After first pouring herself a cup of coffee, Juna swept past Daddy, close enough her skirt brushed his knees. He jerked his legs aside, and she sat opposite him, where she shielded her eyes with one hand as if the sun were too bright. But it wasn’t. She was playing with Daddy’s fear, making him worry his eyes were fading.
“Thought to gather blackberries today,” she said, squinting into sunlight that wasn’t there. “Hadn’t planned for tobacco.”
She laid her head off to one side at an awkward sort of angle that made a person wonder what she was looking at. It made a person think Juna could see things others could not.
“Too early for berries,” Daddy said.
“Come early this year.” It’s part of the know-how, having a knack for knowing where the best berries will be found. “Don’t think today is the day for tobacco. I have a feeling.”
And then she tipped her head in that way she does and gave me a nod too. She sometimes catches me watching her while she sleeps or staring at the fire when she walks into the room to see if it sparks and hisses as she draws near, and so she knows I sometimes worry Daddy might be right. Sometimes, I’m afraid of Juna too.
Two hands reach down from the back of that truck. With the sun hitting me full in the face, I can’t be altogether certain whose hand I’m grabbing, but I make my best guess and I guess right. I can feel it the instant his hand wraps around mine. It’s a large hand, strong, tight grip. It’s Ellis’s hand I’m holding on to.
He gives a tug, and I pop up onto the back of the truck. One of those brothers pulls the gate closed, and as the truck starts up again, the sound of the engine growing louder and the side rails rattling all around us, that same brother hollers at me to hold on.
A flatbed trailer of sorts takes up most of the back of the truck so that everyone is leaned up against the edge and holding on to those railings as we bounce over the deep ruts cut into the road. Two metal tubs, both covered over with tarps and tied off with thin rope, sit on top of the trailer. Two brothers, one to each tub, are holding them in place so they don’t bounce about or slide off altogether, and another brother is shuffling things around, stacking tin buckets, one inside another, tossing a pair of leather gloves to each man.
“Where’s the pegs?” Ellis hollers over the sound of the truck and the wind rushing past our ears.
I stand directly at his side and can feel his one arm brushing against my shoulder as the truck knocks us about. I lean up against the railing that wraps around the truck’s bed just like all the brothers are doing, my arms stretched back behind so I can hold on.
“God damn it all,” Ellis says as the brother who was stacking pails continues digging through all that’s piled up inside the truck and not finding those pegs.
Ellis Baine has thick, dark hair, nearly black, and tanned olive skin. He’s broad through the chest in a way few men are anymore. Though he’s not the oldest of the Baine brothers-that would be Joseph Carl, who doesn’t live here anymore-he’s definitely the most solid.
I loosen my grip as the truck gains speed, and I wait for a deep rut in the road to come along. When it does and the truck lurches to one side, I fall forward in a way I hadn’t intended. I had planned to fall into Ellis Baine so he would wrap me up in his arms, hold me, and tell me to be careful. Our faces would nearly touch. I’d be close enough to smell the lye he’d have washed up with this morning, the icy-cold water he’d have splashed on his face. But the truck is going fast and the ruts in the road are deep, and I fall forward and not into Ellis Baine. My arms fly up. I let out a squeal I’ll later wish I hadn’t let out, crack a shin on the flatbed trailer, and nearly fall into the tubs of seedlings headed to the field.
Someone grabs me by one arm and hauls me back, and I’m hoping it’s Ellis and it is Ellis. In one smooth motion, he yanks me back to right, swings one arm across the front of me, and grabs onto the railing, one hand on each side of me, trapping me between himself and the side of the truck. With my face pressed up against the center of his chest, pressed so close my cheek warms and I can feel his beating heart, I close my eyes.
“Won’t be berries left if I don’t get to them today,” Juna had said as she kept on staring at Daddy across the kitchen table. She scooted her chair to avoid the sunlight that wasn’t shining through the window. Daddy glanced over one shoulder and then the other, looking for that sunlight.
If Daddy were to send Juna to the tobacco field, Abraham Pace might not find her. No matter how often Juna fusses about Abraham Pace or how poorly she speaks of him, she’ll want him to find her. Since Juna was fourteen years old, Daddy has been beating Abraham back, telling him he is too old for Juna and that fact will never change. Too old will always be too old. Every Sunday for two years, Abraham has combed his reddish hair, tucked his shirt and buttoned it as best he could, and has come to call.
It tires Daddy out, makes him shake his head and dig the palm of one hand into the flat spot between his eyes to see Abraham coming. Abraham has been particularly insistent since Juna marked her day of ascension a few months ago and swore to him she saw his face in that well. She said something different to me, and something different still to Daddy and to Dale and to the Brashears, who live down the road, and to their granddaughter, Abigail Watson. Juna has had a different story for every person who would listen.
As eager as Daddy is to rid his house of the likes of Juna, he is more afraid of making her angry. Just one time, that’s all it took. Juna made a face like she was tasting a sour apple when Abraham Pace stood on our porch and tapped on our door. That was sign enough for Daddy, and he didn’t dare rankle Juna by forcing on her a man she did not want. The push and pull is the thing Juna needs. Daddy always pulling. Abraham Pace always pushing. Juna has no intention of trading Daddy’s house for Abraham’s house, but she has said more than once that she doesn’t have to marry Abraham to take what he’s offering. That must be why she told Abraham she saw his face down in that well. So he’d keep offering.
“I could go for the blackberries, Daddy,” I said, cutting into another tomato, and as quick as I did, Dale snatched it up. “If I go for berries, Juna and Dale can go to the field.” And then, because I knew that first juicy tomato dribbling down his son’s face and getting blotted away with a napkin was testing Daddy’s temper, I said, “I’ll see to it Dale puts on something more fitting for the fields.”
I had been thinking more and more about Abraham Pace, and at that moment I was thinking it might be best if he didn’t find Juna. I should have told him months ago that if Juna has been telling him she loves him and wants to be with him if only Daddy would allow, then she’s telling him lies. Same as Juna has claimed to see any number of men down in that well, she’s enjoyed the touch of just as many. Abraham is something to fend off the boredom, nothing more.
“You especially like the early berries,” I said to Daddy and poked at the fire that was already hissing and spitting, which made me glance at Juna because I was wondering if she had stirred up those flames. Juna tipped her head the littlest bit, her blond hair falling over one shoulder, those large black eyes stretched wide, so I would believe she did.
I was thinking of Abraham Pace, that’s true enough, and trying to spare him a painful outcome, but I was also thinking of Ellis Baine. I didn’t often have reason to be walking along the side of the road first thing in the morning, but if I were to have a reason, and if I were walking there early enough, Ellis Baine would happen by in the Baines’ pickup truck, he and all his brothers, and they’d offer me a ride.