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high bosom, and light brown eyes. Old Ben had said Eula’s eyes reminded him of the burned underside of a cook pot. Her father had meant to hurt, and Eula did hold it against him.
    Her father had just about cried when that Kentucky man came down and asked for Bessie’s hand though she was only sixteen. It had taken Momma Thornton a lot of breath to convince her husband that the marriage would be a very profitable one for Bessie. But the old man had still been reluctant to bestow his blessings on the union until Momma reminded him that Eula would never make such a good marriage. In fact, their oldest daughter stood an excellent chance of being an old maid. In that case, it would be up to Bessie to take in her sister. Unable to deny the wisdom of his wife’s reasoning, Old Ben bid a sorrowful good-bye to his favorite daughter.
    “Eula Mae, are those peaches ’bout ready?” Cora Lee, one of the Thornton cousins, jarred Eula out of her musings as she stuffed a tea towel into a Mason jar to complete its drying.
    Ignoring the annoying Cora Lee, Eula bent over a pot of dark cherries just coming to a boil. She lowered her long-handled wooden spoon into a second kettle on a back burner. Filling it only a quarter full and raising it to her lips, she blew on the hot peaches to cool them before she stuck out a tongue to sample.
    “I declare, Aunt Eula, I don’t know how you can stand there over all those cooking pots in this heat.” Tillie, Ben Roy and Fedora’s just-married twenty-one-year-old daughter, patted the kitchen table, which was nearly covered with bowls of cherries, pits, peaches, cored apples, plums, sugar, flour, glass jars, lids, and sealing wax. Tillie’s hand came to rest on her aunt’s account journal. Flipping to the back cover, the newlywed began to tear at the last page.
    Without thinking, Eula tapped the wooden spoon on the edge of the iron pot holding the cherries.
    “Tillie, your momma’s got a fan in the kitchen safe. Use it, not one of my journal pages.” Eula gave her niece an apologetic smile.
    “Eula Mae, you still writin’ down everything in that journal of yours? How many jars of this and how many cans of that? I declare, all that figurin’ would drive me crazy.” Fedora waved the paring knife in the air while she held a half-cored apple in the other hand. “I can’t be bothered. I just use stuff ’til I run out. If I need more, Ben Roy will buy it off ’n somebody.” Finished with the cored apple, Fedora handed it over to Cora Lee.
    With a few quick strokes of her butcher knife, Cora cubed the apple into six parts.
    “I just like to know how much I have so I can pace myself.” Eula really wanted to tell Fedora that her Thornton mother-in-law had insisted that the mark of a good homemaker was how well she kept her farm books.
    Mother Thornton had been a master at managing the household accounts on the large farm, and while Bessie was the prime target of her instruction, Eula had been a keen observer.
    Right after her sister left for Kentucky, Alexander came courting Eula, if courting was the right word. There had been no long buggy rides in the country, nor any chaperoned picnics under the elms with Alex. He sat with her one time at the church social and the next she knew, Old Ben told her that a McNaughton had asked for her hand. She really didn’t need her mother’s constant reminders of how lucky she was to have escaped spinsterhood, especially since her twenty-second birthday was just six months away. Eula needed no prodding. She knew she was fortunate that a good-looking man had wanted her. Though the McNaughtons were just a notch above piss-poor, Alexander was more mannerable than her brothers. Better still, she had quickly understood the rules of their marriage from the outset.
    Her husband had needed a good manager for his farm, and she had provided that and more. It took her no time to anticipate his every need before the thought came into his head. Even when she knew his