The Truest Pleasure by Robert Morgan

Author:Robert Morgan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781565122222
Publisher: Algonquin
Published: 1995-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the summer of 1904 we made our biggest garden ever. I could tell Tom felt bad for not showing more sympathy to me. The truth is that only concern for other people eases our own grief, and Tom had not showed much concern until he set down on the bed after the funeral. Soon as he took my hand and cared that my heart was broke I think he started to feel a little better. I could tell he saw in me then the girl he had married. At that moment the emptiness we both felt started to go away.

By July I was pretty much well again, and figured the best way to show my friendship with Tom was to help in the fields. I went out with him every day and left Jewel and Moody at the house with Pa. I had always done my share of work outside, but that hot summer I pitched in like a field hand. It was what needed to be done, and it was what I needed to do. If you sweat enough it will cleanse you. If you have a cold or feel you’re taking sick sometimes a good sweat will heal you. As I worked in the dirt by Tom I felt I was being cleansed from inside.

And nothing makes a woman feel better than to pitch in and work alongside her husband. I didn’t wear shoes, and it felt like the dirt itself healed me. The hot ground drawed the poisons and ill will through the soles of my feet.

The dirt by the river was moist, even in the hot dry weeks. Working in the loam you could feel the cool of the river way down under the topsoil, and at times you could even feel the movement of the river like a pulse, and hear the whisper and swallow of the stream going over rocks and riffles.

Tom had planted more corn and beans and peas and taters and watermelons than ever before. He had planted the new ground at the upper end of the bottom and he planted the terraces in the orchard above the barn. It seemed like he had put every foot of available land in crops of one sort or another. There was butter beans and crowder peas, squash and pumpkins, tomatoes and onions. He planted twice as much cane as he had the year before.

Every morning after breakfast we went out to pull weeds and hoe dirt around the stalks and vines. There is a thrill to cleaning a row, getting rid of ragweeds and bull nettles. The hardest thing is to take morning glories out of corn, for they wind up the stalks and wrap theirselves tight on the leaves. You have to find the bottom of the vine and cut it, or pull it out. When you weed a row it feels like things has been sorted out and clarified. You have made sense of something.

A small lake and cottonmill had

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