Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

there holding a cap with his neck bowed like he meant it. John Welles would always tip that head just short of respectful or let those eyes roll up a little bit too high. An uppity nigger like John Welles was nothing but trouble. Alex took another look at Cleveland and sat up in the buckboard. The boy dragged the toe of his shoe back and forth in the dirt.
    “Welles is home?” The question wrenched Alex’s body just as much as the first time he asked.
    “Yes, suh, he done come home. Momma say to tell you that he lookin’ for Mr. Harris.”
    “Harris? You talkin’ ’bout the hired man that helped bring in last fall’s harvest?” The very man Laura had claimed as father of their baby?
    Alex peered at Cleveland. Laura must have told John Welles the same story she tried to peddle to him about who’d fathered her baby. He jumped down from the buckboard and walked over to Cleveland, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the half-surprised, half-scared look on the face of the hired man.
    “What else did your momma tell you to say, and why ain’t she here tellin’ me all this herself?”
    Cleveland raised his eyes to Alex’s shoulder. “She say that I is to tell you that papa have a gun, but it’s just to take with him when he go to talk to Mr. Harris.” The boy recited the words his mother most likely put in his mouth.
    Alex kept his hand on the boy.
    “Momma say the gun ain’t fo’ hurtin’ nobody. Not even Mr. Harris. She say Papa just a little upset with that hired hand.”
    “Gun? You say yo’ papa’s runnin’ the countryside with a pistol?” Alex lifted his eyes to the barn window. “Is your momma in the barn?” He took a step up the path while the hired man walked even deeper into the darkening rows of new-sown seed.
    “No, suh. She ain’t in the barn.” Cleveland’s voice sounded alarm. “She took Doug and the little ones over to Aunt Becky’s.”
    “Where’s your papa? Did he go with Laura?” Alex dismissed his misspeak. Calling Annalaura by the special name he’d given her could make no difference to any of them if John Welles really was back, and with a pistol.
    Cleveland stood silent. Alex walked toward the barn, rushing thoughts flooding his head. Welles was going after the man Laura claimed to be the father of her baby. A nigger, a pistol, a wife big with another man’s baby were a dangerous combination. Alex stopped and stared at the window in the loft—that very same window where the moon had played its silvery light across Laura’s naked body when the two made love. A dozen horrors ran through his mind. What had Welles done to Laura?
    He struggled to keep his face and body still as he turned back to Cleveland. One thing was certain. John Welles could not stay long in Lawnover.
    “Is your papa with your mother?” He whirled around to Cleveland.
    “No suh, he ain’t.” The boy finally answered. “Don’t rightly know where he is. Momma say Mr. Harris might be in Kentucky.”
    If the boy was telling the truth, Alex thanked God. Laura was safe for now. He gestured to the hired man to climb into the wagon. The beginnings of a plan laid itself out in his mind. John Welles couldn’t be allowed to stay in Lawnover. He couldn’t be allowed to lay claim to Laura.
    “Momma say I was to ask you one mo’ thing.” The boy’s voice was a whisper as the hired man sat in the back of the buckboard, his knees hunched up to his chin, his face turned toward the chirp of a night bird.
    “Yeah?”
    “She say it would please her most kindly, suh, if you come visit us in the fields next week, but not a day befo’. She say, it might be good if you don’t visit fo’ breakfast no time soon, neither.” Cleveland sucked in a lip. “One last thing, Mr. Alex, suh. Momma say please kindly take these things away.”
     
     
    The Lawnover store hadn’t changed much in the thirty years Alex had gone in and out of its doors, other than that Bobby E. Lee Thompson ran it now since his daddy, Andrew Jackson Thompson, died some ten years back. The building still had that big main room that sold everything from galvanized nails to barrels of brined pigs’ feet to baling wire to calico cloth for the women. The two windows on opposite sides of its walls, along with the kerosene lamp that burned even in the daytime, gave the place enough light so a woman could tell blue thread from black. Bobby Lee and his wife worked the store pretty much through