“Why?”

  “Because-” I stopped. Collected myself.

  “Jake,” I said, in a different tone of voice, “Please come sit with me.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Don’t cuss at me!”

  “Go straight to hell,” he amended.

  I flung the first thing I could find at him- my slipper. He caught it neatly, but he was laughing.

  Five minutes later we were seated at the table. He had gone a dark red. I showed him how to hold the pen.

  “Your right hand, Jake.”

  “This feels more natural-like.”

  He was left-handed. Alright. I wrote out letters for him to copy. He dragged the chalk across the slate to make “A”. It snapped in half.

  “See?” he raged, throwing the pieces down. “Useless.”

  Like a child throwing a tantrum. The giggle exploded out of me. He looked murderous. Furiously he picked up the other half and traced a shaky, jerky, A.

  “Good,” I said, controlling myself. “Now ‘B’.”

  The B was accomplished. We made it all the way through the alphabet without another mishap. By the end, Jake was sweating.

  What I had been wondering for days finally came out. “Why didn’t you go back to school, Jake? After that day we went together?”

  “Why? You know why.”

  “Because you got thrown in the river.”

  “See?” he said. “You remember. Why’d you want to make me repeat it?”

  “Because of that?” I said, puzzled. “But you had a thick skin. I know you did. Sometimes I’d hear Pa’s men tellin’ you worse than what those boys told you. I bet your Pa did worse-”

  But the memory of Jake in the barn, crying, leaped suddenly into my head.

  He set down the chalk, very slowly. I stopped talking.

  “I was a fool,” he admitted. “I should have swallowed my pride and gone back. But I didn’t. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

  “Your Pa should have sent you,” I blurted. “It was cruel that he didn’t.”

  “Minnie,” said Jake, “Don’t talk about my Pa.”

  I swallowed and turned back to the lesson. “ Okay. Let’s try to write your name.”

  A sudden knock on the door startled us both. Jake jumped up, stepping immediately in front of the table to hide what we were doing.

  It was Shortie, of course. The squat man let himself in.

  “There’s a need for strong arms over at Beck’s.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mill roof collapsed.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “The old woman.”

  Shortie peered behind Jake. “What’s this?”

  “Nothin’,” said Jake, his voice too loud. He turned Shortie away and took him outside. I followed them.

  The Becks lived in walking distance of our house. When we arrived, folks were already there bumbling about the wreckage. We had all expected the mill to fall one day. Forever folks were telling the Becks to repair it.

  We could hear the old woman among the wreckage, bleating in pain. Jake fell in to help the men pull out beams and boards and dusty, twisted shapes.

  I took one of the women aside. “What happened?”

  “Old woman was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A cryin’ shame. And with Lu’s condition.”

  Lucille Beck. Oh, I remembered her. I glanced at Jake, straining among the wreck.

  “Condition?”

  The woman clicked her tongue. “Over there, poor girl.”

  Lucille Beck was crying stormily against her father’s chest. The front her seemed to expand before my eyes. She turned. I saw a swollen, distended belly full of a growing child, and heavy breasts erupting from her bodice.

  She looked some months along.

  A cold feeling lodged in my stomach, but I didn’t have a name for it.

  I returned to watch the men. They had freed Mother Beck’s legs. The surgeon, just arriving, debated hotly of whether the limbs could be saved. It was a waste of time to be summoned then denied his right to amputation. The surgeon considered taking the left leg. The men protested. They didn’t have the stomach for it. The Surgeon said he was the authority here. The men called him a hack. Mother Beck squawked her objections, but no one paid her any mind.

  Lucille’s father grew tired of the racket and said why the devil was it taking so long to pull his wife out. It was nearing his time to go to Holly’s Doggery, where she owed him a drink since last week. Holly’s was the only place in this God-cursed town where a man could get a decent baldface without paying half the world for it. Then he noticed Jake.

  “Oy,” he growled. “Who brought that McCoy here?”

  “I did,” said Shortie. Mother Beck shrieked; they had freed one of her purple legs.

  “You,” said Mr. Beck.

  “Me,” said Jake.

  “Irish rat. You dare come here?”

  Jake’s eyebrows snapped together, but he said nothing. Mr. Beck thrust his pregnant daughter forward.

  “You got nothin’ to say for yourself?”

  An awful silence; everyone taking a deep breath at once. Jake looked from Lucille to her father. Mr. Beck to Lucille. Awareness spread slowly across his face. But Jake was no prey animal, to bolt at sudden attacks. He regarded Mr. Beck coolly.

  “What are you suggestin’?”

  Mr. Beck turned purple. I fumbled for the fencepost to support myself.

  “It’s plain as day for anyone to see,” he snapped.

  “What is?” said Jake.

  “Are you mockin’ me, Irish?”

  “I aim to know what I’m bein’ accused of.”

  Beck spat, “You done got my Lucy in a situation and took to your heels to throw off my suspicion. But she told me the size of it. I’ll see you take responsibility, McCoy.”

  “Not now, Ed,” someone muttered. I saw the men had got Mother Beck out of the mill-wreck. They were helping her into a chair.

  “I’m a married man,” said Jake coldly.

  Mr. Beck vibrated in his boots. He was an old hat in the Meadows, and he’d known the McCoys for years. He despised them. In fact, it was he who had cleverly suggested Jake’s older brothers get sent off to the railroad.

  “A married man,” he shouted. “Is that it? Clean the shit off the pig and now it’s a golden goose!”

  They were some yards apart. Shortie and I made for Jake at the same time.

  “I didn’t take your daughter on no rides,” spat Jake. “And I damned sure didn’t do more than what she asked.”

  “Asked!” roared Beck.

  We all looked to Lucille; she was still crying into her skirts.

  “Liar,” hissed Mr. Beck.

  Jake’s face clenched.

  “Jake!” I reached him first. I hung onto his arm.

  “Playin’ court to a Negress,” Beck sneered. “And won’t even take responsibility for my Lucy. Men hang for less.”

  “Hold your threats,” said Shortie. “Jake’s been a standup in this community for years. We can all vouch for him.”

  “He scabbed Jim Henley’s face!”

  “And would have done yours, too,” snapped Jake. He began to take off his coat. “I’ll do it right here for all to see. I ain’t afraid.”

  Beck looked to his friends. They hunched to his side.

  “You gonna cut me up, McCoy?”

  “I don’t need a razor for you,” said Jake. “I’ll do it bare-handed.”

  “Sing small, Jake,” Shortie begged. “Nobody here came to rumble.”

  “Let him come,” said Mr. Beck. “I’ll see the both of you answer for it. You and that Negress witch.”

  “Come away, Jakie,” said Shortie sharply. “There’s nothin’ you can say to convince him.”

  “I never lied in my life,” said Jake.

  Mrs. Beck’s wailing was beginning to overpower.

  Jake looked to Lucille. “Tell him the truth, Lu.”

  “Don’t speak to my daughter!” Mr. Beck yowled, lunging forward.

  Shortie intercepted; I tugged Jake away. We were allowed to leave. The walk back to our house was steamily silent. Jake twisted his hat to pieces in his hands. Halfway to the house he seemed to remember I was there, and fumbled for my loose fingers. His skin was hot and dry. He pressed my knuckles to his mouth, but his mind wandered. When we got to the house the reading lesson we’d left on the table taunted us. Another reminder of his status and shame.

  “Is it true?” I said, as he hung up his hat.

  “Huh?”

  “Is it true that you-”

  “No. It isn’t true.”

  I kept close tabs on my anger. “Are you sure?”

  I had wondered for some time if, when the moment came, I’d be able to match Jake’s wrath with my own. We got angry in different ways. Surely the cool, detached viciousness coursing through me was anger. Just as the trembling in his hands was rage. But anger and rage were not the same, were they?

  “Why does a man need to repeat himself,” said Jake, straightening and staring hard at the wall, “Unless folks doubt his word before he even opens his mouth?”

  There it was, the cold kernel of his pride. I would do well to back away from it.

  “Any man would ask what Beck did,” I said. “It’s not just because you’re-”

  “A dirty McCoy,” Jake finished. “Thank you, Minnie.”

  “I don’t think you’re a dirty McCoy.”

  His old humor twisted at the corners of his mouth, against his will. “Well, I’d hope you didn’t.”

  He turned to me then, frowning. “How come you ain’t angry?”

  “Angry?”

  He answered his own question. “It’s ‘cause you believe me. That’s why.”

  “I’m angry,” I said. “But I believe you.”

  His eyes fell on the remains of our reading lesson. He blinked suddenly and very fast.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I had meant to write my name once, good and proper. So you could get out of my ear about it.”

  “Oh. That’s okay.”

  “I think I forgot everythin’ we just did.”

  “You’ll learn again. Reading isn’t hard.”

  “Neither is loving,” he said. “But I find a way to mess that up, too.”

  Impulsively I went to him and wound my hands around his waist. My ear touched the smooth plane of his back. Through his shirt his heart beat a steady, sad song. We swayed like that for a moment. Whatever was he thinking?

  “Things move fast,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I murmured.

  “Some months ago I was sittin’ here in this room explainin’ myself to your Pa. I was still a boy.”

  “I remember.”

  “Now I’m a married man. I’m livin’ in the house of the man who raised me, havin’ my own troubles. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that time, when most I had to worry about was getting up and laying down.”

  He turned. His arms engulfed me. He reached up and plucked at the knot in my head scarf. I felt frozen in place, trapped by the delicious miasma of his smell. The brag of his heart. He wound the scarf around and around. It slipped off and tumbled to the floor.

  My hair sprang out. He worked the ends free, all the way up to the top of my scalp. I should have slapped his hand away; it would take hours to do up the two braids in the back again. Jake made an exhale. He ran his thick fingers through the tresses- I’d never considered them “tresses”, but he touched them like they were- parting the coily strands with extreme gentleness.

  “If you were anyone else,” I said, “I’d have to kill you.”

  He smiled. It was an odd, catching-off-guard smile.

  “Jake,” I said.

  He didn’t stop. His mouth made for mine. His two hands slid for my cheeks and held me forward like a cup to be drunk from. I twined my arms around his neck, bending against his height. And his maleness, his coarseness, plunged me into the depths of a love I could not possibly escape.

  We fumbled backward through the house. It was dark. The big room swallowed us whole against the world. His hands grew urgent, ripping at my clothes and ribbons as if they had buried me alive. The bodice laces might have been tissue. The skirt, a scrap of lace.

  Roughly he hooked his hands behind my knees, his arm at my back, and piled me into the bed. He continued undressing me there. Our fevered breathing misted in the cold room. But my body burned with its own fire.

  He was trying to say something.

  “I can’t- I’m not tryin’-”

  “What?”

  He swallowed. “Minnie. I didn’t mean to use you. I didn’t mean to make you marry me so I could take some advantage. I wish I could tell you-”

  “Don’t,” I said hurriedly. “Don’t ruin it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He drew a shaky breath. I tried to make out the shape of him in the darkness. Long and lithe, like a stretching cat. He controlled himself.

  “I had always liked you,” he said. “The look of you, that is.”

  “Er-”

  “And then I come to know you. All you tried to do for me. I’m sorry, that I can’t do more for you.”

  “I didn’t do it so you could pay me back,” I said, unsure what he was getting at.

  “I want to tell you what’s in my heart,” said Jake. “But I don’t rightly know. Sometimes I look at you and get a feelin’ like everything is about to be alright. Sometimes you make me mad enough to clout you. But it don’t matter. I feel like you ain’t got no judgements about the world and what it’s supposed to be like. You just try to do right by other folks. And that’s why...that’s why...”

  The traitorous tears had jumped to my eyes. I batted them away before he could see.

  “Shoot, I don’t have the words,” Jake went on, his voice becoming softer. “I just mean to say thank you, Minnie. All that other shit’s just talk. Don’t pay it mind.”

  “Why don’t you-” my voice wobbled.

  “You crying? Don’t cry, sugar. I hate when you cry.”

  “Well hurry up.”

  “I’m done,” he said. “I had all the words laid out, but they just got swept away by your flood. Put those tears away so I can remember ‘em.”

  “Why does it bother you?” I said, lapsing into his way of talking. “I ain’t hurtin’ you.”

  “Everytime you cry,” Jake murmured, “I feel like I got to hit something into the ground.”

  “I don’t cry out of pain always. Sometimes it’s another feeling. Like happiness.”

  “You cry ‘cause you’re happy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “That’s confusing.”

  The silence rose up again, a curtain drawn by little love-cherubs. I snuggled closer.

  “We were in the middle of something,” Jake said. “I interrupted it.”

  “You did.”

  He laid me out and slipped his head down. His mouth closed on my breast. I pointed up towards him, nipples and stomach and toes. He worshipped the shape of me with his hands. Like opening the rind of a fruit, he pierced the center of me with his thick thumb, peeling my wetness apart.

  I had put on weight. Jake grabbed it with both hands. The slickness at my center made slithering sounds. Jake’s breath caught, and then-

  “Oh!”

  He slipped my nipple from his mouth with a pop, moving down now to where his hands pushed my thighs apart. A deliberate placement. His tongue found the wet jewel and put pressure.

  I writhed under him. His hands flattened on my stomach, holding me to the bed. Our position was strange; this was an offering he made to me, as if I were a heathen goddess and he a blind subject bowing to my temple. Goddess-like, I rose above it. I fled my body and went to some distant cloud of ecstasy, where the only things I knew for sure were the silky-softness of the hair between my fist, and the numbing movement of the tongue between my legs. Light, pleasure, a climax into a single point. I introduced my pleasure with a scream.

  And then Jake seemed to lose himself. I could feel him shaking as he pulled away. His belt clattered to the floor.