Free Morning Glory by Lavyrle Spencer Page B

of the room for a dustpan. “Enjoyed doin’ it again. Enjoyed the smell of the shavin’ soap around the house again, too.”
    She had? He thought he’d been the only one to enjoy those things. Or perhaps she was being kind to put him at ease. He found himself wanting to return the favor.
    “I can do that,” he offered as she bent to collect his streaky brown hair from the floor.
    “It’s as good as done. Wouldn’t mind, however, if you took over the chore of feeding the pigs.”
    She straightened and their eyes met. In hers he saw uncertainty. It was the first thing she’d asked him to do, and not too pleasant. But what was unpleasant to one man was freedom to Will Parker. She’d fed him, lent him her husband’s razor, shared her fire and her table and had put him to sleep with a comb and scissors. His lips opened and a voice inside urged, Say it, Parker. You afraid she’ll think you ain’t much of a man if you do?
    “That haircut was the best thing I’ve felt for a long time.”
    She understood perfectly. She, too, had spent so much ofher life in a loveless, touchless world. Odd, how a statement so simple formed a sympathetic bond.
    “Well, I’m glad.”
    “In prison—”
    Her eyes swept back to his. “In prison, what?”
    He shouldn’t have started, but she had a way about her that loosened his jaws, made him want to trust her with the secrets that hurt most. “In prison they use these buzzy little clippers and they cut off most of your hair so you feel—” He glanced away, reluctant to complete the thought, after all.
    “You feel what?” she encouraged.
    He studied his own hair lying on the dustpan, remembering. “Naked.”
    Neither of them moved. Sensing how hard it had been for him to admit such a thing, she wanted to reach out and touch his arm. But before she could, he took the dustpan and dumped it in the stove.
    “I’ll see after the pigs,” he said, ending the moment of closeness.
    Donald Wade agreed to show Will where the pigs were, and Eleanor sent them out with a half-pail of milk and orders to feed it to them.
    “To the pigs!” Will exclaimed, aghast. He’d gone hungry most of his life and she fed fresh milk to the pigs?
    “Herbert gives more than we can use, and the milk truck can’t get in here, what with the driveway all washed out. Anyway, I don’t want no town people nosing around the place. Feed it to the pigs.”
    It broke Will’s heart to carry the milk out of the house.
    Donald Wade led the way, though Will could have found the pigpen with his nose alone. Crossing the yard, he took a better look at the driveway. It was sorry, all right. But Mrs. Dinsmore had a mule, and if there was a mule there must be implements to hitch to it. And if there were no implements, he’d shovel by hand. He needed the driveway passable to get the junk hauled out of here. Already he was assessing that junk not as waste but as scrap metal. Scrap metal would soon bring top dollar with America turning out war supplies forEngland. The woman was sitting on top of a gold mine and didn’t even know it.
    Not only was the driveway sad; the yard in broad daylight was pitiful. Dilapidated buildings that looked as if a swift kick would send them over. Those with a few good years left were sorely in need of paint. The corncrib was filled with junk instead of corn—barrels, crates, rolls of rusty barbed wire, stacks of warped lumber. Will couldn’t tell what kept the door of the chicken coop from falling off. The smell, as they passed, was horrendous. No wonder the chickens roosted in the junkpiles. He passed stacks of machinery parts, empty paint cans—though he couldn’t figure out where the paint might have been used. The goat’s nest seemed to be in an abandoned truck with the cushion stuffing chewed away. Lord, thought Will, there was enough work here to keep a man going twenty-four hours a day for a solid year.
    Bobbing along beside him, Donald Wade interrupted his thoughts.
    “There.”