Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

reached for one of the posters on her bed. She laid her body against it, clinging to it like it was the rope Old Roy threw to pull her out of the murky waters. It could not be true.
    Belle was as much a liar as she was white trash. Every man and woman in Lawnover, black and white, knew that Eula’s brother Ben Roy was the father of Hettie’s three children. But Alexander? The father of a colored woman’s child? Never. She and Alexander hadn’t conceived a baby in twenty years. Now he was nearly forty-four, and there had never even been a whispered hint that he had achieved fatherhood. If he had sired children, the news would have been all over Lawnover in less than two days. No, her Alex couldn’t be the father, because he was incapable of making a baby.
    Alex had never reproached her for her inability to bear him a second child the way any other husband would. Deep in her mind, she thought it might be because he knew he was partially to blame. Still, if Belle was to be believed, the Welles woman was pregnant. How could that be so? For all of her treacherous ways, Eula’s youngest sister-in-law was right about one thing. The hand Alex hired last September couldn’t be the father either. Even on those three mornings when she had awakened during harvest time to find Alex’s side of the bed empty, she had gone down to the barn to see Isaiah Harris carry his slop jar to the outhouse. He had been in her barn every one of the fourteen nights of the September harvest. Yet, if it wasn’t Isaiah Harris, who was the father of the Welles woman’s baby?
    The wooziness increased, and Eula felt the bile rise to her throat. The grandfather clock in her parlor bonged two. She had never laid down in the middle of the afternoon because of sickness in all of her married years, not even when she was racked with the fever. But maybe, just this once, getting off her feet might help her put that imagination of hers to rest. Her father had always told her that imagination in a woman was not only unnecessary but a dangerous thing. Eula eased herself on top of the coverlet, not caring that her shoes carried the dirt and dust of Ben Roy’s backyard on them. The room felt warm though the window was opened wide to let in the mild, new-rose-scented May afternoon. She put her hands to the side of her head to push out the thoughts that no decent woman should carry. If she was really a good wife to her husband, she should be able to come up with the real reason for the short supplies, the missing money, and Alex’s peculiar behavior over the planting.
    With barely a word, her husband had put another hired man on the mid-forty to set the tobacco seedlings. That would have been of no particular concern to Eula. All the farmers knew that it was difficult keeping tenants, black or white, for more than two years at a stretch. But Eula had to learn from Jenny that the man, an out-of-towner, was married with three small-sized children. Worse, Jenny had added that none of the man’s family was staying on the mid-forty. Yet, the Welles woman and her get remained.
    Instead of evicting her as he should when a tenant stopped producing, Alex had allowed the woman and her children to stay, even though their man had been gone for almost a year. Why would Alex let a woman who could do him no earthly farming good live in his barn, while a hardworking man with a family had to travel two miles to and from town every day to tend the tobacco? Maybe if she closed her eyes for just a moment, these devil-placed thoughts might fade away and make room for the true answer. Somehow she knew that even Reverend Hawkins couldn’t help cleanse her mind. She had to pray directly to the Lord for forgiveness for thinking the unbelievable.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
     
    The two sixteen afternoon train from Nashville pulled into the Lawnover station right on time. The train, speeding to Chicago, stopped for only five minutes, and John, wearing his new cream-colored seersucker summer suit, scrambled to pull out his two valises from the overhead rack in the colored-only rail car. Kicking the box of gift s along in front of him, he moved toward the connecting carriage doors. John used his shoulder to open the heavy door and maneuver his belongings to the top of the stairs. The colored porter, standing on the platform at the bottom of the portable steps, stared up the station platform toward another white-coated porter two cars ahead. John’s porter paid scant attention to his own