“It’s only decent people I share my cabin with,” she says. “You got to go.”

“You can’t kick me out. Master put me in here with you.”

“Then when he gets back, you can go tell him why I throw’d you out. Master’s a Christian man. He don’t want no bed wenching around here.”

I march over and grab her wheel, stopping it. “I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

“Oh, no? Where was you sleeping last night?”

“You don’t know what happened. Henry was—”

“Henry? Ain’t that supposed to be Mister Taylor? Well, you go on back to your Henry and let him take care of you some more. I don’t keep company with no Jezebel.”

I storm out of the cabin, hurt and angry, and go to the coach house. I’m tired right through to my soul. Sitting down on the floor at the bottom of the ladder, I lay my head on my knees.

Don’t know how long I sit there like that before Henry comes back from wherever he’s been and sees me.

“Bessie won’t let me stay in the cabin,” I say.

He kneels in front of me and wraps his arms around my shoulders. My head tucks into his neck like I been doing it for years. I cling to him like he’s all I got left. But I don’t have him at all. Not really.

“It’s going to be all right,” he says, and I nod.

That’s a new one for me. A white man promising me things and me believing him. He kisses me like on the night we looked at the stars. Like the day at the river. Like a man kisses a woman.

When we climb up the ladder, the whole world shrinks to the loft above the coach house. We lie on his bed and he puts his arms around me. He waits for me to be ready to be touched any more than that, and I’m not ready, so we fall asleep to the crisp song of the cicadas in the humid night air.

Chapter 39

Henry

I watch her sleep, careful not to move to wake her. I’ve dreamed of having her in my bed. Now she’s here and I dare not touch her. Her eyes fly open and she startles when she sees me.

“It’s just me,” I say, and she eases a little.

I feel like smashing Mulch’s hand all over again. That and more.

I want to keep her squirreled away up here, out of Mulch’s reach and away from the hatefulness of Bessie and Maple and all of them. But I know the more time she spends with me, the harder they’ll make it for her. And, like it or not, she has to go out and face them.

Maple puts her to work with a broom and a rag, having her clean the house, getting it ready for the Johnsons coming home this afternoon. When they get back there’ll be a reckoning. I’m just not sure for who.