As I had nowhere else to go, I went on back to what passed for Solomon’s kitchen. With the boss gone, Jonathan and Eli and them were cutting up, shoving each other around, showing their big teeth in big laughs, having a high old time. They paid me no more mind than if I’d been a June bug skittering underfoot. They treated me like I was a field hand and they were house servants too high-nosed to even cut a glance my way. Which was fine by me. The less truck I had with them, the better.
I didn’t want them or any of the other shiftless drifters knowing a thing about me. Least of all that I was a girl. Someone they could take and rake across the top of a barrel. I plopped down on the bench and, cursing under my breath, set to peeling Solomon’s damn potatoes.
It was past dark by the time Solomon came back from his visit with the whores. I had a pile of skinned taters on the bench next to me and a pair of hands that appeared as if I’d stuck them directly into a thrashing machine. I don’t know how it was that I could gut and skin a deer with a penknife, whittle a cob into a passable pipe, and chop an acre of tobacco without a scratch, but getting the peel off a tater flat bumfuzzled me.
Solomon stood above me and stared hard at the fat peels piled at my feet. When he shook his head in disgust he fanned the smell of lilac water and fornication my way. “Left more meat on the peel than you took off.” Then he ordered, “Scrape them peels until you got enough for pies.”
“It’s too dark to see.”
“There’s your first cooking lesson then: get it done while sun’s up.”
I scraped by firelight until the embers burned down. Then I scraped by nothing until the moon rose. When I finished, I laid my head down on the bench, my hand under my head, cupping the spot the soldier had stroked. It seemed like less than a minute passed before the infernal bugles were squawking.