Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

en.” Her voice came soft, low, and filled with worry.
    “What do you mean? Have I hurt you?” Twenty-one years peeled away in the flash of a second.
    Had he been the cause of Eula’s lost baby? His hand reflexively left Laura’s stomach.
    “No, no. You ain’t hurt me.” She turned her face back toward him, and a hint of alarm flashed quickly in those eyes. She dropped her head, and the cherry-red color returned to her cheeks. “You, ah, you been very good to me. It’s just that you, ah, yo’ love come on strong. Maybe too strong fo’ the baby.” She let her eyes flicker a second on him before she firmly placed them back on the pile of hay. In the fading afternoon light in the barn, they looked soft, even loving. “Don’t come back tonight. Best if you come over no mo’ than one or two times a week.”
    This time Alex thought he heard hope etched in her voice.
    “If you think that’ll be good for the baby.” Before he could sort out her request, she sat up against the hay piled against the side wall and slipped her arms around his neck.
    She pulled him close. He felt her fingers run down his neck and up into his hair as her tongue probed into his mouth. He pushed her back down onto the hay.
    “After today, I won’t bother you more than three times a week. I promise I will be careful.”
    “No more’n once a week,” she whispered as she led his hand to the top of her winter drawers.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
     
    The sound reminded him of a woodpecker worrying a tree somewhere far off in the distance. Knock, knock. He wasn’t ready to come out of his sleep just yet though there was nary a dream in it. The woodpecker kept up his work until a fantasy burst on him full grown. He was in the middle of the Clarksville battlefield and the Union cannon were bombarding the Clarksville rebels. With bullets flying from both directions, he didn’t know which way to run.
    “Welles, John Welles. Is you in there? Miz Zeola wants you.” The knock thundered into his bedroom like a cannonball had fallen onto the pillow next to him.
    He jumped bolt upright, flinging his arms up to ward off the next attack, only to come into hard contact with Savannah’s nose. The grade-school teacher had lifted her head off the pillow beside him just as he reacted to Big Red’s voice. He looked over at his lovemaking partner of a half hour ago. Her mouse-brown eyes stared big at the door. Her face looked like she expected the whole Confederate army to storm though and drag her off into slavery. Knock, knock. Big Red was getting even louder. John reached for a corner of the blanket on the double bed to cover himself.
    “Oh, my Lawd.” Ignoring the accidental blow, Savannah, the older of the two schoolteacher sisters living next door in Miz Brown’s best room, snatched the blanket from his grasp, pulling it completely off the bed. She wrapped the heavy cotton coverlet around her ample body as she jumped to the floor.
    Now naked in the room lit by late afternoon sun, John watched the woman turn in circles with his blanket snug around her as she sought a place to hide. One of her breasts escaped the swathing and drooped nearly to her waist. Savannah was five years younger than his Annalaura, but the schoolteacher had a body that looked more like a middle-aged Zeola than a young woman who had never birthed a baby.
    “John Welles, Miz Zeola wants you and she wants you now. I ain’t standin’ here foolin’ with you no mo’.” Big Red’s voice oozed its own particular charm as John motioned Savannah to stand behind the door.
    “Hold on, Red. Let me git my britches on.” John took his time donning his trousers.
    He wished Savannah would stop bending and straightening her knees. Each time she did it, he could feel the floor shake. John pulled on the knob and opened the door into Miz Brown’s second floor hallway. Big Red crowded out what sunlight shone through the hallway window at the front of the house. The cook’s substantially sized feet, planted firmly on the floor, blocked out the garish red roses stitched into his landlady’s carpet.
    “My shift don’t start ’til eight o’clock. Ain’t but fo’ now. What Zeola want?”
    “It ain’t fo’ you to ask what Miz Zeola wants. It’s fo’ you to come when she calls.” Big Red turned and rumbled down the staircase muttering all the way.
    Before John shut the door, he peered over at the hallway window. Though he had the second-best room in the entire