The Well Read Free

they’d be back. Knowing that, I looked up at the sky and prayed for rain. Lots of it. I prayed it would rain so folks wouldn’t have to be coming to our well. I prayed it would rain so the Simmses wouldn’t have to come here again, because I figured if they did come, sooner or later, there was going to be trouble.
    Breakfast that morning was kind of quiet. Hammer was in a mood; so was Ma Rachel. I ain’t had much to say myself. Aunt Callie had gone on home, but Halton was at the table, and it was him and Mama who done most of the talking. Papa and Mitchell and Kevin, they usually done a great bit of the talking at the table, great part of the laughing too, but they were away now doing lumbering along the Natchez Trace. They’d been gone for more than a month. The last couple of years they’d been going away to do lumbering work to get money for taxes and for some of the things Papa and Mama wanted our family to have, including more land.
    Since they’d been away, not only had Halton been staying with us to help out, but Aunt Callie had been spending a lot more of her time here too. Now Aunt Callie and her husband, my Uncle Lawrence, and theirchildren lived on our place, but they had their own house, their own fields, on the other side of the woods. Most days Aunt Callie was up to our house anyway a couple of times a day to see about Ma Rachel and visit with her and Mama, but with Papa, Kevin, and Mitchell gone, she was visiting even more. She and Halton and Uncle Lawrence called themselves keeping watch on us.
    That was all well and good, having them keep watch, but far as I was concerned, Papa and my brothers had been gone long enough lumbering on that Natchez Trace. I was missing them, and I knew Hammer was too. I figured it was high time they came back. Mama kept saying any day now they’d be home, and they would stay awhile when they came home too. They would stay and watch out for us themselves and help us out with the farm work. Soon, she said, soon. But she’d been saying that for more than a week, and I don’t even think she really knew when they’d finally come walking up the road.
    After breakfast it was Hammer’s and my job to take the cows to get water. Now back then our family was considered rather prosperous, for folks black or white. We had ourselves the two hundred acres, cotton fields, fruit orchards, and a garden. Mama had herself a buggyand Papa had himself one of the finest stallions in the county. We also had ourselves plenty of livestock—hogs, chickens, guineas, ducks, horses, mules, goats, and cows. We had some thirty cows and calves. Fact, we had so many cows, we had to graze half of them in the pasture behind the barn and the other half down near the pond. Because everything was drying up, the pond was nearly dried out too, but there was still enough water for the cows to get themselves a drink. Each morning we’d take the cows down to the pond and then bring them back again ’round the time the sun set. Well, this particular morning when we gone to take the cows down, we found it so near to dry, we decided to take them on to the Creek Rosa Lee. Even though folks couldn’t drink the muddy water anymore, leastways maybe the cows could.
    On the way to the creek we met up with John Henry Berry. John Henry was the same age as Hammer, and the two were good friends. “’Ey there, John Henry,” Hammer and I both said.
    â€œâ€™Ey, y’all,” said John Henry, and gave his bony cow a swat to push her on. “Y’all headed to the Rosa Lee?”
    â€œThat’s right,” said Hammer.
    â€œThen I walk ’long with ya.”
    â€œFine,” said Hammer, and we kept on going.
    When we got down to the Rosa Lee, we found Charlie and Ed-Rose along with Dewberry Wallace, a close friend of theirs, and Mr. Melbourne’s boy, George, watering their cows. With them was Joe McCalister, a few years older than the