The whole neighborhood watches and wonders. Why does Mother put up with this? It’s a mystery. “Mr. Mitchell,” Ann Hall tells Aunty Rogers, who tells everyone else, “does not one lick of work. He won’t even bend down to put a log on the fire.”

Mr. Mitchell is quickly known and despised as an ill-tempered drunk. The neighborhood children, black and white, are used to roaming the farm, even into the cabin, where Mother or Ann can be counted on to give them something to eat. Now there is no food to spare and Uncle Mitchell shouts at them, telling them to get off the very property where they have lived longer than he.

Rosalie’s cousins also seem to feel that their previous hardships entitle them to the easy life now. “Cousin Rosalie,” George says. “Fetch me some milk.” The milk bucket is kept cool in a small brick cave that the spring runs through. Rosalie has to put on her boots and bonnet to go and get it, and then take it back. His tone is imperious though he’s two years younger. In fact, he’s just the age Henry Byron should have been. Rosalie resents this unearned and inexplicable survival more than she can say.

“Cousin Rosalie,” says Robert, who is younger still. “Go and tell your servant to make me an egg with a soft yolk.”

One day as Rosalie is getting Asia ready for her nap, Uncle Mitchell arrives with a rabbit that he throws onto the dining room table. Its neck has been broken. “It just up and died,” Uncle Mitchell says. “Fell at my feet. Hand of God. I thought it disrespectful to let it just go to waste. Tell your woman to stew it with some onions and potatoes.”

Rosalie sees the great absence in the rabbit’s eye. Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!

“You can have the tail,” Uncle Mitchell tells Asia, who has never been offered anything she didn’t immediately desperately want.

Mother says no to the tail and then Rosalie has to remove Asia, screaming, from the house until she can be calm again. But she says yes to the stew. She even eats it. Everyone but Rosalie has some. Is Rosalie the only one who remembers how Father said that falling away from his beliefs and eating meat was what killed Mary Ann and Elizabeth? The cabin smells of cooked flesh for days.

—

In the evenings, while there’s still light, Mother sits, more pregnant than ever, on a chair dragged outside so she can be under the cherry tree. The wind tosses white petals onto her dark hair, her shoulders, the hillock where her lap once was. She’s busily altering Rosalie’s day dress and June’s Sunday shirt to fit one Mitchell child or another. Mother has always made Father’s costumes. She’s good at this work. Rosalie watches her favorite dress disappear and reappear no longer hers. She herself has been put to the task of hemming cloth into diapers, the dullest sort of sewing imaginable.