Rose was 13 years old and back on the farm in Dobbin—she was breathing hard and sweating and fighting to get loose in the steamy, shadowy dark of her mama’s bedroom where she had been dragged kicking and screaming after Papa found her in the lean-to hay shed with Jack Nash’s bare muscular arms holding onto her.
Papa was going to kill him. He even got the gun down from its rack over the back door … but Mama had a cooler head and she told Brother to get the horse whip from the barn and encouraged Papa to whip him instead.
It could only have been guilt that kept Jack from taking that whip away from the old man because he was certainly powerful enough to have done it. But he took his punishment without a whimper.
Rose hadn’t witnessed the whipping, but she could hear the leather cut the air and crack across Jack’s back and an occasional swear-word drawn begrudgingly past his clenched teeth. All the while Rose was fighting like a bobcat, and she never did know exactly who or how many of her brothers and sisters betrayed her trust and held her there that afternoon. They knew they had been in a battle though, before it was over and they straggled out of there bloody and gasping for breath to lick their wounds. Truth be told there was never another time in the remainder of her life in Dobbin that anybody tried to subdue Rose Sharon Saylor. She could chuckle at the memory, but nobody had been laughing then. When Papa had exhausted himself and his rage, they hitched Jimmy the mule to the wagon and lifted Jack into it and then Brother drove him to his Daddy’s farm and dumped him at the end of the lane with nary a word to anyone.
It was nearly a year before he ventured near Rose again. In fact he kind of disappeared altogether for a time. At least nobody could say where he was—or anyway, nobody would tell Rose.
She touched the photograph to her lips and kissed it. “But I never wasted a minute worrying whether you’d come back, my sweet darlin’, I just knew that sooner or later you had to come back to me. Sooner or later! “ But that wasn’t exactly the truth, because Rose had spent that melancholy season wallowing in a deep and dark despair.
Now she took some more time to study the photograph, remembering her surprise when her new husband took her to a real professional photographer’s studio right there in Jackson and they had their wedding portrait made. And now, truth be told, that picture was Rose Sharon’s most treasured possession. After Jack Nash, of course!
Rose sighed and hung the tin frame back on its nail. Then she returned to the sink and finished the dishes. After dumping the dishwater down the drain, she started her regular cleaning and straightening-up routine. She surely was in an unusual nostalgic mood this morning and was finding it difficult to keep her mind on anything except the past. It seemed especially joyful to dwell on those dusty, sultry summer days and nights, some of which were so sweltering the only way you could sleep was to wring out the sheets you laid on in cold well water. It was hard to think there could have been heat like that anywhere when she was practically freezing to death right now in another of those awful Chicago winters. Of course, lying close to Jack and twining her body around his was a lot more comforting in this climate.
Rose happened to notice the alarm clock while she was straightening up the bedroom and realized it was later than she thought. So she slacked off on the cleaning and started to gather a load of clothes for the weekly wash.
Mary Jean, the lady who rented them their part of the building had a wringer-washer down in the cellar and she let Rose use it on Monday mornings between 10 and noon. That was a real blessing from God or she’d probably have to do it on a washboard in the bathtub and God forbid she have to go back to washing persnickety Jack’s white shirts on a washboard! She smiled recalling how fine he looked when he was wearing one of those crisply starched white shirts.