For the first year of their marriage, but with decreasing frequency, he and Sarah had applied themselves to becoming a loving couple. Familiarity did not quell Leon’s feelings of embarrassment at fondling sexually an innocent woman. His self-consciousness made him awkward and ineffective, and so he never roused Sarah to any genuine passion. She wanted to feel it, and she wanted a child. But she felt nothing except his awkwardness and embarrassment and responded in ways that mirrored and compounded them, believing that she failed him in some manner she was too ignorant to know. Eventually, her own shyness and sense of decorum prevented her trying to approach him physically except for the most innocent gestures of affection. She was genuinely fond of him and felt certain that Leon was fond of her, but there was no physical desire in the feeling on either side. Finally accepting that it was so, they slept in separate beds in the large room they shared.

Sarah told herself that it was not perhaps for everyone to know the storms of the blood certain poetry had led her to expect of loving. In any event, she had Roman and her school. And Leon renewed his old friendship with Bonard. More and more often he rode with him into town, and they sometimes went together to certain sisters who lived alone beyond the edge of town in the other direction from their plantations. Their names, or the names they had given themselves, were Florabel, Pansy, and Annette, and Leon felt robust and easy with them and was happy to enjoy his fucking again.

Leon and Bonard also began to do business together. Bonard was firmly established with Felix now, and Felix was glad to welcome his nephew into their business dealings. Presently, Leon was taking a larger and more confident part in the actual money end of the running of Beulah Land. Felix gradually turned over to him the matters he had previously handled for Deborah, including all those pertaining to the cotton gin and the storage warehouse, which they owned jointly, and which up to now had been left entirely to Felix to manage.

Given a sheet of figures, Leon understood them—better than Deborah, it turned out, although he would never have her shrewdness in understanding how those figures were translated from acreage and barn, from good husbandry of land and livestock. Roscoe knew every detail of the sweat work. Leon soon learned the pen work. Deborah knew less of both than either of them, but more than either knew of each other’s realm of activity. If it was not a happy arrangement, there was the advantage that it worked.