Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

she stopped and let her man speak until he skirted close to the line again, and there she was, smoothing over his too-glib words.
    Alex couldn’t put his finger on what was so different about her. He hadn’t thought her uncommonly pretty back then, but he hadn’t yet stared at the soft oval curves of her face, nor those full lips that looked just right for a man to suck into his mouth. He hadn’t taken in the whole look of her until today. Back then, it had been more in the way she stood erect behind her man. Even in that shapeless flour sack of a dress she’d worn, he could still guess at the outlines of her slender figure. The gray cleared the welcoming shade. Alex flicked the reins again as he spotted the next set of trees in the distance. It was getting harder and harder to ignore the stiffening in his pants. He took off his straw hat and fanned his face as he shifted in the saddle. Lord knows he couldn’t remember the last time a hardening had come on unbidden with Eula. In their first year of marriage, he recalled hankering after her in that way. After she lost the baby, he supposed her interest in him waned, and so did his in her. It wasn’t that he didn’t need a woman, and most of the time, it was Eula he bedded. Unlike other men down at the back room of the Lawnover store, he had no need to complain about Eula not being willing. That was another way in which she was good. His Eula never refused him like some men said their wives did. Even Eula’s brother, Ben Roy, had complained against his Fedora. Alex never had that sort of trouble with Eula. As far as he could tell, she seemed all right with whatever he wanted. Come to think of it, she never troubled him by what she might have wanted or not wanted. She knew as well as he, that a woman was there to do a man’s bidding in the bedroom, and the timing was his call. After twenty years of marriage, he only needed to come to her every two weeks. Of course, that didn’t mean a man didn’t need some variety every now and again.
    An oriole swept down from the upper branches of an oak tree and swooped in front of the gray’s eyes. The horse broke stride a second before Alex could steady it as horse and rider cleared the second stand of trees. Now that he’d seen her again, he guessed that the Welles woman had never gone all the way from his mind. No wonder. Blackberry juice kept a man young. Every white man in Montgomery County knew that.
    Scrunching his brow, Alex reckoned that the last nigger woman he’d bedded was about six months back. He’d gotten to her first after he learned that her husband had been killed on the railroad down in Nashville. She’d been good for a few rounds, and like always, he knew the change would keep him faithful to Eula. It had never crossed his mind to be unfaithful to his wife. Unlike his Thornton in-laws, he didn’t keep going back to the same nigger women year after year. Once or twice a year with a new woman each time was good enough for him.
    Alexander rounded the slight bend in the lane and spotted the fence with the missing rail that separated his back-forty from the Thornton place. He reminded himself to get after that new man to get it fixed as soon as harvest ended. As the horse neared the path leading to the old log-hewn cabin, he wondered if the Welles woman really had a husband who was coming back “any hour now.” If she did, she was off-limits. No white man in these parts went with a nigger who had a man around the place. Made no economic sense. Husband was sure to get surly and slow down the work, wrecking things for both himself and the farm owner. It was smart business to only mess with nigger women who had no man around, like the widow woman he had last winter.
    As his gray turned onto the narrow path and started toward the new family working in the field, the hardening in his pants rubbed against the saddle. McNaughton knew the truth of it and so did the Welles woman. No matter what she said, the sharecropper’s wife, with those legs ready and more than able to straddle a man, had no full-time husband about the place.
     
     
    Alex trotted up the lane to his own barn after riding his acres. What to do about the mid-forty still hung in his mind. He gauged the time at nearly three in the afternoon. The sun reigned at its August hottest with the sky showing no sign of rain in the foreseeable future. Without rain, there was small chance the stalks would grow much taller, even with all the weeding