“Oh . . . So it’s you. Come in. Shall I make a light?” Christine wanted to know. And then added, with characteristic frugality, “If we sit up close the stove by, we not have to make it. Ya?”

Abbie looked around for Anna, Christine’s granddaughter, who had been living with her for several years. “Where’s Anna, Christine?”

“Huh!” Christine was evidently disgruntled about something. “Anna, she’s gone to Omaha up.”

“Omaha?”

“Ya. To vork . . . until she some money earn.” She was excited. Her broken words came tumbling over each other. “I give Anna land all the same to her . . . eighty acres. Eighty acres to every child I give, I tell you. I give Anna the land from her dead mother. What keep I? Three eighties. Ya! Out of all that eleven eighties, for myself three I keep. Maybe I starve. Maybe I go the county house by. How they like their old mother go the poorhouse by? Anna care nothing. She come by me and say, ‘Grandmudder . . . I haf it . . . the land . . . but I haf taxes to pay. Can I haf money the taxes to pay?’ How you like? Huh? The land I gif her . . . do you hear. . . Abbie Deal? Eighty acres I gif her and she come already yet and say, ‘For taxes no money I haf.’ I say, ‘Better you get and money earn for taxes then. Nein?’ ”

“Oh, and she’s gone?”

“Ya, she’s vent.”

“But, Christine, Omaha is such a city. Don’t you know about her . . . where she first went?”

“Oh, I guess herself she take care. She svill pigs and corn shuck. You learn ’em svill and shuck, and demselves they take care.”

“Christine, why don’t you sell some of your land and use the money for yourself? The three eighties you kept for yourself are worth a lot of money now. Sell one of the eighties and have more comforts and conveniences.”

“Ya . . . and go the poorhouse by. How long I know I live? Only eighty-two I am. A man I know a hundred-and-four was when he die. Maybe like dat I live. Maybe twenty year I live yet already. I guess dey not all my land get. Ya . . . when I die, over it quick dey fight. Not while here I stay.”

Abbie Deal sighed. Well, she thought, one gets out of life largely what one puts in. Christine had put all her time and thought on the land and for reward she had . . . land.

As soon as the Cedartown school was out that summer, Laura came over to spend a few days with her grandmother. Abbie still found pleasant companionship in this particular grandchild, an understanding and sympathy deeper than the usual twelve-year-old girl possessed. The two seemed, to hold a oneness of thought, a kinship of mind as well as of body. With none of Katherine’s sophistication, the child yet seemed mature.