Free Love and Lament by John M. Thompson Page B

at.”
    The next week was sweltering hot, a hundred degrees, and there was talk of a group going down to Hackett’s Mill on the Rocky River for a picnic and swim, but then somebody suggested they go to Hartsoe’s. Mary Bet and Siler were against this plan, but Myrtle Emma said she wanted to go see her grandfather. After all, he was their last grandparent alive. That he had lately become obsessed with perpetual motion should not prevent them from making a visit.
    Myrt and a friend named Sallie Wood were going in the Woods’ surrey, with room for four more. Mary Bet was not much on swimming in places where there might be snakes, but she was not about to be left out. Myrt was going away to Wilkesboro to teach at the end of the summer—a prospect that, along with her brother’s imminent departure, scared Mary Bet more than snakes. Now twenty, Myrt told her father she needed to go out in the world and do some good and make a living. Cicero could only shrug mutely at the diminishment of his family, vowing silently that Mary Bet would never leave him.
    Mary Bet and Siler squeezed in on the two seats, along with Sallie, Myrt, and Sallie’s two cousins, visiting from Rocky Mount. The mill was a journey of about an hour, during which Mary Bet discovered that Sallie Wood’s cousins, a boy and a girl—straddling her in age—were unimpressed with anything they had seen in HawCounty. They and Mary Bet were on the backseat, and Mary Bet pointed out some daisies growing next to a patch of little sunflowers. She said, “That looks like eggs and suns. It looks like pastries you could eat nearly.”
    The boy sniffed, and the girl, sitting in the middle, didn’t change her sullen expression. Mary Bet wished she was up front with the others. “I can drive a horse and buggy,” she said.
    “Who can’t?” the boy asked. Siler turned around and glanced from one person to the other, Mary Bet smiling at him with eyes that she knew he could interpret. He shot a stern look at the boy and girl, but they seemed not to notice.
    “I can ride sidesaddle and astride,” Mary Bet said.
    “I could ride bareback when I was four years old,” the boy answered, kicking the seat in front of him.
    “Well, I can wring a chicken’s neck,” Mary Bet retorted. “I like doing it too.”
    The boy was quiet a moment. “I don’t even like chickens,” he said. The girl laughed quietly at her own thoughts. Another mile rolled by, the two young women talking in the front seat and the shadows of pines across the rutted road alternating with the clear spaces where there were green-and-gold fields of knee-high tobacco and corn and wheat and hay and sometimes cotton, not yet flowered.
    The boy pulled a tin from his pocket, took a pinch of snuff, and sniffed it into his nose. He offered some to his sister, but she shook her head. Then he held it over to Mary Bet. She too shook her head. “Go on and try it,” he said. “It clears your head right up.”
    Sallie Wood turned around. “Leave her alone, Jacob,” she said.
    But Mary Bet reached into the tin and took a big pinch like she’d seen the old men doing down at her father’s store. She held it to her nose and smelled the sweet dank foresty odor, and then she breathed some in. It tickled her nose so that she sneezed. But Jacob had beenright—it felt as though cool air filled her entire head. Siler turned and gave Mary Bet the same stern look he’d given the other children, but he took some snuff himself. The young women politely refused. “Not too much,” Myrt warned her sister. “It’ll make you sick.”
    When they got there they saw no one about, except Samuel’s last remaining black man, whose name was Ezekiel Hallelujah Monday. He was known as Zeke, and he had once been Samuel’s property. The other handful of slaves had drifted away as soon as the war was over, including Zeke’s own mother. Zeke was older than Samuel, which put him somewhere over ninety. Still, he came out of the barn