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So I didn’t want to see him for fear of him raising awkward questions we couldn’t answer. But every once in a while I’d find myself glancing along the road, or listening to see if someone was coming, halfway hoping it might be him. And more than once I found his face and voice coming to my mind.

Gradually we kept working more and more parts of the plantation. Now that it was summer and there was so much to do, we worked sunup to sundown. Katie was showing Aleta and Emma how to tend the vegetable garden, and we were starting to have lots of fresh vegetables. We canned as much as we could for next winter, and dried some of it. Fruit was coming on too, peaches and strawberries first, though apples and the wild berries weren’t ripe yet. The iceman came regularly now as we were going through the ice faster. So far he hadn’t seemed to mind that he hadn’t seen Katie’s mother. Since Katie was paying him now, he didn’t seem to ask too many questions. William was growing like a weed, and Emma was looking a lot healthier herself.

We continued to make cheese every few days and started to get a good supply built up. Most of the things in the root cellar from last year were either gone or spoiled, but now we started collecting a new supply from this year’s onions, potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and squash, though we wouldn’t be able to harvest most things till a little later. We were about out of honey too, so we smoked the bees out of a couple of nests and collected what we could. Emma was scared to go with us and stayed back at the house, and Aleta ran around as terrified and excited as one of the bees herself. We continued to churn butter, which we stored in the root cellar in a big barrel of well water. We still had some corned meat in the brine barrel left over from Katie’s mama. What we would do when we ran out, I didn’t know. The only animals we’d had to kill so far were a few chickens. But we didn’t eat that much meat, except for the poultry.

The cows kept milking, though with the heat they weren’t giving as much milk. We ate a lot of johnnycakes, though I knew we would have to resupply the corn bin before next winter or we’d run out of corn too.

All the hard work was showing in Katie. She was getting stronger and was becoming tan and hardy. I could see her changing in so many ways. Though every once in a while, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see her stop for a few seconds and wipe her hair back out of her face and let out a sigh that almost seemed to say, It never used to be this hard around here! But she didn’t lose her composure anymore.

Then she’d always go right back to work without complaining. I think she knew she had to stay strong for the sake of Aleta and Emma. Even though Emma was a mama, in so many ways it was like having two young’uns to take care of. Without Katie telling her what to do, Emma was just about as helpless a creature as I’d ever seen.

ALONE WITH MY THOUGHTS

31

THE SUMMER WENT BY AND SOMEHOW WE MANAGED to survive and no one bothered us. Though the work was hard sometimes, it wasn’t anything like it used to be for me, and we had enough of a routine by then that the days seemed almost normal. Working hard as a free person was a lot different than working as a slave.

“Katie,” I asked one morning, “what day is today?”

“Uh, Tuesday, I think,” she said.

“I mean the number of the day.”

“You mean the date,” she said and went and looked at the calendar.

We hadn’t paid that much attention to the days and weeks, and I hardly knew how to read a calendar. Mostly we’d been keeping some track of the time by getting newspapers once in a while, but Katie had only been into town twice more.

“It’s August twenty-second, Mayme,” said Katie. “That is, if it’s Tuesday.”

I smiled.

“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” I said.

“Mayme, why didn’t you tell me? How old are you going to be?”

“Sixteen.”

“That’s old, Mayme. You’re practically a grown-up!”

I laughed.

“You’re a year older than me again,