Sundays Fanny used to wear her grandmother’s portrait painted in miniature on ivory, as a breast-pin.
“Hand-painted,” she used to explain. And always added: “Creoles are all white.” Which was true. But, when quarrelling with his wife, Odell pretended to believe otherwise.
Rummaging through Fanny’s effects a day or two after her marriage, Mazie discovered a painted fan, a mother-of-pearl card-case, and this breast-pin. She carried the miniature to Odell.
“Looks like baby,” she explained, with her care-free laugh.
“She’ll be lucky if she favours that pitcher,” said Odell. “But like as not she’ll take after Fanny.” He was wrong in his guess.
When Eris was five her resemblance to the miniature had become marked. And Mazie’s boys looked like their mother and father.
On Saturday nights, after immersing her own unwilling brunette brats in the weekly bath, Mazie found the slim white body of little Eris an ever-increasing amusement and a pique to her curiosity. The child’s frail yet healthy symmetry, the fine skin, delicate, perfect limbs, lovely little hands and feet, remained perennial sources of mirth and surprise to this robust young woman who was equally healthy, but built on a big, colourful, vigorous plan.
Solid and large of limb and haunch, deep-bosomed, ruddy-skinned, the young stepmother always bred true to type. Her sons were sons of the soil from birth. There could be no doubt about her offspring. What wasn’t Lister was Odell. They belonged to the land.
But when Mazie looked at her husband and looked at the child, Eris—and when she remembered Fanny—then she wondered and was inclined to smile. And she was content that her sons’ thick, sturdy bodies and slanting, black eyes so plainly advertised the stock they came from. Utility. Health. Strength.