The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

killed, and as far as Elma could tell, her father stopped going to the mill at all. She had seen nothing of the Wilsons.

      “You like that,” said Sara. “For people to stay out of your way.”

      “Not you!”

      “Well, maybe that’s because I haven’t asked you about the twins yet.”

      Elma sat down in one of the wooden chairs. Then, remembering for the first time where she was, she stood up again. She could still smell the smoky char of the fire that had nearly burned the shack down. “What about them?”

      “How they look so different. I mean—”

      “I know they look different,” Elma said sharply. She busied her hands in the basket. Then, more gently, feeling her tongue go loose, she said, “I didn’t ask for two babies.” She had thought that sentence hour after hour, it had lived silent in her head, and there it was now, out on the table. She laid the hoecakes side by side. They were heavy as rocks, made with the low-grade flour left in the back of the pantry, and Elma wished she’d made something else instead. “They have two different daddies, is how come. They’re twins, grown up inside me at the same time, but they ain’t all the way kin.”

      “That’s something,” Sara said, wide-eyed.

      “Alls I’ll say,” Elma said, but she’d already said more than she ever had, even more than she’d said to the newspaperman—when had she ever had a real friend to talk to, who could talk back!—“Alls I’ll say is one of the daddies is Freddie Wilson. The landlord’s his granddaddy. More like a daddy.”

      “The one that owns the farm?”

      “He ain’t no more than a dog. Freddie, that is. Granddaddy too, I reckon. Folks look down they noses at the baby for his skin, well! The Wilsons ain’t no better! They don’t even take up for they own.”

      “You sure these Wilsons don’t have mulatto blood, and that’s how come Wilson’s dark? It’s the uppity white folks, the ones with the slaves in the family—”

      “Oh, no!” Elma shook her head. “Not the Wilsons. They’re pure as cotton. No. No. They’re two daddies. That’s alls I’ll say. Nature has its own ideas, I reckon.”

      “I reckon it does,” Sara said, trying on the word.

      “You think a mare ever thought she could mate with a donkey?”

      Sara considered it. “I reckon she mates with whoever she pleases.”

      “Well, the first mare that gave birth to a mule ought to have been as surprised as me. But you think she’d have loved him any more if he’d been a horse?”

      “I reckon not.”

      “They’re both gone now, the daddies. One is dead and one might as well be.” Elma fingered the envelope in the pocket of her apron. “That’s alls I’m like to say about that.”

      Sara crossed the room and touched her hand to Elma’s shoulder. “Thank you for the lunch.” She took a hoecake from the table. They both took bites. The rain tapped against the tar paper roof.

      “You ain’t spent much time near livestock,” Elma asked her, “have you?”

      “Can’t say I have.”

      “A mare don’t mate with whoever she pleases. She mates with whatever ass is penned in with her.”

      Sara laughed. Before she could stop herself, Elma asked, “How do you keep from getting caught?”

      “Do what?”

      “From getting pregnant.”

      Sara didn’t flinch. “You ain’t spent much time near Catholics, have you?”

      “Can’t say I have.”

      “You know your time of the month, don’t you?”

      “I don’t bleed anymore, not while my milk is in.”

      “Well, you count it. Just before or just after your time is the safest. It’s the time in the middle you worry about.”

      Elma nodded, though she didn’t quite understand.

      “Good thing about my time of the month is that it’s my time, not Jim’s. He might be the one getting caught, come Christmas.”

      Now Elma laughed. She smoothed her apron. “A letter came from Atlanta.” She slipped it out of her pocket. “Some doctor at Emory University wants to study on the babies.”

      “Study on them? What for?” Sara reached for the letter and lowered herself into a chair.

      “He wants to see how come twins can have two daddies, I guess. I ain’t gone let him, though.”

      “Why not?” Sara didn’t look up from the letter.

      Elma sat on her hands. Could doctors really tell if two babies were twins? Could they even tell if they were brother and sister? She said, “I don’t want my babies poked and prodded. I don’t want them in a medical journal. They ain’t specimens!”

      “But he says he’ll pay. Times are hard!”

      “How do I know he’ll pay? How do I know I won’t get there and they’ll take the babies away?”

      Sara snorted. “Elma, Emory University is a respectable institution. They’re not going to take your babies. Tell them your terms.”

      Elma shivered at the word. Her “terms.” Yes, she had set terms before—she had set terms with her father. That was the word for it, wasn’t it?

      “Tell them what you demand in order to cooperate with their study. Atlanta’s all the go! Have you ever been?”

      Elma shook her head.

      “Well, it’s bigger than a bread basket, let me tell you. The men aren’t bad to look at, either. Oh, you’re going to love it! You can take our electric!”

      “I don’t know how to drive. Well, I know a little.”

      “I’ll teach you!”

      “Sara, I can’t. I’m much obliged, but I can’t leave. Daddy would never let me, for one.”

      “He sure keeps you down on the farm, doesn’t he?”

      Elma took another bite. For a moment a dry cake of panic lodged in her throat. What did Sara know about her father? About Nan? Was Elma the last person to know what was happening in her own house?

      “I don’t mean nothing by it,” Sara said.

      Elma could see that she didn’t. She swallowed. The rain was lightening up on the roof. She had a flash of herself, like a remembered dream, flying through Atlanta on a streetcar, holding her hat tight to her head. If her father could leave the farm, if her father could go to the city and be someone else, why couldn’t she? She had told him her terms before. She would set her own terms now.

      She said, “How’d you get your hands on that electric, anyway?”

      Sara smiled around a mouthful. “You can get your hands on just about anything if you’re clever enough.”

      “You stole it?”

      “It’s on loan from my uncle up in Buffalo. He used to like to kiss me with his tongue. I figure he had it coming. First he lost the car, then he lost everything else in the crash.”

      Now the hoecake sat like a stone in Elma’s stomach. To Nan, her father used to call himself that, an uncle, just like she’d called Nan’s father Uncle Sterling. “Come on and hug Uncle Juke’s neck. Come on and give Uncle Juke some sugar.” Then he stopped. Was that when it had started up, with Nan?

      Her mind fell upon something. She closed her eyes and followed the branches of the tree. If her daddy was Wilson’s daddy, then Wilson was not Winna’s brother