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entered. My pulse quickened, and I hunched my shoulders, waiting for a blow to the head. Mama was standing there, had heard every word I had said. I just knew it by the terror in Wallace’s face. Mama was taking her time, preparing for the slaughter, making me squirm and suffer.
    When I could take it no longer, when I knew that the pounding of my heart had awakened everybody in the house, I turned to face her.
    No one was there.
    I finally exhaled. “I shouldn’t have said that,” I whispered, “but it’s true. Remember when she used to tell us we were rich, and how we’d never be hungry as long as we lived in Georgia? ‘Too many trees bearing nuts and fruits. Corn and bean stalks running out to the road for the taking. Bushes of berries and vines of grapes. No way to be hungry.’” I said, quoting my mother.
    Wallace smiled. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “I believed that all the way to the second grade.”
    “Me, too. I’d be sitting in school with my stomach making all sorts of noise, and everybody looking. I’d keep telling myself how it couldn’t be hunger because people in Georgia don’t get hungry. At lunchtime, I’d go off by myself so I wouldn’t have to smell the food.”
    “Tan, do you ever wish you’d been born in another family? I mean . . . like Shaky Brown’s, or somebody like that.You know, where you don’t have to worry ’bout things so much.”
    “Wallace, it’s time for you to get up,” I said. If I could help it, he would never know how often I wished for that very thing.
    He rose from the floor, pulled on a sweater and a pair of blue jeans over dingy underclothes, then made his way to the front hall to get the night bucket. It was his responsibility to empty it each morning and wash it out, then bring it back in at night. While he was getting the bucket, I rolled his blankets and placed them next to the other bundles.
    Martha Jean was with Wallace when he came back to the kitchen, both of their noses twisted from the stench. Martha Jean handed him the water bucket and watched as he stepped outside, then she took down two pots from the open shelf, one to heat water for Mama’s coffee, and the other to cook grits.
    I returned to the front room to find Laura and Edna sorting clothes that Tarabelle and I would have to wash. Tarabelle was holding a handful of newspaper and a few sticks of kindling.
    “I’ll start the fire in Mama’s room,” she said.
    “Try not to wake her.”
    Tarabelle took a deep, weary breath. “She already woke. Don’t you hear her in there howling like some ol’ kicked dog? I hope we ain’t gotta listen to that all day.”
    I listened and heard the moaning come to an abrupt halt. It was followed by a loud, strong voice that I knew so well.
    “Where’s my damn coffee?’
    “What you reckon we’ll burn in Hell?” Tarabelle asked as she hung a sheet on the clothesline and clamped it in place with wooden pins. We worked in silence as a Krandike dairy truck rounded the bend below us and moved westward toward the farmland.
    I turned Tarabelle’s question over in my mind, then asked, “What do you reckon?”
    “I reckon we will.” She leaned over the washtub, tossed a couple of shirts into the sudsy water, and began rubbing one up and down against the rub board. “Just think, Tan, all we do is fool around fire. First thing in the morning . . . fire. Last thing at night . . . fire. I think the devil getting us ready. We gon’ be the ones keep the fires burning in Hell.”
    It was a cold morning and the clothes froze almost as fast as we hung them up. They stood on the line, stiff and glazed in a thin layer of ice. We hung as many as the line would hold, then we went back inside to warm our hands and wait.
    Around noon, curiosity and goodwill brought Reverend Nelson and half of the women’s choir down from the Solid Rock Baptist Church. They were about a dozen or so, bearing gifts of prepared meals, bumping into each other as they scrambled for a