A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton (33 page)
“Can we really do that, Katie?” asked Aleta.
“It’s my house,” laughed Katie. “We can do anything I want! Emma, you and William can have my bed, and the rest of us will sleep on the floor!”
Aleta didn’t need to be told twice. Excitedly she bounded off the bed to the corner across the room where she had been sleeping on an extra mattress we had put there for her.
“But I couldn’t take yo bed, Miz Katie,” said Emma. “Dat wouldn’t be right.”
“You
are
going to take it, Emma,” insisted Katie, already gathering blankets and pillows to make herself a bed on the floor while I hurried to my room and did the same.
“What if William wakes you all up?”
“We won’t mind,” said Katie. “We’re a family, Emma, and William is just as much a part of it as the rest of us.”
Ten minutes later I turned the lantern down and crept under the blanket where I’d fixed a bed for myself on Katie’s floor. All of us had one of Katie’s dolls with us, and we kept talking and talking until it must have been past midnight. As tired as we were, I don’t know how we could stay awake so long, but none of us wanted to go to sleep.
After a while we heard Aleta breathing deep and rhythmically and we knew she was asleep. Emma wasn’t far behind and five minutes later she was sound asleep too.
Lying beside me, Katie rolled over and turned her face toward mine. I could just barely see the white glow from the moon coming in one of the windows reflecting off her face. Her eyelids were drooping, and I could tell she was nearly gone herself.
“I’m so happy,” she whispered. “I wish it could stay this way forever.”
I turned toward her and smiled.
She reached out and took my hand and clasped it tight, then sighed deeply and closed her eyes.
“I love you, Mayme,” she said softly.
“Good night, Katie,” I said. “I love you too.”
A few seconds later she was asleep, her hand still in mine, and I followed soon behind her.
A
TALL, STEALTHY FIGURE CREPT AMONG THE
trees bordering a cultivated field of cotton, approximately half of which had recently been picked.
He had ridden out from town after his own work was done, keeping out of sight and making his way closer on foot. And now in the light of the sinking sun, he shielded his eyes with his hand and tried to make sense out of what he saw.
The five workers busily engaged in harvesting what remained on the stalks were the object of the man’s attention. What were they doing out here alone? Four of them were girls, one of them far too young to be doing a man’s work. The fifth was a slender young man whose skin color and other physical characteristics bore an uncanny resemblance to his own.
“I been wonderin’ where he been disappearin’ dese las’ few days,” he said to himself as he watched. “Dat boy’s been fibbin’ ter me. An’ I knew dere wuz a suspishus look in dat girl’s eye too. She ain’t been tellin’ me da whole truf. Sumfin be goin’ on roun’ ’bout here. Sumfin dat don’ mak much sense ter dese ole eyes er mine.”
He continued to watch for a few minutes more, then turned and made his way back to where he had tied his horse.
“Me an’ dat son er mine’s gwine hab a man ter man talk ’bout a few things,” he muttered as he went. “And den I’s gwine t’ pay me a visit ter Miz Kathleen Clairborne an’ her young frien’s. An’ right soon! Matter fact, I jes’ might go visit dem termorrow.”
Watch for volume three of
S
HENANDOAH
S
ISTERS
The Color of Your Skin
Ain’t the Color of Your Heart
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