Annie Clyde had come to feel closer to her husband. If she found him bent washing his face at the basin and pressed her cheek against the flesh of his back, it seemed that any worry she had would be erased. In their bed at night, under quilts in winter or naked on top of the sheets in summer, he explored even the inside of her mouth with his fingers. She tasted the bitterness of his shaving soap. His caught breath filled the cup of her ear. Once when she was big with Gracie, he pushed her dress up over her thighs and stomach, over the mounds of her breasts. She raised her arms for him to take it off and they looked together, James propped on his elbow. They took in her taut navel, her darkened nipples, her swollen ankles. He placed his hand on the round of her womb and the baby’s foot or fist rose to meet it. But Annie Clyde wasn’t the only one whose body had changed. During her pregnancy she cared for her mother while James ran the farm alone. He would leave the house before dawn with a bucket of cold dinner and stay gone until suppertime. He butchered the hog, chopped down trees for wood, spent whole days in the corncrib shelling or carrying boxes of kernels to the mill to be ground. While she had gained weight, he had lost some. There were new shadows under his eyes, new skinned places across his knuckles, a spider bite on his forearm from a black widow hiding in the woodpile. She thought how it must have hurt him and tears rolled from her eye corners toward her ears. James asked, “Why are you crying?” She said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Look at you. How beautiful you are.” She had held on to him, unable to tell his warmth from her own, not wanting the night to be over.
Then morning lit the curtains again, and the silence between them came back. It stretched out long at the breakfast table, with the kitchen still and Mary dying upstairs. In the evenings before Annie Clyde put out the lamps to save oil, she’d catch him drowsing again in his chair by the fire as she sewed buttons back on his shirts and feel as separate from him as she did from the dark outside. She’d think of the mountains brooding over the farm, the wind sweeping its forty acres. She wanted to talk to James, but they seldom knew what to say to each other. Annie Clyde saw her fault in it. She had always been one to keep to herself. Even as a baby she had wriggled out of Mary’s confining arms. When she started school she had made no friends. At first the girls and boys were drawn to her prettiness. Lined up in the mornings at the schoolhouse door, the boys had pulled her hair and the other girls had given her gifts of ribbons and peppermint. But her sullenness had finally driven them away. Annie Clyde didn’t know why she acted like she did. The others were the same as her in their flour sack dresses with nothing but pone bread for their dinner. All of them had toes poking out of holes in their shoes. There were no outcasts among them. Annie Clyde had made an outcast of herself. She would sit on the schoolhouse bench stiff and straight, too conscious of her sleeve touching the arm of another child.
Gracie had changed things when she came along. Annie Clyde couldn’t have kept all to herself if she wanted to anymore. Gracie followed her everywhere, always talking and singing and romping with the dog. Always wanting Annie Clyde’s attention, showing her buckeyes and seedpods and bugs. Whatever Annie Clyde’s neighbors thought of her sullenness, they’d been drawn to Gracie. She never felt like part of the town, but her daughter was somehow. They would stand at their mailboxes and wave as she walked Gracie down the road to Joe Dixon’s, where the old men bought her sticks of horehound candy. At church the old women took her onto their laps. Gracie looked like Annie Clyde, but she was more like James on the inside. She had her father’s friendliness about her, his kind nature. Last year when Gracie was two they took her to a molasses-making at the Hankins farm across the road. Dale Hankins grew sorghum cane, his back field high with thin stalks, their ends tasseled umber with seeds. Before dark he would feed the stalks into a cane mill between steel rollers, the juice pouring into vats to be boiled. It took ten gallons of cane juice to make one of molasses. All the neighbors for miles gathered to gossip and tell stories, the little ones playing and the teenagers courting, the men leaning under the shade trees with their hats stacked on a post of the hog pen and their overalls still dusted with the work of the day. Once the moon rose and the cane juice was ready for boiling, Dale would bring out his guitar. It was tradition for some of the children to dance on the cane fodder scattering the ground. That night Gracie had thrown off her shoes and whirled barefoot to the strumming, dress flared out like a bell. She’d stomped and shook her curls as the whole town laughed and clapped. Annie Clyde had felt close to her neighbors. But then she’d noticed Beulah Kesterson with the pouch of bones around her neck, wrinkled face lurid in the firelight, watching Gracie without smiling. After that, the night was ruined for Annie Clyde. The old woman gave her an ill feeling.
Now she looked at Gracie sitting on the back of the fallen beech and felt overcome with such loss that she had to shut her eyes. She had managed not to cry for two years and wouldn’t let herself break down now. This was like dreams she’d had as a child of her parents dying, without the relief of waking and knowing it wasn’t true. The wind rose again, blowing strands of hair across her face and fluttering the sleeves of her dress. She opened her eyes, too aware of a weight in her pocket. It was the tin top the drifter had given Gracie. It seemed to Annie Clyde in that moment like a threat or a curse. On impulse she pulled it out with disgust and tossed it while Gracie wasn’t looking into the shadows under the beech tree’s tortured roots. She felt somewhat better when she couldn’t see it anymore. She wiped her palms on the front of her dress then went to lift her daughter off the beech’s back, swung her up and held her close. Gracie’s slender arms came around Annie Clyde’s neck and they studied each other, their noses inches apart. Gracie’s eyes were the same as her grandmother Mary’s had been, wide brown with an amber shine to them. Gracie took a lock of Annie Clyde’s hair and twisted it up in her fingers, like she used to do when she was nursing. “Come on,” Annie Clyde said, pushing her nose against Gracie’s. “We better get Rusty to the house before he runs off and leaves us again.”