Free The House Near the River by Barbara Bartholomew Page B

closing the chickens in their house , safe from predators for the night.
    Matthew looked up from where he was sending the fresh milk through the separator that removed cream from the milk, separating into two streams . The leftover milk would be fed to the animals as the family only drank whole milk while the cream was put in a can to be sold in town on Saturday.
    Angie felt like her middle was about to cave in because she was so hungry and hurried to wash her hands and join the others at the dining room table. For supper, they had what seemed more like breakfast: pancakes served with homemade butter and sticky sweet sorghum, thick slices of fried ham, and either sweet milk or buttermilk. To her relief, Angie found that the sweet milk did not  boast  of added sugar, it simply was the term used for regular milk as opposed to buttermilk, which she would not even think of tasting, but was a popular drink for the rest of them, excepting, of course, David.
    Feeling too full from the heavy, calorie laden meal Angie only wanted to collapse in a chair, but such was not the design for living at the Harper household. Matthew took a couple of buckets of the skimmed milk out to the barnyard animals while Danny was sent to draw a bucket of rain water from the cistern. While they did dishes together, Clemmie explained that though they had well water piped in the house, it contained to much gypsum to be drinkable so they still collected water in the old cistern for that purpose.
    Sharon had seen to the baths for the younger children while they cleaned the kitchen, and then she and Sharon had taken their own turns, so that by the time she emerged fro m the kitchen, the children in their nightclothes had assemb l ed in the dining room to listen to the Fibber McGee Show on the radio.
    They seemed to enjoy it as much as children she knew liked television and even Clemmie seemed amused. Matthew came in from the back of the house, his hair wet from a fresh combing and he was clad in clean clothing.
    Danny, who wanted to listen to the radio, was sent for his bath . Angie sank into a chair and promptly fell asleep.
    When Clemmie awakened her later to send her to bed, she smiled gently at her. “Just another day on the farm,” she said with considerable irony.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Matthew felt ready to chew nails. He came in to noon dinner dirty and tired from work he usually loved. Working on the tractor, planting cotton was to build the future. Usually he could think of the various stages of the growing cotton from the first plants breaking through the soil to producing squares, blossoms, then the heavy green bolls hanging from the plants. Best of all was the fall harvest when workers gathered in the fields with their long dirty-white sacks to pluck the fluffy balls of cotton, stick them in their sacks, weigh the sacks and then dump cotton into the old red wagon until it was piled high and he pulled the wagon to the gin with a bale of cotton.
    A good crop mean t good times. Saturday, the usual market day when they bought groceries and feed for the week turned into a full-fledged festival as everyone had money in their pockets and new clothes, household goods and small indulgences could be purchased.
    After a decade of poverty, then the war years, the fall of 1946 promised to be a superlative one.
    Trouble was his mind wouldn’t stay on his planting today, nor on the promise of the planting. These days it went back like a homing pigeon to thoughts of Ange.
    The truth was that he was about out of his mind with his need for her. It had been a long time since they met back in 1941 and the kisses and hugs of that day were thin food for a grown man who had been forced to sustain himself with dreams for years now.
    It was even harder now that she was here, a presence in his home, living like another sister in the house and leaving him aching with want and desire so that he could hardly sleep and spent half his nights pacing the long drive outside the