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strange behavior.
    “Isaiah, I’m goin’ to think on it and let you know day after tomorrow. In the meantime, you think about gettin’ yo’self a woman to keep you through the winter.” He heard Eula gasp at his suggestion of unmarried cohabitation.
    He smiled. Hell, they were just niggers. The Bible didn’t say nothing about niggers not sleeping together before they were married. His mind flashed on Eula’s brother, Ben Roy Thornton. What would the Bible say about him? Married to Fedora for almost twenty-five years, he’d kept the same nigger woman for almost six of them. As he closed the door on Isaiah, Alex decided that Ben Roy had committed no sin. After all, his brother-in-law wasn’t keeping company with a white woman.
    That night after Eula dried and put up the last of the supper dishes, he lay in bed waiting for her. When she slipped in beside him wearing her summer cotton nightshirt that covered her from neck to ankles, he turned off the lamp. No need to waste oil on seeing a sight that he had looked upon for twenty years. Though she had never had much in the way of curves and highs and lows, it was still better to remember her the way she used to be rather than the thick flabbiness he touched nowadays. Some Fridays he felt like he was laying his body across one of his downed alder trees after a spring flood. It was thoughts of the alone nigger woman on the mid-forty that hardened him enough to put it to Eula Mae this night.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Though she never regretted her marriage to Alexander McNaughton and the stepped-down life it brought her, Eula still took great comfort standing in the oversize Thornton kitchen where her mother had directed the preparation of so many family meals. Back in Momma’s time, one day during the last two weeks of August had always been set aside for the preserving and storing of the fruits of the garden and the arbor. Momma had a full-time colored cook and a cook’s helper, but this special day was the time when all the Thornton women, blood and in-laws alike, gathered to peel, core, boil, and jar for the barren winter months. These days, there were about half a dozen more female Thornton kin than back in Momma’s time. Still, the job took a whole day.
    While Alex was off riding the fields, Eula had gotten up when it was still dark to gather and feed the chickens and hogs. She had milked all three cows before she readied herself to get into the buckboard Alex had hitched up for her. The ride to her childhood home on the neighboring farm had taken no longer than fifteen minutes.
    Standing at the new six-eye, coal-burning stove Ben Roy had just bought for his Fedora, Eula alternated sampling from the five big iron kettles, all in various stages of cooking. She delighted in the routine of sameness, and through the years of this mass production had developed an efficient process to get the job done on the allotted day. Now, with six burners, she could keep five pots simmering, instead of three, with the sixth eye available for the cooling. That would cut off about three hours of sweat-pouring work. In the years since she took over the job as main canning-day cook from her dead mother, Eula had learned to block out the Thornton women’s chatter and lose herself in her own memories of girlhood.
    Although there were four Thornton sons, Eula and Bessie had been the only girls. She and her sister could not have been more dissimilar. Bessie, five years younger and half a head shorter, had taken more after their curvaceous mother in height and build, but she was her father’s spitting image in coloring. Bessie’s hair had definite yellows and light browns to it, while Alexander had once described Eula’s hair color as “neither this nor that…more like the color of house dust…” Eula knew in her heart that he hadn’t meant to hurt, so she never held the remark against him. But Old Ben had clearly favored his younger daughter with her creamy complexion, pinched-in waist,