Being wed to a hard man takes its toll on a woman. Most endure, taking what scraps they can from the skimpy meals that life allows them, trying desperately to make a banquet of some sort from them. They are the lucky ones, the ones with eyes that look out blankly at a bleak world, mouths that turn down when a rare smile crosses their faces. Some just go crazy, wander off into the hills, and are never heard from again. Others seek rest in a bed of red dirt under a hand-carved stone.

For Leona, five years of daily fear had driven the youth from her heart. By the time she was twenty, she felt as worn down as the Tennessee mountains that had bred her.

Leona knelt in her kitchen garden, thankful for the sharp pebbles that ground into her knees. The pain helped crystallize her thinking. Her face, once considered the prettiest on Lion's Head Peak, was now angular, the hollows under the sharp cheekbones that hinted at her Cherokee great-grandmother, spoke of hard labor in the gardens and the cabin. Lines had begun to appear around the large blue eyes, that she had trained into a submissive gaze downward.  They were also faintly apparent around the mouth, and a slight scar bisected the left side of her bottom lip. Her long auburn hair was pulled tightly at the nape of her slender neck, pinned into severe compliance, the waves, tamed and lifeless. 

She rocked back and forth as she weeded the heartsease that flourished, neatly disguising two tiny depressions in the tilled earth. She glanced over at her daughter Keziah. The three-year-old was sound asleep, nestled in a faded quilt, her defiant red curls stirring in the brisk August breeze. Leona's heart contracted with love and fear and she began to hum a nameless lullaby.

Anyone listening would have thought the tune was for the sleeping child, but Leona's song belonged entirely to two small ghosts who haunted the herb garden. Each day she visited her sons with a mother's guilty and determined conscience. Crouched among the lavender pansies, she conjured what only she could remember and honor.

Tiny fingers, complete with tissue paper nails. Huge sightless, black eyes. Fragile white bones, the width of threads, shining through transparent flesh. By now, they were most likely gone, melted into the soil like sweet butter left out in a warm, Smoky Mountain rain.

Keziah cried out in her sleep; a tremor ran through her body. Leona froze at the soft echo of the terror that had ripped the air earlier that day.

                                                                     ******

The shriek of fear had brought Leona running to Keziah's aid, only to see the child dangling from Titus' huge hands, a bright red mark rising along her cheekbone from a vicious slap he had just delivered. She snatched Keziah away and shoved her screaming into the kitchen then turned to face her enraged husband.

"She gets the strap, ya hear me? The little bitch told me no! Her Paw, and she tells me NO?? I'll break her from it sure is shit!"

He pulled the belt from his pants and started for the kitchen. Leona grabbed his arm and hung on in desperation.

"Please Titus, I'm sorry... I'm sorry! I'll teach her better. She won't say it no more."

"I said she's getting the strap!"

"Please, don't. Don't, she's too little. You'll kill her Titus!"

She froze as he pivoted towards her and she felt her bowels turned to water. His face was a few inches away and she recoiled from his hot breath and the fine spray of saliva as he hissed.

"Then yer gonna take her lickin'. Maybe she'll larn quicker thet way. Maybe larn ya to be a better Maw too."

There was no way to argue or beg his mercy. The marks of the strap and the sound of leather meeting flesh were the only things he wanted now.

Leona walked on rubbery legs to stand in front of the fireplace mantle, numb fingers fumbling at the buttons on the front of her dress. She watched in apprehension as Titus crouched before Keziah. Their daughter stared, mesmerized by his soft whisper and insane eyes, searching consolation from the thumb jammed into her mouth.

"See what ya done? See what happens when ya sass me that way, gal? Yer ma gets the whip. Understand me, ya goddam brat?"

Keziah bobbed her head as he strode into the front room to Leona, waiting in patient terror for the lick of the strap on her back.

                                                                    ******

Leona slowly stroked Keziah's hair, lulling her into a deeper sleep. She inhaled the fragrance of her sons' graveyards as her hands traveled slowly down the front of her still flat stomach. She did not need a checkmark on the feed store calendar to verify which she already knew; she had been down this particular road to hell three times before. The two unmarked graves nearby were bleak testimony of what would come her way once Titus noticed that her waist was thickening up again. Only Keziah had survived the onslaught of her father's fists as he savaged Leona's swelling belly during her pregnancies.

Leona had learned early not to run. The night of her first beating she took off down the mountain, almost making it to Red Deer Holler. Titus' cousins, Marcus and Julius  Trent found her and dragged her back. After they helped him drink a jar of whiskey, he took a hickory cane to her.

The next morning she crawled to the creek and soaked her blood-caked clothes from her back. Leona miscarried her first son before noon. Dizzy with blood loss, numb with grief, she buried the translucent body and cleaned the mess up before her baby's killer came home that evening.

By her own reckoning, she had about 8 weeks, before Titus took notice of the coming baby. This next beating would be the worst. He'd be determined to make this one work and with his violence increasing with each passing fit, she could very well lose her life. Keziah would be left alone with a man who had no soul.

There was no alternative.

For Keziah's sake and the sake of the young ones in Leona's womb, Titus would have to die.

An accident was necessary. One that would never be doubted. If the authorities caught her, they'd allow her to give birth to the baby, then they would hang her. As desperate and beat down as she felt, Leona did not want to leave this world. Keziah and the new one would end up in an orphanage, few folks would want to adopt the children of a drunken father and a murdering mother. Or worse, the Trents would get them and they would be raised up in the same nasty world that had fashioned Titus'.

The solution eluded her for a week. As she began to prepare a cobbler for supper one day, she worried it around again. It wasn't until she popped the lid off of some canned peaches, that Leona had her inspiration. She nearly dropped the Ball jar when it dawned on her that her weapon lay beneath her feet.