Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)
to Lawnover swept right by his barnyard, and there was no sign of Harris’s wife or children. Alex shifted his weight and stared at the applicant.
“Well, Isaiah, how old are you?” Alex folded his arms over his chest in growing unease. A man in his thirties should be fairly settled in his ways. Where was his woman?
“I’m thirty-one, suh.” Isaiah kept his eyes properly on the ground, and Alex liked the way he stooped his shoulders. John Welles had stood a little too tall for his own good.
“How many in your family?” Alex asked with Eula standing right behind him.
“Ain’t got none, suh.” The man kept his eyes on the bottom stoop of the step where Alex stood.
“Ain’t got no what? Don’t have no family or don’t have no wife?” Alex’s face drooped into a frown. “A man old as you ought to have a family unless he’s a sportin’ man. You a sportin’ man, Isaiah?” He could smell the vinegar in Eula’s hair assaulting his nose.
“Naw, suh. I ain’t no sportin’ man. Jest ain’t got me enough money to get me a wife right now.” Isaiah twirled the hat in his hands faster.
“How you gonna bring in forty acres of tobacco all by yourself?” Alex’s frown deepened.
A single man most oft en brought a ruckus with him. Women helped settle a man—black or white. Something in his gut felt uneasy about the idea of an unmarried man on the mid-forty. Alex had just about made up his mind about Isaiah Harris when Eula whispered in his ear.
“He won’t be by himself. That missing man’s wife and her older boys can pitch in.” The sound of her voice startled him and he half-turned toward her. “As soon as the crop is in, you can send them all on their way.”
Though getting rid of a sharecropper who ran off whenever the notion took him felt like a good idea in Alex’s head, Eula knew better than to bring up business matters to him, even if it was only in front of a nigger. He wondered if his wife had taken sick with her strange behavior.
“Isaiah, I’m goin’ to think on it and let you know day after tomorrow. In the meantime, you think about gettin’ yo’self a woman to keep you through the winter.” He heard Eula gasp at his suggestion of unmarried cohabitation.
He smiled. Hell, they were just niggers. The Bible didn’t say nothing about niggers not sleeping together before they were married. His mind flashed on Eula’s brother, Ben Roy Thornton. What would the Bible say about him? Married to Fedora for almost twenty-five years, he’d kept the same nigger woman for almost six of them. As he closed the door on Isaiah, Alex decided that Ben Roy had committed no sin. After all, his brother-in-law wasn’t keeping company with a white woman.
That night after Eula dried and put up the last of the supper dishes, he lay in bed waiting for her. When she slipped in beside him wearing her summer cotton nightshirt that covered her from neck to ankles, he turned off the lamp. No need to waste oil on seeing a sight that he had looked upon for twenty years. Though she had never had much in the way of curves and highs and lows, it was still better to remember her the way she used to be rather than the thick flabbiness he touched nowadays. Some Fridays he felt like he was laying his body across one of his downed alder trees after a spring flood. It was thoughts of the alone nigger woman on the mid-forty that hardened him enough to put it to Eula Mae this night.
CHAPTER FIVE
Though she never regretted her marriage to Alexander McNaughton and the stepped-down life it brought her, Eula still took great comfort standing in the oversize Thornton kitchen where her mother had directed the preparation of so many family meals. Back in Momma’s time, one day during the last two weeks of August had always been set aside for the preserving and storing of the fruits of the garden and the arbor. Momma had a full-time colored cook and a cook’s helper, but this special day was the time when all the Thornton women, blood and in-laws alike, gathered to peel, core, boil, and jar for the barren winter months. These days, there were about half a dozen more female Thornton kin than back in Momma’s time. Still, the job took a whole day.
While Alex was off riding the fields, Eula had gotten up when it was still dark to gather and feed the chickens and hogs. She had milked all three cows before she readied herself to get into the buckboard Alex had hitched up for her. The ride to her childhood home on
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