Free Tenderness by Dorothy Garlock Page A

herself looking out on a clear morning. She stretched luxuriously. Then a clatter of iron
     brought her full awake. She sprang out of bed and scrambled into her clothes, brushed and pinned up her hair, and hastily
     made the bed. She glanced around the small room where the neat iron bedstead was now spread with a patchwork quilt, then walked
     barefoot into the kitchen. Granny stood at the cookstove stirring a pan of raw-fried potatoes.
    “Morning.”
    “Hit’s goin’ to be a fair day. Mr. Lester says there ain’t a cloud in the sky. Sleep good? Bed not too lumpy?”
    “The bed was wonderful.” Jesse had not slept well. Her mind would not release thoughts of Wade Simmer and the devastating
     effect of his kiss. As she washed her face and hands and dried them on the towel that hung on a nail above the wash bench,
     she strove without much success to put him out of her mind. “What can I do?”
    “Ya can sit. Mr. Lester is comin’. I heard the gate swing shut.” Jesse stood behind the high-backed kitchen chair feeling
     awkward at being waited on by this elderly woman with the goiter that was choking the life out of her. But knowing the pride
     of the hill people, she waited quietly.
    The screen door banged behind Grandpa Lester. He set a dishpan on the wash bench and poured water from the bucket over a small
     skinned animal in the pan.
    “Caught us a possum, Mrs. Lester.”
    “We ain’t had a possum in a coon’s age.” Grandma Lester wiped her hands on her apron and went to peer into the pan. “It’ll
     be plumb larrupin’ fer Sunday dinner. Got to let it stand a day and night in salt and sody water,” she explained to Jesse.
     “Ain’t nothin’ better ’n possum and sweet ’taters.” Granny went back to dishing up fried potatoes, white milk gravy and buttermilk
     biscuits.
    Jesse’s stomach did a slow roll at the thought of eating the possum and she gave thanks silently that she’d be spending the
     next night with the Baileys.
    After they were seated at the table and Grandpa Lester had said the blessing, he announced that the “boy” had come early this
     morning with Jesse’s buggy.
    “Jody brought it over?” Jesse asked.
    “Wade brung it.”
    “When you said boy, I thought you meant Jody.”
    “Wade brung it,” Granny repeated. “Said tell ya Hod Gordon’d meet you at Merfelds’. Boy ain’t got but one flaw. He’s dead-set
     on treatin’ that darkie like he was white. Ain’t natural.” Granny’s mouth twisted in lines of disapproval.
    “Now, Mrs. Lester, don’t get yoreself all flustered,” Grandpa said soothingly, then to Jesse, “Wade’s goin’ to Coon Rapids
     and tell the teacher to close the school.”
    “Oh,” Jesse said and busied herself with pouring sorghum onto a buttered biscuit.
    “Mine is the first face the boy saw when he come into this world o’ woe.” Granny pushed the gravy bowl toward her husband
     when he reached for it. “Scrawny, skinny little beggar. Looked like a skinned rat, he did. Humpt! No wonder. The woman that
     birthed him bein’ what she was. But he let out a whoop when I whapped his behind and I knew sure he was a Simmer.”
    “Were you a midwife, Granny?”
    “Only one fer miles in them days. Brung more’n a hundred younguns in the world. Didn’t lose more’n a dozen.”
    “You must know everyone around here.”
    “—And their folks and their folks’ folks. Some come from good sturdy stock. Pure hickory, they is. Some’s offshoots of a rotten
     vine and ain’t never goin’ to be nothin’ else but rotten like their folks. Ya ain’t goin’ to have to kill a chicken for Sunday,
     Mr. Lester, now we got the possum.”
    Hod Gordon was waiting at Merfelds’. He escorted Jesse on her rounds and to four additional families who had sent word that
     they had sick children. Her supplies were running dangerously low by mid-afternoon, and she knew that she would have to send
     another message to her father or make the trip to