“I didn’t plan to, but it turned out so mild, just like you said it would. I decided it was the best time to bring the children in to look at all the Christmas things in the stores. They want everything they see.”

“Of course they do.” Edna snorted and waved a hand dismissingly. “Just get ’em a box of raisins and a sack of niggertoes.” She had gone back to work; she was scraping earth mold from the edge of Benjamin’s tomb.

“Well,” Trudy said, “you really did come to work, I can see.”

“Mm,” was all Edna gave her.

“Adam!” Trudy called loudly. “We’re going now! You hasten and make the others come along to the gate!”

Instead, Adam and Annabel and Doreen and James came bounding back to say goodbye to Edna. “You coming with us, Grandma?” Doreen asked.

“No, I’m coming later by myself after I drive Miss Sarah home. Call goodbye to her as you go.”

“Is that Grandpa?” Doreen asked, looking at the gravestone where Edna knelt.

“Of course it is,” Adam said. “I told you.”

“You going to be right next to him?” Doreen persisted.

“Yes, I am,” Edna said. “Now go on.”

They called goodbye to Sarah, not once but several times, together and separately, and Sarah lifted her head to smile and a hand to wave.

“Well,” Trudy said, and followed the children away.

An hour later when they had gone back and forth comparing their work and admiring what each other had done, they talked of what they would do next time they came, “around midspring,” Edna suggested. Then they cleaned their tools and took them back to the buggy. The tools stored, the two women climbed tiredly into the buggy, and Edna found and opened a jar.

“Time for a little blackberry wine,” Edna said, and offered the jar to Sarah, who took it. “Got no glasses; we can drink from different sides.”

“Edna, you think of everything.” There would be no more “miss” between them in direct conversation. Sarah drank. “That is so good!”

Edna smiled and took the jar back and drank carefully from her side of the rim. “Rooster has a nice hand at making wine and brandy, especially as one who doesn’t care much for them himself. His daddy taught him.”

Later, when they turned from the main road into the drive that would take them to the front door of Beulah Land, Edna said, “I wouldn’t take anything for Trudy’s having married Rooster, but she’s—well, not got a lively mind. Doesn’t think beyond house and children, poultry and preserves.”

They had not spoken all afternoon of Bonard and Lauretta, Sarah realized, after she had got down from the buggy, and Edna had driven away home. But thinking this, albeit thankfully, she remembered Rachel and hurried into the house.

PART FOUR

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