She waited, of course, until the whole family clasped hands and bowed heads; she did the same, and Missus Sawyer said a much, much longer prayer than her husband did, slipping in a few admonitions to her offspring along the way and adding gratitude that her husband was home safe, and a little coda at the end well-wishing Anna on her journey that made Anna blush. Then they could eat.

The stew was rabbit—she would have recognized the bones, but Hal piped up when his father asked what was in the stew. “I got me two rabbits in the garden, Pa!” he said proudly. “Jest like y’all showed me t’do.”

“Wall! Thet’s fine!” Jeb said with enthusiasm. “That’ll larn ’em! Et our garden, get et yore own self!” He laughed heartily over that, and Hal beamed proudly.

It occurred to Anna halfway through this meal that she had eaten more food in the last two days than she normally did in a week—and better food than she had seen since the children’s Christmas Party at the Methodist Chapel. The jelly, deep red and shining in its bowl, was exceedingly tempting, but she wanted to have some of that pie—so she ate carefully, using the tender, flaky biscuits to sop up the gravy from the stew so Missus Sawyer wouldn’t think she was wasting anything. Biscuits didn’t happen very often in the Jones house, because they required lard and baking powder as well as flour and salt, and bread only required the starter, flour, and salt.

“Ev’body got room for pie?” Missus Sawyer asked rhetorically, when the plates were all clean (and Hal and Jeb had had second helpings of everything). Without waiting for an answer, she cut the pie and began serving pieces around the table.

By this point, Anna was nearly in a trance of pleasure. The food had gone a long way toward mitigating the slightly sick feeling she’d had when they neared Cleveland. But oh! That pie! It was blackberry, and while the fresh blackberries she and Jeb had picked and shared had been delicious, the pie was just so much more!

“Lemme he’p y’all with the dishes,” she said as soon as she had finished, licking the last of the sweet berry-juice she had scraped up off her plate from her fork. If she’d been alone, she would have licked that plate clean—but, no. Manners.

“Lawsy, no, I got a better chore for y’all,” Missus Sawyer corrected. “Them blackberries ain’t a-goin’ ter last ferever. I want all four of y’all t’fill me them baskets by th’ door.” She pointed with her chin at a pile of empty baskets. “The more blackberries I gets, the more jelly I kin put up.”

She hadn’t even gotten all of the words out of her mouth before her own children were scrambling for the baskets and out the door. Anna got the last basket, the largest of all, and went hurtling after them, afraid they had forgotten that she was a stranger to these parts and didn’t know where the blackberries were.