Chapter 3
The morning air was thick with moisture even though the temperature was cooler than it was back in Lindale. They’d walked since sun up after a breakfast of fresh fish and coffee. The bear hadn’t bothered with the tins of food, so while they walked they shared a dinner of biscuits and ham her mother had packed in a cracker tin. The salt-cured ham was sliced thin enough to chew, but left them thirsty and looking for a spring before much time had passed. The water in Rafe’s canteen didn’t last long enough to slake their thirst. “You got anymore of that cake in your bag, Katie?”
Katie pulled the canvas bag around her shoulders until she could open the top while she walked. The tin pan inside held thick slices of their wedding cake, dense pound cake yellow from the dozen eggs used to make it, iced with a sweet, sugar syrup. She coaxed a slice away from the others and handed it to him, then licked her fingers. She would save her slice for later and tucked the tin back into her tow sack. “We got much further to go? You said we’d be there before dinnertime.” She wiped the sweat from her eyes and slung it away. She was soaked through. She picked the wet cloth away from her skin with two fingers. She’d never felt so sticky hot, not even standing in front of the spinner in the mill, but that was mostly standing still. Now she was marching over hills and swiping at the stinging flies that gathered around her face and neck. “Is it going to be this hot at our house?” She waited for Rafe to answer, then looked up from watching her steps to see that he was much further up the road than she was. It didn’t matter. She was tired. All day long yesterday she’d walked, and it had been fun because she had gotten married in the morning, and she was thrilled to walk through the dark woods following her handsome new husband, but today, today she was hot and tired and sore in places she’d never been sore in before. Walking only made it worse what with her legs chafing against one another. After the bear woke them up, they hadn’t slept much, then Rafe said they should get up before sunrise and walk before it got too hot. She wondered how much hotter it could get when she was wet through already.
She wasn’t hungry, though. Even after the bear messed around with their food, they still had enough because her mother’d packed enough food for several days. She was thirsty, but Rafe kept saying they’d find the creek soon.
Up ahead, Rafe was searching the road for a sign he’d left. Their feet crunched on gritty sand as they walked. Mosquitos zinged through the air past their heads. Mockingbirds called. Their grating footsteps fell steady against the random sounds of the woods they passed through. No wind blew to take away the heat.
“Look here, Katie,” Rafe pointed ahead to a clearing between the trees, “I strung up a piece of cloth just like at your family’s place so you’d know you were home. See it there? The yellow stripe on the left tree?“ Katie saw the tails of the band twitching in the slight breeze. Her tired feet picked up their pace.
“Are we almost there?” Katie looked through the trees searching for her house.
“It’s up the ridge aways. I liked it because it sits above the creek. We won’t get flooded out in the spring rains.” He waited for her to catch up. “I remember my daddy telling a story about that happening when he and my mama first got married. They built their house right on the river, and when heavy rains came the next year, that house picked up and floated away with them hanging on. He said after that he always looked for a house on the high ground.” Rafe glanced over his shoulder at Katie, then waited until she caught up to him at the edge of the road.
Katie looked above the open, sun-baked field to a small house set back from the road, a stubby, grey-planked cabin with a shake roof. It wasn’t what she’d pictured. She’d been thinking of a house like her mother’s made of bricks and glass windows with painted sills and asphalt shingles on the roof. This was a cabin with two doors on the front and an open hallway running between them. No foundation, but a raised floor on rock piers. No windows on the front at all. A porch stretched across the width of the house. She stood still, staring at it all.
“Come on, Kate. We almost there.” Rafe’s long legs stretched out covering the last hundred yards of the road, clattering across the footbridge over the creek, and he set off across the hill to the house beyond. Katie stood still. Her heart hammered in her chest. She unclenched her hands and wiped them on her skirt.
He called from the split-rail fence that surrounded the house. “Come on, I’ll show you it, just come on.” He ran the last way and jumped onto the porch. Katie could hear his feet pounding on the way all the way into the front yard. “Look, we got us two rooms and a dogtrot! You ever heard a that? A dogtrot. Now we got to get us a dog to run through it.” Rafe ran from the front to the back of the house in the open space built between the two rooms. He ran into the yard and grabbed Katie by the hand to pull her up to the house. “See here? When the slaves lived here, they was one family there and one here, but we got us the whole place. I figure we can live in one and use the other to store things. What do you think?”
Katie looked from one end of the porch to the other. Each end had a single door opening into a single room, but no windows. She walked into the trot a little ways, down into the cool shade and found a long window on each side opening to the middle, face to face. The door on the left half squealed as Rafe slammed it open. “We got us a table. It was already here, but I fixed it up some. Ma give me a skillet. We got knives and forks. There were some plates left here, but don’t worry, I scrubbed them real good.”
The ceiling was high and flat, and in the corner near the door a ladder rose up to a half-loft. The table stood in the center of the room, and on the back wall a boarded platform was built into the wall for a bed. A tick mattress was rolled at the end. It looked new. The white stripes were still bright, and the blue hadn’t faded. She remembered her bed back home with its colorful quilt and the pink pillow at the head. “I stuffed the mattress myself, Katie. Mama sewed it up, but I stuffed it just right.”
Rafe saw her gaze and jumped to the bed flinging the mattress out onto the boards that made their bed. He grinned. “Give me your blanket.” And he threw that on top spreading it out tight rolling the edges under the mattress.
“Mama forgot to give me the quilts she made. We was supposed to have a wedding ring quilt...” Katie’s voice cracked. She sucked in her breath.
Rafe was breathing hard in his own excitement, but his smile began fading as he watched Katie began to weep. “What’s wrong?” He was eighteen, still a boy, barely a husband and his wife was crying in the home he’d made for her. He stood in front of her just watching. His arms dangled at his sides.
Two days of walking got the best of her, and she sobbed until snot ran down her face. Rafe handed her a kerchief. He tried to wipe her eyes, but she slapped his hand away. She tried to catch her breath to stop crying, but she missed her family. She was tired. She thought there'd be more more like she made up in her daydreams. But this was a small, broken cabin on a hill near the edge of a field too far from her mother and the women who could have taught her how to do this job she had chosen.
“Katie, girl, come on. Don’t cry. You ain’t even see everything yet. We got chickens and a hog. David’s got a cow. We got a well and a creek and a field to plant. Come on.”
She lifted her eyes to survey the room. “There’s no stove.”
“Well, no, but we got a fireplace with a spit.”
“I don’t know how to cook in a fireplace!” she wailed. Her voice scratched his ears.
“Okay, then,” he said with his hands raised in front of him, palms out as though to ward off her anger, “we’ll get us a stove. Maybe a little potbelly stove. That’d be good, wouldn’t it? I can get one of them down at the store. We can make do until then, right?” He walked over to the back door. “Come on, I’ll show you where the outhouse is and the well.” He grabbed her hands and hustled her out the door into the yard. The outhouse was on the edge of the woods and the field on the left, far enough away from the creek and the well and close to the field for convenience. They had just crossed the creek in front of the house where they could fish. It was perfect, he said.
Katie circled around in the grass taking in the view of her new home. It didn’t feel perfect to her. She could see that it felt right to Rafe, but he’d been living here already. She didn’t know the place. “Where are the neighbors?”
Rafe pivoted, waving his arms at their surroundings. “Well, my brother’s yonder on the other side of the field. We’re going to work the crop together. They ain’t any neighbors like you had back home. No one to bother us.” He grabbed her by the arms. “Nobody making noise or watching us. Just you and me.” Pulling her to him he pawed at her breast through her blouse.
“Stop it, Rafe,” Katie tried to push his hand away. “You’re hurting me.” She wrapped her fingers around his wrist and tugged harder, but Rafe was strong and wouldn’t let go. “Stop it! That hurts.”
“Aw, come on, girl.” He began unbuttoning her blouse and forced his mouth to hers bruising her lips. When they were courting, Rafe kissed her soft and shy like he was afraid to touch her. He was always clean-smelling and polite. But last night, when he’d gotten warmed up good, he couldn’t seem to find enough places to put his hands. Now his hands were grabbing and pulling at her clothes, yanking her blouse from her skirt and slipping underneath.
“We’re not even in the house, Rafe.” Katie tried to push his hands away.
“It don’t matter.” He pulled away the bag she’d been carrying and dropped it on the ground, but he didn’t let go of her. “Nobody’s around to see us.” He reached behind her and began untying her skirts. “Come on. Let’s see what it feels like in the daylight.”
“No, no.” She fought against him slapping her hands against his chest, twisting her face away from his until he pushed her hard away from him to the ground.
He stepped back from her and wiped the sweat from his face with the flat of his palms. He held the sides of his head with his hands and stood there. His voice was soft, but rough like the bark of birch tree. “What you saying no for, Katie?”
“Please, I don’t want to--” She kneaded her eyes with her hands and rolled over onto her side. Last night the woods had been dark when their hands moved together finding each other quietly. It was all new and precious, but the thought of lying with him in the morning sun out in the open seemed wrong and ugly.
He brushed his mouth with the back of his hand and squinted at her like she was a puzzle he had to work out. “You’re my wife, Katie. I got every right.” His hands clenched at his side. “I done all this for you. I got the house and the bed. I got a farm to work, hell, I even got dishes.and all you said was you ain’t got a stove.” His voice rose as his anger grew. “I’m tired, too. I walked all that way twice. I’m tireder than you by half.
Katie stared at her husband. A few hours ago his voice had been soft and whispered. He’d said things she’d never heard before, words that made her skin tingle, but now he seemed a stranger. She could see the anger in his stance, the way he planted his feet to stand his ground. Rafe was always sweet to her when he came to visit, but now it seemed like he took on a man’s attitude. A boy who was courting tried to keep his girl happy, but man could tell his wife what to do. She remembered then what her mother told her. When a husband gets his way, a woman’s life gets easier. Brushing the dirt from her blouse, she held her skirts up with one hand and sidled around him talking softly so as to keep him calm the way you do a horse that’s gotten spooked.
“Let’s go inside,” she said. “Inside'll be alright.” She walked backward toward the house, not taking her eyes off his face, but he didn’t follow until she reached the steps. She turned then to run into the house ahead of him. It’ll be alright, she thought. It’ll be just as sweet as it was in the dark. But it wasn’t. It was hot and hard and scared her and when he was done, Rafe left the cabin. Katie lay on the rough, tick mattress in the heat of the afternoon hardly caring to wave the flies away wondering how it could feel different this time. When she heard her husband moving around outside the house, she jumped up quickly and arranged her clothes hoping he would stay outside.
“Katie!” Rafe called through an open window. “I’m going over to David’s to tell him I got back. Get us some supper fixed. I’ll bring him so’s you can meet him.” Katie looked around the cabin wondering where the food supplies were. “You hear me, Katie?” Rafe pounded on the cabin’s wall.
“Yeah, I hear you. What do you want me to fix?” She didn’t see anything laying out.
“There’s some beans in a jar and some cornmeal in a bag in that trunk at the end of the bed.”
She looked over at the cedar trunk, then at the fireplace. He hadn’t even built the fire for her. It was going to be hot to cook, but it was always hot to cook in the summer. She sat down nearly side-saddle in the high backed chair near the table so she could study on the problem. It was a large fireplace, not just a coal one like in their parlor back home, but a large one with an iron crane attached to the fireplace jamb with a hinge so she could move a pot back and forth into the fire without stretching her arm over the flames. She spotted a skillet and a small cast iron pot with a lid. That would do for beans. She reckoned Rafe had been cooking somehow before he’d come for her. Her mother had given her a long-handled spoon and a big fork. There was a stack of split wood near the fireplace and a little kindling that might be enough to get the fire started. She knew about starting fires. She’d done that at home. Even a stove had to have a fire. There was a long tin of matches pinned to the wall. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. She’d have to clean out the ashes from the fire he'd left four days ago.
The canvas bags they carried all the way from Lindale had a few food supplies--a pound of sugar, two pounds of flour, two small tins of baking soda and powder, a little sack of salt. That bag survived the bear because it was covered up by the others. The bear only wanted what he could get to easily. She couldn’t carry butter because of the heat, but she was able to bring a slab of salt pork except the bear had eaten most of it. She could cut off the chewed-up pieces and use the fat for grease. There weren’t any apples left, but the raw peanuts still rolled around at the bottom even though the shells were crushed. Maybe she would use those for planting instead of roasting them.
Planting. Katie felt the blood drop to her feet. What happened to the seeds she’d brought? The okra and green beans? The turnips and mustard greens? The sunflowers and hollyhocks? She counted the empty bags, then looked through the clothes she’d dumped onto the bed. No seeds. Trembling with fear, she tried to think. Had they left a bag at the camp? The thought of walking back there was just awful, but she flew to the porch anyway to look the direction of the path and saw the bag Rafe had dropped off her shoulder onto the ground earlier. The seeds. She grabbed up the tow sacks she dropped next to the door. There they were, the seeds her daddy gave her, something from home to hold onto, something for the future to plan. She had her garden just like her daddy said, just like he showed her. Katie sank to the floor, the tow sack tight against her chest and wept like a child. Three days ago, she stood in the mill and tied knots in thread, picked up her last pay envelope, and walked home with her girlfriends giggling over her upcoming marriage. Three days ago, she wore ribbons in her hair. Today, she was a wife sticky with sweat who had to feed her husband. This wasn't the way she'd thought it would be. She dreamed of curtains blowing in a window and flowers at a gate. She'd never even thought about fixing a meal. All she had was beans and flour. Beans, flour, and a cold hearth.