Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray by Dorothy Love Page A

one in charge of the dining room, and he showed me how the bread tray goes between the vegetable platters and how the meat supposed to go at one end with the gravy beside it. Served in a boat. And the soup at the other end of the table, served in a tureen. Boats and tureens looked to me like plain old bowls, but Charles said it was important to know the right names for things, so I learned them.
    Keeping a big house, you need a schedule for everything, and we had one. Mondays for doing the wash, Tuesdays for ironing, Wednesdays for beating the dust out of the carpets, and so on all the way to Sunday, which was a day of rest. More or less.
    Missus had stopped my reading lessons when I turned ten years old because I could read the Bible as well as anybody, and since that was the main reason for teaching me in the first place, there was no need to keep going. She saw how disappointed I was and told me I could borrow the books she kept on a table in the parlor. But to be honest, they were dry as dirt. Most of them were sermons a preacher wrote down and put into a book. I liked preaching well enough, but not a steady diet of it. I wanted stories about pirates or the Wild West. Something with a little more excitement to it than a “Treatise upon the Lessons of Saint Paul” or whoever. I still had the book Miss Mary gave me for Christmas, but those stories were for little children and not for a girl about to turn thirteen.
    On the day Miss Mary’s little daughter, Mee, was born, it was July and hotter than blue blazes. Breathing was like taking in air through a wet blanket. It was a Sunday—supposed to be a day of rest—but Missus kept me busy all morning going up and down the stairs fetching water and linens and liniments and such. The door to the birthing room was shut up tight. I could hear voices in there, Old Nurse and Missus cooing like doves to Miss Mary, who was having a bad time of it, judging from the way she was moaning and crying.
    I knew what was happening in that room, and I was partly scared and partly curious. I had got my nature just a few months before, and Mauma, who was waiting for the birthing of her own baby, had sat me down and told me where babies come from and how they get to the outside world. It didn’t sound like anything I wanted to try.
    Soon as I finished fetching and toting for Missus, I went outside and headed for the summer kitchen. The ground was so hot it scorched the bottoms of my feet. Down in the woods the crows were cawing and the dogs had set up a ruckus. I could smell some of George’s tea cakes from clear across the yard. Sure enough there was a pan of them cooling on the sill. I took a couple and got me a gourd and went to get some water from the well. Mauma called it the sweet water of Arlington. There was nothing that could take the heat out of you like a long drink of that pure, cool water.
    “Selina Norris.”
    I spun around so fast that my tea cakes plopped into the dirt.
    The stable boy stood there grinning at me. Thornton Gray wasn’t much older than me, but he was taller, and thin as a rake. He smelled like hay and leather and horses. His hair was straight and his face was broad until you got down to his chin, which came to a sharp point.
    Thornton would tell anybody who would listen that his people was Indians and he was planning to head out West just soon as he was free. We didn’t talk too much, me and Thornton, because he usually sneaked away from Sunday night preaching, and during the week he was busy sunup to sundown helping with the horses and the carriages, or else helping the men with the planting. And I was up at the house with my beeswax and candlesticks.
    “What do you want, Thornton Gray?”
    “I was going to ask for one of them tea cakes.” He looked down at them, just about as sad as if he was on his way to a burying. “But not now.”
    I filled my water gourd and took another long drink.
    Thornton shook the dust off his bare feet. “Can I at least have