ALMA BATTLED WEEDS ALONG THE GARDEN FENCEROW, SICKLING DOWN the burdock and jimson weed and sumac, daring any cat or dog to come near. The snakes scooted, double-S-ing into the thicket. Alma’s wide feet were planted firmly on the ground in her new spring brogans—her “spreadin’-adder shoes,” Wad called them. Once Alma had killed a spreading adder, thinking it was a copperhead, and Wad laughed at her for getting so scared. “A snake is a snake,” Alma said.
Christie observed Alma’s furious strength—the way she hauled water, or hoed the garden, or hitched up the mule, or shoveled manure into the spreader. Alma beat rugs as if she wanted to murder them.
“There ain’t no time to set around for sorrow,” she told Christie.
Determined to follow Alma’s example, Christie worked steadily. Sometimes she didn’t see James all day. She didn’t miss him. She served his supper, washed his clothes, sent his dinner to him in the field at midday. She washed the children and brushed their teeth with frayed black-gum twigs, collected eggs from fussy hens, baked pies and bread, put out a wash on clear Mondays. She worked automatically through long mornings in the garden, hoeing vigorously and not even noticing the heat. She churned clabber into butter with a rhythm too fast for any song, sometimes too fast for the butter to gather properly. Often at the end of a day she was astonished to realize the hours had gone. Other times it seemed the day was lasting forever. But whenever a train went by, it jolted her memory and told the time for her. When the teakettle whistled, she held her ears, anticipating the train. She watched each train sauntering past, slowing down as it approached Hopewell. The noon express, though, rumbled straight through, with a single long, chilling note. One morning a freight train passed, and she saw a Negro standing on the coal car, tossing off coal. The black chunks tumbled down the embankment into the weeds. She saw the man the next morning walking along the bank with a scuttle, picking up the lumps of coal.
Christie welcomed the ripening blackberries, the baby-chick sound of bats in the barn beams when she opened the barn door, the carpet of white clover in the pasture, the daisies everywhere. Everything was a new wonder to her. She observed a pair of ducks settling on the pond; a pair of bluejays nesting above the wash-house; a turtle laying eggs in a dirt hole on the lane; a snakeskin stretched on the doorstep like a fine necklace left as a present. The dogwood was spread out through the woods, like thousands of lighted candles. With Nannie, she made a sweat garden—a hole lined with moss where they placed a clump of tiny blue flowers, a sprig of clover, and a row of minuscule seashells picked from the grit James bought for the chickens. Christie covered the little garden with a clear glass bowl that was broken on one edge. The garden looked like the candy garden inside the paperweight her father gave her mother one Christmas, the year Susan was born. In the mornings, Christie and Nannie watched the steam clear inside the glass bowl and reveal the greening moss, which had sent up little shoots with red seeds on the ends. Christie and Nannie made a pond garden, too, in another clear bowl. They filled the bowl with pond water and set it beside the wash-house. They watched mosquitoes hatch, then tadpoles. The tadpoles slowly grew frog feet. Little green plants like lilies, the size of pinheads, sprouted on the surface of the water. Christie dropped a blue button into the water and it sank to the bottom. Nannie said, “The button drowneded.”
Nannie begged Christie to make new clothes for her doll, Miss Laney Bright. The doll was ugly and worn. “She needs a new dress,” Nannie said, pulling at the tattered calico.
“No, ask Aunt Mandy. I ain’t in a sewing frame of mind,” Christie said. “And besides, that doll never sets still for me. She’s too giggle-some.”
Nannie splattered the air with giggles then. “Miss Laney Bright always sets still,” she gasped. Nannie ran around the yard, so full of vigor that Christie thought her own amazed breath would fly out after her.
Boone made furniture for Nannie’s dollhouse from candy wrappings the older children brought back from town. He made tables and chifforobes from the cardboard, and Amanda fashioned rugs from little scraps of wool and curtains from bits of lace. She made doll-bed covers from feed-sacks, and Boone made several clothes-pin dolls with painted faces. He had whittled the clothes-pins and then turned them into dolls. Christie wondered why he didn’t whittle more realistic dolls instead of creating the clothes-pins first. A strange image came to mind: it was as though people were fashioned as trees and then got twisted and bent into believing they were human, with souls. Maybe that’s what it was, she thought. We just have human features painted on us. But what are we to start with? she kept wondering. She clung to Nannie and Clint and Jewell. Laughing obliviously in their play, they seemed so fragile—like dry, rustling leaves that might burst into flames.
Nannie dressed kittens in doll clothes. She kept asking what had become of the five babies. Dead, they had looked like dolls to her. Arch told Nannie that her mama and papa were hiding the doll-babies until Christmas. He told Clint and Jewell their mama was crazy. Christie herself felt as though her mind were simply somewhere else, away from what concerned the men and women around her. She was comfortable charging through the season, letting the hard necessity of daily work carry her along. She didn’t listen to the clatter around her: Alma and Amanda fussing; Alma yelling at Wad or the children; Wad teasing and growling; Thomas, when he was home, spouting his news of the people he’d seen. The glory that had rubbed off on him had not abated with the loss of the babies. After adding a line of teething powder and a line of nursing bottles to his wares, he had persuaded the manufacturers to print special tags, identifying them as the kind used by the Hopewell Quintuplets. “How do your customers know the bottles didn’t kill the babies?” James asked Thomas angrily. “And they didn’t live long enough to cut teeth, so where does this teething powder come in?”
Mostly, though, James was silent. He went about his work dutifully, with good sense. He treated the boys and Nannie with affection and humor, as if nothing had happened. Most of the time he treated Christie that way, too. She suspected he was suffering deep inside, but she didn’t want to drive the hurt in further by mentioning it.
One June day he came in from working the corn—mad at the mule, mad at the bent tine on the cultivator, mad at the dogs. He said to Christie, while the children were still out finishing their night work, “They’re saying we’re glad those babies are gone.”
“Who’s saying that?”
“People at church, at the store. They saw how you didn’t hardly cry at the funeral. They’re saying we thought we were too good to have the funeral at our own church.”
“Don’t listen to talk like that,” she said.
James sat on the hassock, opening and closing his pocketknife blade. He said, “When my daddy died, the women took care of the body, and Mack Pritchard’s daddy built Daddy’s coffin, and old Mrs. Culpepper fixed his clothes and helped Mammy line his coffin with sheets. But now Joseph said he heard ’em talking at the square about how we wouldn’t bury our own babies—we had to go to a fancy funeral parlor.”
“Jealousy,” Christie said.
He shook his head and put away his knife. He went to the washstand in the kitchen and poured water in the wash pan. He started to splash water on his arms.
“Gossip,” she said.
“Well, I’ve got to hold my head up in this place,” he said, drying himself on the kitchen towel. Then he took her elbow and pulled her around to face him. “Remember what we promised when we moved here, how we were going to get along with all kinds?”
She squirmed, cringing from the dirt on his clothes, hating his sour breath, wishing for a moment she had never met him.
“It’s still true,” he said. “Don’t you forget it.”
“What do you want me to do, go bawling around the courthouse square? They’d say I was crazy. Or had hydrophobie. They’d go find me a madstone then!” She blurted out her words in rapid bursts, like spitting, the way she always did when he was mad at her.
“Don’t you get sassy,” said James, letting go.
She knew she should not talk back to her husband this way. But her bitterness at his authority drove deep in her, into a place where she saved such emotions, a place where they could grow into something useful. Abruptly, she went out the door, leaving him standing in the kitchen, waiting to be fed. She headed down the lane. The sun was low and would be setting clear.
She hadn’t cried much at the funeral, it was true. Her grief was too deep. And it was hidden under the strange exhilaration she often felt—now, for instance, seeing the late evening light darken the line of cedar trees between the tobacco and the corn, turning them into a foreboding forest. At this time of day, everything in sight seemed so precious and fleeting, every flower head and grass stem on the ground and every bird soaring over the vast sky.
She could hardly believe the babies were dead. But then it was unbelievable that they had been born in the first place, and that so many people had come to see them, from so far away. The funeral was at the Central Methodist Church in Hopewell. Wad and Alma both wanted an additional service at their own, smaller church, saying it wasn’t fair to Brother Jones for them to switch churches on him, but Amanda and Boone both pointed out that Christie and James had been through enough and they should get this over with in one big service that everybody could attend.
At first Christie hadn’t wanted to go to the funeral parlor at all. She was afraid of what Mr. Mullins had planned. She dreaded seeing the babies treated by his unusual methods. She was afraid they wouldn’t seem dead. They might look so alive she wouldn’t be able to bear it. But Mama, understanding more than anyone else what Christie was going through, gathered all her resources and took charge. She fixed up Christie’s clothes and sewed on some buttons, and she assigned tasks to the children. Dulcie blacked Christie’s boots. The older girls draped the furniture—the beds, the chairs, the safe, the chifforobes—all in clean sheets, and they stopped the clocks at both houses. More food arrived. Mama complained that it was wrong not to have the bodies at home to sit up with all night.
“They took those babies away from us,” she said.
After being looked after for so long, Christie seemed to have forgotten her own direction. Things went on around her all that week. Her papa and brothers and sisters arrived on the train during the night. Luther and Jack were nearly grown. Eunice and Emily were taller and more alike. But Papa still had his hacking cough. It worked its way into the familiar household sounds—the clock, the rocking chair, the stove. Christie could hardly bear to look at Amanda, whose own sorrow had subdued her. Amanda herded the small children out of the way, promising them pieces of damson pie if they wouldn’t eat it point first, which was bad luck. Her eyes were swollen and her hair unkempt.
The Mullins establishment, with its ornate, expensive furnishings, Persian carpets, and dark woodwork, swallowed up the family. They had never been in such a place. Walking on a rich rug patterned with peacocks and yellow trees made them all self-conscious. The babies, sealed inside a small glass case, were on display on a table in the large front parlor, which Mr. Mullins called the Slumber Room. He had draped the whole room in curtains the color of dried blood. Behind the case, like the box a present came in, was a brass-handled oak chest, the receptacle for the glass case.
Seeing the babies for the first time shocked her into stillness; they no longer seemed to be her flesh and blood. They were objects, painted pink, in identical dresses, white with lace and tatting—fine handiwork. Christie could not recall who had made the dresses. She and James had seen dead people before, and always there was a lifelessness in them that was restful. The faces always seemed angelic, as if they were about to smile, as if all effort used in frowning and confronting life had relaxed and left only peace. But the babies looked tight and contorted, their little features frozen like knots on fence posts. Their expressions were painted in place. Boone said later the babies looked like something petrified.
“And they’ll stay that-a-way?” James asked Mr. Mullins incredulously.
“Yes, Mr. Wheeler. They’re preserved from decay. And as long as they’re in that glass case they’ll always be as you see them, your precious babes. If the air doesn’t hit them, they can’t go back to dust. They’ll be that way till the end of time, or till the air hits them.”
“I never saw the like,” James said, fumbling at his cuff links.
Christie pitied her husband. He seemed uncomfortable in his best suit and collar. She felt like a bird perched on a tree outside, looking in the window. Those weren’t her babies plopped on that tatted pillow in the Slumber Room.
“I hope you understand why I insisted on keeping the little angels here,” said Mr. Mullins. “Everybody will be able to come here, and it will be the most convenience for you.” He turned to leave the room. “I’ll leave you two for a little while, before I open the doors to the rest of the family.”
When they were alone with the babies, James and Christie stood quietly for a moment, staring. James held her closely and they both cried then. She was aware they were standing as stiff as if they were posed for a photograph. Outside, they heard roaring, the noise of an enormous crowd.
“They don’t look right without their bonnets,” Christie said. “And Minnie’s not in the middle. She’s on the outside. She’s supposed to be in the middle.”
Mr. Mullins had apparently left them bonnetless to show off his undertaking skills. The babies’ heads were like carved wood. Their sleeves were pulled up to show their wrists, like peeled sticks. They still wore their bracelets. Their little fingers curved like bug legs.
“Why?” Christie sobbed. “Why did they have to die?”
In the two and a half days before the funeral service, the register album was signed by almost everybody in town. But their signatures were mingled among those of a much larger force of strangers. The train brought people from Louisville, St. Louis, Memphis, and from places even farther away. Someone from California signed the album, and several people traveled in a group from Texas. People still wanted to say they had seen the babies—dead or alive, it seemed not to matter.
Mr. Mullins provided a curtained room off to the side of the Slumber Room, where the family could retreat, but Christie kept pulling back the curtain to face the people—wanting to see who was there, wanting to see the babies through their curious eyes. She was on display then, too, like a criminal waiting to be hanged. Amanda had washed and ironed Christie’s handkerchiefs, but she hardly used them.
Each day at dinnertime Wad drove Christie and James home, where they sat down to the feast neighbors had left. Members of the family took turns being with Christie and James and taking care of the children. The smaller children ran down the corridors and up the stairways of the funeral parlor, sprung loose with glee at their unusual surroundings.
Everyone in the family was dressed up in their dark winter clothes, even though spring was coming on. All the Wheeler men appeared awkward in their suits, and Christie knew they worried about neglecting their work. They stayed out on the street talking much of the time. Crops, no doubt, Christie thought. Wad and his sons traveled back and forth to the farm, tending to the livestock or to Mammy Dove. Boone made two brief trips in, and both he and Mammy Dove attended the funeral.
At night, Wad took Alma and the children home, leaving Amanda to stay through the night with James and Christie at the Mullins establishment. But Christie wanted to go home to sleep.
“Somebody needs to stay,” Christie’s father argued. “Ye don’t have them in your own house to watch over, and something might happen to them here.” He was hacking more, and his face had a pallor.
“The Bible says never to leave the corpse untended,” said Mama.
“Where does it say that?” asked Christie.
“That was Jesus,” Mama said. “He busted out and went right up to heaven when nobody was looking.”
“Well, wouldn’t that be the finest thing that could happen?” Christie wanted to know.
“Hush, Christie,” said James. “We’ll stay.”
“What if the Devil got them instead?” said Papa. “Or what if somebody was to steal them?” Later he said, “That fancy casket they ordered from Memphis must have cost a fortune. We could have cut one out of pine. I could have made ye some nice brass handles. Or wrought iron. Or we could have made five caskets for what that one cost.”
“It’s free,” Christie said.
Mama said she would have lined the inside with some bleached domestic and trimmed it on the outside with balls of fringe held down by leaden rose-beaded tacks. “A paper of tacks and a couple of yards of domestic is all you’d need to outfit a baby casket.” Mama studied the babies for the hundredth time. “I believe they’re a-laying antigodling,” she said. “They ain’t lined up straight.”
“I can’t see it,” said Christie. “But Minnie oughter be in the middle.”
“I never heard of a thing like this a-going on so long,” Papa said with characteristic exasperation. “Won’t they rot?”
“Hush, Lake,” said Mama.
“Go on back to Dundee, Papa,” said Christie wearily.
She thought she would fly to pieces. Strangers approached her with awe, but her parents found fault at every opportunity. And she thought the Wheelers had to have something to fuss about all the time. That week, Alma had other troubles, for Jimmie Lou had taken up with Herschel Long, a young man from town who hung around the funeral parlor as if he couldn’t pay enough respects to the family.
“Courting at a time like this!” Wad hissed to Alma.
“Jimmie Lou ain’t none of your business,” Alma told him. “If Thomas wants to do something about it, he can.”
“Why, Herschel’s a short feller, and he’s got little-bitty ears and he’s already losing his hair,” said Wad. “I bet he can’t work a lick.”
“Well, I expect not,” said Alma. “A feller with little-bitty ears couldn’t hear you tell him what to do.”
Amanda said, “He’s a nice-looking boy, Wad. And he’s got manners.”
“I don’t know how she’s going to please a town boy,” said Alma with a sigh. “He’ll be wanting his fine shirts boiled and starched, and no telling what he’ll be wanting to eat. Those town folks want things rich, with a lot of oysters and too much meat.”
Christie felt as powerless as she had in the winter, struggling against her cumbersome weight. She was heavy and tired. Her breasts hurt. She still felt a misery place deep inside, where the babies had been. Now under that glass, undisturbed, they lay rigidly on their backs, their arms bowed stiffly at their sides. In life, they had lain in varied positions, heads turned in any direction, arms working, their noises soft and pulsating. Mr. Mullins had accentuated the babies’ smallness. The dresses were pulled tight, and the babies’ necks were bare and red. Their heads were lacquered like the simulated hair on a bisque doll, the shine of their scalps seeping through like light through a lace curtain. Without the bonnets, they looked cold, and more than once Christie had the impulse to cover them up. She could not comprehend her grief. She thought of Nannie lining up her clothes-pin dolls. There was a connection, she thought, as if life were a simple circle, with events occurring and recurring, and when you encountered an event the second time you had learned to feel its pain—as though when you were grown, events might be unbearable, while for a child they meant nothing at all; they were just hollow rehearsals.
On the morning of the funeral, Mr. Mullins located Christie in the reception room. He seemed agitated by some news.
“I have somebody that wants to see you, Mrs. Wheeler,” he said.
“Bring them on in,” she said. “If I’ve talked to one, I’ve talked to five thousand.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am. You’ll have to come with me.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s a nigger that said she worked for you.”
“Mittens!” Christie was so overwhelmed, imagining the woman’s sweet, sympathetic face, that she had to sit down. “Can’t you bring her here?”
“It wouldn’t do, Mrs. Wheeler.”
Christie felt the clarity of anger for the first time since she lost the babies. Mittens was more her friend than any of these strangers, any of the townfolks—even some of her family, she thought, as her eyes lit on Wad and Boone and Joseph. But she stifled these thoughts and followed Mr. Mullins.
Mittens was waiting in a little storeroom in the back of the immense house. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her legs crossed and her arms folded. She wore a felt hat with a faded ribbon tied around the crown. And she had on a good, freshly ironed, figured dress. When Mr. Mullins left them alone in the storeroom, Christie burst into tears, remembering her babies at this woman’s breasts. When Mittens stood up to hug Christie, Christie could feel how Mittens’ breasts were smaller now. The two women both seemed aware that their breasts touched as they hugged.
“I wanted to see them so bad,” Mittens said, as they moved apart. “But that white man, he said there was so many peoples he couldn’t allow a time for the colored to come in. He say there was peoples from all over the world.”
“It don’t look like them,” Christie sobbed. “It’s not my babies.”
“I needs to see them if I pays my respects,” Mittens said. “I’s so sorry, Miz Christie.” She dabbed at Christie’s face with a rag.
Mittens picked up a napkin-covered plate from the floor. “I brought you some of them angel biscuits like you like. And a bit of cake.”
Christie couldn’t speak. Mittens said, “I’ll tell you what was going through my mind these last two days. I was thinking how the Lord is unfair sometimes, and they’ll try to tell you it’s not so, but it is so, and the thing is, Miz Christie, is what you say back to the Lord finally. Do you say, That’s all right, Jesus, I deserve to lose my babies? Or do you straighten up and rare back and say, Lord, you won’t get me down that easy—jest watch? You’ll get by, Miz Christie. I know you will.”
“That’s the kindest thing anybody’s said to me, Mittens,” said Christie. Impulsively, she took Mittens’ arm. “Come on,” she said.
Carrying the plate of biscuits and cake, she led Mittens through the hall, through a room that opened into the Slumber Room from the back, and before Mittens could realize what was happening, Christie had taken her right into the Slumber Room, which was full of visitors. She led Mittens straight to the glass case. Mittens began sobbing and wailing, and Mama and Amanda rushed to her.
“Here’s Mittens!” cried Mama. “Oh, we missed you!”
The loud, happy greetings Mittens got from Mama and Amanda silenced the rest of the room. Everybody stopped talking and stared at the women’s mingled sorrow and joy.
“What does she think she’s doing?” Christie heard Wad say. Did he mean her or Mittens? She didn’t care. Mittens’ black cheeks, shining and wet, glistened like exposed hearts.
Later that day, during the singing at the end of the service, one man’s voice was noticeable above the rest. He sang as though he were a heifer being led by a rope. “That’s one of those men that tromped on your March flowers,” Amanda whispered into Christie’s ear.
So many of the people greeting Christie after the service were familiar. Mrs. Blankenship passed the casket and made a beeline toward Christie, grabbing her in a sisterly hug. Mrs. Blankenship’s face was warm and wet. Her hat had several tiers of ruffles and feathers on it, like an elaborate nest made by a buzzard. The neighbors seemed awkward and bashful, as they mumbled “We’re real sorry” or “They look so natural.”
“They look so real,” Mrs. Willy said. “They look like they might pucker up and commence to bawling any minute.”
Mrs. Willy blubbered, lingering so long over the babies that her daughter, visiting from Maple Grove, came forward to usher her away.
For more than three hours after the service, people filed past the sealed-glass case to view the little bodies. The congregation spilled out of the large uptown church. The crowds extended all around the courthouse square. What Christie remembered later was how cloudy it had been that day. And she remembered James standing with Nannie beneath a dogwood tree. He leaned over and lifted Nannie up to his shoulders so she could reach the flowers on the tree. And Christie remembered Amanda marveling to everyone at the supper table that night, as if they hadn’t been at the funeral, “Why, that church was so fine, they turned on all their electric lights right in the middle of the day. They just had to show them off, I reckon.”
When those electric lights flickered on, Christie had had the impression that the deaths of her children were a grand show at an opera house. Amidst all the sorrow and tears surrounding her, she noticed the little beam of happiness on Thomas’s face. And then she thought she saw it on everyone’s face—a faint little tinge of excitement and wonder and privilege, as the town shared in a tragic drama. They were all thrilled by the shudder of death and giddily aware of the glow of national attention. Later, at home, she realized she had felt it too.
At home, there was food everywhere. Christie had never seen such a fine assortment of food, more bountiful than any church dinner. Townspeople and neighbors brought what Alma later said amounted to a wagonload of food—watermelon-rind pickles, chess pie, boiled custard, angel-food cake, coconut cake, chicken salad, fried chicken, ham, dried mutton, fruit salad, poached pears, spiced plums, cold slaw, gooseberry jam, tongue sandwiches, sweet-potato pie, banana pudding, blackberry pie, guinea hen, quail, dressed eggs, salt-rising bread, pickled souse, egg bread, soda biscuits, chicken-and-dumplings, damson pies, peach pies, fried pies. The chess pie and the salt-rising bread had been sent by Mrs. Crittenden, from Crittenden’s Inn, where the St. Louis newspaperman had eaten dinner.
Now, a month later, as Christie walked back in the fields, leaving James waiting for his supper, she thought about all that food. So much of it had ruined. The fruit pies and the meat kept the longest, but the banana pudding soured and the chess pie dried out. The waste was heartbreaking. She didn’t want to think about the funeral. But parts of that week stole back to her from time to time, and somehow they fit into a whole like pieces of Nannie’s jigsaw puzzle. Those stiff, lifeless, inhuman things in their glass case—maybe, after all, they had come from the Devil. It had slowly grown on her that perhaps her original intuition had been right—that the Devil had been at work, entering her, disguising himself as innocent, sweet babies, using her mother love to promote his evil. It was as though Mr. Mullins’s art had laid bare the Devil’s intention, by making the babies look so hard and dry. Her thoughts were hard, she knew, but it was easier to let go of her babies if she thought this way. Yet the babies were her own. She had been blessed as well as cursed with them. But maybe it had been best to lose them, just as it might be better to run from their memory, out into the fields where she could release some of the poison that afflicted her.
The last of the sunlight made yellow blankets on the far field, the one that sloped slightly toward the South. She descended into the creekbed, where a few patches of water from the spring runoff remained in the yellow gravel. She picked a flower from a bank of red honeysuckle, snipped off the end with her teeth, and sucked out the honey. She noticed an elderberry bush in full bloom, a young one that had not bloomed last year. She intended to gather its berries for jelly later in the summer.
She climbed out of the creek and headed out through a field of timothy. Suddenly a fox went trotting through the ankle-high grass. She froze. The fox didn’t see her, but his bushy white-tipped tail waved like a greeting. He lowered his tail and moved slowly, his gaze on some slight movement in the thick grass. She watched, breathlessly, for a long time as the fox slowly stalked a mouse or some other small creature in the grass. He pounced quickly and missed. Like a cat, the fox seemed to pretend he was only playing then, as though he knew someone was watching and he didn’t want to seem to have failed. She realized that she wasn’t afraid, and that she was creeping toward him, to see how close she could get. She had never done such a thing with a wild animal before, but she felt an unaccustomed boldness. She crept so quietly, like a fox herself. The fox made several comical leaps, high and long, snouted the grass, then continued on his way. His path described a broken crescent on the hill, as he disappeared at times into a furrow or depression, then reappeared farther along. She continued following. If she could get close enough to touch him, she would reach to pet his head, stroke his thick fur. She longed to touch him.
The fox was red, with a new glistening summer-gray coat sprouting through the shedding red. His nose was sharp and delicate, his throat and bib white, his front legs dark. Shadows of stripes lurked in his tail. The backs of his ears were dark triangles. She imagined him going to his den, carrying a rabbit or mouse to the little ones. Or was the fox a mother? Somehow, she thought he behaved like a man.
Suddenly someone shouted from behind her. She jumped, and the fox streaked across the pasture and bounded straight through the fence.
“Why didn’t you run?” cried Wad. “Law, girl, you’ll be chewed to pieces if you go around fooling with wild varmints! If I’d had my gun I’d ’a’ got him.”
Wad had come out of nowhere. The fox had disappeared, like the sun over the horizon.