Chapter 4 - The Smokehouse Lock
The smokehouse didn't have a floor. It was bare earth, packed hard by fifty years of salt drip and bacon lard, black as soot and smelling of old hickory ash.
My trunk—the small cedar one my grandmother had left me—sat near the salt bin, its brass corners tarnished grey by the damp.
Harlon stood in the doorway, his silhouette wide and square against the faint twilight coming off the pasture. He held the key to the smokehouse padlock between two fingers.
"You'll sleep in here tonight," he said.
"It's November, Harlon," I said. My ankles were numb inside my leather shoes.
"There's two wool blankets on the salt table," he said. "And a bucket of water from the pump. You can think about whether you want to go back to your father’s house and tell him why he has to give back the bottomland."
"The bottomland was transferred in October," I said. "The deed is registered at the courthouse in town. My name is on the second line."
Harlon spat onto the packed dirt near my shoe. The dark brown spot disappeared into the greasy earth instantly.
"Paper doesn't mean much on this ridge, girl," he said. "The land stays with the name. You don't have the name anymore. You're just Colton’s wife, and Colton’s wife sleeps where I tell her to sleep until she learns how to hold her tongue."
He backed out and pulled the heavy door shut.
The sound of the iron latch dropping into the staple was short and final—a heavy, mechanical clack that left me in total darkness except for the thin lines of grey light coming through the gaps between the oak slabs.
I didn't cry.
I sat down on my trunk, wrapped my coat tight around my knees, and pulled the wool blankets off the salt table. They were stiff with dried brine and smelled of pig fat, but they were thick.
In the dark, I reached into my coat pocket.
May you like
My fingers touched the piece of glass I had picked up off the bedroom floor before Colton had come at me. It was sharp, three inches long, the edge jagged like a saw blade where it had snapped against the cedar chest.
I didn't hold it like a weapon. I held it like a key.
