Free Touched by Carolyn Haines

of July picnic. They would have married him. Why didn’t he marry one of them?”
    JoHanna looked back to smile at Duncan. They didn’t speak a word, but there was something that passed between them.
    “I suspect Elikah didn’t want to be bothered with a wife who had family right around him.”
    I nodded. Elikah had never offered a question about my family or about how they were doing. He’d given me money to mail a letter to them, but even when Mama wrote back he handed me the letter and didn’t even ask what they’d said. If he had family, he didn’t say. He was a man who just didn’t have much need for other connections.
    “How is Elikah?”
    “Fine.” I looked down at my new shoes. “He bought me a dress and some shoes, but it wasn’t as nice as the one y’all sent.”
    JoHanna kept pulling the wagon. We’d passed the last building on the road until we got to the Hancock farm, about half a mile out of town. Cedar Creek was another mile. It was going to be a long, hot walk.
    “Will has excellent taste in women’s clothes. He picked that out for you.” She smiled at my shocked expression. “My only concern was that it might cause trouble for you, but Will said you were smart enough to handle it.”
    “I haven’t shown Elikah the dress.”
    “Handle it however you see fit.”
    We walked along in near-silence; the only sound was the creak of the rocker or an occasional flap from Pecos. The rooster made me nervous at first, but it became apparent he had no intention of leaving Duncan’s side.
    “Why are you going to the baptism?” I’d been to the Mississippi Methodist Church twice since I’d come to Jexville, and none of the McVays had been in attendance. “Are you Baptist?”
    “No.” She gave me a look. “Why are you going? Are you religious?”
    That question set me back on my heels. I was going to be with her. So far as I’d seen, God hadn’t made any great interventions in my life for the better. But church was a woman’s duty, and it was a place to go. “I’m going ‘cause you asked me,” I finally answered. “Do you believe God might heal Duncan?” That had been at the back of my mind, too. I was wondering if JoHanna was hoping for a miracle.
    JoHanna walked on a bit, her face calm, serene. “What I believe is hard to say,” she said, her pace steady, the sun hot on both of our shoulders. “I believe ‘god’ is in all living things, even grass and trees. It’s a tough belief in a sawmill town.” She was mocking herself.
    “You think trees have God in them?” I looked around. The huge pine trees along the roadway had already been harvested. In a nearby field, the raw stumps still bled resin, the scent as pungent as any other death. On the other side of the road, the stumps had been burned or pulled out and pasture allowed to grow. Half a mile back, the huge trunks of the unharvested trees made a leafless wall of brown.
    “I think every thing alive has something of a soul.” She cut a look at me. “Even men.”
    I knew she was teasing me, but the idea was so fanciful I couldn’t let it go. “Who else believes this?”
    She shrugged. “Not many around here, that’s for sure. But it’s an old religion. I certainly didn’t make it up.”
    “Did you get baptized?”
    She laughed. “If you count swimming naked in a cold creek and glorying in the beauty of the water a baptism, then I’ve been immersed. But as far as I know, people who believe like me don’t even have church buildings or any kind of formal rituals.”
    I watched her face and saw the humor and spark of mischief that I’d seen duplicated in Duncan’s face the day she’d danced. Now I understood better why the men of Jexville disliked her so. She talked wild. Her words were tiny darts of freedom that stung the men, even when she spoke of nothing but trees and creeks. Her awareness of things struck at the root of men’s lives. Why it should threaten them so, I didn’t understand, but I knew it