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pleasing silhouette in moonlight, but in the light of day they were hideous monstrosities—gutted and stripped—with coiled springs sprouting from the backs and seats. The makeshift chair covers were useless in disguising the hateful springs that ripped our clothes and tore at our skin.
    The dress I had worn the day before was draped over one of the chairs. I moved cautiously across the room, avoiding the curled forms of my sisters, and retrieved my dress. I held my breath and quickly pulled the wet gown off over my head.
    When I was dressed, I tipped out to the kitchen where my brothers slept. Harvey and Sam were gone. Their blankets had been rolled into neat bundles and were stored in a far corner of the kitchen. Wallace was sitting up, his back against the wall, a blanket pulled up to his chin.
    “Wallace,” I said, surprised at finding him awake and idle.
    “Morning,” he said in a voice hours removed from sleep.
    It was not so chilly in the kitchen. The coal stove, which was identical to the one in the front room, had been lit and was making a feeble attempt at warming the room. The pipes of both stoves elbowed at about the same angle and met at a junction between the walls. Smoke from the stoves came out on the gully side of the house. The entire house should have been warm with the two stoves back to back, and the fireplace in Mama’s room, but somehow a draft of cold air always found its way inside.
    “How long have you been up?” I asked, sensing that something was troubling my younger brother. Wallace, at the age of eleven, was not one to linger, not in bed or anywhere else. His store of energy did not allow for much in the way of idleness.
    He shrugged his shoulders. “What time is it?” he asked. “I been woke since Harvey and Sam left. Told Mr. Frank I’d come around today, help him fix his fence. He’s gonna give me a dollar.”
    “Don’t tell Mama about the dollar,” I warned. “Don’t tell anybody.”
    “I ain’t stupid,” he said indignantly.
    “You told me.”
    “Yeah, but you don’t never tell nothing.”
    I lit the kerosene lamp, placed it on the kitchen table, and knelt down on the edge of Wallace’s pallet. “Why are you sitting here like this?” I asked.
    “Like what?”
    “You know. Like something is wrong.”
    He was silent for a moment, his gaze avoiding mine. He glanced around the kitchen, toward the back door, up at the ceiling, and finally at me.
    Wallace was frail, and small for his age. His eyes were large and round with thick, long lashes. He had the same silky, black hair as Tarabelle, and his thin face seemed to shrink beneath the mane of hair and those wide eyes that took up so much space.
    “Tan, I think I been sitting here sinning,” he whispered. “Tarabelle says Mama is gonna have another baby. She said it hurts awful bad and sometimes people die.”
    “That has nothing to do with you, Wallace. It wasn’t you who sinned.”
    “I ain’t told you yet what I been doing,” he said.
    “What? What were you doing?”
    “I was thinking how Mama might die, but that ain’t the worst of it. I was thinking how that might not be so bad. I heard Mama tell Miss Pearl that every time a man look at her she gets knocked up. If that’s true, there could be a hundred of us in a few years.”
    “Wallace, nobody gets knocked up just because somebody looks at them,” I said.
    “I don’t know, Tan,” he said, shaking his head.
    “Just think about it,” I said. “Mr. Frank has been looking at Miss Pearl for years, and she doesn’t have a baby. It doesn’t happen just because you look at somebody. And anyway, Mama is always saying something that’s not true.”
    Blasphemy!
    Simultaneously, we gasped and stared at each other, waiting for the roof to cave in, or the ground to rumble and open and suck us in. I had overstepped my boundaries, and poor Wallace was guilty by association.
    Wallace slowly shifted his gaze from my face to the doorway from which I had