping it off instead of talking to Laura and coming on back, I’ll take a switch to you. I swear I will.”
I got the half day off, all right. I never once heard James Melton tell his wife “no” about anything. Maybe he was scared to, but I don’t reckon he could have been worried about rat poison in his food, for I never saw Ann do that much cooking. So off I went on that next afternoon, while Melton tilled the field alone, with his two milch cows yoked to the plow. I hated to wear out shoe leather trudging through the muddy trace to German’s Hill, when I could have got there in an hour or so on horseback, but if James Melton could not afford even a scrub horse, at least he could cobble me a new pair of shoes.
The walk was pleasant enough in the late afternoon, but I decided to stay the night, for spring nights are still bone-chilling cold, and I had no desire to make my way home on foot close to midnight in that weather, especially since this visit was being done as a favor to Ann, and I was disposed to inconvenience myself as little as possible on her account. Why is it that fine-looking folk always think they are doing you a favor by letting you do them one?
We still weren’t far enough into spring for there to be much to see on my way to the Fosters’ place-a few green leaves on trees here and there, and sprouts of grass amid the mire of rain-soaked fields. The road ran along beside the river, and it was as brown as the fields from the spring rains. I thought it looked like a trail of tobacco spit, not at all like the clear little streams we have up the mountain in Watauga County. I am not much moved by the beauty of nature anyhow, because every place I’ve ever seen looks about the same. I hoped that the Fosters would have something decent to eat and that they’d offer me some of it, and even more I hoped that there would be a full jug of whiskey and not too many people around to share it with. Whiskey is better than scenery. Better than people, too. It doesn’t ask you for anything in return.
I never paid much attention to the
It was a dingy white frame house that didn’t look big enough to house six people, but I suppose that the little ones all slept piled together somewhere like puppies. It looked like a house that nobody cared about-not Wilson
