Free Sapphire's Grave by Hilda Gurley Highgate Page B

the barroom, new and cosmopolitan, casting a yellowish glow on his profile. She had waited for a rejoinder, crouched behind him on the lumpy bed. For several moments he had not spoken. A chill, slight and barely stirring, had filled the room, causing Queen Marie to hunch her shoulders and pull a quilt around them. Prince had not moved a muscle.
    “Prince?” She had begun to move toward him, finally, touching his broad back.
    “You’s in a family way,” he had stated, his voice flat. Still, he had not turned to face her.
    “Maybe, I reckon,” she had replied softly, afraid of his posture and tone. She was not sure what she had expected. She had known that he did not,
had
not wanted this. But that, Queen Marie had thought, was water under the bridge. She would have a baby now, a boy, like Sister; and Prince would love both her and their son. Like Sister. And her son.
    He had not touched Queen Marie that night. She had tried not to worry, and toyed with the idea of trying, once again, to elicit a response to her touch. But she had thought better of it. He was angry now. His contraceptive efforts had failed; but he would cool down in time.
    After that night, Prince had avoided Queen Marie. She saw him once in early March, at a general store in Warrenton, buying fatback and homemade “cracklin’” corn bread. He saw her, too, watching him from the candy counter, holding a bag of butterscotch stick candies, her favorite confection, and he had looked away. When she cornered him to ask him of his plans with respect to her, he had looked at her strangely, then looked away, above her head, past the rough wood door that led to the fields outside.
    “
You’s
in a family way,” he had said, and shuffled around her and toward the door.
    She stood frozen for a moment, wondering at his words, before the intended impact of his
“you’s”
dawned upon her, and a gathering began to assemble in Queen Marie’s heart.
    Disbelief arrived first. Then, the thought of Prince denying in this way his role in her pregnancy Shocked and Shamed Queen Marie.
    Then, Doubt made its appearance. Queen Marie had had sex with two men, only one of whom had the foresight to have made feckless, undisciplined attempts to protect himself from unintended paternity. She had taken for granted, irrationally, the identity of this child’s father, on no basis other than that she had wanted to; and Queen Marie had not been able to imagine things not working out, ultimately, in the way that she wanted them to.
    Realization arrived disheveled, hurried, and unfashionably late: Prince did not intend to claim this child. Her jaw lowered itself slowly, her mouth opened in a horrified O.
    Prince did not believe that he had spawned this child.
    Prince believed her a liar and a cheat.
    She watched his departing back, dumbfounded. Suddenly, she dropped her candy and ran after him, intending to take an authoritarian tone—this worked sometimes with Prince—and scold him into repentance.
    “How you know it ain’ yours!” she cried, all attempts at dignity and indignation lost as she began to wring her hands, something she had never done, in horror and frustration. “How you know? How you know you ain’—how you know we ain’—” she sputtered.
    “Queen Marie,” he said, his voice patiently condescending, as if talking to a stupid child. “I keeps up wit’ yo’ mont’ly. I knows yo’ cycle. I ain’ never touch you when you was . . . dat way.”
    Queen Marie stared at Prince.
Cycle?
She had no idea what this meant. She stood silent, puzzled and ashamed of not knowing this thing that she should have known. And as Prince ambled down the path that led from the store to the road, hot tears began to burn a path down Queen Marie’s face.
    For weeks thereafter, she sat alone in her room above the barroom. Sometimes she plotted ways to win back her Prince. She even toured the barrooms in three counties searching for him, prepared with well-rehearsed words of wit