All I knew at the time and then it was like there was no time or that my whole life was squeezed into the lifespan of a thunderclap or a single hollow click-song of a cicada like the ones that used to descend on my grandparents’ farm where later in that old barn on the hot clingy sticky scratchy hay my cousin said this is how it goes in and he showed me with his hand and finger and I didn’t believe him but then I had never seen one before, all I was aware of then was that I felt like dying, wanted to die, wanted to die so I could live so my whole body could be alive and holding it inside me just one second longer when I heard myself cry out after the fact and I thought oh God just let this feeling last. And it didn’t matter that I loved a nigger boy, a black man, that didn’t matter anymore.

I don’t know how long I was watching him before I realized I was watching when he was out there in the yard digging those post holes and putting those posts in the holes out in the hot July sun when he would leave the shade of the tree line and go over to the corner of the yard where a big bundle of posts had been dumped and grab one, sling it over his shoulder like a Sabine woman and carry it over and shove it into one of those holes and twist it and turn it and shove it in deeper with those big black hands of his and I thought, he must be awful thirsty.

My husband was out that afternoon tending to patients which he still did in those days which all the doctors used to do before they got too rich and too lazy and too used to not having to do it anymore, just up the road as we used to say which was actually a good fifteen miles away at least up at the old Brunson house which was the only house that the yankees hadn’t burned to the ground and then only because old grandma Brunson was a yankee herself or at least from Maryland and was related to some yankee colonel and by virtue of that had kept her house and her barn and most of her chickens although they took most everything else, and her grandson’s wife kept him my husband for a good long while every time he called up there (she was a yankee too) asking after everyone by name just to prove although she could never prove that she was really one of us. So I knew he wouldn’t be back before dark.

So I brought him the post hole digger a glass of sweet iced tea and I watched his neck throat and shoulders and smooth carved perfectly evenly brown mahogany arms as he brought it up to his lips and tilted his head back and drank it, drank it all down without stopping, and I said why don’t you come inside and sit a spell, and he must have known what I wanted or else he intended to rape me but maybe that’s what I wanted too or at least what I had been thinking about without realizing it because maybe I would never have done it otherwise, never have invited him in like that. But he grabbed me and pulled me close up against his body and I could smell the sweat and the skin underneath the sweat and feel the muscles underneath the skin and his tongue cold from the tea he just drank forced its way into my mouth and when I got my breath back I pulled him even closer and said fuck me, which I had never said before not to anyone not even in my own thoughts, I had never thought that word before but I said it then, I said it out loud and I meant it. God or the devil or something put it in me to say it, and he looked at me with eyes so hungry it scared me and I said fuck me now. And it started to rain from out of nowhere. And we went outside and he fucked me again in the rain.

I guess that’s what did it, because the nigger maid next door had run outside to get the clothes off the line when she saw it started raining and that’s who saw us coupling and she told my husband or at least it got back to my husband from her, though whether because she thought it looked bad for the whites or for her own I don’t really know. All I know is my husband thundered into the bedroom one night after being quiet and sullen all day and I guess holding it in as long as he could and hit me, knocked me right off my chair in front of the vanity which was my daddy’s mother’s vanity and part of my dowry I guess you could say, and grabbed me by my hair and pulled me up and screamed you fucked a nigger and hit me again. And I just lay there and wanted him to keep on hitting me for as long as it took until he finally understood that hitting me wouldn’t change anything. And only then did I cry but not for myself nor even for him probably, or only a little bit for him. I cried because I just needed to cry.

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