They grew seventeen hundred plants per acre of bright-leaf tobacco, which had to be tended from seed to crop through to curing and market. Besides the hogs there was fescue grass for hay. So Roy was bone tired, and at night his terrors caused him to shout and thrash. The whole house seemed to hum with his nightmares. In the evening he and his father drank jars of moonshine, which was not offered to his mother or me. It made his limp and his terrors worse.

Everyone smoked; it was tobacco country. I grew used to smoking after meals, enjoying the enforced pause, the few minutes of staring into space. We rolled our own cigarettes from tobacco from the fields, and Roy and his father chewed tobacco as well, spitting streaks of brown sickly-sweet-smelling juice in the dirt or into old teacups they kept inside for the purpose. In spite of her fear of disorder, Mrs Jackson didn’t seem to mind that the men of her house were spitting indoors. Somehow the fact that they were doing it in chipped cups made it okay.

The yellowed lace curtains quivered in the mornings when I opened them, the floorboards creaked as I swept them and kittens sprang in and out of my lap in the square curing barn, their claws poking through my stockings like tiny thorns, the sharpness a glad reminder of pain outside my homesick heart. I tried to talk to Mrs Jackson. Passing her dishes from the sink to dry I would ask questions about their neighbours, but her one-word answers were an admonishment for asking. I wondered if her silence was a measure of blame. If Roy had not married me perhaps he would never have been in that battle in New Guinea. Perhaps he would not have been injured. Because he had left in one piece, married me and come back broken, she blamed me rather than the war for his injury.

When visitors did come—the preacher, the women from her quilting circle, her gardening club—she shut the sitting room door behind them. The rise and fall of voices was steady then, and though I knew they spoke of me, I wanted more than anything just to feel that buzz of talk. To hear chatter surround me rather than the swallowing echo of my own loneliness.

•

One Sunday morning while we dressed for church Roy asked me what was wrong.

‘You seem quiet,’ he said. ‘Different than before.’

I’d been so busy thinking of how he had not lived up to my expectations that I hadn’t considered that I wasn’t meeting his.