and wrinkled like. Feel like you pullin’ a wad a cloth out a that tree. One good
tree can do you for a year or two, but you gotta keep it dry.”
Mourning jealously guarded their lucifer matches. He had wrapped some of
them in bark coverings and buried them at the edge of the farm, so that even if
both the cabin and barn burned to the ground, they wouldn’t be left without the
means to start a fire. After a long argument, he also convinced Olivia to let him
hide her Hawken rifle in the woods.
“You gotta be plannin’ for the worst,” he said. “Spose I be out in the farm and
you be down by the river when a band of Indians be comin’ up on us? What we
gonna do? Even if you be near the cabin, rifle ain’t gonna do you no good in there. It ain’t got no window to shoot from. Ain’t gonna take wild Indians five
minutes to burn you out a there. Best we be runnin’ into the woods, have a rifle
waiting on us there.”
“There aren’t any wild Indians around here.”
“Robbers, then.”
“If you’re so worried about robbers, why don’t you keep the rifle with you? I
wouldn’t mind that. But I’m not about to leave it hanging in some tree, out in the
rain, where anyone could walk off with it.”
“It be fine. I’m a cover it with bark, and you gonna go out there regular and
clean and oil it.”
Olivia finally agreed to relinquish her precious Hawken. She kept the shotgun
loaded by the door and the pistol hidden down in the cellar.
“She brought us four eggs,” Olivia said. “I thought we’d each have one for
breakfast and I’d use the other two to bake a cake. We ought to get a couple of
chickens of our own. It’d be nice having eggs.”
“Good with me. Next time we see them, I ask Mr. Stubblefield if it suit him to
pay us in chickens for usin’ the oxen.”
“What did you think of them?”
“White folks.” He shrugged and turned to go back to work. Then he stopped
and added, “Ain’t no friends of the colored man.”
“How do you know that? Did he say something mean to you?”
“Don’t gotta. I can tell.”
Later, when they were drinking coffee by the fire, she asked him again about
the Stubblefields. He avoided answering.
He doesn’t want to talk about it because I’m white, she thought. That’s what Iam to him. White. Not his friend.
She tried another subject. “What was it like? Growing up without a family?”
“Can’t tell you nothing ’bout that. I ain’t never growed up with no family, so I
guess I don’t know the difference.”
She looked up at the stars coming out and then back at him. “It’s amazing
when you think of it. Here we lived in the same town all our lives, but we might
as well have been on different planets, for all one of us can understand what it
