Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

intertwined bodies as he waited for daylight to banish the night. His only company in that long space between sundown and sunup had been the hired man’s words that kept playing in his head, and his own black-handled pistol. He had run his hands over the weapon so much that it was a wonder he hadn’t rubbed off all the black.
    As soon as that first gray light of dawn brushed half the sky clean of the dark, he had made his way over to the blacksmith’s shop, awakened the drowsing man, and rented a horse. Now, it took all he had not to whip the animal into a frenzied pace to reach the barn and Annalaura, and whoever else she might have in there. So far, he had won the fight to keep the bile down in his stomach. The pictures plaguing his mind left him no room to plan anything beyond what he knew had to be done on the McNaughton acres.
    As the horse trotted down the lane, John struggled to keep enough of his wits about him until he could get the job done. Then he would welcome mindlessness. Riding as sedate as a preacher’s wife was the first thing he had to get right. A colored man riding a horse at breakneck pace down a country lane would stir up the suspicions of any early rising cracker farmer. By the time he turned off the lane and onto the path leading to the mid-forty barn, the hired man’s words were beating a tattoo in his head.
    He’d had no real trouble finding the man, despite Annalaura’s claim that her so-called lover had hied himself off to Kentucky. A few well-asked questions at the colored juke joint down near the river bottom let him know that Isaiah Harris, along with his new wife, was staying the night in the colored principal’s back room. The two planned to catch a ride the next morning for a tenant farm ten miles south of Lawnover. As John’s horse made its slow way to the hitching post, his head swirled with bigger-than-life pictures of the hired hand, Annalaura, and her lie. When he first set eyes upon the rather flabby-looking man, John knew something wasn’t right.
    Harris couldn’t look him in the eye, only at some place between his eyebrows and the middle of his forehead like John bore the mark of Satan. As soon as he spotted that look on Isaiah’s face, he knew the truth. John knew that look. It was the same one black men all over the South gave one another when a man’s woman had just been made some white man’s whore. Even before the first real words passed between the two, John read all the answers in that look of Isaiah Harris. No black man had fathered Annalaura’s baby.
    John’s heart beat faster as he climbed down and tied up the rented animal. Walking through the barn, he neither heard the cows grazing at their hay, nor smelled the pigs, happy in their swill. He put one hand on the side of the ladder and stopped. He had clamped down so hard on his lip that the taste of his own blood stained his teeth and flowed into his mouth.
    John began the slow climb up the ladder. A trembling Cleveland greeted him. The boy still held the pitchfork.
    “You promised you ain’t gonna hurt her no mo’.” The boy raised his voice.
    “I ain’t come here to hurt yo’ momma. I come to talk.” Halfway up the ladder, John tried to peer around his son.
    Cleveland shoved the sharp tines two feet from his father’s chest. John’s ears finally cleared of the hired man’s voice, only to have it replaced by a strange silence in the loft. Where were the sounds of a crying Henry and a pouting Lottie?
    “Where’s yo’ momma?” John moved to climb up one more rung, but neither Cleveland nor the pitchfork budged.
    “She don’t wanna see you.”
    The fork brushed his shirt.
    “I wanna see her.” John grabbed a corner of the metal tines and jabbed the wooden handle into Cleveland’s little chest, knocking the child onto his bottom.
    Before the boy could regain his feet, and control of the pitchfork, John bounded up the last few rungs of the ladder. Throwing the fork to the opposite side of the room, he reached down with one arm and scooped up Cleveland.
    “You a good boy to look after yo’ momma. It’s just what I wanted you to do when I had to be away.” John watched his son’s face dissolve into tears.
    He wrapped his arms around the child as the wetness dampened his shirt. John kept his hand firmly around Cleveland’s head, grateful that the boy could not see his own throat swallow back the beginnings of unmanly tears. What had he done? Had he left a child to do a man’s