Nelia, adrift in her own life, and sure now that she never had really cared very much for Gus Carline, admitted to herself that her husband had been only a step up out of the poverty and misery of her parents’ shack.
“You see, missy, I’m a sinner myse’f!”
Her ears had caught the depths of the pathos of his regret and sorrow, and she pitied him. At the same time her own thoughts were ominous, and her face, regular, bright, vivacious, showed a hardness which was alien to it.
Nelia went over to Mrs. Caope’s for supper, and Parson Rasba was there, having brought in a wild goose which he had shot on Wolf Island while going about his meditations that afternoon. Mrs. Caope had the goose sizzling in the big oven of her coal range—coal from 73 Pittsburgh barges wrecked along the river on bars—and the big supper was sweeter smelling than Rasba ever remembered having waited for.
Mrs. Caope told him to “ask one of them blessin’s if yo’ want, Parson!” and the four bowed their heads.
Jim Caope then fell upon the bird, neck, wings, and legs, and while he carved Mrs. Caope scooped out the dressing, piled up the fluffy biscuits, and handed around the soup tureen full of gravy. Then she chased the sauce with glass jars full of quivering jellies, reaching with one hand to take hot biscuits from the oven while she caught up the six-quart coffee pot with the other.
“I ain’t got no patience with them women that don’t feed their men!” she declared. “About all men want’s a full stomach, anyhow, an’ if you could only git one that wa’n’t lazy, an’ didn’t drink, an’ wasn’t impedent, an’ knowed anything, besides, you’d have something. Ain’t that so, Nelia?”
“Oh, indeed yes,” Nelia cried, from the fullness of her experience, which was far less than that of the hostess.
After they had eaten, they went from the kitchen into the sitting room, where Rasba turned to Nelia.
“You came down the river alone?” he asked.