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special to sisters, and Ruby shared her spoils from the field of
amour
with Alma and the Dunahew boys whenever she had any surplus. Alma did not like the way Ruby lived, had often said so in the sternest tones, but understood too well, too well her baby sister’s ravenous need for the comforts and adulation that men provided her, and the savage joy that bounced in her soul whenever she dumped a stricken beau and went out once more dancing alone.
    Alma said their early lives had been like this: Cecil DeGeer was white-haired at Alma’s birth, and owned with the bank about twenty-five acres across the road from South Turn Creek, maybe fifteen acres in timber and the rest red clay and scrub. They made a huge garden by poaching good soil from the creek bottomland of their neighbor and carrying it away in peach baskets by the light of the moon or in utter darkness. There was no fence line, making it easy to splash buckets from the creek onto row upon row of things to eat if the weather didn’t listen to the Devil and blaze or the creek flood again and wash every meal of tomorrow downstream, and run a few hogs in the brambles and timber. Their mother was a Pruitt with cancer of the nose that required a large portion be sliced off, so she seldom left the land or went among strangers, but worked long, long, long hours, as though to punish herself for whatever act or failure cost her that slice of nose. There was slim reward apparent for her relentless toiling but an eking survival and the toil itself. She was kind, made that effort, she hoped, less and less but still, she tried, on and on. As soon as Alma could wield a short-handled hoe she bent her back to work the land. Her mother begged until the girl was let go to school, and begged each year until begging ceased to be effective, and after third grade (she still couldn’t quite read or write and never would) Alma worked the dirt from daylight to dark.
    Great-grandpa Cecil could not ever seem to reconcile himself to his circumstances, or want to, and sat still more often than could be forgiven. He’d been born to comfort and a fair portfolio of wealth in Texas, blown his inheritance before the age of twenty-five (he drank wildly and thought he could gamble wildly, too), gone to his kin to beseech for more, a new start, and within a year blown that as well, then become permanently estranged from his family when they would loan him no more, not a chance, don’t even bother to ask. His face flushed to a scalded red that didn’t go away and his hands quivered. The DeGeers never spoke again, nor traded letters, birth or funeral notices, and became unknown to each other. Being born to poverty one is accustomed to the degradations and neediness, hence at home in all that dinginess, while not much is worse (Cecil was certain of this) than becoming accustomed to a high station from birth only to watch yourself sink, incredulously, lower by the season, until you land bumpy-assed on rocky dirt with folks cloaked in rags and desperation who were now your peers, no arguing that, but who would never feel like equals. Cecil was basically unemployable by temperament; he quit jobs over slights no one else heard or even assignments stated too plainly, the very plainness of wording an insult to his pedigree. This arch sensitivity to social hierarchy prevented him from working steadily, a sullen employee always, even if he worked for himself, every workday a diminishment of his proper standing in the world, a daily lessening that meanly sapped his vim, rendered him forlorn and inert, while his women, made natural vassals by their gender, worked like swampers, muckers, field hands toiling for his ease. They sweated dry in sunlight and slept in stiffened calico. Cecil sat and dreamed or walked to Wilhoite’s for a jar and returned home to resume sitting, his dreaming now aided by gulps of shine. A far richer life continued hourly behind his eyes, a life painted on sky-blue panels, and in it he