Light to the Hills: A Novel (53)

“Can we get on back home?” she’d asked Mama. “I’m wore out, and Miles needs to eat.”

“Let me just tell your daddy,” Mama had answered. “He’ll likely be here the rest of the afternoon.”

“Here, you take Miles, and I’ll fix a pail to take to Mooney.” Amanda made sure to add an extra slice of jam cake for her friend and was wrapping a few pork ribs in paper when a woman approached her. She wore a plain gray cotton dress that she’d tried to spruce up with an added collar, and her brown hair was twisted into a low knot at the back of her neck. She was some years older, lines around her gray eyes that were the same color as her dress. Amanda didn’t recognize her, likely a miner’s wife.

“Sorry ’bout your loss,” she said, nodding toward the grave sites. The woman’s voice was odd, but Amanda had heard so many sorries that day, her ears were worn out.

Amanda nodded at the woman and topped the pail with some deviled eggs, which wouldn’t keep long. She wondered if the vinegar in them would sour Mooney’s milk.

“I guess it’s a blessing your folks were able to get here and straighten things out,” the woman persisted.

Amanda turned to her, the dinner pail hanging in her hand. The question in her expression must have issued a license for the woman to continue.

“I see you got a young’un now,” the woman continued. If her words had had teeth, they would’ve drawn blood. “Maybe that’ll slow you down some.”

“I don’t take your meaning,” said Amanda.

The woman laughed, though her eyes showed no mirth. “No, I think I got you pegged. You’re—you were,” she corrected, “Frank Rye’s wife. That makes two of us.” She held up her left hand and waggled the ring on her finger. “Seems he was plowing more than one field.”

Amanda froze, the blood drained from her face. “That’s not so,” she said. “Frank may’ve been a lotta things but he wasn’t two-timin’.” Even as she said it, her confidence wavered.

“That’s what I figgered you’d say,” the woman told her, fishing in her dress pocket. She pulled out a creased sepia photograph—a wedding photo, something Frank had told her was an extra they could do without—and in it, a trim couple, she seated with a slight smile playing on her lips, and he standing behind her in a dark suit with a stiff, short collar, his hands lying possessively on each shoulder. Amanda would know him anywhere: it was Miles’s father, her late husband. The day felt suddenly too warm, and her knees threatened to buckle.

“Here you are”—the woman pointed her long finger at Amanda’s chest—“carryin’ on not two counties over, gettin’ with child, and pushin’ him to who knows what ends so you can live the life of Riley while he’s supposed to be sendin’ money back to his wife—to me.”

Amanda glanced around the graveyard. The woman had grown shrill, and several folks were looking. Mama walked toward her, holding Miles over one shoulder, her free hand patting his back. Her father stood with his arms folded under a stand of white oaks, his Bible tucked under one arm. He looked to be having a serious talk with a group of men, their faces grim. Even from that distance, she thought she could see veins bulging in his neck, and she figured they must have asked him to mediate some cockamamie dispute; that usually got his dander up. The limestone grave markers winked in the light as the sun passed in and out of the clouds overhead.

Amanda’s shoes were still muddy from stepping in the dirt of her husband’s grave. Her belly still showed a small bulge from having carried his child inside her.

“Well, Frank ain’t sending money to anyone no more. He never said a word to me about having a wife. Never.” A thought struck her then. “You have children?”

The woman shook her head. “No, he weren’t around long enough to get that far. Mines closed and he lit out—to find work, he said. I never did hear from him after that.” She looked at the mounded dirt a few yards away. “Till now.”

“I s’pose that means we were never truly married,” Amanda said.

“Way I heard it, you made your own money and don’t need what my husband give you.” The woman’s eyes scrolled up and down Amanda’s body. “Why he’d want to take up with such as that, I can’t say.”

Mama joined them then, and Amanda traded the dinner pail for her son. Her mother looked between her daughter and the woman, who stood with her lips tight and jaw clenched. Amanda held Miles close and turned to the woman, whose name, she realized, she still didn’t know. It was too much.

“I just buried a man today. He wasn’t who I thought he was in a number of ways, that’s for certain. But he’s nothing to me now.” She flung her hand toward the grave. “Help yourself to what’s left, but weren’t nobody to blame for any of this except him. I don’t aim to lay down beside him and let you stomp all over me, so you best go back to your two counties over.”

Amanda turned on her heel and stalked off toward home as Miles started to fuss. She imagined Mama was as full of questions as she was herself, but it would have to wait. Her breasts tingled with the familiar sting of her milk letting down and she hurried on, knowing if she didn’t, her blouse would be soaked by the time she reached the cabin, and Miles’s wails might be loud enough to wake the dead.