Maybe they were in here to be safe from owls.

She stared at the glowing eyes, defiantly. They stared back.

But eventually, they must have gotten bored when she didn’t do anything. Pair by pair, they blinked out, until there was nothing up there. And Aunt Jinny put out the light and grumbled her way to bed.

And Anna fell gratefully asleep.

5

SHE woke to her aunt banging on the loft floor with a stick from below. “Time’s a-wastin’, girl!” her aunt proclaimed, as Anna struggled up out of a dream in which she was Pharoah’s daughter, lying back on a silk divan like she’d seen once in a Sears Roebuck catalog they’d gotten for the privy, being fed bits of bread and jam by mice wearing nightgowns. “Things t’ git done!”

She fought her way out of the featherbed, her nightgown up around her armpits, got everything tugged down into place, and climbed down the ladder to find her aunt working at the hearth, and the table all laid. Outside there was barely enough pre-dawn light to see by, so Aunt Jinny had lit three wax candles to work by. She got to the bottom of the ladder and her aunt jerked her head at the sink. “Wash up. Do a good job of it. Y’all’s new close is on th’ bed.”

Wax candles! Most people she knew had tallow-dips at most, maybe an oil lamp, though oil was expensive. But then, most people she knew didn’t have beehives.

She obeyed her aunt, and made her way over to the bed, where the “new” clothing waited. The outfit certainly wasn’t going to turn any heads, but she was grateful to be able to put something clean over her clean body. Unsure of what to do with the nightgown, she folded it up and draped it over one of the ladder rungs, then went to take her seat at the table.

“Here,” said Aunt Jinny, and plonked down a bowl of cornmeal mush in front of her. The mush was followed by a fried egg, bacon, and fried bread, all washed down with that herb tea. Jinny watched her eat with a sharp eye—but not the way Ma did, making sure she didn’t get more than her fair share. No, this was more like Jinny wanted to make sure she ate every scrap, and if she was still hungry, asked for more.

“Dishes, then chores,” Jinny said when she was finished. “Y’all pay heed. I ain’t a-gonna show y’all twice, an’ this’ll be what y’all do ever’ mornin’ afore breakfast when I’m a-cookin.”

“Yes’m,” she replied, resisting the urge to bob a curtsy.

The first chore was to let the chickens out of the roost and feed them. “Y’all ain’t niver had chickens?” Aunt Jinny exclaimed, when Anna showed confusion about how to handle them. Anna shook her head and her aunt pursed up her lips in a way that made Anna wonder what she had done wrong. “Wall . . . look, jest scatter ’em some grain, like this—” she broadcast a few handfuls. “That’ll get ’em started, an’ once they get t’eatin’, they’ll go down inter the garden on their own. They’ll spend th’ day chasin’ bugs’n ettin’ weeds.”