Read Online A Matter of Souls by Denise Lewis Patrick - Free Book Online Page A

started the unpacking without him! Covington hurriedly washed and dressed and rushed into the other room.
    â€œMornin’, Sleepy.” Beesi had set Elizear Markham’s round pine table with a steaming tin mug of coffee and a fork, both flanking a heavy ironstone plate piled high withfluffy eggs and a plump, browned sausages.
    â€œGood morning, Honey-girl,” Covington said. His mouth watered. He hoped Beesi would always be full of such wonderful surprises.
    Elizear had not been keen on the match, though Covington had overheard his uncle’s salty “Ain’t none of yourn, Master Markham, and you chose it that way! Leave the boy to his heart.” And the way he’d said that, Covington remembered, was the closest any Colored man could come to accusing any White man of anything. ’Course, they’d been way out behind the shed on the far edge of the property, tanning hides. But Covington knew courage when he heard it.
    Besides, his choice of a bride hadn’t been all that complicated.
    When Beesi first came to work for them, neither she nor Covington had made sixteen years. She’d come to tend house and the garden, and she kept her deep, dark eyes cast down. She never spoke. Townsfolk said she was mute, and simpleminded.
    But Beesi put that lie to rest one day—for Covington, at least—when a mouse had run across his foot near the woodpile. Covington had unfortunately never gotten over his fear of such, and he’d squealed, jumped, and thrown his armload of kindling higher than his head.
    A laugh, loud and sweet and free as singing, rang out from the kitchen window, and Covington saw Beesi smiling directly at him.
    â€œYou funny, funny!” She’d laughed, pushing the window up so he could hear her clearly, then shutting it quickly. She held his gaze for a long while, until Covington remembered himself and began to gather up the wood to go on with his duties.
    Covington believed he had loved her from then on. They had waited four years till the end of the War to marry, so they could do it legal. Covington’s only regret was that his uncle hadn’t lived to see freedom come—nor see them wed.
    â€œBeesi, I thought we were going to set up house together today!” He gulped coffee sweet with honey.
    Beesi looked at him with a schoolteacher’s stern frown.
    â€œDon’t you fret none ’bout that. I’m gonna put everything good. You got feet to make shoes for, dontcha?”
    She flashed him a dazzling smile, her dimples deep, and Covington knew right away that Beesi was well aware of the way she had twisted the old folks’ saying about making feet for shoes. Making babies.
    Covington blushed.
    Beesi, still smiling, waved her apron tail at him as if to shoo him off.
    â€œGone work, now. Gone!” she cooed.
    Covington pushed back his chair and swallowed the last of the sausage.
    He felt he must’ve been walking on clouds, leaving his own wife to go into his own business on his own property.
    Covington sat comfortably at his stool and took a moment to survey the shelves of lasts around the walls; many he had carved himself. He could almost see the faces of the people whose feet were modeled in wood. Mostly well-off, these were generations of planters, farmers, businessmen, and fine ladies that Elizear and his father before him had courted and kept satisfied by their exquisite workmanship.
    Along the bench to his left, Beesi had neatly arranged his familiar tools in the order he liked: lasting pincers first, to shape the leather onto the custom-carved lasts; the small hammer next to the awls he used to pierce elaborate patterns into the leather of women’s shoes; rubbing sticks to finish the heels and edges just right.
    On another small bench to his right were several pairs of shoes in progress. A ripple of annoyance ran through Covington; he was behind, everything was behind, what with Elizear Markham’s sudden taking sick