Pamela Morsi (2 page)

The preacher glanced around at the other men and then spoke to Eulie more quietly, as if he preferred that others didn’t hear.

“He’s your husband now, Eulie,” he said. “What’s between you two is none of our concern.” He hesitated thoughtfully. “If … if he beats you, you can come back to the parsonage. In your condition, Mrs. Thompson and I wouldn’t hesitate to take you in.”

Her eyes widened. The preacher thought Moss Collier might beat her. She had never even considered that. Although she did suppose she knew the fellow might be some put out with her. Most fellows seemed to want to choose their own wife. But Moss Collier was pretty old not to have gotten around to choosing. He looked easily twenty-five years of age and nary a potential
bride in sight. It might even be said that Eulie had done the man a favor.

Of course the husband-man himself might not see it that way. And he might well be the kind of man who impressed his opinion upon his nearest with the aid of a strap or a switch. Eulie wasn’t really used to such. Pa had taken a razor strop to Ransom a time or two for sassing him. Her brother had a fresh mouth and an argumentative nature. It was a father’s duty to try to teach his son respect. But Pa had never been in a temper about it. He’d done it as if it were a distasteful chore that he hated more than Rans did.

Eulie supposed telling a lie that forced Moss Collier to marry up with her might well be a beating offense. If it was her due punishment, she’d take it, but she wasn’t about to allow nobody, not even a husband-man, to make a rug of her for his own comfort.

“Don’t worry about me, Preacher,” she assured him. “My family and me, we’ll be just fine. Eulie Toby takes care of her own.”

Her confidence was unshakable. The old preacher didn’t look so certain.

“You’re Eulie Collier now,” he pointed out.

A change of name wouldn’t make any difference.

With a spring in her step, Eulie began gathering up her things and her family. There was very little of the former and a lot of the latter. She’d left the Knox homestead that morning with all her worldly possessions tied into a ten-pound poke. The weather had looked sunny and bright and she’d determined that it was a perfect day for a wedding, so it might as well be hers. With yesterday being Preaching Sunday, she knew that the pastor of the Sweetwood congregation
was still at home. He’d be setting off tomorrow to ride his circuit. If she didn’t get married today, she’d have to wait a whole month. She simply decided that sooner was better than later.

Smiling and cheerful, with her brother at her side, Eulie began making her way up the path toward Moss Collier’s place on the high ridge above the falls. She was as familiar with these narrow mountain trails as the back side of her own hand. Eulie had lived her whole life within the shadow of the tall, tree-covered peaks. It was where she was from and all she knew. It was all her mother and father knew. It was where the Toby family had lived out their lives for half a dozen generations. And Eulie was going to see that they survived here for a dozen more.

At her side, her brother was silent until they were out of hearing range of the men at the meetinghouse.

“I don’t like him, Eulie,” her brother declared. “No way, no how, I just don’t like him.”

She gave her ill-tempered sibling a dismissing glance of unconcern. “Oh, Rans, you don’t like anybody,” she reminded him.

Ransom didn’t argue the fact, but he still didn’t look pleased.

“I don’t know why you have to up and marry some fellow anyway,” he countered.

“I explained all that to you,” Eulie said. “It was the only way that we could all be together. Nobody in the Sweetwood is going to let a family of women and children sharecrop for them. And you ain’t big enough to do it on your own. If we are ever going to have our own place again, one of us gals has to marry some land.”

“Then you should have let Clara do it,” Rans told
her. “Mr. Leight’s a fine fellow. I wouldn’t have no caution about him joining the family.”

Eulie turned to look her brother in the eye. His bowl-cut blond hair was not as clean as it could have been, and his face was in need of a good scrubbing as well, though it was difficult to tell how much was dirt stains and how much freckles.

“Clara is not marrying that old Bug,” Eulie stated adamantly. “I don’t know where you’d get such an idea.”

“From them,” Rans answered. “You ain’t seen them together, Eulie. I told you, they’re plumb lovestruck with each other.”

Eulie snorted in disapproval. “Well, sure enough he’d be lovestruck with her. Clara’s the sweetest, kindest, prettiest girl in the Sweetwood and I ain’t just saying that ‘cause she’s my sister. But him …”

Eulie screwed up her face in an expression of distaste.

“They don’t call him Bug ‘cause he’s got a pig-face.”

“It ain’t his fault, Eulie. The doctor down at McComb says he’s got some kind of glandular complaint,” Rans told her, not for the first time. “That’s what makes his eyes bulge out like that.”

“Well, my sister ain’t marrying nobody that’s got no glandular complaint, especially not one what looks like a click beetle.”

“Well, ain’t you just the belle of the valley,” Ransom sneered. “You’re not so dadblamed pretty yourself that you need to be carrying on about the shortcomings of others. Looks ain’t everything.”

“And looks ain’t everything the man’s doing without,” she countered. “Bug is as dull as a widow’s ax and easily half as smart.”

“I don’t care what you say, I’d still rather have him for a brother-in-law over a fellow who acts like he ain’t got no use for you nor none of your kin,” Rans told her.

Eulie waved his words away.

“Moss Collier’ll suit us just fine,” she assured him. “He just ain’t got used to the idea of marrying and starting a family.”

“The way I heared it, he done started one already,” Rans answered.

When Eulie didn’t answer, he stopped abruptly in his tracks and stared at her in disbelief.

“Good Lord save us all!” he said under his breath. “You lied about it, didn’t you.”

Eulie hushed him with her hand and glanced around guiltily.

“It ain’t no big catastrophe,” she assured him in a whisper. “Moss was sure to come around sooner or later. A little tall tale just had it happening more speedy than was perfectly natural.”

Rans had covered his face with his hands and was shaking his head in disbelief.

“No wonder he continued to deny it all, even after it was certain they was going to insist he marry up,” Rans said.

“He’ll just get used to the idea of all of us and he’ll be settled and resigned to it,” Eulie said with certainty.

“Lord, he’ll probably kill us all in our beds and feel right and justified,” Rans moaned.

“The man needs a wife, clear and simple,” Eulie declared. “It ain’t like I cain’t do the job.”

“Oh, my God,” Rans whispered under his breath. “Oh, my God almighty.”

“Quit taking the Lord’s name in vain!” Eulie scolded.

“Don’t be reproving me, Eulie Toby,” Rans snapped. “You’ve done told the biggest lie ever heard in the Sweetwood.”

“It ain’t all that big a lie,” she said “He did kiss me.”

“He kissed you.”

“Yes, he done kissed me,” Eulie said. “I made myself all pretty and then sort of chanced upon him. He kissed me of his own free will, so it ain’t totally a lie.”

“Kissing ain’t getting a baby,” Rans told her. “If you had it in your head to tell such a tale, you should have at least a let him have a shag so he could wonder.”

“A shag?”

Rans stared at her incredulously.

“You don’t even know what it is, do you?”

Eulie was silent.

“You’re so dadblamed ignorant, you don’t even know where babies come from.”

“I do, too,” Eulie shot back. “I just didn’t know what you call it.”

Rans continued to shake his head. “We’ll be murdered in our beds.”

“Just stop that foolish talk,” Eulie said. “I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“Eulie, this ain’t going to work,” Rans told her quietly.

“It already has,” she answered “Now it’s getting late and it’s a long way up the mountain. You best be getting the youngers. I want to get Little Minnie and still have time to fix the husband-man a good meal.”

“A plate full of hot food ain’t going to fix this,” Rans warned.

“Just stop your worrying,” she said “Everything is going to be just fine.”

As Eulie watched her brother take the ridge row path, she wondered if she believed the words herself. But she raised her chin and headed her own way, determined. Eulie had learned most of life’s lessons at her mother’s knee. And if there was anything that her mother had been certain about, it was that the more distasteful the job, the quicker it had to be faced. In the last few years, Eulie had been forced to face more distasteful jobs than she cared to think about.

Her mother, a strong, hearty woman who had always seemed capable of overcoming even the most daunting of life’s obstacles, had succumbed to childbed fever only a week after the birth of Little Minnie. Her death had been more than a husband’s grief for Virgil Toby. A sickly, often listless daydreamer, he’d counted on his wife both to do most of the work and to raise his children. His death last year was as much from simply giving up as it was from the weak, rheumatic heart he’d lived with from childhood.

At age seventeen, Eulie had found herself to be in possession of very little and the head of a large household. Clara had been able to take on most of the child-care duties of Little Minnie, Ransom, though prone to complaint and quick to take umbrage, was a very hard worker. And the twins were as biddable as two children could be. But it had not been enough to keep the family together. Within months they had all been farmed out, living at different places.

The twins had gone to live with Mrs. Patchel. The old widow, known as Miz Patch, was the finest weaver and tatter around. Lately she was bothered with aching bones, and she’d been eager to provide a home for the two nine-year-olds who could thread the loom
and do needlework from daylight till dark.

Little Minnie stayed with the Pierce family. It was Enoch Pierce’s land that Virgil Toby had been sharecropping. The bond between landlord and sharecropper was usually tenuous, requiring only an occasional conversation and an annual payment. But the Pierces had taken an active interest in the Toby children after their mother’s death. Enoch checked on them daily and often brought meat and game for the table. His wife, Judith, had been equally kind and dependable. She had taken quite a shine to Little Minnie. Evicting the Tobys had been a necessary cruelty. It was made more palatable to the Pierces by their taking the youngest to be raised in their home.

Farmer Leight had hired on Ransom to help him. Bug seemed to be one of the few people in the world to get along well with Rans. When the farmer later offered room and board for Clara to cook and clean for him, it seemed an ideal situation. It might have stayed that way if the fellow hadn’t cast his bulging insect eyes upon Eulie’s sister.

But that was all in the past now. Eulie was married fair and square to Moss Collier. She’d have her whole family together again under one roof.

Unwillingly her thoughts drifted to what Rans had called shagging. She’d been raised outside for the most part and was not totally ignorant of the ways of procreation. Of course, she’d never been allowed anywhere near the pens when the hogs were bred, but she’d seen birds and squirrels pairing up.

Eulie swallowed a little unhappily. It didn’t look like anything she’d personally like to do. Downright embarrassing, she thought. Still, she supposed that
now that she was married she’d have to let the husband-man shag a time or two. But if Moss Collier thought she’d be allowing that every spring like some barnyard animal, she’d simply have to dissuade him of the notion.

And if her brother Rans thought she was going to allow herself to be worried and anxious on the happiest day of her life, well, he was just as cross-hinged as a two-headed pup.

M
OSS
didn’t return to his plowing. When he got back to the field, he’d hitched up the jenny. The dependable little she-mule was right, ready, and agreeable to pull, but when Moss stared at that rocky ground and thought about those extra six mouths to feed, he just got so mad all over again that he didn’t work a lick. He walked up and down the half-turned rows cursing a blue streak and wishing his new bride into perdition.

She was going to be sorry. Eulie Toby and her whole worthless, hungry family were going to be sorry. With them like a millstone around his neck, why, he might never get West. And if he didn’t, they’d be sorry. The whole sorry lot of them would be sorry.

He went over the events of the morning again and again. Even knowing what had come to pass, he still suffered from disbelief. How could a slip of a stringy-haired gal just walk up to the preacher and declare herself dishonored and point to him as the guilty party? It was as if his ability to resist temptation meant nothing.

He remembered that afternoon at the falls with vivid clarity. He’d been out with his old hound running a fox to ground when he’d happened upon her. Sitting on the big rock, she was dangling one foot into
the water while she combed through her damp hair. Her unexpected appearance momentarily startled him. And the sight of her bare leg hastily covered by her skirt was equally disconcerting. All flushed and clean from bathing, her body was outlined with exquisite accuracy by her thin cotton clothes. His imagination had taunted him. What if he’d arrived only moments earlier? What if he had caught her wet and naked in the frothing water? The fantasy had him immediately aroused. The reality of the feminine charms within his reach was a lusty provocation.

“Morning,” he’d said, politely doffing his hat.

“A good morning to you, too, sir,” she’d answered. Her smile was broad and welcoming, all plump pink lips and pearly white teeth.

The old hound quit his tracking and hurried, tail a-wagging, to her side. She immediately began to scratch him behind the ears.

“What’s the dog’s name?” she asked.

Moss shrugged “I just call him Old Hound.”

She laughed at his words. It was a warm, enticing sound.

“Well, hello there, Old Hound,” she said to the animal and commenced talking baby talk to him in a pouty-mouth fashion.

As Moss watched her hugging and snuggling against the dog’s neck, prickles of excitement skittered upon his skin like lightning. If she had that much affection for an old hound, how much love might she have for a man?

She spoke to him with words so soft they could not be heard over the rumble of water cascading down the river over great flat boulders.

“What did you say?” he asked her.

She raised her hand to him and he helped her off of her rocky perch. Stepping up within arm’s length of him, she smelled fresh and sweet. She gazed up at him with eyes of awed anticipation and innocence.

“I’ll have to get closer to hear you,” she replied.

Moss wondered if she could hear the pounding of his heart. It was certainly sounding loud enough in his own ears.

“I hope you don’t mind me washing in your falls,” she said.

He nodded mutely, unable to reply.

“I guess I wasn’t really in your falls,” she continued. “I was sitting there on that rock next to the falls. It’s on the creek side. Nobody owns the creek.”

“No … nobody owns the river, or the falls, neither,” he assured her. “It just is smack-dab in the middle of my acreage.”

He didn’t want to talk about farmland. He didn’t want to talk about anything. She was there, so close to him. He didn’t want to talk at all.

“You’re looking right pretty, and real welcome,” he said.

She blushed and lowered her chin before glancing up at him beneath demure lashes. She seemed to be such a cheerful, happy person, it was difficult to look at her without smiling. It was like sunshine bubbled up inside her bursting to get out.

“My name’s Eulie,” she said. “Miss Eulie Toby. Thank you for allowing me to wash in your water.”

The reminder that she was so recently naked teased him, and Moss felt a near-irresistible desire to do likewise. He raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Do you mean that you don’t intend to pay?”

“Pay?”

“Why yes, Miss Eulie,” he said. “Don’t tell me you are unaware of a tariff on the use of Flat Rock Falls for bathing.”

“A tariff?” She looked genuinely concerned. “How much is the tariff?”

Moss smiled at her.

“Well, it depends,” he answered. “For somebody’s old stray milk cow, I usually charge a bucket of sweet cream skimmed from the top. For a noisy old goose, I might roast her offspring for Sunday dinner. Now a pretty little gal like you—well, I suspect a kiss might seem a fair enough trade.”

He’d half expected her to huff up and give him what for. That’s what nice females had a tendency toward, he was certain. But she didn’t do that at all. She raised her head and pursed her lips, closing her eyes in expectation.

Moss had looked at that upturned mouth for a very long moment. He’d been careful to avoid the young gals of the Sweetwood. They were looking for mates. He’d made certain that he was always looking in the other direction. Best not to catch the eye of a maiden who was marriage-minded. As he gazed down at the slim young woman with the pretty blonde hair and the puckered little mouth, his resolve faltered. One kiss wouldn’t hurt anything, he assured himself.

One kiss had ruined his life. He should have just walked away. While she had her eyes closed he should have turned his back on her and run as if his life depended upon it. Because in a way it did.

Moss gave a whispered curse under his breath.

She’d trapped him. She’d lied about him and trapped him like some fool rabbit in a snare. If he had any sense at all he’d take off running now. It still wasn’t too late. He could just walk out on the whole lot of them. Leave them high and dry and head out west on his own. That’s what they deserved. That’s what
she
deserved.

In his fury, Moss eyed the big sandstone boulder that he’d been plowing around all his life. It graced the center of his cornfield, ever unmovable, ever in the way. Today that rock looked even larger than it had before.

Frustrated, he kicked it, then howled in pain at the ungiving reception it had offered his foot. He’d acted the fool and now he was suffering for it.

Limping, he unhitched the mule back from the turning plow, which he left standing in the field. He gathered up the leading strings on Red Tex and led the animals down the mountain toward his place. He still felt shame at his public humiliation and anger at the conniving Jezebel. Those emotions, however, were overridden by an incredible gnawing sense of disappointment that was so sharp he could nearly vomit. He was tied now. Tied with the bonds of matrimony. Tied to that woman and her kin. Tied to this place, once again.

As a boy it had looked so easy. All he had to do to get away was grow up. And growing up happened without even trying. He’d grow up and he’d move away. He’d leave behind the hardscrabble life that made men tired and old. Break free of the restraints and constriction of mountain ways. Declare his freedom from the land that held him prisoner.

But he’d learned that growing up could be different
than a man thought. He’d learned that as he leaned tearful over his fevered mother’s deathbed.

“Promise me you’ll take care of Jeptha,” she’d whispered. “He ain’t going to have nobody but you. You got to promise to care for him all his life.”

“I promise, Ma,” he’d whispered. “I promise to take care of Uncle Jeptha. Now you promise to get better. You promise to get well, Ma.”

She hadn’t made the vow she couldn’t keep. They’d lowered her into cold Tennessee ground less than a week later.

He hadn’t worried much about Uncle Jeptha. Jeptha was old and sick, ruined from the war and not long for this world. That’s what young Moss had thought. Ten years later, his uncle was exactly the same as he had always been. He seemed not older, nor sicker, nor any more eager to meet his maker.

Not that Moss wanted him dead. That was not it at all. The old man was family, his only family. And he would always keep his mother’s dying wish. Still, Uncle Jeptha stood in the way of his leaving. And Moss couldn’t quite help but resent that.

But now it wasn’t just him. Now it was all of them. Stringy-haired Eulie and her five youngers would forever be a rock he couldn’t move, one he’d spend the rest of his life plowing around. Moss cursed once more, while only Red Tex and the old jenny could hear him.

He made his way down, around, and up once more to the homestead. The earth smelled of spring, fertile with forest duff and green moss. In the distance, a lark sang in the meadow. Closer, a big grasshopper whirred in the tall grass.

The cornfield was almost within shouting range of
the house, but the rocky ridge paths that skirted the water’s edge made the traveling route from one point to the other three times the distance. The high land next to the river was surrounded by dense woods and reed-thick backwash marshes. The cold, clear water bred fish and fowl in abundance. That had apparently held a keen attraction to his mother’s ancestor, the old Scotsman, who had settled upon the land over a hundred years ago.

Glancing around the homestead where five generations of his family had been born, Moss thought about the old Scotsman. He had
chosen
this place to live. All Moss’s life, he’d craved the same opportunity, to choose his own place to make his own mark. The last thing that he’d wanted was simply to live out some destiny that had been forced upon him. A destiny some lying Jezebel had forced upon him.

The barn, like the rest of the buildings on his place, had been constructed before the war. Aged and sagging now, it could hardly manage to keep the weather out. The pens and split-rail enclosures were weak and rotted. Red Tex and the mule stayed within their confinement only by force of habit.

Moss had not spent money or time on a new barn or new fences. He was leaving this place. He was leaving it all behind. He was going west. As he awaited his opportunity, he neglected his farm. Only the essential tasks were accomplished; all his profits were hoarded and stored.

Moss unhitched the mule and casually surveyed his surroundings. They did not look like fields and farm capable of supporting eight people. They looked poor. They were poor. The sack of coin stowed away in the strongbox beneath his bed notwithstanding, the place
was kept no better than a sharecropper’s hovel.

He shook his head. He would have thought that a scheming Jezebel determined to force a man to marry her would have at least picked a fellow who appeared prosperous. Of course, maybe this dreary place seemed familiar. Certainly the poor, rocky scratches that her father had farmed looked no better. He recalled with some displeasure how cheerful and pleased she was at the wedding. Perhaps the woman was just not quite right in the head. That would explain a lot.

Moss snorted in disgust. That would just top it all, he decided. Not only was he saddled with a woman he didn’t know and her whole hungry family, she was probably teched to boot.

When he finished with the mule, Moss rubbed down Red Tex carefully and adoringly. The big red horse was the living symbol of all that Moss wanted and all that he dreamed about. He was a Texas horse, bred for wide plains and working cattle. He was tangible proof of the commitment to go west. Moss loved him.

The horse had been run hard that day, hard enough to lather. And then he’d been left to stand while Moss had cursed and kicked rocks. He deserved a bit of attention and some good treatment. It sure wasn’t the horse’s fault that that no-account lying woman had slithered in and ruined his life. Lingering over the task, he thought once more of his lawfully wedded wife, and it drew his mouth into one thin line of displeasure. He thought of her damp clothes against her body. He thought of her arms so lovingly wrapped around his old hunting dog. Grimly, he thought of the matrimonial trap he had fallen into.

“If she’s so dang fond of that old hound, maybe I’ll
have her sleep under the porch with him,” he boasted to Red Tex unkindly.

Once the horse was clean and relaxed, Moss gave him a bucket full of oats and headed for the cabin. He had to give Uncle Jeptha the news, though he dreaded it like the plague. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened. He didn’t want to have to explain himself to anyone. But the subject couldn’t be avoided She and her family would be showing up before supper. Moss couldn’t just allow them to arrive unexpected. He had to tell Uncle Jeptha. And he wasn’t at all sure how the old man would take it. Moss had been shackled to this land all his life, but it was, after all, Jeptha’s farm.

This homeplace, the double cabin that had been sitting on the flat of this ridge since the old Scotsman built it, was two windowless rooms with a wide porch running the total length of the front and side. The kitchen and smokehouse were separate, a stone’s throw away. That building had burned once and was rebuilt, though the fireplace, blackened both outside and in, bore witness to the ferocity of the blaze. Moss had laid brown river rock chiseled flat and even as paving for a walkway easy to traverse and free of spring mud. But the safe distance from the cooking fire could seem a lengthy trip on a cold winter morning.

The double cabin had a small fireplace of its own that was used only in the very frostiest weather. He and Uncle Jeptha didn’t require a lot of space, so they lived in one room and used the other for storage. The two men were satisfied with the arrangement and it saved them from the need to replace the leaky roof on the grain shed.

Moss deduced with annoying certainty that with the
place about to be filled to the rafters with unwanted children, he’d be repairing those shake shingles atop the shed very soon.

With spring already nearly upon them, Moss had removed the front door and replaced it with a frame-stretched wire screen. It would keep the worst of the pests and insects out of the place and offer a bit of ventilation to the windowless building.