Maud's Line by Margaret Verble

Author:Margaret Verble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

5

By the time Maud and Lovely rode home, stars blanketed the sky. Maud, swaying on the mule, felt dozy. When they stopped at the cattle guard, she jerked full awake and grabbed Lovely’s arm to slide off. She opened and closed the gate and walked in front of the mule to the next one. But even had she been alert, her thoughts were too tumbled to sort. When she got to the house, she fell straight to bed.

She woke the next morning feeling sick. And three days in a row were too unusual not to arouse her suspicion. She told Lovely to cook and went to the garden to avoid the smells of breakfast. She felt both happy and panicked while plucking weeds. She filled almost half of a bushel basket. Then she moved to picking cherry tomatoes. She was tempted to eat one but was afraid it would make her sick. She picked a passel of them and set them on top of the weeds.

After Lovely rode off, Maud quit working and looked toward the house. It hadn’t felt empty to her with her father gone, and staring at its gray boards and tin roof, she realized that was because Booker had taken his place. She placed a hand on the front of her dress. Under it and her slip could be a little seed that held her and Booker together. The breeze whipped her skirt against her legs. She wished the wind would lift her off her feet and carry her high enough to see the entire bottoms and the Arkansas River, to see the water cut beneath the foothills, coil to the Mississippi, and flow to the sea. Maud stood, her hand on her stomach, held by her vision. She walked toward the house, her basket on her hip, feeling eternity inside her.

In the kitchen, she discovered that Lovely hadn’t washed the dishes. Every bowl they had was dirty. She smelled coffee. It nauseated her. She went back out to the porch, plucked the tomatoes out of the basket, and set them in rows against the wall. Then she walked to the chicken house and dumped the weeds behind it. She came back, went in the main room door, and set the basket on the floor. She opened her drawer in the chest, pulled out her little handbag, unsnapped the clasp, and drew out Booker’s letter. Before she closed the drawer, she took out a handkerchief, too.

She chose the rocker that always stayed on the porch. But as soon as she sat, she felt the wind getting gustier. It hadn’t rained in a while, and the gusts picked up the dust into brown swivels that danced like dirty little ghosts in the yard. Grit hit her face; dust hit her eye. She squinted and realized the wind was rolling the little tomatoes across the porch like they were being pushed from behind. She set her handkerchief and envelope down by her chair and put her handbag on top of them.

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