Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

tobacco.” She jerked her head up quickly to indicate the acres in back of her.
    She gave his face a quick read before she dropped her eyes again. He laid his forearm on his knee. With her eyes lifted as far as the lower half of his face, she watched him drop his head to the tops of her boots as he slowly slid his stare up her legs. She sensed his eyes come to rest just under the knot tied at her middle. A rash of prickly heat raised up on her lower abdomen.
    “Woman, Hopkinsville or no, husband or no, you’ve got two weeks to get me my tobacco.” She watched him straighten in the saddle. He pulled on the reins and headed the horse back up the path toward the lane. “Remember. Two weeks. ’Til the first of September, or you and your get are off this place.”
    She watched him dig his heels into the horse’s side and set the animal trotting up the path and away from her.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    With little guidance from Alexander, the gray trotted up the path and turned right onto the lane bisecting his acres. He let the horse have his head as he fought the urge to look back. He didn’t need a second glance to tell him what he already knew about the mid-forty. The tobacco stalks were too short, and he was middling uncertain if they could be brought in on time even if the woman did have a man on the place. He knew as well as she that the tobacco had to be in no later than mid-September, and that meant cut, stacked, and hung in the barn to dry. He hadn’t dared hope that Welles could duplicate last year’s profits, but getting nothing when he had hoped for at least fifteen hundred dollars would definitely be a blow. Determined as she was, that slip of a woman couldn’t do the job, not even with the two older boys she’d lied about. No, it wasn’t the tobacco that made him yearn to turn his head for one more look.
    Rocking in the saddle as the gray moved down the two-buggy-wide lane to his back-forty, Alex let his mind wander to the woman. She didn’t look like a good wind could blow her over, but neither was she built for work like most field hands. Eula had her beat by far in the husky department. Yet, he could see that she wasn’t soft. One look at those tight, coppery-bronze thighs glistening in the mid-morning sun told him that. The way the rays caught the color of those bare legs made his mind wonder what other pleasures she had under that hiked-up dress.
    Alex slowed the horse to a walk as the gray approached a leafy canopy of alders. This close to noon, they both needed a cooldown. He ran his shirtsleeve across his forehead trying to dismiss the growing pressure in his groin. McNaughton forced his thoughts onto the new family on the back-forty. What there was of tobacco on their plot was taller than the Welles’s acres. But that family was never going to earn him three thousand dollars. He supposed they put their backs into the work, but they were not John Welles. As the gray continued its loping pace, Alex squirmed in the saddle. He couldn’t keep the thoughts away. He remembered the first time he had seen the Welles woman.
    Most of the tenant families looking to farm came in the fall to see if they could work the last few weeks of the harvest, hoping that the owner would then feed and shelter them all winter. He should have known then that there was something different about John Welles. The man had tapped on his back door in April, just at the time when the hard winter ground was breaking up and the best farmers wanted to start their plowing. Most tenants didn’t want to work then. White man had to drive them to the fields, but not so for John Welles.
    There the nigger stood, hat in hand, big and strapping, looking like he could do the job. Welles had done most of the talking with his woman and children standing behind him. Alex had to concede that John Welles had been as smooth as corn silk with his words, saying all the things a tobacco farmer wanted to hear from a prospective tenant. Even then he thought Welles had sounded almost too good. Now, Alex realized that just as the new applicant came close to crossing the line into uppity, his woman spoke up and reeled him back. Today, he remembered his first look at the wife.
    Those amber eyes, with their slight upward tilt, had come up just a fraction of an inch too much whenever she spoke. Her words came soft and low, just like they did today, but they always took the edge off whatever her husband had just said. As soon as she got her piece out,