how easy it is to make people believe what they want to believe or what they are most afraid of.
Ann hated every word I said about Tom Dula and Laura Foster, but never once did it cross her mind to doubt my word. One time she got so furious over what I had to tell that she went and kicked over a slop jar I had not yet emptied, and I had to get down on my knees with a rag and mop it up and then scrub the newly cleaned floor all over again, but it was worth it, just to see her weep.
You know how the Bible said that God called things into being just by saying the words of creation out loud?
Ann practically pushed me out the door to go visiting in German’s Hill, and when I got back, sometimes around sun-up, if I had stayed late and slept over, she’d be in a bate to get me off alone so she could hear what I had to tell. It wasn’t easy, either. Sometimes I had been up drinking until the wee hours, and on that damp morning walk back, with my stomach queasy and my head pounding with every step I took, I’d be hard-pressed to get my thoughts together well enough to dissemble to Ann.
“Well, roll out the biscuit dough,” I’d say, “while I catch my breath and get the eggs going in the skillet. It will take a while to tell you everything.”
Most times Ann would be so crazed to know the worst of what was happening between Tom and Laura, that I could get her to do more than half the chores, while I spun out my tale, which I had worked up on the long walk back. It wasn’t easy, neither, trying to think up sweet talk and what courting couples might say and do. All that syrupy nonsense always bored me so much that I never paid it any mind when folk were doing it around me for real. Now I was having to invent a romance out of whole cloth, and it was harder work than plowing with the milk cows.
One time Ann almost caught me, though, for I had just opened my mouth to tell her a new tale about Tom Dula’s visit a-courting Laura, when Ann interrupted me to say that Tom had spent yester evening with her and James Melton. Hearing her out gave me time to think up a new piece of news, so when she drew breath, I told her that Laura had wept and raged for want of seeing her sweetheart last night. I got out of that predicament all right, but it was a near thing, and I thought to myself that in future I’d best wait and hear Ann’s news before I delivered any more of mine.
It worried me that Tom had been here while I was gone. “Did he say anything about Laura?” I asked Ann, trying not to sound overly concerned about it.
She shook her head. “He never says two words about her. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he didn’t give two hoots about her.”
“He’s trying to throw you off the scent, Ann. He knows there’ll be trouble if you find out how things are between him and Laura.”
She shrugged. “I don’t like it, but I don’t reckon it matters. Remember I told you about that Caroline Barnes what he courted a while back? That blew over, and this will, too. He’ll always be at my beck and call. Always.”
I went back to kneading biscuit dough then, and thinking on how I could use that.
Every now and again, Tom really would show up at Wilson Foster’s place, and then I’d breathe a sigh of relief, because it meant I could have some real conversations to recite to Ann instead of having to conjure everything up out of my head on the cold walk back. Mostly, though, even when he did come, I’d have to improve on that, too, for there wasn’t much between Tom and Laura that I could see. He didn’t look calf’s eyes at her or sweet-talk her like courting fellows generally do. Seemed to me like he’d as lief talk to her brothers as her.
Most times of an evening, when he did show up in German’s Hill, Tom would slink in like a stray dog, flashing a smile to whoever caught his eye, and if he was invited to take supper, he’d pull up a chair between the boys, and tuck in with the rest of them, talking farming or hunting, or whatever anybody had a mind to run on about. Oh, he’d wink at Laura now and again, especially when he wanted biscuits or taters sent his way, but then Tom always winked at the ladies. I’d seen him do it to fat, gray widows twice his age at a social, and he didn’t mean nothing at all by it. Maybe it made him feel important to watch old ladies giggle and blush when he showed them a penny’s worth of his sunshine. He even tried it with me a time or two, but I just looked at him like he was something I’d have to scrape off my shoe, so he quit trying to dazzle me. Tom Dula didn’t have one single thing that I wanted, except that it was in his power to hurt Ann Melton, and for that alone I tolerated his society.
He didn’t seem to affect Laura much, either, with his smiles. Maybe her head was already too full of thoughts about her other lover, but truly I think that Tom’s charm mostly worked on fat old ladies that he wouldn’t have looked at twice, for real feelings. He was a handsome boy, and not much man about him, for all that he had been in the War. I think marrying-age women have to be more practical about who they take an interest in, but those dried-up old sticks who sat out the settlement socials gossiping in corners-why, they just beamed on Tom Dula as if he was a brand-new speckled pup. They didn’t mean anything by it, either, I reckon. Maybe he was just a pretty child to the likes of them. But child-bearing women had too many real babies underfoot to bother about a handsome boy, who wouldn’t work or settle down.
Once at a social when Tom’s name came up in conversation, one of the younger women said, “Tom Dula? Why, he’d be like having a blood racehorse on a tenant farm-nice enough to show off, but useless for everyday.” And all the other ladies around her nodded in agreement.
The exception to that was Ann. Ann never would hear a word against him, and for his part, no matter what other dalliances he might get up to, it seemed like he never changed toward her, either. I think if there is such a thing as love, which I don’t altogether believe, then what Tom felt for Ann was real, and the rest was just a way of making his life easier by giving people what they wanted, as long as it didn’t cost him nothing. He would take anything pleasant that was foisted upon him-sex with a likely young girl was the same as a piece of pie to him, as far as I could see-but it meant no more than that to him, either.
I had to be careful carrying tales to Ann about Tom Dula. I didn’t want to make her so mad that she’d light in to Tom when next he came around. I wanted her simmering mad, but not aflame. Anger muddies up people’s minds, so that they don’t think clearly and they act too fast, without counting the cost of what they’ve done. I am blessed not to have that affliction. Nothing shakes me inside. When people pour their boiling anger over my head, I just get colder and slower inside, like a bear in a winter cave, and let them rage, while all the while I am thinking how I will hurt them down the road, when they have even forgotten how they treated me. I never forget anything.
So we lived through that first winter since the end of the War, and though folk said it was a mercy not to have to hear about any more men dying, and not having shortages from the blockades and the armies attacking the railroads, things still weren’t altogether peaceful again. There were bushwhackers still at large, attacking travelers on the roads or robbing isolated farms. We didn’t worry about them overmuch, since there wasn’t anything any of us had for them to take, but it was a reminder that times were hard, and likely to stay that way for a good while yet.
Most of the time, even if the devil himself had been riding roughshod through the Yadkin Valley, I would have been too tired to care, for me and James Melton and those two sorry milk cows had every foot of the farm to plow and seed, and at the end of the day in the fields, we all had other work to do, besides, even the cows. It was hard lines on all of us, I figured, to have to work two jobs-me in the fields and doing the house chores besides, and James Melton making shoes of an evening, when he was so tired, he’d fall asleep in his chair and pitch forward until he woke himself up, and then he would yawn and stretch, and go back to sewing leather again.
Ann didn’t change with the seasons. She still lay abed as long as she could, swallowed in quilts, and she took no more notice of the farm in spring than she had in winter. Some of that might be to my credit, though, for I had given her other things to think about. If Laura Foster’s dark lover was really going to carry her off, it would be soon.
I didn’t think about the three of them all the time. I had my chores, and my doctor visits, and a jug of whiskey when I could get it, and the company of the fools in the settlement and now and then a man, when I felt the urge,
