Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

was—tomatoes—and the number beside it read fifty. Since Alex enjoyed her tomato preserves and she included them on his plate at least twice a week, she was quite certain of the accuracy of her count. Fifteen Mason jars of tomatoes were missing. She drew her fingers down the other columns. Turnips, collard greens, carrots, pole beans, and butter beans all came up short in the recount. There were no errors. Eula pulled her fringed shawl closer as she lowered the lamp to the fruit shelf below. Mason jars of peaches, pears, plums, cherries, and strawberries were missing with no accounting. Even more perplexing than the vacant spaces on her shelves was the clear evidence that the shortage was increasing each week. She glanced over at the hams and hog sides hanging on the hooks. Their numbers were also down, but Alex had explained their decrease. Back in December, she watched him box up a particularly large package of just-cured bacon and two whole hams that he said were destined for his sister in Kentucky. Eula remembered being so stunned by this unusual generosity that she forgot to conceal the surprise in her voice. When she mentioned that his sister had always appeared too well-off to need food from them, Alex flashed a quick torrent of angry words that doubly baffled her.
    Holding the lamp in front of her, Eula put the closed journal in the crook of her arm and stepped out of the smoke house, latching the door behind her. She glanced around to see if the sun was preparing its appearance. The ground was still hard with frost and the night smells still lingered in the darkness. With caution, she stepped up the gravel path to her porch door and into the kitchen. Sitting at the table, Eula opened her account book and carefully lined out the old numbers. In her square handwriting, she wrote in the new. The missing jars both puzzled and annoyed her, though she was keenly aware that annoyance had to be banished from her mind as unworthy of a good wife.
    Her irritation stemmed from her pride. Eula didn’t need Reverend Hawkins to remind her that pride was a sin almost as bad as bearing false witness or coveting thy neighbor’s ox. But, if pride hadn’t been strictly forbidden to the righteous, Eula knew she could hold her head higher than any other white woman in all of Lawnover when it came to farm managing. That the food stocks were dwindling and she couldn’t explain the loss gnawed at the one talent where she knew she was the best. Still, such a boast was prideful and she tried to push the sinful thought out of her mind. Eula tapped her pencil on one of the open journal pages. The assault on her pride did nag at her, and tonight on her knees, she would have to pray extra hard for forgiveness. But another worry, far more serious than missing tomatoes, clouded her mind, and she wasn’t quite sure how she should address that particular subject to the Lord.
    Dropping her pencil on the table, Eula stood and walked to the corner behind the stove and lifted the poker. She jabbed it into the coal box to stir up the fire in the cook stove. The kitchen remained too cold for her to remove her shawl. Most mornings when Alex got up first, he stoked the fire, but not this morning. She took a corner of her shawl and rubbed clear a little spot on the kitchen window. A pale white glimmer of a January day shone back at her, and still no sign of Alex. Eula dropped to her chair and wrapped her arms under the shawl as she started a slow rock. Maybe she should offer up a prayer right now and get these unreligious thoughts out of her head.
    The wind had been fierce last night, and sleep had been hard to come by. Though she never, on purpose, touched Alex unless he asked, Eula didn’t have to feel the cold sheets on his side of the bed to know that her husband had been away all night. And she didn’t need the whistling wind to remind her that it wasn’t the first time her husband had stayed away from their bed. Some years, his nights away had been as many as four or five. Those times, he had casually mentioned, were spent playing cards with Ben Roy at the Lawnover tavern. Last evening, Alex had made no mention of a game nor of the tavern.
    Returning the poker to its corner, Eula went back to the table and stared at the columns and numbers in her journal. She needed no written record to recall that her husband hadn’t been close to her more than three times since September. She required no jog to her memory to wonder if something, or