to it. That’s why …” She raised her hands, palms up, and looked around the barn.
“You can’t be sure that I’ll become with child.”
Iola sat back, looking crafty. “Can’t I? I know when you last bled. Regular as
a clock, you are. This is your time of the month to conceive. And conceive you
will.”
The realization was awful. Iola must have started planning this the very first
time the Stubblefields came over to welcome their new neighbors. All those
nosy questions – did Olivia bleed regularly, what time of the month, for how many days – had begun the first time Iola laid eyes on her.
“So you plan on keeping me tied up in your barn for nine months?”
“Oh no, there’s no need for that. A week will suffice. Long enough to be
certain the seed has been planted.”
Olivia had to bite back a cry. A week. Seven days. Seven times to suffer
Filmore tearing her apart. The sickening smell of him. The weight of him
crushing her. Iola sitting next to her, gloating.
“And then what’s to stop me from telling everyone what you’ve done?”
“Oh, you won’t do that. Not once you’ve had time to think on it. Who exactly
are you going to tell? We’re your only friends. Oh, I know, you think you’re going to run to your nigger boy. Well, you can forget about him. Not that he’d be
any help to you, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s gone. Filmore saw to that.
You won’t be seeing any more of him.”
“What have you done to Mourning?” Olivia cried, rising and clenching her
fists to refrain from striking her.
“We haven’t done anything to him. You can thank us for that. Not that a soul
would pay any notice or care if we had. Nobody’s going to miss that pet coon of
yours. We haven’t done him no harm, but he’s gone and I promise you he won’t
be coming back.”
Olivia sat and tightly clutched the sides of the seat of the chair, wishing she
could strangle the life out of this evil woman. What had they done to poor Mourning to make him go away? Was she lying? Had they killed him?
“I’ll tell folks in town,” Olivia said, managing to keep her voice steady. “Not
if you let me go today. If you do, I promise not to say anything to anyone. But if
you keep me here for a whole week, I’ll tell the world.”
“Oh you will, will you? Just who do you think is going to believe you? You
have no friends there. What fool’s going to take the word of a girl like you –
what up and left her own Christian family to go live with a nigger – against respectable church-going folk like us? You know what they’ll say? Shameless
girl got herself in trouble and now she’s looking for some poor man to lay the blame on. Think about it, dear. If someone had told you a story like that about
me and Filmore last week, would you have believed it? I hardly think so.”
She leaned back and smiled. “So there’s no good to come of you telling
anyone. You’d only be shaming yourself. You can’t go back home, either. Not in
that condition. No, your only good lies in keeping quiet and letting Filmore’s seed come to fruition. Last three or four months, depending on how big you get,
you won’t go into town. You know as well as I that no one will miss you. You’re
alone, Olivia. Alone. We’re all you have. We’re your family and your friends.”
