Free Love and Lament by John M. Thompson Page A

over herself and Myrtle Emma. You couldn’t pray to graven idols, but you could pray in front of them and so she said her prayers right there on the hearth bricks.
    Cicero aired the room out, as he had done after the other deaths. And he went back to work, his family now down to four.

CHAPTER 6
    1900
    I T WAS JUST before Siler was to go off to Morganton that he and Mary Bet became at last good friends. She had school friends, but she had always preferred her own family. Now with O’Nora gone, she and Siler, five years apart, were the youngest. Siler would’ve had trouble making friends in the village even if he were outgoing, which he was not particularly. At home he would do and say funny things that made Mary Bet laugh, yet in public he behaved like a trim little soldier, his watchful, deep-set eyes ever alert and his thrust-out chin daring anyone to make fun. He wore a boater tilted back on his head in the cocky way the baseball players did. He tried out for the Hartsoe City team and made right field, his strong arm cutting down many a would-be run. He was considered friendly and handsome, but, above all, quiet, deaf, and a loner. Mary Bet noticed him more now that he was leaving.
    They went together to the Fourth of July celebration. The Hartsoe City Concert Band was marching by, the trombones and drumspounding excitement into the chests of the bystanders, the dignitaries’ carriages draped in bunting, the flags, dipping and rising, carried by the Masonic Lodge members, stiff in their starched white shirts and dark ties, stepping proudly along. A midget named Gus Hightower marched by holding a large flag, beside six-foot-five-inch farmer Richard Wren, who waved a small flag. Then came the veterans, some in uniform, some on horseback, with swords strapped to their waists, and as the crowd cheered Mary Bet felt a strange sadness that had been with her for days now. She had been feeling out of sorts in a way that was new and disturbing. And then she decided to go home, and she wished she had brought a friend other than Siler. She made her way out of the crowd of mustached men in linen suits and bow ties, women in flower-pile hats and long-sleeved white blouses, then hurried back to her house.
    It felt as if she had sat on a wet chair—why did she have to wear white today? Well, there was nothing she could do about it now. Myrt had showed her what to do with the sanitary napkins, so she was not unprepared. She washed her hands, letting the water trickle down past her wrists, the way the Hebrews did long ago. She laughed at herself in the mirror—it’s just me, she thought. No more a woman than I was yesterday. Her breasts were growing, her hips taking shape, yet she was still short, still unsure of herself. No one at school thought so, of course—at the new public school, divided into two rooms and attended by fifteen children, she was a smart aleck, always quicker to answer than anybody and reading books that the others could not understand. They thought her strange. One teacher told her not to be so proud of herself, and for the rest of the year she quit raising her hand until, her mind wandering during class to the characters in her book, she was thought as dull as the others.
    When her father heard about it, he came in and spoke with the teacher, who told him that his daughter was of average intelligence.Cicero said nothing. He went home and told Mary Bet to answer up loud and clear in school. “I shouldn’t be proud,” she said. “Not if you don’t have anything to be proud of,” he replied.
    She wanted to tell someone about what had just happened to her. She wanted to open the window and shout, “My monthly started!” She looked at herself again, tucked a loose piece of hair, readjusted a clasp on the back of her head, and thought, “I’m not bad-looking.” She shook her head at her vanity, staring into her own black, impenetrable eyes. “Not pretty,” she whispered, “just not bad to look