Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

naught. He counted out over ten dollars that his wife had saved for school shoes for Cleveland and Doug. He had promised his sons that they could both go to school right after harvest. Doug, in particular, had been excited. Though his second boy was coming up fast on ten, the child hadn’t had more than a year’s schooling all put together. Yet, Doug could both read and write a little.
    John was determined to do better by all his children. Even little Lottie would have her chance at school. He took only eight of the dollars and left Annalaura a little bit over two. A woman as clever as his wife would find a way to make it stretch. Of the two slabs of bacon hanging in the smoke house, John took only one though he did take most of what was left of last fall’s preserves. He knew he was leaving his family in a tight spot, but he had every intention of being back in Montgomery County no later than mid-August. He had no idea that Nashville was going to hold him this long, but he was too close to satisfaction to go back home with nothing. For sure, he’d be back by Christmastime. By December, he would send both his boys off to school in fine style and he would put a fancy yellow, ruffled pinafore on Annalaura.
    “Thank you for the words and the list. I’m jest gonna check to see if we have enough clean dinner dishes in the dining room safe.” Before Big Red could mount a protest, John, his deferential half-smile in place, backed out through the swinging door that divided kitchen and pantry from the dining room.
    This time of day, and with any luck, he might find Miz Zeola herself. He had wasted enough time with a colored man who was going nowhere in this world. John hadn’t left the best thing in his life for nothing.
    Miz Zeola’s dining room cabinet was built into the wall, but you wouldn’t know it because of all the mahogany surrounding the massive piece on the sides and even up to its nine-foot-high top. The safe was almost the length of the twenty-eight-foot room. Behind its four sets of leaded glass doors, Miz Zeola must have kept six different china patterns of twelve settings each, not to mention the matching crystal and silver. Though it wasn’t part of John’s job to check on the china, it was the only way an outside man could ever get into the main-floor rooms of the bordello. It was the job of the hired girls to keep the contents of the safe clean. They did the polishing of the silver ’sticks that sat four thick and stood three feet tall on the dining room table that sat twelve. At the entry, with the kitchen swinging door at his back, John scraped his boots clean on the rag rug Miz Zeola kept there for just that purpose. He wanted no telltale signs of dirt when he tipped across the burgundy-red carpet to peek into the small private hideaways Miz Zeola had set up for her best customers.
    On the opposite side of the room from the china safe, the madam had carved out three little rooms, each no bigger than six feet by seven. Their doors were papered in the same wall covering as the rest of the room. The brass doorknobs held flowers that seemed to melt into the wallpaper. Three mirrors, each no bigger than two feet square, separated the doors. Miz Zeola wanted no outsider looking into her business. To the uninitiated, the doors looked like part of an elaborately paneled room. Inside, small tables were set for two, and a little kerosene lamp gave out the only light in the windowless rooms. If a person took a notion to peer close enough in the dimness, the outlines of a settee draped in satin sheeting could be seen. John smiled at the finery.
    After he had plucked the money he needed from Nashville, he would drape satin sheets over a big four-poster bed and wallow all over it with Annalaura’s tight, fine body wrapped in his arms. What his wife’s face may have lacked in great beauty, that body of hers more than made up, with those curves and dips that made a man just about holler to the skies at their perfection. Of course, none of this could he tell her. Women didn’t need to get their heads puffed out. A swish of air startled him out of his thoughts.
    “You gittin’ yo’ eye fill of my rooms? Lessen you can pay, I don’t want no country boy in this part of the house. What you doin’ in here anyway?” The clock had not yet sounded five, and Miz Zeola hadn’t quite finished her evening toilette.
    Her usual perfume, which she declared came straight from New Orleans and always preceded her