Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman Read Free Book Online Page B

shift and then her blue cotton dress over her head. The little pink sprigs that had blossomed over the fabric when she’d cut it out six months ago from a flour sack had faded through its many scrubbings in the big iron pot in the side yard. She pulled on a sweater that her older sister Esther had crocheted and then outgrown and passed down to her. She was still cold, as was the fireplace, last night’s carefully banked fire having died hours ago. But she wouldn’t be cold for long, once she took her place in the kitchen at the wood-stove and began her morning chores.
    “You better get those biscuits started now,” Virgie said, pushing the flour sack toward her. “Your pa and the boys have already been up an hour. They’re going to be back in here soon.”
    Rosalie nodded “Yes’m” and began cutting lard into the flour with two knives. She worked carefully and quickly as Virgie had taught her, handling the mixture as little as possible once she’d added the fresh milk from the pail that her father had already left on the back steps. It hadn’t taken but one slap from the side of her mother’s hand when she was careless and made tough biscuits to teach her the technique. Flour and lard, like everything else on the Norris farm, were too hard-earned to waste.
    Rosalie tested the oven of the woodstove with her hand and slipped the first pan of biscuits inside. There would be three before she was finished. Her five brothers and her father would polish off the first two, dabbed with butter her mother had churned and sweet honey gathered from their hives. Afterward the menfolk would wipe their mouths on the backs of their hands, scrape their chairs back from the table and clomp back out the kitchen door to finish their morning work in the barn.
    Only then would the girls clear away their debris from the big round table, scrape and wash the dishes in the pot of water that was always at the boil on the back of the black-and-silver stove, dry them and reset the table for their own breakfasts. Only then would Rosalie pull the third pan of biscuits from the oven, and the girls would settle down for a few minutes to eat while their mother, at her place closest to the door, drank a cup of boiled coffee while she nursed the baby.
    “They’ve tracked in again,” Virgie nodded at the bare wooden floor.
    “Yes’m,” said Janey and Florence. It was the two middle girls’ job to scrub the floor clean with lye which bleached the pine pale as wild spring dogwood blossoms. What it did to their hands was another matter, but country girls couldn’t worry about niceties like soft skin. They couldn’t afford to.
    Luxuries of even the most meager kind were unheard of in Virgie and William Norris’s wide-hipped house set on top of a hill well back from the dirt road which led to the hamlet of Sweetwell four miles away. The acres surrounding the farm where William and his family planted cotton every spring were fertile, repaying with bountiful crops the backbreaking, finger- splitting labor of seeding, chopping, hoeing and picking—those years it didn’t rain too much or too little and the boll weevil didn’t come to dinner.
    It was pretty country, northwestern Louisiana, green all the way to the nearby border where the piney lands of Texas began. A few miles south was the Cane River, with magnolia-lined plantation lands rolling back from its banks. The three-storied big white houses along the Cane, layered and decorated and sweet like wedding cakes, were so pretty they could break your heart.
    But there was nothing but backs to be broken on the thousands of small farms like the Norris place, where the never-ending work spread itself out to fill all the days from sunup to sundown, and the more children there were to do the work, the more mouths there were to feed, and the more store-bought shoes to purchase, the more disappointments to worry about at Christmastime.
    Virgie Norris plopped the baby, Will, down for a few moments and