about the weather, and to tell me about a new dress she was fixing to make with a bolt of blue calico she had got from the store, but her eyes kept straying around the room, and she kept on repeating herself and losing the thread of her story, and I think her mind must have been somewhere else. I just kept smearing dollops of honey on those biscuits, and swallowing them as fast as I could, while I let her talk.
She was on her third cup of water, and she had just about run out of things to say, when a pounding on the door made her spill the contents of the cup all over the table. She tried to sop it up with her apron, while the pounding went on, louder and faster. She gave me a big-eyed stare, and whispered, “Is it her?”
I tried to remember what people do when they are afraid. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and made as if to bite down on the side of my fist. The pounding shook the door, and Miz Scott kept glancing toward it, while she tried to mop up the water with the tail of her apron. At first I thought she was just going to sit there and hope the visitor would go away, but the knocking never let up, and finally a voice said, “Open this door or I’ll break it in!” and she had to get up and unbar it.
Ann Melton pushed past Miz Scott without so much as a how-de-do, and made straight for me with a look on her face that bespoke murder. “What are you doing here again?” She put her face up close to mine and screamed at me.
I didn’t bother to answer her, but just sat there, taking note of the way her eyes got all squinty when she shouted, and seeing little flecks of spit on her lower lip. I judged that Miz Scott would be too upset by Ann’s carrying on to notice whether or not I was cowering in fear.
“Pauline, you have no business to be out gossiping. You have got to come home!” Without waiting for me to speak, she grabbed my arm and jerked me up out of my chair. Then she gave me a great push in the small of my back and sent me stumbling toward the still-open door.
I grabbed on to the doorjamb and looked back at Miz Scott with pleading eyes, hoping she’d remember this scene if ever the time came. It is easy to get the better of high-tempered people like Ann. They get so caught up in their moment of rage that they lose sight of the consequences. But I don’t.
Ann turned me loose, but only so she could shake her fist in my face. “I heard what you told Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson, about how you and Tom killed Laura Foster. The story is all over the settlement by now. You have said enough to Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson to hang you and Tom Dula, if it was ever looked into.”
I shrugged. “You’re as deep in the mud as I am in the mire.”
She made as if to slap me, but she stayed her hand, and hissed in my face, “How could you tell such a lie as that?”
I hung my head and made my voice quaver. “I said it in jest, Cousin. I reckon I lose my head when I’ve been drinking.”
“If you don’t learn to hold your tongue, I will see to it that you lose the rest of your head as well. And if I catch you gossiping and telling lies again, Pauline, you’ll end up the same as Laura Foster.”
Miz Scott let out a little squeak when she heard that, and Ann, still blazing with wrath, rounded on her, and said, “You had better never tell what you heard here today, Celia Scott. Do you hear me?”
Miz Scott just stared at Ann open-mouthed, the way I often see people do when someone screams at them. It seems to freeze them in their tracks, the way deer turn to stone when they hear a noise in the woods. I could see the sense of it for deer, but not for people. When someone shouts at me, I know that they are too het up to think straight, and I find myself looking down on the scene as if I were watching from outside myself, while I try to find a weakness that I can use against them. I was cold and watchful now, but Ann had forgotten me for the moment.
She hustled me out the door, and as we stood on the path, I said, mild as milk, “Do you really think she’ll keep quiet about this?”
Ann’s eyes narrowed, and she glanced back at the still-open door. “Wait here, Pauline, else I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life.”
Without waiting for an answer, she stormed back up the walk to the front door, where Miz Scott stood twisting the tail of her apron, and watching us, to make sure we were leaving. When she saw Ann coming, she took a step back and made to slam the door, but Ann was too quick for her. She blocked it with her body, leaning against the door, and changing her tone to a near whisper, as cold as the March wind. I could still hear her, though.
She said, “Miz Scott, that there Pauline Foster is a liar and a troublemaker. You’d best not be repeating what you heard her say today in your house. For, so help me, if you get me or Tom in trouble by spreading Pauline’s lies, I will follow you to hell to make you wish you’d held your tongue. Do you understand?”
Miz Scott looked at her for a long moment, like she wanted to answer back, but finally she just said, “I hear you. Now get off my land,” and she slammed the door in Ann’s face.
Ann stood there for a moment, still whey-faced with rage, and then she came back and grabbed my elbow again. “Come on, Pauline. We’re going back home, and by god you’ll keep your mouth shut from here on out, or I will kill you myself. You hear me?”
I did. And, what’s more, I believed her.
She was right about what I said to Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson, though. One ought never to jest with a lawman, for they have a grim view of the world. By the end of August, the pair of them had mulled over my remark for a couple of weeks, and no other evidence had turned up to lead them to Laura Foster, so they came to Reedy Branch and arrested me.
I didn’t mind. I don’t get affrighted like other people, and besides, it was only those two prize fools Jack Adkins and Ben Ferguson who came to collect me, and I reckon they were more uneasy about it than I was. Ben Ferguson blushed and stammered as he read out the warrant calling for my arrest, and Jack Adkins said, “Now, Pauline, don’t take on, but we are bound and sworn to bring you in to answer on a charge of murder, but we reckon they’ll let you go once you tell them the truth about what you know.”
“We won’t tie your hands or nothin’,” Ben added. “But you must give us your word you’ll come along peaceable. You can ride up in front of me on my horse, for it’s a long way to Wilkesboro.”
I nodded and gave them my word that I would go along willingly, which I would have promised them regardless, because to my mind saying something is not the same as meaning it. I believe I could have got away from them if I’d had half a mind to. They had sidearms, but I didn’t think either one of them had the sand to shoot an unarmed female. They were both so embarrassed at having to arrest a woman of their acquaintance that they could hardly keep their minds on what they were doing, and they kept telling me that all would be well-as if their word was any good on that point. I nodded and tried to look grateful for their concern, but I thought that going to jail would be a fair bit of adventure, and maybe a chance to do some mischief as well. Anyhow, it would be better than doing all the farm chores and still having to cook three meals a day for the Meltons. Since I was a woman, I’d get a cell to myself, and I could use the rest.
It was a fine afternoon, and we took our time following the river road toward Wilkesboro so as not to overtax Ben’s horse. Horses are dearer than people in Carolina these days, since the Confederate army put them through battles like meat through a sausage grinder. I leaned back and washed my face with sunshine, eyes closed, and smelled the fresh-cut hay as we ambled past the fields and woods on the way to town. I was glad I didn’t have the cast of mind to be a worrier, so that I could enjoy the ride, instead of dwelling on what would happen once I got there.
Wilkesboro is a fair-sized town, sitting on a little rise above the plain, with a line of wooden storefronts facing the town square: a towering red brick courthouse with pitched roofs and a white columned porch atop a flight of white stone steps. Behind the courthouse, just before the town ends in fields again, stood the squat two-story brick jail with barred windows on the right-hand side, both upstairs and down, where the prisoners were kept. I wondered where Tom was.
On the ground floor of the building sat two white painted doors: a small and ordinary looking one on the left side, where the windows weren’t barred, and a wide oak door squarely in the middle of the building. Ben Ferguson swung off the horse and caught its reins. “That there is the jailer’s quarters,” he said pointing left, as if I couldn’t figure that out for myself.
He helped me down out of the saddle, and steered me by the elbow toward that wide center door. I looked back toward the courthouse, the way we had come, and from where I stood I could look straight down the dirt
