Kathleen Valentine Read Online Free PDF Page B

start our married life.

I thought I knew what loving was all about. I thought our summer of scorching afternoons and steaming hot nights had prepared me for being a married woman. What a silly girl I was not to know how much better it would be. The first time Asa put hisself inside of me I thought my eyes would pop right out of my skull like two hickory nuts roasting in a fire. I got so lost in him I didn’t even know there was a world past the walls of our bedroom. Didn’t care, neither. I felt like a cake of fresh cream butter melting in the heat of an August afternoon. All I wanted was Asa, every minute of the night and of the day.

I tried to be a good wife. I kept our little house as clean as I could. Sometimes we’d go to Mama and Daddy’s for Sunday dinner but we never stayed to gab—not on a lazy, sweet-smelling Sunday afternoon when everything was still and we had other ways to use that time. Sometimes Asa’d take me hunting with him but we never fired a bullet. What we did standing up against them old pin oak trees would frighten every jackrabbit in the county.

Not that our life together was perfect, mind. He had a temper, that one. We had our rows and I spent more than enough time turned over his knee! I learned there was no point in fighting with him cause he always got his way and I just got me a real sore bottom. But I never stopped being crazy for him. He’d go off to work and all day long I’d lay in bed feeling his hands and his body all over me. I’d stand by the kitchen door when I knowed he was coming home for dinner. I’d get my first glimpse of his hat coming up over the rise and I’d go flying to him. Most nights dinner just sat there getting cold.

Four years went by and we didn’t have no babies, I don’t know why. In a secret little part of me I expect I was glad cause babies need a lot of caretaking and I was scared by what Mama had said—that once we had babies we’d be too busy for all our loving. Mama and Aunt Shoog fretted about it all the time, too.

"Are you doing right by him?" Mama would ask me.

"What do you mean, Mama?" She scared me when she talked that way. "I’m a good wife." I told her. "I have his dinner ready when he gets home and if he has to go back out and do more work at night I always wait up so’s he can have some love when he comes back—no matter how late it gets."

I didn’t tell her I gave him sugar morning, noon, and night.

But she and Aunt Shoog kept fretting. I heard them talking it over whenever they thought I wasn’t near enough to hear.

"I don’t know what’s the matter with that girl of mine," Mama would say, "she must not be doing her wifely duties is all I can think. If she don’t get him a baby pretty soon..." She shook her head. "It’s too easy for a man to wander off if he don’t have a family to keep him home."

"Don’t go blamin her now," Aunt Shoog said. "It’s more a case of that busy bee scatterin his pollen too far and wide."

"Don’t talk nonsense, Shoog. That don’t make sense, bees don’t make pollen."

"Maybe not," Shoog said lighting herself a pipe, "but that don’t mean he ain’t the problem."

"My girl says she waits up for him when he works late," Mama said in that low worrisome voice of hers.

Shoog snorted. "What kind of nails do you reckon he’s drivin that late at night, sister?"

Sometimes Mama’s silences was scarier than the words she had to say. "I knowed he wasn’t husband material but you can’t tell my girl nothing." My stomach knotted up something horrible at her words.

Shoog took a long draw on her pipe. "Maybe you best be glad she don’t have no youngsters to worry for."

I don’t know if we would have got babies eventually. I still get queasy inside when I think about our last morning together. He always looked so sweet in the day’s first light, cuddling up with me all sleepy and tender. He loved me for a long time and I kept pulling him back. It looked like snow outside and I didn’t want