Well Ma almost never went agin Pa’s wishes, but he knew better than to keep palaverin’ when she did. So he shut his mouth, and there was the clatter of cookery for a moment or two, twice as loud as normal ’cause Ma was still mad. And then Ma made as much of a stompin’ noise as she ever did, which weren’t much, and stomped out to the porch where Anna sat on the stoop.

“Y’all done with them peas?” she asked.

Anna held back her tears with an effort. “Yes, Ma,” Anna replied, and held the two bowls up to her, the one with the shelled peas and the other with the pods. You didn’t throw away nothin’ in the Jones house. Ma would make a soup out of the pods and that’d be what she and Ma ate for lunch, with cornbread, while Pa took a hunk of cornbread and some cold bacon and pickled slaw in his lunch bucket. Pa needed the extra food, and every scrap of meat they got went to him; every miner needed as much food and water as could be packed into their lunch buckets to keep up their strength. So Pa got a big breakfast, as big as Ma could manage, and a big lunch, and the lion’s share of what she made for supper. And Anna and Ma got the ends of everything, like thin soup made from pea-pods, and plain grits with just salt, and poke salad and potlikker from the greens. Pea-pod soup and a little bit of cornbread wouldn’t satisfy most folks, but Anna never had much appetite anyway, and the taste was all right. Better’n cabbage soup, which was all she got come winter.

“Come inside and read yore Bible until supper,” Ma ordered, which probably meant she was to show Pa she was a Godly girl, and Aunt Jinny wasn’t gonna corrupt her no matter how much of a Jezebel Aunt Jinny was. Although Anna couldn’t imagine how anyone who lived alone in the woods could be a Jezebel in the first place. Nor how, if she lived all by herself and was doing all the things you needed to do to keep body and soul together and making all them potions, she could ever find the time to be a Jezebel. Anna had a hazy idea of what it took to be the kind of woman that one could call a Jezebel, and it required an awful lot of time to make yourself pretty. It probably needed servants too, because you couldn’t stay lookin’ pretty if you was out weedin’ the garden or choppin’ wood.

Ma stared at her hard, which made her scramble to her feet, flushing painfully, aware that she had been wool-gathering again. She trotted into the house, obediently got the Bible she’d been given at Sunday School as a prize for memorizing the longest passage, and sat down with it on a little stool near the window, opening it at random, which you were supposed to do if you needed guidance. Which right now, she surely did. Because it seemed like Ma had arranged it, and Pa wasn’t going to fight it anymore, and she was being sent off to Aunt Jinny. She wasn’t sure if she wanted that or not.