It was, then, small wonder that Lauretta felt wronged by Leon and took a self-annealing satisfaction in the reflection that it would cause a sensation were she to tell Sarah the truth of her recent past. That she did not, made her feel virtuous. It would, after all, ruin Sarah’s marriage. What sort of marriage was it anyhow, she asked herself, that produced no child in seven years? Even as she wondered, she could not but observe between Sarah and Leon evidence of an affection she did not understand but could not discount.

The only relief she had from her many physical and emotional discomforts was the occasional company of Bonard. He did not stop at Beulah Land for dinner or supper, but he would come by to find Leon on some business matter, or he would return from town with him and pause a few minutes on the porch where Lauretta spent so many of her hours, with little to claim her attention other than a bee’s progress from one flower to the next, or the usually vain hope that a breeze would stir the ropey wisteria into a cooling motion.

Bonard would dismount if he were on horseback, or step out from buggy or carriage, and come onto the porch as if eager to speak with her, or sometimes merely plant a foot on a step, companionably propping an elbow on his knee as he talked. What cheered and entertained Lauretta was that, notwithstanding her condition, he treated her as a man does a woman he thinks beautiful, desirable, and consequential. Indeed, at their first meeting, his was no polite sympathy, but the sly and amused attitude of one who guessed without having been told what had transpired on the occasion of Leon’s journey to Charleston.

She was so surprised—she had not remembered Bonard as in any way amusing, only as somewhat grim and sinister on his visits to Broughton Street—that she laughed outright when he took her hand the first time and, bowing low over it, spoke his respects. Soon, with no private meeting or word, it was as if they shared a secret joke. They looked at each other in such an ironic and particularly interested way that Lauretta could feel that she was not negligible as a woman who might create pleasure or discord, as she pleased.

13

The two farms that lay between Beulah Land and Oaks were the one owned by Trudy’s family, the Cokers, and that of the Andersons. Clarence Anderson, who had survived his older brother Walt, buried his mother and father too, then saw his two sisters, Bessie and Emily, married to men who worked at jobs in Highboro. Bessie married a clerk in the hardware store, and Emily became the wife of the manager of the post office, whereupon she put on airs of superiority with her sister.