Free Man in the Blue Moon by Michael Morris Page A

unfolded on his forehead. A stream of blood darkened the floor and the pieces of white china.
    That night after Harlan was sewn up, Ella put him to bed in a stack of hay inside the barn. She awoke the next morning expecting to find her husband mournful and ready to repent. Instead there was only the indentation of his body on crushed hay. Harlan had seemingly disappeared into the ground. At the breakfast table, none of the boys said a word about what they had witnessed the night before or if they expected their father to return. They left for school through the front door, leaving Ella sitting at the dining room table with shards of china strewn before her, working to glue the pieces of the bird back together.
    Ella tried to walk away from the preoccupying memory, and without ever realizing it, she had ventured outside in her bare feet. The earth was cool with dew, almost soothing. She dug her toes into the soil. The dampness soothed her aching calves and tickled the length of her spine. She tried to let the moment envelop her, but the sweetness of the earth could not ease the sting of the fear that whipped at her mind. She wondered what would become of her if she lost the farm. Visions from easier days fluttered about, tempting her to give up and walk away. If only she could go back in time and lounge in her aunt’s parlor listening to proper ladies in her aunt’s reading group, the Philaco Club, debate the social perils of women’s suffrage. This time she would have opinions of her own.
    The Philaco Club met monthly in the home of Ella’s aunt Katherine. The women sat in a semicircle in the parlor, where dried red rose petals and crystal rabbit figurines were scattered across a marbled fireplace mantel. It was Ella’s young and foolish friend, Neva Clarkson, who suggested reading The History of Women’s Suffrage . Ella could still see Neva’s round face turn as crimson as the rose petals when Sadie Donohue, a former schoolteacher herself and wife of the former mayor, reprimanded Neva’s mother for allowing her to read such propaganda. “Mr. Donohue says that women have no business getting mixed up in politics. A turn of the ballot will be a loss of purity in the home. Why, it will be a loss of the home itself, you mark my word.” Sadie’s arthritic and shaking finger pointed straight at Neva until the girl seemed to fold into the wingback chair. Her posture reminded Ella of one of the rabbits on the mantel, bent and ready to jump.
    Now, all these years later, it was Ella who felt pressed to the point of shattering. With the newspaper declaring that it was only a matter of time before women cast their votes, Ella wondered if Old Lady Donohue had been right after all. Maybe it was an omen, like the kind that Narsissa cautiously delivered to her during breakfast after a restless night of dreams. Maybe she had been brought to this point of homelessness as a punishment by God Almighty for having secretly agreed with Neva that women had a rib as strong as Adam’s and a voice beyond the walls of their homes.
    As Ella circled the magnolia tree, she was lost in the tortured thoughts that flashed in her mind like gray charcoal drawings: images of her standing by the lamppost at the corner of Commerce Street and in front of mounds of tattered fishnets at the docks in Apalachicola, begging with cupped, callused hands, relying on those who no longer recognized her as the niece of Katherine or the wife of Harlan.
    Ella gripped the collar of her robe and hurried away from the scent of magnolia leaves. She made her way down to the stack of timber that lined the edge of the road. Crickets and bullfrogs called out from the thicket of pines yet to be touched. She pictured the pines all cut down to the low-lying ground covered with water and cypress trees, land so marshy that not even Harlan had been able to gamble its value. Harlan never did believe the spring that rose up in that section had the magical properties that Narsissa