come up with the rest of us to help on Saturdays. Meanwhile, we can knock some sense into him if he goes after any of his own family again. If your daddy has questions, he can come see me.”
Daddy talked to Momma and then drove me back to the farm. It took Frank about five minutes to pack up the duffel bag and they were gone.
Later, when I was putting clean sheets on the bed in his room, I found one of Frank’s photographs under the bed—the one with the burned girl in it. I kept it.
I hadn’t liked what Frank said about Cole. I didn’t know what else he might say. Since Frank had arrived, Cole had visited only a few times and then we just sat on the porch talking, the tension of what we wanted sparking around us. If we got caught, both our daddies would have shotguns after us, baby or no baby coming. I wasn’t particularly romantic, but I wanted to choose my husband rather than have my daddy decide for me. Though I wanted to be near Cole, I wasn’t sure I loved him, and he was still more boy than man. Not ready to be a husband.
The next time I saw Cole at church, I told him he couldn’t be coming over anymore, that I was afraid of getting into trouble. He thought I was talking about getting pregnant. He’d be careful, he assured me.
“I mean getting caught by my daddy,” I said. “Momma seems to know something. And if she knows anything, he’ll know it soon enough.” At the mention of my daddy, Cole took a step back and looked so sad and defeated that I found myself adding, “Not forever, just a few months—until after Christmas.”
“So you gonna wait until after Christmas to give me my present?” He trotted off to join his family, but I heard the grin in his voice.
That was late October. The cold nights were already coming on, and the trees had turned. Christmas seemed a long time to wait.
But those weeks alone again gave me time to think. Becoming Cole’s wife—or any man’s, for that matter—would mean leaving the farm. A wife was expected to follow her husband.
By then, I’d been on the farm over two years. I’d managed to keep a good-size kitchen garden, most of the livestock, and a few acres of hay, corn, and alfalfa. Even with the help of my family, it had not been easy. I was proud of my work. I wanted to stay where I was. Alone in my bed at night, I wanted Cole, but I didn’t want anything else to change.
But things did change.
For Christmas, Momma got one of her wishes. By virtue of her interest in the farm and the small sum she paid her siblings, the deed to the farm was hers. None of my aunts and uncles wanted to live in a house without an indoor toilet or electric lights. If it had been up to Momma, she and Daddy would have moved to the farm, but he wouldn’t have it. Momma made it clear to me that the farm was mine to live on as long as I kept the family in vegetables, eggs, milk, and meat. I knew I could keep my part of that bargain.
As everyone returned to their post-holiday work routines and Cole, who still had not received his “present,” was laid up with the flu, an early January snow fell. The house ticked and sighed around me with the change of temperature. Outside, an expectant hush of white enveloped the land. The contours of the world changed, angles softened to clean abstractions of themselves. The blank expanse of the fields seemed new, brilliant, and beguiling.
A week later, as the snow melted, receding to expose the rust-red clay again, the farm seemed reborn. A hard, steady rain followed. Lightning winked on the horizon and thunder muttered, still distant. Within hours, water rose between the house and the slight elevation of the fields. From the parlor window, I looked down at a narrow rush of water, roiling against the foundation of the house like a trapped animal seeking escape. The fields usually drained east behind the barn, then on to the creek or south to the tracks. But now they sent their runoff straight at the house as if the land had, indeed, undergone some subtle shift. In all my time at the farm, including the times with Eva when I