Foster, because he was too shiftless to own it, and not his landlord, because he probably figured that a ramshackle place with a leaky roof was good enough for a tenant farmer’s family.
I didn’t feel sorry for them, though. They had a roof over their heads, and a woods full of game to put meat on the table, and they had lived through the War. There’s many that had to make do with less than that. Besides, the Fosters were not what you would call a close family. We didn’t think we owed anything to one another, and we didn’t flock together like guinea fowl, preferring our own company to the outside world. Look at Cousin Ann. She didn’t take me in out of the kindness of her heart. She let me stay so that she could have a servant for next to nothing. If that is family feeling, you can have my share of it.
I sat looking at the house for a minute, before I approached the door. Before I could hello the house, one of the boys came around from the side of the house, and stood a few feet away from me, staring. I made sure he didn’t have a rock in his hand, and then I bade him a good evening, but he just glanced at me wall-eyed, and gave me the barest nod to acknowledge my greeting. Shy around strangers, I thought, and I left him be, and walked on up to the house, wearing a plaster smile, and ready to be the long-lost cousin from the mountains, if that’s who they needed me to be.
At first nobody answered my knock, but inside I could hear a child hollering, “Somebody’s come a-calling.”
I waited, because there’s no use in rapping again if they know you are there. By and by, the door opened enough for a small head to peek up at me, and a big-eyed boy stared at me for a moment or two, before he said, “What?”
I gave him a careful smile. “It is all right,” I said. “I am kin to you. Which Foster boy are you? James?”
He shook his head. “Naw. I’m John. It was Elbert what brung you up to the door.” That got him talking, which is why I pretended to think he was James, who is seventeen. This sorry little pup couldn’t have been twelve yet. I knew that the best way to get some folks to talk is to let them correct you. After that, he forgot to be bashful, and I edged past him and headed straight for the fireplace, for it had been a cold walk from the Meltons’ place to German’s Hill. While I warmed my hands, I glanced around, seeing exactly what I had expected to see: a few sticks of homemade pine furniture, a rag rug on the floor, and some pans and a cast-iron skillet hanging from hooks in the ceiling.
Nobody ever got rich being a tenant farmer, and Wilson Foster was proof of it. After a minute or two my eyes got adjusted to the dim light, and I spied my cousin Laura over next to a cradle, holding a lap-baby in her arms. This must be the youngest of the brood, the one that their mother had probably died giving birth to. That, too, was a commonplace, among poor folk. The women just keep spitting out babies, and wearing themselves out with tending to the brood and doing all the farm chores, until finally one day they birth one baby too many, and die trying. Most men managed to get through at least two wives in a lifetime. The wonder of it was that any woman was ever fool enough to walk into that trap, but most all of them did, sooner or later. I supposed that my cousin Laura would, too, if she ever got the chance, though one baby seemed the same as another to me, and since she had one to tend to as it was, why would she go off to saddle herself with another one?
She was a little thing, Laura was. The top of her head wasn’t much higher than a broom handle, and I’ve seen gourds bigger around than her waist. She had mousy brown hair, and good cheekbones in a heart-shaped face, but she wasn’t a patch on Ann, for looks or brains.
When my feet and hands stopped tingling, I left the hearth and went over to the cradle, where Laura was. She had got the baby to sleep now, and she set it down in its old rag quilt, laying a bony finger to her lips to warn me not to wake it with any loud talking. I needed no cautions on that score. The last thing I wanted was to have my visit marred by the bawling of a smelly young’un.
I nodded to Laura to show her that I understood the warning, and pointed for her to come back over to the hearth. We dragged a couple of pine stools up close to the fire, and put our heads together to talk in low voices. I didn’t see Wilson Foster anywhere about, and I reckoned he had not come in from the fields yet, which was fine with me, for I had not come all that way to suffer through idle chit-chat.
“I don’t know if you know who I am,” I said to Laura.
She nodded. “Yes. You have the look of the Fosters, I reckon, but I had already heard tell you was working over to the Meltons’ place, so I’d a-knowed you anyhow. Not too many strangers about. Leastways, not females.”
She didn’t seem put out to see me, and I wondered if she had heard the gossip about me and Tom, and whether she cared about it or not. Best not to speak of it right away. “I envy you your home and family, Cousin, for I have none.”
She shrugged. “The house is rented, and as for family, I’d as lief give you some of ours, for they are no end of trouble to tend to, night and day. Trying to take care of it all killed my mama.”
“I thought I’d heard that the baby there was the cause of her passing.”
Laura glanced over at the cradle, where the small assassin slept in peace. “She was worn out, anyhow, and birthing that last child took more strength than she had. I doubt not she was glad to go, in the end.”
I mustered the smile I use when I have worked out the right thing to say. “I’m sure it eased her passing to know that her brood was left in your loving sisterly hands.” I didn’t believe any such thing, but I thought it might please her to hear it said.
“Well, I hope I do my best.” Laura looked away and scowled as one of the younger boys ventured into the room. “What is it, John? Get along to bed now! I’ve no mind to fool with you this evening.”
“I’m still hungry, Sister,” he said, in a treble voice, on the verge of tears.
Laura sighed and shook her head. “There’s cold biscuits in the tin plate in the pie safe. Get you one, and mind you don’t make a mess with the crumbs in your bed, for I’ll not change it.”
The boy snatched his biscuit, and crept away past us. When he had gone, I turned back to my scrawny cousin, beaming in pinchbeck admiration. “Why, all this responsibility for home and children will serve you well when you have a husband and a home of your own.”
Laura took up the poker and stirred the fire. “I reckon it will.” She didn’t seem none too cheered by the sentiment. “But for the War, I’d have been wed long ago, but now there’s scarcely enough men to go around, though my spinsterhood is not for want of trying. I reckon I could have set my cap for a fat old widower, but that wouldn’t be no different from staying here.”
“It can’t be as hopeless as that,” I said. “After all, you are only just past twenty now, and the War is over, so it may not be long before somebody makes you a bride. I hear tell you have a sweetheart.”
She turned on me, still holding the poker, likely forgetting she had it in her hand, but she looked like she’d spied a snake. “What have you heard?”
I laughed. “Oh, not a word about a fat old widower, Cousin. I hear tell that a handsome young soldier is paying court to you.”
She sat back down on the stool, and the firelight made shadows on her ashen face, but there was no trace of the pleasure a girl usually shows when you tease her about a beau. She sighed. “Oh, I reckon you’re talking about Tom Dula. When Daddy caught us together, I knowed it would get about. Well, Tom is fine to look at, and he is one for sport, right enough, but what would he do with a wife?”
“Why, take her home to the Dula farm, of course. His mother still lives there, but what of that? The rest of the Dula young’uns will be out and gone before too long, and old Miz Dula won’t last forever.”
“No. But our cousin Ann will. At least it will seem like it to me.”
“Ann Melton? Why would she come into it? She has a husband already.”
“Some say she has two, and she seems likely to keep them both.” Her lip curled, and she twisted a hank of her broom-straw hair. “Don’t you wish you were beautiful, Pauline?”
It hurt to be reminded so matter-of-factly that I was not, but I never flinch when I have been stung. “Well, Cousin, if beauty would give me a golden palace to live in, meat and whiskey every day, and servants to do my bidding, I would welcome it, but I cannot see that beauty has given our lovely cousin any more than the lot of an ordinary plain woman: a dull husband and a middling farmstead. Where is the wonder in that?”
Laura shrugged. “More than I ever got, or you either. But it may yet come right for me. There’s somebody else who is sweet on me. Folks around here wouldn’t think him even as good as that no-account Tom, but leastways he would be proud to have me.”
That was the first interesting thing that drab little cousin Laura had said. “Well, who is your suitor then, missy?
