Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

someone, other than a game of cards was the cause.
    The first time Alex passed over their Friday together, she paid scant attention. He hadn’t joined her at bedtime, and he had been beside her in the morning. When that second September Friday slid by, she admitted to a fleeting moment of curiosity, but that passed when she attributed her husband’s lovemaking absence to the hard work and long hours he’d spent bringing in that troublesome mid-forty. After he returned to her bed right after full moon in October, she dismissed her earlier fretting. Her relief was short-lived. After his two quick visits in November, the last of which she had carefully maneuvered herself, there had been nothing. That was when her impure thoughts began.
    Momma Thornton had never said it outright, but Eula had pieced together enough information in her growing-up years to know that men, long married, sometimes acted like Alex. When she was fifteen, she caught her mother in a back bedroom rouging her cheeks and puffing a white powder all over her face and down the front of her open shirtwaist. She had never seen the frown lines etched so deep in her mother’s face before, nor had those eyes looked as though they’d seen more than they wanted.
    Eula’s mother had promised her a new set of hair ribbons if she wouldn’t tell her father that his wife’s newfound attractiveness was anything but natural, glowing beauty. The next morning, her mother came out of her room smiling, with the rouge long gone from her cheeks. Momma had winked at her and whispered, “It’s a wife’s job to keep her man happy.” Eula got red, blue, and green ribbons the very next time Momma went to town. And she learned that a less than vigilant wife could cause a husband to stray.
    After twenty years of marriage, had she forgotten that early lesson? Though she loathed the thought of rubbing her face in white powder and painting on red cheeks and lips, she knew a wife’s responsibilities. It had taken careful planning, since a trip to the Lawnover store was out of the question. A description of everything she bought there would have gone straight to Alex’s ear. Instead, she managed to catch a ride to Clarksville with Ben Roy when Fedora was over visiting Tillie. While her impatient brother took care of his own business, she hurried over to the mercantile store. She bought a bar of a sweet-smelling soap—the clerk called it lavender. She wasn’t at all sure how Alex would take to soap that smelled like a flower rather than good old homemade rendered tallow. In case the lavender didn’t work, she bought a bottle of rose water. Back home, she splashed half the bottle of roses into the galvanized tin wash tub and scrubbed her skin raw with soap that smelled more like the bark of the tree rather than the purple flower. Even so, it had worked. When Alex came in from the fields that Tuesday night, he took her to bed. That had been in late November and no amount of scrubbing and soaking had worked again.
    The kitchen had not only warmed up, it had become fiery hot. Eula dropped her shawl from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She reached for her journal and used it as a fan. There were images flying around her head that no good wife should entertain. Sin and sinful thoughts were the province of Reverend Hawkins, but she would never dare discuss such things with him. Over the past few weeks, she’d nearly rubbed the print off some of the pages of her Bible looking for the precise chapter and verse that said distrust of a husband outranked pride as a major sin. With two hands, Eula batted at the air with the journal. God help her, despite weeks of effort, she could not banish the thought of Alex with another woman. If he had strayed, and she couldn’t accept that he had, it must have been her fault.
    Though Momma Thornton had been very strong on telling her eldest daughter about her shortcomings, she had never been much at sharing talk about the bed habits of men. Eula got most of her information on the ways of men and women at quilting bees, canning parties, and even at church socials when she sometimes overheard snatches of conversation. Fedora had hinted that husbands lost “the feeling” after a number of years of marriage. And her sister-in-law had made it clear to the ladies that it wasn’t the fault of the wife. Eula wished it were so. If she could ask Fedora how a husband lost such a thing and what a wife could do to help him retrieve it,