That seemed curious. Roscoe had never heard of a woman farmer, though plenty of black women picked cotton during the season. They came to a good-sized clearing without a stump in it. There was a large cabin and a rail corral. Louisa unharnessed the mules and put them in the pen.
"I'd leave 'em out but they'd run off," she said. "They don't like farming as much as I do. I guess we'll have corn bread for supper. It's about all I eat."
"Why not bacon?" Roscoe asked. He was quite hungry and would have appreciated a good hunk of bacon or a chop of some kind. Several chickens were scratching around the cabin — any one of them would have made good eating but he didn't feel he ought to mention it, since he was the guest.
"I won't have no pigs around," Louisa said. "Too smart. I won't bother with animals I have to outwit. I'd rather just farm."
True to her word, Louisa served up a meal of corn bread, washed down with well water. The cabin was roomy and clean, but there was not much food in it. Roscoe was puzzled as to how Louisa could keep going with nothing but corn bread in her. It occurred to him that he had not seen a milk cow anywhere, so evidently she had even dispensed with such amenities as milk and butter.
She herself munched a plate of corn bread contentedly, now and then fanning herself. It was hot and still in the cabin.
"I doubt you'll catch that sheriff," she said, looking Roscoe over.
Roscoe doubted it too, but felt that he had to make a show of trying, at least. What was more likely was that if he rode around long enough July would eventually come and find him.
"Well, he went to Texas," he said. "Maybe I'll strike someone that's seen him."
"Yes, and maybe you'll ride right into a big mess of Comanche Indians," Louisa said. "You do that and you'll never enjoy another good plate of corn bread."
Roscoe let the remark pass. The less said about Indians the better, in his view. He munched corn bread for a while, preferring not to think about any of the various things that might happen to him in Texas.
"Was you ever married?" Louisa asked.
"No, ma'am," Roscoe said. "I was never even engaged."
"In other words you've went to waste," Louisa said.
"Well, I've been a deputy sheriff for a good spell," Roscoe said. "I keep the jail."
Louisa was watching him closely in a way that made him a little uncomfortable. The only light in the cabin came from a small coal-oil lamp on the table. A few small bugs buzzed around the lamp, their movements casting shadows on the table. The corn bread was so dry that Roscoe kept having to dip dipperfuls of water to wash it down.
"Roscoe, you're in the wrong trade," Louisa said. "If you could just learn to handle an ax you might make a good farmer."
Roscoe didn't know what to say to that. Nothing was less likely than that he would make a farmer.
"Why'd that sheriff's wife run off?" Louisa asked.
"She didn't say," Roscoe said. "Maybe she said to July but I doubt it, since he left before she did."
"Didn't like Arkansas, I guess," Louisa said. "He might just as well let her go, if that's the case. I like it myself, though it ain't no Alabama."
After that the conversation lagged. Roscoe kept wishing there was something to eat besides corn bread, but there wasn't. Louisa continued to watch him from the other side of the table.
"Roscoe, have you had any experience with women at all?" she asked, after a bit.
To Roscoe it seemed a bold question, and he took his time answering it. Once about twenty years earlier he had fancied a girl named Betsie and had been thinking about asking her to take a walk with him some night. But he was shy, and while he was getting around to asking, Betsie died of smallpox. He had always regretted that they never got to take their walk, but after that he hadn't tried to have much to do with women.
"Well, not much," he admitted, finally.
"I got the solution to both our problems," Louisa said. "You let that sheriff find his own wife and stay here and we'll get married."
She said it in the same confident, slightly loud voice that she always seemed to use — after a day of yelling at mules it was probably hard to speak in a quiet voice.
Despite the loudness, Roscoe assumed he had misunderstood her. A woman didn't just out and ask a man to marry. He pondered what she had said a minute, trying to figure out where he might have missed her meaning. It stumped him, though, so he chewed slowly on his last bite of cornbread.
"What was it you said?" he asked, finally.
"I said we oughta get married," Louisa said loudly. "What I like about you is you're quiet. Jim talked every second that he didn't have a whiskey bottle in his mouth. I got tired of listening. Also, you're skinny. If you don't last, you'll be easy to bury. I've buried enough husbands to take such things into account. What do you say?"
"I don't want to," Roscoe said. He was aware that it sounded impolite but was too startled to say otherwise.
"Well, you ain't had time to think about it," Louisa said. "Give it some thought while you're finishing the corn bread. Much as I hate burying husbands, I don't want to live alone. Jim wasn't much good but he was somebody in the bed, at least. I've had six boys in all but not a one of 'em stayed around. Had two girls but they both died. That's eight children. I always meant to have ten but I've got two to go and time's running out."
She munched her corn bread for a while. She seemed to be amused, though Roscoe couldn't figure out what might be amusing.
"How big was your family?" she asked.
"There was just four of us boys," Roscoe said. "Ma died young."
Louisa was watching him, which made him nervous. He remembered that he was supposed to be thinking about the prospect of marrying her while he finished the cornbread, but in fact his appetite was about gone anyway and he was having to choke it down. He began to feel more and more of a grievance against more and more people. The start of it all was Jake Spoon, who had no business coming to Fort Smith in the first place. It seemed to him that a chain of thoughtless actions, on the part of many people he knew, had resulted in his being stuck in a cabin in the wilderness with a difficult widow woman. Jake should have kept his pistol handier, and not resorted to a buffalo gun. Benny Johnson should have been paying attention to his dentistry and not walking around in the street in the middle of the day. July shouldn't have married Elmira if she was going to run off, and of course Elmira certainly had no business getting on the whiskey boat.
In all of it no one had given much consideration to him, least of all the townspeople of Fort Smith. Peach Johnson and Charlie Barnes, in particular, had done their best to see that he had to leave.
But if the townspeople of Fort Smith had not considered him, the same couldn't be said for Louisa Brooks, who was giving him a good deal more consideration than he was accustomed to.
"I was never a big meat eater," she said. "Living off corn bread keeps you feeling light on your feet."
Roscoe didn't feel light on his feet, though. Both his legs pained him from where the root had struck them. He choked down the last of the corn bread and took another swallow or two of the cool well water.
"You ain't a bad-looking feller," Louisa said. "Jim was prone to warts. Had 'em on his hands and on his neck both. So far as I can see you don't have a wart on you."
"No, don't believe so," Roscoe admitted.
"Well, that's all the supper," Louisa said. "What about my proposition?"
"I can't," Roscoe said, putting it as politely as he knew how. "If I don't keep on till I find July I might lose my job."
Louisa looked exasperated. "You're a fine guest," she said. "I tell you what, let's give it a tryout. You ain't had enough experience of women to know whether you like the married life or not. It might suit you to a T. If it did, you wouldn't have to do risky work like being a deputy."
It was true that being a deputy had become almost intolerably risky — Roscoe had to grant that. But judging from July's experience, marriage had its risks too.
"I don't favor musta
ches much," Louisa said. "But then life's a matter of give and take."
They had eaten the corn bread right out of the pan, so there were no dishes to wash. Louisa got up and threw a few crumbs out the door to her chickens, who rushed at them greedily, two of them coming right into the cabin.
"Don't you eat them chickens?" Roscoe asked, thinking how much better the corn bread would have tasted if there had been a chicken to go with it.
"No, I just keep 'em to control the bugs," Louisa said. "I ate enough chicken in Alabama to last me a lifetime."
Roscoe felt plenty nervous. The question of sleeping arrangements could not be postponed much longer. He had looked forward briefly to sleeping in the cabin, where he would feel secure from snakes and wild pigs, but that hope was dashed. He hadn't spent a night alone with a woman in his whole life and didn't plan to start with Louisa, who stood in the doorway drinking a dipper of water. She squished a swallow or two around in her mouth and spat it out the door. Then she put the dipper back in the bucket and leaned over Roscoe, so close he nearly tipped over backward in his chair out of surprise.
"Roscoe, you've went to waste long enough," she said. "Let's give it a tryout."
"Well, I wouldn't know how to try," Roscoe said. "I've been a bachelor all my life."
Louisa straightened up. "Men are about as worthless a race of people as I've ever encountered," she said. "Look at the situation a minute. You're running off to catch a sheriff you probably can't find, who's in the most dangerous state in the union, and if you do find him he'll just go off and try to find a wife that don't want to live with him anyway. You'll probably get scalped before it's all over, or hung, or a Mexican will get you with a pigsticker. And it'll all be to try and mend something that won't mend anyway. Now I own a section of land here and I'm a healthy woman. I'm willing to take you, although you've got no experience either at farming or matrimony. You'd be useful to me, whereas you won't be a bit of use to that sheriff or that town you work for either. I'll teach you how to handle an ax and a mule team, and guarantee you all the corn bread you can eat. We might even have some peas to go with it later in the year. I can cook peas. Plus I've got one of the few feather mattresses in this part of the country, so it'd be easy sleeping. And now you're scared to try. If that ain't cowardice, I don't know what is."
Roscoe had never expected to hear such a speech, and he had no idea how to reply to it. Louisa's approach to marriage didn't seem to resemble any that he had observed, though it was true he had not spent much time studying the approaches to matrimony. Still, he had only ridden into Louisa's field an hour before sundown, and it was not yet much more than an hour after dark. Her proposal seemed hasty to him by any standards.
"Well, we ain't much acquainted," he said. "How do you know we'd get along?"
"I don't," Louisa said. "That's why I offered just to give it a tryout. If you don't like it you can leave, and if I can't put up with you I expect I could soon run you off. But you ain't even got the gumption to try. I'd say you're scared of women."
Roscoe had to admit that was true, except for a whore now and then. But he only admitted it to himself, not to Louisa. After some reflection he decided it was best to leave her charge unanswered.
"I guess I'll bed down out back," he said.
"Well, fine," Louisa said. "Just watch out for Ed."
That was a surprise. "Who's Ed?" he asked.
"Ed's a snake," Louisa said. "Big rattler. I named him after my uncle, because they're both lazy. I let Ed stay around because he holds down the rodents. He don't bother me and I don't bother him. But he hangs out around to the back, so watch out where you throw down your blanket."
Roscoe did watch. He stepped so gingerly, getting his bedding arranged, that it took him nearly twenty minutes to settle down. Then he couldn't get the thought of the big snake off his mind. He had never heard of anyone naming a snake before, but then nothing she did accorded with any procedure he was familiar with. The fact that she had mentioned the snake meant that he had little chance of getting to sleep. He had heard that snakes had a habit of crawling in with people, and he definitely didn't want to be crawled in with. He wrapped his blanket around him tightly to prevent Ed from slipping in, but it was a hot sultry night and he was soon sweating so profusely that he couldn't sleep anyway. There were plenty of grass and weeds around, and every time anything moved in the grass he imagined it to be the big rattler. The snake might get along with Louisa, but that didn't mean he would accept strangers.
Hours passed and he still couldn't get to sleep, though he was plenty tired. It was clear that if the sleeping didn't improve he was going to be dead on his feet long before he got back to Fort Smith. His eyelids would fall, but then he'd hear something and jerk awake, a process that went on until he was too tired to care whether he died or not. He had been propped up against the wall of the cabin, but he slowly slid down and finally slept, flat on his back.
When he awoke he got a shock almost worse than if he had found the rattler curled on his chest: Louisa was standing astraddle of him. Roscoe was so tired that it was only his brain that had come awake, it seemed. He would ordinarily have reacted quickly to the sight of anyone standing astraddle of him, much less a woman, but in this case his limbs were so heavy with sleep that he couldn't move a one: opening his eyes was effort enough. It was nearly sunup, still sultry and humid. He saw that Louisa was barefoot and that her feet and ankles were wet from the dewy grass. He couldn't see her face or judge her disposition, but he felt a longing to be back on his couch in the jail, where crazy things didn't happen. Although he was just in his long johns, the blanket was up about his chest, so at least she hadn't caught him indecent.
For a second he took a sleepy comfort from that reflection, but a second later it ceased to be true. Louisa stuck one of her wet feet under the blanket and kicked it off. Roscoe was so anchored in sleep he still couldn't react. Then, to his extreme astonishment, Louisa squatted right atop his middle and reached into his long johns and took hold of his tool. Nothing like that had ever happened to him, and he was stunned, though his tool wasn't. While the rest of him had been heavy with sleep, it had become heavy with itself.
"Why you're a torn turkey, ain't you," Louisa said.
To Roscoe's astonishment, Louisa proceeded to squat right down on him. Instead of being covered with a blanket, he was covered with her skirts. At that point the sun broke through the mist, lighting the clearing and adding to his embarrassment, for anyone could have ridden up and seen that something mighty improper was happening.
As it was, though, only three or four of Louisa's chickens watched the act, but even the fact that the chickens were standing around added to Roscoe's embarrassment. Maybe the chickens weren't really watching, but they seemed to be. Meanwhile Louisa was wiggling around without much interest in what he thought about it all. Roscoe decided the best approach was to pretend a dream was happening, though he knew quite well it wasn't. But Louisa's vigor was such that even if Roscoe had got his thoughts in place they would soon have been jarred awry. A time or two he was practically lifted off the ground by her efforts; he was scooted off his tarp and back into the weeds and was forced to open his eyes again in hopes of being able to spot a bush he could grab, to hold himself in place. About the time Louisa moved him completely off the tarp, matters came to a head. Despite the chickens and the weeds and the danger of witnesses, he felt a sharp pleasure. Louisa apparently did too, soon afterward, for she wiggled even more vigorously and grunted loudly. Then she sat on him for several minutes, scratching at the chigger bites on his wet ankles. He soon sank right out of her, but Louisa was in no hurry to get up. She seemed in a quiet humor. Once in a while she clucked a time or two at the chickens. Roscoe felt his neck begin to itch from the weeds. A swarm of gnats hung right over his face, and Louisa considerately swatted them away.
"There's Ed," Louisa said. Sure enough, a big rattler was crawling over a log about ten yards away. Louisa continued to sit, unconcerned about the
snake or anything else.
"Are you a one-timer or are you feisty, Roscoe?" she asked after a while.
Roscoe had a notion that he knew what she meant. "I'm mostly a no-timer," he said.
Louisa sighed. "You ain't hopeless, but you sure ain't feisty," she said after a while, wiping the sweat off her face with the sleeve of her dress. "Let's go see if the corn bread's done."
She got up and went back around the house. Roscoe quickly got dressed and drug his gear around the corner, dumping it in a heap beside the door.
When he went in, Louisa sat another pan of corn bread on the table and they had breakfast.
"Well, what's it going to be, marriage or Texas?" Louisa asked after a while.
Roscoe knew it had to be Texas, but it was not so simple a matter to think out as it had been before Louisa came out and sat down on him. For one thing, he had no desire to go to Texas; he felt his chances of finding July to be very slim, and July's of finding Elmira completely hopeless. In the meantime it had become clear to him that Louisa had her charms, and that the fact that they were being offered him on a trial basis was a considerable enticement. He was beginning to feel that Louisa was right: he had mostly been wasted, and might have more feistiness in him than anyone, himself included, had suspected. There was no likelihood of his getting to use much of this capacity in Texas, either.
"It's a hard choice," he said, though one thing that made it a little easier was the knowledge that life with Louisa involved more than featherbeds. It also involved pulling up stumps all day, an activity he had no interest in or aptitude for.
"Well, I don't take back nothing I said," Louisa declared. "You men are a worthless race. You're good for a bounce now and then, and that's about it. I doubt you'd make much of a fanner."
For some reason Roscoe felt melancholy. For all her loud talk, Louisa didn't seem to be as disagreeable to him as he had first thought her to be. It seemed to him she might be persuaded to tone down her farming, maybe even move into a town and settle for putting in a big garden, if it was presented to her right. But he couldn't, because there was the problem of July, who had given him a job and been good to him. The point was, he owed July. Even if he never found him, he had to make the effort, or know that he had failed a friend. Had it not been for that obligation he would have stayed a day or two and considered Louisa's offer.