“Of course he’s to work,” Arnold said slowly. But even as Roscoe’s mind-wrinkle relaxed, he added, “He has a lot to do, you know, with Leon. He’s Lovey and Ezra’s boy.” He thought that over a bit. “Not to be treated just like anybody, you understand. But when he isn’t obliged to be with Leon or doing what his ma and pa tell him, let him work.”

Boys are smart in knowing who is against them, and Floyd and Leon knew that Roscoe was against them. He never overstepped his authority to the point where Leon wanted to complain to his father. Leon was not one to make decisions and take action anyway. He liked to let life happen, and if trouble came, not hurry or hassle it, but wait and see if it would solve itself or run its course. Roscoe was so often there, it seemed, asking questions, not waiting to hear them answered, furrowing his brow and talking of who was too sick to work and how shorthanded they were in the hollow where the sugar cane grew. Behind his back they teased one another about him, but the idea of Roscoe as a menace to them grew in their minds, just as Roscoe meant it to. When a fly is noticed and not brushed aside, he gains confidence.

11

Clovis had not been a virgin since she was four years old, and by the time she was fifteen she was tolerably well acquainted with the ways of men and knew something of how to manage them. Although he had made no straight approach, she was aware that Roscoe wanted her. Her mother dead, her father unknown to her and she to him, she lived in a cabin of single women of various ages, including Posie and Buttercup, whose mother Jane had recently died. She’d heard about the women who did for Roscoe, one way and another. Gossip declared that he had the biggest dick they’d ever seen that he did it longer than other men, and that he sometimes required funny things of them that surprised and hurt. She knew that if, when the time came, she managed him cleverly, it would be to her future advantage.

She did not incline to him. For a while she thought it might be to do with the gossip. Then she decided it was because he was old. Then, as she herself grew older, and months at such an age as hers are like years at another, she realized that he was not old at all, and what seemed age was something else, the way he set himself remote from others.