He stood in the shade of the feed store porch with his black hat in one hand and the late-afternoon Texas sun turning the dust on Main Street copper-red, and he said it the way a man might offer terms at the end of a war.
“I only have six months left to live,” he told her. “Marry me, give me a child, and your family will never have problems with money again.”
Annie Mae did not answer at first.
She was only twenty years old. Her hands smelled of milk and hay, and the mud on her boots had not fully dried from the morning walk back from the pasture. There was a crack along the cuff of her left glove where the leather had worn thin from carrying pails. A loose strand of brown hair clung to the sweat at her temple. She had spent the day selling milk, butter, and cream from two stubborn Jersey cows that were the only dependable income her family had left.
In town, respectable women did not marry men because they were desperate.
But respectable women also did not go home each night to an old wooden house with a sick mother coughing blood into flour-sack handkerchiefs and a father sitting in county lockup because debt had turned, through the hands of cruel men, into a criminal charge.
Annie’s father, Samuel Carter, had borrowed money after a drought ruined their corn. When he couldn’t pay it back, the bank claimed he had altered ledger numbers and signed false weight slips for feed. It was the sort of crime poor men were accused of when rich men wanted an example made. Now he sat in jail in Briar County, waiting for a hearing nobody expected to go his way.
