Exah

Fiction

Newton County, Mississippi, 1874

She’d been daydreaming again, that was the trouble. Mama always said someday her future would pass her by while she was lollygagging, and Exah hated it when Mama was right. She knew her brother J. J. was coming home today, and just possibly bringing his friend Jesse Smith to stay, and she’d planned to be scrubbed and changed into her clean dress and greeting them in the front hall, fresh as a peach.

It was hard being the last child left at home. Not that she was a child anymore. She was nineteen — perfectly old enough to be moving on into a home of her own. But that required a husband. Plenty of young men had come calling, of course. Poor as they were, her people were better off than most, and the local families would have been pleased to have a son married into the (comparatively) prosperous Haralsons. But the suitors thus far were all farm boys, most of whom she’d known since they were runny-nosed toddlers, and whom she couldn’t imagine staring at across the kitchen table in some ramshackle farmhouse for the rest of her life.

She knew what that life would be like. She’d seen it already. Even before the war, farming had seemed a particularly sweaty way to make a living. She’d watched her mother work nonstop from dawn ’til long past dusk, straining her eyes to squint at her mending by the firelight in the evenings. It was a life of monotony studded with unpleasant surprise, and it was a fate Exah wanted desperately to avoid. Which is why the ambitious Mr. Smith, training to be a…