“I know you’ve never. I suppose I have, being a woman who lived most of my life in a house of men and thinking it would be nice to know another woman in the house. I blamed Bonard because I felt he scared Selma, and I wanted her to be with us.”

Deborah looked brooding for a moment. “She writes poetry.”

Again Edna looked shocked. “Poetry?”

“Scribbling. Things that rhyme sometimes but mostly don’t. Sarah calls them her poems.”

“Oh,” Edna said, the word sounding stark although she had meant it to comfort.

“Sarah says she understands them. I don’t. I like a poem to rhyme, if there has to be a poem. What else is it for?”

Edna nodded, but her next words showed that her mind had veered off from Selma. “Sarah needs to have a baby.” Deborah’s stillness told her she had gone too far; she had encroached on privacies. “I talk a lot,” she apologized.

“Our children—will we ever understand them!” Deborah exclaimed, taking that way to excuse her friend’s presumption.

“Surely Sarah is a comfort to you,” Edna said.

“Oh, yes. When she isn’t busy with her school. She’s teaching the children to read and write and figure a little. Funniest thing I ever saw, a whole line of pickaninnies saying the multiplication table.”

Edna pursed her lips before commenting, “Too much of that and they won’t be so ready to take hoe in hand when the time comes.”

Deborah shook her head. “They’re all too lazy to stick at it. Soon as they learn to write their names and do a little basic adding, off they go.” She took another sip from the jar, then gave it back to Edna without bothering to wipe the rim. “That’s good, and that’s enough. Are we ready to go?” She took up the reins, slapped them slackly across the horse’s rump and said, “Giddap, Napoleon.”

Without turning his head or switching his tail in acknowledgment, the horse picked up his feet and moved along the lane.

“We stayed longer than we thought,” Edna said. “It’s starting to get dark.”

“January days are short. But I’ll have us home soon. Come to Beulah Land and take supper with us. Leon will drive you home later.”

Edna laughed appreciation. “I thank you, but I better not. I want to see my grandchildren. Adam and James and Annabel and Doreen—their very names comfort me when I think how everything is and how little of what we want turns out.”