The morning air the next day 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’re 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.
Rafe 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. My mother 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 by 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 had imagined more. His words had painted a picture that she couldn’t see in the world around her. What she saw 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 stamped her foot and rubbed her eyes with balled up fists.
“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 outhouse 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.
“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.
“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 back 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.
“Last night you wanted to.” 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. So if I want to have you as my wife right now, you need to do what I want.”
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 will be all right.” 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 all right, 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?” 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. Looking around for utensils, 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. On the mantel, she could see a long tin that probably held matches. 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. 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. Running toward the bag she began to cry for the second time today. She cried out of sheer relief that she had 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 ground clasping the tow sack to her and wept. Four days ago, she stood in a mill and tied knots in thread, picked up her last pay envelope and walked home with her girlfriends complaining that the foreman yelled when she had to stop the machine because too many threads broke at once. Today, she was a wife trying to figure out how to feed her husband. She looked up at the chimney to see the smoke had stopped. The fire was out. Supper was moving even further away. Before she was ready, she heard boots on the steps outside the door.
“David, this is my wife, Katie. Katie, David.” Rafe’s smile was broad and proud. David stood quietly next to his younger brother, nearly a head taller, lean and raw-boned. She could see his large, red knuckles on the rough hand he stretched out in welcome. Where Rafe was loud and excited, David was still and quiet.
“I hope the walk didn’t tire you out much.” David nodded once at her.
She glanced at Rafe and kept working at the fireplace. She’d found the plates and put them on the table with the forks and knives.
“I’m trying to make corn cakes, but I keep burning them. I ain’t never cooked on a fire before.”
“It can’t be much different than a stove. Only a stove’s got a top on it and a fire don’t.” Rafe straddled a chair as he sat at the table.
David looked from one to the other.
“I guess you would think it’s the same, Rafe, since you been eating at my house. Don’t let him fool you. He don’t cook at all, Katie.”
“Can you get us some water, Rafe? I can’t leave this right now, and that bucket’s too heavy anyhow when it’s got water in it. I could only get a half a bucket when I went before.”
David moved toward the fire. “I can show you how to set the skillet so you can get the heat right, if you want me to.”
Katie looked at him while she stirred the beans. “I’d like that, thank you.”
“First, you got the grate in the wrong place.” He used a poker to push it back into the mouth of the fireplace.
“The fire goes under it, not on top. You want to set the grate further back so that you can put your pot back there to bake and pull the embers out toward you so you can set your skillet down on them. See, the skillets’s got little feet on it to raise it up. That way it’s not directly on them. You got your bean pot on the crane right, though. Just push it further in to get all the heat.” He dusted his hands off and wiped them on his pant legs.
“That dutch oven’s really heavy, especially when it’s full, so only use it when you have something to cook a long time, like a Sunday roast. That way the fire can burn down so it won’t be as dangerous when you go to get it out.”
“That’s the best cooking lesson I’ve ever had, I reckon.”
“I’m sure you can cook real good. You just got to learn how to use a fireplace to do it.”
Rafe walked in with a bucket of water in each hand. He looked from David to Katie and back again.
“What y’all talking about?”
“David’s just telling me how to set up the fireplace to do my cooking in.” Katie smiled happily at Rafe, but her eyes lingered on David a second too long before she turned to pick up the corn cakes to place them on the table. Glaring at his brother, Rafe spoke to Katie.
“You should of asked me how to do that. I could of told you.”
“Let me get that bean pot for you.” David reached for a towel to wrap around the sloped, wire handle. He set the hot, cast-iron pot down on a metal trivet instead of the wood.
“You don’t want to put the pot directly on the wood table, Katie. If it’s too hot, it’ll burn a ring in.” He pointed to the circles already on the surface. “I don’t reckon it’d make any difference anymore though.”
“You sure are acting smart, brother. I don’t remember you giving me any of these lessons when I moved in.” Rafe yanked a high-back chair with a woven seat over to the table.
“From the condition of this tabletop, I can see that I should have.” David grinned at his younger brother while he sat down. Rafe rested his elbows on the table.
“I’m starved. Dang, that's a long walk, then that bear after us."
“Bear?” David glanced at the two of them. “You didn’t tell me about a bear.”
“Early this morning when we was sleeping then I hear something messing and snorting around. I opened up my eyes, and there was a big, black bear tearing through our sacks.” Rafe used his arms to show how big the bear was.
“It was full-grown, too. And I bet it was hungry.”
“Didn’t you tie the bags up off the ground like I told you?”
Rafe looked at Katie and grinned. We fell asleep early, and I never woke back up to do it.”
“Rafe covered me up so the bear couldn’t see me.” Katie was proud of her husband.
“He like to have smothered me to death, but he took care of me.”
“I was afraid that bear was going to eat my backside though. Are we going to eat?” Katie got up to get the spoon to serve.
“I fried some fatback in the skillet so I’d have some grease for the corn cakes, then I used the pieces to go in the beans. I don’t know if these beans cooked long enough. I don't know how hot things are hanging them over the fire this way.”
“I expect it’ll be fine.” David spooned beans onto his plate. The liquid was nearly all water, not the rich gravy that would develop when beans were cooked properly for several hours.
Rafe reached for the plate of corn cakes. As he lifted one, then another, he could see the bottoms was burnt black.
“Are they all burned, Katie?"
He threw two corn cakes onto his plate.
“I did the best I could. I told you I ain’t never cooked in a fireplace before.” Katie wiped her face with a towel to take the sweat off. She was thirsty. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbows and her hair was pinned up off of her neck.
David bit into a forkful of beans. They were still crunchy, but he chewed them quietly. Rafe took a mouthful, chewed and spit them back out onto his plate.
“These ain’t hardly hot. I thought you said you knew how to cook.”
Katie kept her eyes focused on her plate with her hands flat on either side of her plate. She knew it wasn’t good. Only three hours since she got here, and she’s cooking beans in an iron pot in a fireplace.
“I can’t eat this.” Rafe threw his fork into his plate. Katie startled at the sound. “What have we got left over? Anything?”
“Only what the bear didn’t eat. A slice of cake I was saving and a ham biscuit.”
David swallowed his mouthful of beans with a big gulp of water. “I reckon I have some canned peaches y’all might enjoy. I’ll just run over and get them.”
Before David got out the door good, Rafe lit into Katie. “Is this the best you can do?
“We just got here. How am I supposed to fix anything when they ain’t nothing to fix? You got a garden somewhere? I can’t just walk in and cook nothing and make it something. I got to have time, too, like how to use this fireplace.” As she talked, Katie got angry. She’d cried enough on the second day she was married. She was angry now.
“This ain’t what you promised me. You promised me a good house. You promised a farm. This ain’t no farm. This is a piece of land and a broken-down shack. I got a mind to head back home right now.” She jerked her arm out and pointed to the door. “What do you think my daddy’d say if he knew what you brung me to?” Rafe turned on his heel. He slammed the door open banging it against the wall and marched away through the field away from his new wife even though his legs trembled from tiredness.
In the house, Katie flopped onto a hard chair and stared at the doorway with her stomach churning. Tiredness settled into her spine. She was so tired, it was hard to breathe.
“Katie?” She heard David on the porch. “Here’s the peaches. Where’s Rafe?”
“He done took off.”
“I’ll go find him in a bit.” He stood next to the table where he’d set the peaches and fiddled with the clasp on the canning jar.
“Katie, Rafe’s got some growing up to do. You both do. Y’all got to figure out how to grow up and be married at the same time. He didn’t get things ready for you too well. Tomorrow we can go into town and get some supplies from the store to get you set up. Did he show you the garden??”
She rubbed her dripping nose with her wrist. “No, I didn’t even know there was one.”
"We got a big garden up the hill. Corn's coming up already. And we put in potatoes right before he went down to get you. Did you bring any seeds with you?
“My daddy sent me with a sackful of seeds. All sorts.”
“Good. We’ll get you a real good garden, then. You scrape these beans back into the pot. If you’ll push the arm of that crane over the fire, it’ll cook all night, then in the morning, you’ll have some fine beans for breakfast. You got any salt?”
“There’s a little over there in the trunk.”
“Good. Throw a pinch of salt in. That’ll help the flavor.” He tapped the table with his knuckles.
“I’ll get on then. I’ll send Rafe back over when I find him.”
Katie watched him walk away from the house swinging his bent arms in time to his jog. David made her husband seem like a boy, but back home, Rafe had seemed a man next to the boys at the mill and in her church. Rafe came in broad-shouldered and swaggering, showing up in town on market days and Sunday mornings. When he noticed her one Saturday morning in town, she’d been thrilled by his attention. Then, Sundays he turned up at church service smiling at her from across the aisle. It wasn’t long before they were walking home from church and before she really knew it, she was married and moved away from home. She was finding out that what she’d heard from her family might well be true. “Marry in haste; repent in leisure,” her mother’d told her more than once; but she didn’t listen. All she saw was blue eyes that stared into hers and wavy blond hair that curled around the back of his ears. She saw strong forearms that looked like they could lift her up without him breathing hard. She thought he was beautiful, and she didn’t care what her mother said about cooking and keeping house because she wasn’t thinking about anything but him. Besides this was only two days. Only two days into marriage. Surely things would get better as they got to know one another better. She could learn to fix what he liked and keep the house the way he wanted. He was only being mean because he was tired from all that walking. And he was hungry. She should have planned better and saved some of the food instead of them eating it while they walked. She moved around the place fixing the beans to cook all night, laying the tin with the cake on the table and wrapping the plate holding the last biscuit with a flour sack. He could eat that when he got back. Then he’d feel better. Mama always said that food in his stomach makes a happy man.