Free Offerings Three Stories by Mary Anna Evans Page A

cows and vegetable gardens that gave them all they needed to eat. I saw no reason why all children wouldn’t have two or three toys to play with, just like I did. I was Florida-bred so, though I could well imagine that other folks might sweat occasionally—I certainly did—I had no notion of what it might mean to be cold. I went to Sunday School weekly, so I knew that there were bad things that I shouldn’t do. Still, for the first eight years of my life, those bad things were just numbers on the commandment list. What did killing and stealing and taking the Lord’s name in vain have to do with me?
    Perhaps my eight-year-old self was aware that I was infringing on one of those commandments when I filched a cookie shaped like a candy cane and crept out into that warm December night. Even now, I’m not sure which commandment covers spying on your sister, but one of them must. I knew that I shouldn’t be creeping around in my nightgown, following Iris as she crept down the river path wearing hers. I justified my actions by telling God (and Santa Claus, whose sleigh was probably on its way to my house right that minute) that if seventeen-year-old Iris couldn’t manage to stay in the house when she was supposed to be asleep, then how could I?
    I tried to be quiet as I skulked down the damp trail, but Florida riverbank foliage is lush and overgrown, even in wintertime. Iris should have been able to hear the spider lilies and palmettos rustle like crinolines as I pushed past them, but her mind was on something else. When she reached the landing, I saw what that something else was. Except it wasn’t a “something” else. It was a “someone” else.
    He was older than Iris. I would have called him a man, and Iris was, in my eyes, just a girl. And a silly one at that. He wore a driving cap pulled low over his eyes, and a glen plaid vest that was so fashionable that it must have come from a city. Maybe Tallahassee. Pensacola, even.
    I was glad to see that he was gentleman enough to take off his cap when he saw Iris coming. Then he tossed that fancy cap into the bottom of his flat-bottomed boat, stepped onto the landing, wrapped his arms around Iris, and commenced doing some ungentlemanly things. After a time, his behavior turned quite ungentlemanly—I’ll refrain from discussing her behavior completely, if you don’t mind—and there I sat, stuck in the palmettos until they got finished with whatever it was they were doing.
    When the other boat arrived, they were in no condition to hear it coming, particularly since the two men piloting it came from upstream with their motor off, poling it silently into place beside the dock. With a careless motion, the thin, dark-haired man standing in front tied the heavily loaded boat to a handy cleat.
    “And here I thought your deliveries was slow ‘cause you was cheating me,” said the burly man standing in back with his hand on the rudder. “Shit, Owen. You was just passing the time with this young slut.”
    The young man lunged toward him with both fists balled up, but he never got to use them. Fists aren’t a whole lot of good against a revolver.
    Owen, who suddenly looked less like a man and more like a boy, went dead still when the burly man pulled his gun. I swear, he stopped moving so fast that he was left standing on one foot, with the other hanging in the air behind him. Iris, who had been busily arranging her nightgown, which was in quite some disarray, started screaming. The sound stirred the hairs on the back of my neck.
    “Come to think of it,” the gunman said, “maybe I want to spend some time with the slut, too.” His hand shot out and grabbed Iris by the waist. He showed that he’d spent a lifetime on the water by hauling her into the boat, one-handed, without flipping the blamed thing. Also, it was a mighty big boat.
    “Leave the girl alone, Gibson,” his partner whined. “This’ll get us nothing but trouble.”
    “Shut up,” Gibson said, and I was