Touched by Carolyn Haines Read Free Book Online

stabbed with the knife, sinking the tip of the blade a good inch into the wooden table.
    Janelle flinched, but she didn’t step back. “The men are too impatient. They won’t let a big piece cook.”
    “How do you know they’re going to the doctor?” My sleeve was soaked with sweat, but I had nothing else to wipe my face on.
    “Duncan hasn’t walked or talked since the lightning. Doc Westfall says she won’t.”
    I didn’t believe Doc Westfall was making predictions, but I didn’t say so.
    “There was brain damage,” she said, nodding wisely. “She’ll probably be like a big old cabbage the rest of her life.”
    I’d seen Duncan’s eyes. They were distinctly un-cabbagelike.
    “Agnes said the girl was dead.” Janelle dropped her voice to a whisper. “She said you were there, standing right beside her. Was she?”
    “Yes.”
    Janelle stepped closer. “Was she really dead? You know Agnes exaggerates so that I didn’t want to believe her. Was Duncan really dead?”
    “Yes.” I couldn’t help it. My reward was the widening of her eyes, the flutter of her lids, as if she’d just been smote by the Holy Spirit or a really bad whiff of something rotten.
    “My goodness.” She huffed a little in excitement. “So it’s true.”
    There were still a dozen chickens to cut, and my hand was hurting. I looked at it and saw that the wound had reopened. Blood had soaked the bandage I’d tied around it. Janelle looked down and saw it, too, but she ignored it. In her new print dress she didn’t want any part of the bloody gore of cutting chickens.
    “You know they say that not even the devil would have that child, so he sent her back.” She wasn’t smiling.
    I drew the knife out of the wood, running my fingers along the blade in an absent gesture. “I heard it was God that sent her back.”
    Janelle stepped away from me. “God?”
    I nodded solemnly. “God.”
    “Well, he wouldn’t have her either.”
    “Not exactly. He gave her a chore to do.” Without warning I brought the knife down hard on the half chicken she’d been discussing. The blow cleaved it. I looked up from the chicken directly into her eyes. “Duncan is his chosen one.”
    “I have to see to the tea.” Janelle hurried away, looking back once with her eyes wide.
    By the time the table was finished and the food ready to eat, the heat and the blood of the chickens had made me sick. Elikah brought me a glass of tea under the shade of the oak. The other girls had gone off with their families or their beaus, and I had the strong support of the tree trunk and the cool shade all to myself.
    “You need to go home,” Elikah said, looking at my ruined dress and my hair, at the blood on my hand. There was whiskey on his breath, and I knew that in the dawn hours when the pig roasting had begun, Tommy Ladnier had been by with his jars of clear liquor.
    Liquor was the nectar of Satan, and Tommy Ladnier was the devil’s own spawn. But he had the finest clothes and the best car, and I’d heard in my short stay in Jexville three times about his house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with a brick gallery that was terraced straight down to the waters of the Mississippi Sound. Each weekend negro musicians played their dark music and men and women danced, drunk on whiskey and moonlight and the promise of sex.
    The way I heard it, Tommy Ladnier spent money by snapping his fingers and giving an order. Someone rushed to carry out his most outlandish whim. But Tommy worked six days a week delivering his goods. Personally delivering. The trademark of a fine salesman, Elikah always said. My husband, and most of the men of Jexville, were regular customers of Tommy Ladnier.
    I gave Elikah back the unfinished glass of tea and started home, wanting nothing more than to strip my old dress off and throw it away. I wanted to take the scissors and cut the dress into bits so small that not even my mama could make it go back together again. And then I wanted to cut my hair.