When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband’s fingernails and encrusting the children’s knees and hair. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of the house. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast when I crossed the yard. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown.
When it rained, as it often did, the yard turned into a thick gumbo, with the house floating in it like a soggy cracker. When the rains came hard, the river rose and swallowed the bridge that was the only way across. The world was on the other side of that bridge, the world of light bulbs and paved roads and shirts that stayed white. When the river rose, the world was lost to us and we to it.
One day slid into the next. My hands did what was necessary: pumping, churning, scouring, scraping. And cooking, always cooking. Snapping beans and the necks of chickens. Kneading dough, shucking corn and digging the eyes out of potatoes. No sooner was breakfast over and the mess cleaned up than it was time to start on dinner. After dinner came supper, then breakfast again the next morning.
Get up at first light. Go to the outhouse. Do your business, shivering in the winter, sweating in the summer, breathing through your mouth year-round. Steal the eggs from under the hens. Haul in wood from the pile and light the stove. Make the biscuits, slice the bacon and fry it up with the eggs and grits. Rouse your daughters from their bed, brush their teeth, guide arms into sleeves and feet into socks and boots. Take your youngest out to the porch and hold her up so she can clang the bell that will summon your husband from the fields and wake his hateful father in the lean-to next door. Feed them all and yourself. Scrub the iron skillet, the children’s faces, the mud off the floors day after day while the old man sits and watches. He is always on you: “You better stir them greens, gal. You better sweep that floor now. Better teach them brats some manners. Wash them clothes. Feed them chickens. Fetch me my cane.” His voice, clotted from smoking. His sly pale eyes with their hard black centers, on you.
He scared the children, especially my youngest, who was a little chubby.
“Come here, little piglet,” he’d say to her.
She peered at him from behind my legs. At his long yellow teeth. At his bony yellow fingers with their thick curved nails like pieces of ancient horn.
“Come here and sit on my lap.”
He had no interest in holding her or any other child, he just liked knowing she was afraid of him. When she wouldn’t come, he told her she was too fat to sit on his lap anyway, she might break his bones. She started to cry, and I imagined that old man in his coffin. Pictured the lid closing on his face, the box being lowered into the hole. Heard the dirt striking the wood.
“Pappy,” I said, smiling sweetly at him, “how about a nice cup of coffee?”
. . . . .

But I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with “Chapter One: I Am Born,” you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect. Why is young David fatherless? Because, Dickens tells us, his father died of a delicate constitution. Yes, but where did this mortal delicacy come from? Dickens doesn’t say, so we’re left to speculate. A congenital defect, perhaps, inherited from his mother, whose own mother had married beneath her to spite her cruel father, who’d been beaten as a child by a nursemaid who was forced into service when her faithless husband abandoned her for a woman he chanced to meet when his carriage wheel broke in front of the milliner’s where she’d gone to have her hat trimmed. If we begin there, young David is fatherless because his great-great-grandfather’s nursemaid’s husband’s future mistress’s hat needed adornment.
By the same logic, my father-in-law was murdered because I was born plain rather than pretty. That’s one possible beginning. There are others: Because Henry saved Jamie from drowning in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Because Pappy sold the land that should have been Henry’s. Because Jamie flew too many bombing missions in the war. Because a Negro named Ronsel Jackson shone too brightly. Because a man neglected his wife, and a father betrayed his son, and a mother exacted vengeance. I suppose the beginning depends on who’s telling the story. No doubt the others would start somewhere different, but they’d still wind up at the same place in the end.
It’s tempting to believe that what happened on the farm was inevitable; that in fact all the events of our lives are as predetermined as the moves in a game of tic-tac-toe: Start in the middle square and no one wins. Start in one of the corners and the game is yours. And if you don’t start, if you let the other person start? You lose, simple as that.
The truth isn’t so simple. Death may be inevitable, but love is not. Love, you have to choose.
I’ll begin with that. With love.
. . . . .

There’s a lot of talk in the Bible about cleaving. Men and women cleaving unto God. Husbands cleaving to wives. Bones cleaving to skin. Cleaving, we are to understand, is a good thing. The righteous cleave; the wicked do not.
On my wedding day, my mother—in a vague attempt to prepare me for the indignities of the marriage bed—told me to cleave to Henry no matter what. “It will hurt at first,” she said, as she fastened her pearls around my neck. “But it will get easier in time.”
Mother was only half-right.
I was a thirty-one-year-old virgin when I met Henry McAllan in the spring of 1939, a spinster well on my way to petrifaction. My world was small, and everything in it was known. I lived with my parents in the house where I’d been born. I slept in the room that had once been mine and my sisters’ and was now mine alone. I taught English at a private school for boys, sang in the Calvary Episcopal Church choir, baby-sat my nieces and nephews. Monday nights I played bridge with my married friends.
I was never beautiful like my sisters. Fanny and Etta have the delicate blonde good looks of the Fairbairns, my mother’s people, but I’m all Chappell: small and dark, with strong Gallic features and a full figure that was ill-suited to the flapper dresses and slim silhouettes of my youth. When my mother’s friends came to visit, they remarked on the loveliness of my hands, the curliness of my hair, the cheerfulness of my disposition; I was that sort of young woman. And then one day—quite suddenly, it seemed to me—I was no longer young. Mother wept the night of my thirtieth birthday, after the dishes from the family party had been cleaned and put away, and my brothers and sisters and their spouses and children had kissed me and gone home to their beds. The sound of her crying, muffled by a pillow or my father’s shoulder perhaps, drifted down the hallway to my room, where I lay awake listening to the whippoorwills, cicadas and peepers speak to one another. I am! I am! they seemed to say.
“I am,” I whispered. The words sounded hollow to my ears, as pointless as the frantic rubbings of a cricket in a matchbox. It was hours before I slept.
But when I woke the next morning I felt a kind of relief. I was no longer just unmarried; I was officially unmarriageable. Everyone could stop hoping and shift the weight of their attention elsewhere, to some other, worthier project, leaving me to get on with my life. I was a respected teacher, a beloved daughter, sister, niece and aunt. I would be content with that.
Would I have been, I wonder? Would I have found happiness there in the narrow, blank margins of the page, habitat of maiden aunts and childless schoolteachers? I can’t say, because a little over a year later, Henry came into my life and pulled me squarely into the ink-filled center.
My brother Teddy brought him to dinner at our house one Sunday. Teddy worked as a civilian land appraiser for the Army Corps of Engineers, and Henry was his new boss. He was that rare and marvelous creature, a forty-one-year-old bachelor. He looked his age, mostly because of his hair, which was stark white. He wasn’t an especially large man, but he had density. He walked with a noticeable limp which I later learned he’d gotten in the war, but it didn’t detract from his air of confidence. His movements were slow and deliberate, as if his limbs were weighted, and it was a matter of great consequence where he placed them. His hands were strong-looking and finely made, and the nails wanted cutting. I was struck by their stillness; by the way they remained folded calmly in his lap or planted on either side of his plate, even when he talked politics. He spoke with the lovely garble of the Delta—like he had a mouthful of some rich, luscious dessert. He addressed most of his remarks to Teddy and my parents, but I felt his gray eyes on my face all through dinner, lighting there briefly, moving away and then returning again. I remember my skin prickling with heat and damp beneath my clothes, my hand trembling slightly when I reached for my water glass.
My mother, whose nose was ever attuned to the scent of male admiration, began wedging my feminine virtues into the conversation with excruciating frequency: “Oh, so you’re a college graduate, Mr. McAllan? Laura went to college, you know. She got her teaching certificate from the Memphis College for Women. Yes, Mr. McAllan, we all play the piano, but Laura is by far the best musician in the family. She sings beautifully, too, doesn’t she Teddy? And you should taste her peach chess pie.” And so on. I spent most of dinner staring at my plate. Every time I tried to retreat to the kitchen on some errand or another, Mother insisted on going herself or sending Teddy’s wife Eliza, who shot me sympathetic glances as she obeyed. Teddy’s eyes were dancing; by the end of the meal he was choking back laughter, and I was ready to strangle him and my mother both.
When Henry took his leave of us, Mother invited him back the following Sunday. He looked at me before he agreed, a measuring look I did my best to meet with a polite smile.
In the week that followed, my mother could talk of little else but that charming Mr. McAllan: how soft-spoken he was, how gentlemanly and—highest praise of all from her—how he did not take wine with dinner. Daddy liked him too, but that was hardly a surprise given that Henry was a College Man. For my father, a retired history professor, there was no greater proof of a person’s worth than a college education. The Son of God Himself, come again in glory but lacking a diploma, would not have found favor with Daddy.
My parents’ hopefulness grated on me. It threatened to kindle my own, and that, I couldn’t allow. I told myself that Henry McAllan and his gentlemanly, scholarly ways were nothing to do with me. He was newly arrived in Memphis and had no other society; that was why he’d accepted Mother’s invitation.
How pathetic my defenses were, and how paper-thin! They shredded easily enough the following Sunday, when Henry showed up with lilies for me as well as for my mother. After dinner he suggested we go for a walk. I took him to Overton Park. The dogwoods were blooming, and as we strolled beneath them the wind blew flurries of white petals down on our heads. It was like a scene out of the movies, with me as the unlikely heroine. Henry plucked a petal from my hair, his fingers lightly grazing my cheek.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” he said.
“Yes, but sad.”
“Why sad?”
“Because they remind us of Christ’s suffering.”
Henry’s brows drew together, forming a deep vertical furrow between them. I could tell how much it bothered him, not knowing something, and I liked him for admitting his ignorance rather than pretending to know as so many men would have done. I showed him the marks like bloody nail holes on each of the four petals.
“Ah,” he said, and took my hand.
He held it all the way back to my house, and when we got there he asked me to a performance of The Chocolate Soldier at the Memphis Open Air Theatre the following Saturday. The female members of my family mobilized to beautify me for the occasion. Mother took me to Lowenstein’s department store and bought me a new dress with a frothy white collar and puffed sleeves. On Saturday morning, my sisters came to the house with pots of color for my cheeks and eyes, and lipsticks in every shade of red and pink, testing them out on me with the swift, high-handed authority of master chefs choosing seasonings for the sauce. When I was plucked, painted and powdered to their satisfaction, they held a mirror to my face, presenting me with my own reflection like a gift. I looked strange to myself and told them so.
“Just wait till Henry sees you,” laughed Fanny.
When he came to pick me up, Henry merely told me that I looked nice. But later that day he kissed me for the first time, taking my face in his hands as naturally and familiarly as if it were a favorite hat or a shaving bowl he’d owned for years. Never before had a man kissed me with that degree of possession, either of himself or of me, and it thrilled me.
Henry had all the self-confidence that I lacked. He was certain of an astonishing number of things: Packards are the best-made American cars. Meat ought not to be eaten rare. Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” should be the national anthem instead of “The Star Spangled Banner,” which is too difficult to sing. The Yankees will win the World Series. There will be another Great War in Europe, and the United States would do well to stay out of it. Blue is your color, Laura.
I wore blue. Gradually, over the course of the next several months, I unspooled my life for him. I told him about my favorite students, my summer jobs as a camp counselor in Myrtle Beach, and my family, down to the second and third cousins. I spoke of my two years at college, how I’d loved Dickens and the Brontës and hated Melville and mathematics. Henry listened with grave attention to everything I chose to share with him, nodding from time to time to indicate his approval. I soon found myself looking for those nods, making mental notes on when they were bestowed and withheld, and inevitably, presenting him with the version of myself that seemed most likely to elicit them. This wasn’t a deliberate exercise of feminine wiles on my part. I was unused to male admiration and knew only that I wanted more of it, and all that came with it.
And there was so much that came with it. Having a beau—my mother’s word, which she used at every possible opportunity—gave me cachet among my friends and relations that I’d never before enjoyed. I became prettier and more interesting, worthier somehow of every good thing.
How lovely you look today, my dear, they would say. And, I declare, you’re positively glowing! And, Come and sit by me, Laura, and tell me all about this Mr. McAllan of yours.
I wasn’t at all sure that he was my Mr. McAllan, but as spring turned to summer and Henry’s attentions showed no sign of slacking, I began to allow myself to hope that he might be. He took me to restaurants and the picture show, for walks along the Mississippi and day trips to the surrounding countryside, where he pointed out features of the land and the farms we passed. He was very knowledgeable about crops, livestock and such. When I remarked on it, he told me he’d grown up on a farm.
“Do your parents still live there?” I asked.
“No. They sold the place after the ’27 flood.”
I heard the wistfulness in his voice but put it down to nostalgia. I didn’t think to ask if he was interested in farming his own land someday. Henry was a College Man, a successful engineer with a job that allowed him to live in Memphis—the center of civilization. Why in the world would he want to scratch out a living as a farmer?
. . . . .

“My brother’s coming up from Oxford this weekend,” Henry announced one day in July. “I’d like for him to meet you.”
For him to meet me. My heart fluttered. Jamie was Henry’s favorite sibling. Henry spoke of him often, with a mixture of fondness and exasperation that made me smile. Jamie was at Ole Miss studying Fine Arts (“a subject of no practical use whatever”) and modeling men’s clothing on the side (“an undignified occupation for a man”). He wanted to be an actor (“that’s no way to support a family”) and spent all his spare time doing thespian productions (“he just likes the attention”). Yet despite these criticisms, it was obvious that Henry adored his little brother. Something quickened in his eyes whenever he talked about Jamie, and his hands, normally so impassive, rose from his sides to make large, swooping shapes in the air. That he wanted Jamie to meet me surely meant that he was considering a more permanent attachment between us. Out of long habit, I tried to stifle the thought, but it stayed stubbornly alive in my mind. That night, as I peeled the potatoes for supper, I imagined Henry’s proposal, pictured him kneeling before me in the parlor, his face earnest and slightly worried—what if I didn’t accept him? As I made my narrow bed the next morning, I envisioned myself smoothing the covers of a double bed with a white, candlewick-patterned spread and two pillows bearing the imprints of two heads. In class the next day, as I quizzed my boys on prepositional phrases, I pictured a child with Henry’s gray eyes staring up at me from a wicker bassinet. These visions bloomed in my mind like exotic flowers, opulent and jewel-toned, undoing years of strict pruning of my desires.
The Saturday I was to meet Jamie I dressed with extra care, wearing the navy linen suit I knew Henry liked and sitting patiently while my mother tortured my unruly hair into an upswept do worthy of a magazine advertisement. Henry picked me up and we drove to the station to meet his brother’s train. As we stood in the flow of disembarking passengers, I scanned the crowd for a younger copy of Henry. But the young man who came bounding up to us looked nothing like him. I studied the two of them as they embraced: one weathered and solid, the other tall, fair and lanky, with hair the color of a new-minted penny. After a time they clapped each other on the back, as men will do to break the intimacy of such a moment, then pulled apart and searched each other’s faces.
“You look good, brother,” said Jamie. “The Tennessee air seems to agree with you. Or is it something else?”
He turned to me then, grinning widely. He was beautiful; there was no other word for him. He had fine, sharp features and skin so translucent I could see the small veins in his temples. His eyes were the pale green of beryl stones and seemed lit from the inside. He was just twenty-two then, nine years younger than myself and nineteen years younger than Henry.
“This is Miss Chappell,” said Henry. “My brother, Jamie.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I managed.
“The pleasure’s mine,” he said, taking my offered hand and kissing the back of it with exaggerated gallantry.
Henry rolled his eyes. “My brother thinks he’s a character in one of his plays.”
“Ah, but which one?” Jamie said, raising a forefinger in the air. “Hamlet? Faust? Prince Hal? What do you think, Miss Chappell?”
I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. “Actually, I think you’re more of a Puck.”
I was rewarded with a dazzling smile. “Dear lady, thou speakest aright, I am that merry wanderer of the night.”
“Who’s Puck?” asked Henry.
Jamie shook his head in mock despair. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” he said.
I saw Henry’s lips tighten. I suddenly felt sorry for him, standing there in his brother’s shadow. “Puck’s a kind of mischievous sprite,” I said. “A troublemaker.”
“A hobgoblin,” Jamie said contritely. “Forgive me, brother, I’m only trying to impress her.”
Henry put his arm around me. “Laura’s not the impressionable type.”
“Good for her!” Jamie said. “Now why don’t you two show me this fine city of yours.”
We took him to the Peabody Hotel, which had the best restaurant in Memphis and a swing band on weekends. At Jamie’s insistence we ordered a bottle of champagne. I’d only had it once before, at my brother Pearce’s wedding, and I was light-headed after one glass. When the band started up, Jamie asked Henry if he could have a dance with me (Henry didn’t dance, that night or any other, because of his limp). We whirled round and round to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, music I’d heard on the radio and danced to in the parlor with my brothers and young nephews. How different this was, and how exhilarating! I was aware of Henry’s eyes following us, and others’ too—women’s eyes, watching me enviously. It was a novel sensation for me, and I couldn’t help but revel in it. After several numbers, Jamie escorted me back to our table and excused himself. I sat down, flushed and out of breath.
“You look especially pretty tonight,” Henry said.
“Thank you.”
“Jamie has that effect on girls. They sparkle for him.” His expression was bland, his tone matter-of-fact. If he was jealous of his brother, I couldn’t detect it. “He likes you, I can tell,” he added.
“I’m sure he doesn’t dislike anyone.”
“Well, at least not anyone in a skirt,” Henry said, with a wry smile. “Look.” He gestured toward the dance floor, and I saw Jamie with a willowy brunette in his arms. She was wearing a satin dress with a low-cut back, and Jamie’s hand rested on her bare skin. As she followed him effortlessly through a series of complicated turns and dips, I realized what a clumsy partner I must have been. I wanted to cover my face with my hands; I knew everything I felt was there for Henry to see. My envy and embarrassment. My foolish yearning.
I stood up. I don’t know what I would have said to him, because at that moment he rose and took my hand. “It’s late,” he said, “and I know you have church in the morning. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
He was so gentle, so kind. I felt a rush of shame. But later, as I lay sleepless in my bed, it occurred to me that what I’d shown Henry so nakedly wasn’t new to him. He must have seen it before, must have felt it himself a hundred times in Jamie’s presence: a longing for a brightness that would never be his.
. . . . .

Jamie returned to Oxford, and I put him out of my thoughts. I was no fool; I knew a man like him could never desire a woman like me. It was marvel enough that Henry desired me. I can’t say whether I was truly in love with him then; I was so grateful to him that it dwarfed everything else. He was my rescuer from life in the margins, from the pity, scorn and crabbed kindness that are the portion of old maids. I should say, he was my potential rescuer. I was by no means sure of him, and for good reason.
One night at choir practice, I looked up from my hymnal and saw him watching me from one of the rear pews, his face solemn with intent. This is it, I thought. He’s going to propose. Somehow I got through the rest of the practice, though the director had to chide me twice for missing my entrance. In the choir room afterwards, as I unbuttoned my robe with trembling fingers, I had a sudden vision of Henry’s hands undoing the buttons of my nightgown on our wedding night. I wondered what it would be like to lie with him, to have him touch my body as intimately as though it were his own flesh. My sister Etta, who was a Registered Nurse, had told me about the sexual act when I turned twenty-one. Her explanation was strictly factual; she never once referred to her own relations with her husband Jack, but I gathered from her private smile that the marriage bed was not an altogether unpleasant place.
Henry was waiting for me outside the church, leaning against his car in his familiar white shirt, gray pants and gray fedora. That was all he ever wore. Clothes didn’t matter to him, and his were often ill-fitting—pants drooping at the waist, hems dragging in the dirt, sleeves too long or too short. I laugh now when I think of the feelings his wardrobe aroused in me. I practically throbbed with the desire to sew for him.
“Hello, my dear,” he said. And then, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”
Goodbye. The word billowed in the space between us before settling around me in soft black folds.
“They’re building a new airfield in Alabama, and they want me to oversee the project. I’ll be gone for several months, possibly longer.”
“I see,” I said.
I waited for him to say something more: How he would miss me. How he would write to me. How he hoped I’d be here when he returned. But he said nothing, and as the silence stretched on I felt myself fill with self-loathing. I was not meant for marriage and children and the rest of it. These things were not for me, had never been for me. I’d been a fool to think otherwise.
I felt myself receding from him, and from myself too, our images shrinking in my mind’s eye. I heard him offer to give me a lift home. Heard myself decline politely, telling him I needed the fresh air, then wish him the best of luck in Alabama. Saw him lean toward me. Saw myself turn my head so his kiss found my cheek instead of my lips. Watched as I walked away from him, my back as straight as pride could make it.
Mother pounced on me as soon as I came in the door. “Henry stopped by earlier,” she said. “Did he find you at church?”
I nodded.
“He seemed eager to speak with you.”
It was hard to look at her face, to see the hope trembling just beneath the surface of her bright smile. “Henry’s going away,” I said. “He doesn’t know for how long.”
“Is that…all he said?”
“Yes, that’s all.” I started up the stairs to my room.
“He’ll be back,” she called out after me. “I know he will.”
I turned and looked down at her, so lovely in her distress. One pale, slender hand lay on the banister. The other clenched the fabric of her skirt, crumpling it.
“Oh, Laura,” she said, with a telltale quaver.
“Don’t you dare cry, Mother.”
She didn’t. It must have been a Herculean effort. My mother weeps over anything at all: dead butterflies, curdled sauce. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said.
My legs went suddenly boneless. I sank down onto the top step and put my head on my knees. I heard the creak of her footsteps and felt her sit beside me. Her arm went around me, and her lips touched my hair. “We won’t speak of him,” she said. “We won’t mention his name ever again.”
She kept her promise, and she must have passed the word to the rest of the family, because no one said a word about Henry, not even my sisters. They were just overly kind, all of them, complimenting me more often than I deserved and concocting ways to keep me busy. I was in great demand as a dinner guest, bridge partner and shopping companion. Outwardly I was cheerful, and after a time they began to treat me normally again, believing I was over it. I wasn’t. I was furious—with myself, with Henry. With the cruel natural order that had made me simultaneously undesirable to men and unable to feel complete without one. I saw that my former contentment had been a lie. This was the truth at the core of my existence: this yawning emptiness, scantily clad in rage. It had been there all along. Henry had merely been the one who’d shown it to me.
I didn’t hear from him for nearly two months. And then one day, I came home to find my mother waiting anxiously in the foyer. “Henry McAllan’s come back,” she said. “He’s in the parlor. Here, your hair’s mussed, let me fix it for you.”
“I’ll see him as I am,” I said, lifting my chin.
I regretted that little bit of defiance as soon as I laid eyes on him. Henry looked tan and fit, more handsome than he ever had. Why hadn’t I at least put on some lipstick? No—that was foolishness. This man had led me on, then abandoned me. I hadn’t gotten so much as a postcard from him in all these weeks. What did I care whether I looked pretty for him?
“Laura, it’s good to see you,” he said. “How have you been?”
“Just fine. And you?”
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
I was silent. Henry came and took my hands in his. My palms were damp, but his were cool and dry.
“I had to be sure of my feelings,” he said. “But now I am. I love you, and I want you to be my wife. Will you marry me.”
And there it was, just like that: the question I’d thought I would never hear. Granted, the scene didn’t play out quite like I’d pictured it. Henry wasn’t kneeling, and the question had actually come out as more of a statement. If he felt any worry over my answer, he hid it well. That stung a little. How dared he be so sure of himself, after such a long absence? Did he think he could simply walk back into my house and claim me like a forgotten coat? And yet, beside the enormity of his wanting me, my anger seemed a paltry thing. If Henry was certain of me, I told myself, it was because that was his way. Meat should not be eaten rare. Blue is your color. Will you marry me.
As I looked into his frank gray eyes, I had a sudden, unbidden image of Jamie grinning down at me as he’d spun me around the ballroom of the Peabody. Henry was neither dashing nor romantic; like me, he was made of sturdier, plainer stuff. But he loved me, and I knew that he would provide for me and be true to me and give me children who were strong and bright. And for all of that, I could certainly love him in return.
“Yes, Henry,” I said. “I will marry you.”
He nodded his head once, then he kissed me, opening my mouth with his thumb and putting his tongue inside. I clamped my mouth shut, more out of surprise than anything; it had been years since I’d been French-kissed, and his tongue felt foreign, thick and strange. Henry let out a little grunt, and I realized I’d bitten him.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
He didn’t speak. He merely re-opened my mouth and kissed me again exactly the same as before. This time I accepted his invasion without protest, and that seemed to satisfy him, because after a few minutes he left me to go and speak to Daddy.
We were married six weeks later in a simple Episcopal ceremony. Jamie was the best man. When Henry brought him to the house he greeted me with a bear hug and a dozen pink roses.
“Sweet Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad Henry finally came to his senses. I told him he was an idiot if he didn’t marry you.”
Jamie had spoiled me for the rest of the McAllans, whom I met for the first time two days before the wedding. From the moment they arrived it was clear they felt superior to us Chappells, who (it must be said) had French blood on my father’s side and a Union general on my mother’s. I didn’t see much of Henry’s father that weekend—Pappy and the other men were off doing whatever men do when there’s a wedding on—but I spent enough time with the McAllan women to know we’d never be close, as I’d naïvely hoped. Henry’s mother was cold, haughty and full of opinions, most of them negative, about everyone and everything. His two sisters, Eboline and Thalia, were former Cotton Queens of Greenville who’d married into money and made sure everybody knew it. The day before the wedding my mother gave a luncheon for the ladies of both families, and Fanny asked them whether they’d gone to college.
Thalia arched her perfectly plucked brows and said, “What good is college to a woman? I confess I can’t see the need for it.”
“Unless of course you’re poor, or plain,” said Eboline.
She gave a little laugh, and Thalia giggled with her. My sisters and I looked at each other uncertainly. Had Henry not told them we were all college girls? Surely they didn’t know, Fanny said to me later; surely the slight had been unintentional. But I knew better.
Still, not even Henry’s disagreeable relations could dampen the happiness I felt on my wedding day. We honeymooned in Charleston, then returned to a little house Henry had rented for us on Evergreen Street, not far from where my parents lived. And so my time of cleaving began. I loved the smallness of domestic life, the sense of belonging it gave me. I was Henry’s now. Yielding to him—cooking the foods he liked, washing and ironing his shirts, waiting for him to come home to me each day—was what I’d been put on the earth to do. And then Amanda Leigh was born in November of 1940, followed two years later by Isabelle, and I became theirs more utterly even than I was their father’s.
It would be six years into my marriage before I remembered that cleave has a second meaning, which is “to divide with a blow, as with an axe.”