Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

second she wondered what John would think of her body now. He had always pretended that her middling height frame was “just right…not beanpole skinny nor so fat your bottom fill up two seats on the church pew.”
    With food being stretched like it was, Annalaura knew she had lost weight. She put a quick hand underneath her breast and gave it a little boost. Hadn’t changed all that much she thought. Her husband had told her that she had tight tits, and she guessed that was still so. Sometimes, when he didn’t know she was watching, she’d catch a gleam in his eye like he believed she had the best-looking female shape in all of Montgomery County. But what did she care what John Welles thought about her body? She couldn’t put any stock in the words of a man who had probably laid down with a dozen women before he ever met her and two dozen afterward.
    Annalaura reached for her work shirt with its two missing top buttons. Waiting to earn enough money for a new spool of thread, she had saved them in the old snuff tin she’d believed she had hidden so well in the smoke house. Never mind, she thought, as she stepped into her ankle-slapping skirt, the waist band twisting on her narrowed body. There’d be no one who mattered to see that her blouse wasn’t properly fastened under her chin. She patted her chemise and drawers, which lay on the shelf above the nail hooks. She only had one set, and they were for Sunday. Besides, there was no need to put on drawers and a chemise on a scorcher of an August day like this one promised to be. Not when she would be in the fields from just past breakfast ’til sunset. With her work brogans laced on her feet, Annalaura climbed down the ladder leading to the bottom floor, hitching up her skirt as she moved. She held her breath as she walked by the three sows and the two milk cows. She didn’t know why. They were no more smelly when she stood close to them than they were when they sent their special aromas drifting upward to the barn rafters and her family.
    Several feet outside the barn sat the chicken coop. Just beyond, stood the brick smoke house that McNaughton allowed the family to use for the preparation of its meals. That is, when Annalaura had food enough to prepare a meal. Inside the makeshift kitchen, Annalaura checked the larder. With half a barrel of flour left, she figured she had enough to last ’til the harvest in mid-September. She had a jar of dried butter beans, and used with care, the contents could be stretched into next month. The only slab of bacon John left her had run out two weeks ago, but she still had half a can of bacon fat. The cornmeal was low, but she reckoned she had enough of that for bread once a week ’til harvest. The garden had very little left in it. A few pinched-in tomatoes, one row of tired green onions, and the last of the pole beans were all that were left standing. In normal times, she would have put in the turnips and her other fall vegetables, but there had been no money for the seed—not after John had cleaned out her snuff tin of all but two dollars back in June. She hefted the weight of the salt container and the baking soda. Both were too light to the touch. Annalaura had been taught to be a good manager, and she suspected that was the real reason John Welles picked her over all those other females who swarmed over him like a hog going to slop.
    She had been seventeen when twenty-two-year-old John came parading his wares in front of her. To say that she was surprised was to put the lie to the sun coming up in the east. Yet, when he asked, she had nodded her slow yes. Even back then she wasn’t really sure about John as a husband, and now she had the hard times to back up her earlier doubt.
    To announce the arrival of the sun, the rooster began strutting his stuff and greeted the day with a piercing crow. The dark silhouettes of the tobacco plants came marching up at her like short children. And that was the problem. Would the plants be tall enough for harvest in two weeks?
    As much as she wanted, she couldn’t put off facing the truth much longer. She carried a pat of lard for the breakfast biscuits as she climbed back up the ladder. The cows mooed their discomfort.
    “Ma, I can start the fire in the smoke house.” Cleveland’s voice came out of the gloom of the second platform bed on the opposite side of their living space.
    Annalaura stepped off the top rung to see young Henry stretched out on the straw pallet he