Leon and Floyd were fourteen, a year younger than she, when she got both of them on her mind. There they were. She didn’t know why. Maybe it was because a prophecy of their future manhood had begun to show in their bodies. Similarly big of head, feet, and hands, with knee and elbow joints that looked swollen, they moved quickly but without grace, or even much precision, and they considered themselves the center of the universe.

Their voices were alike because they had always been together. All his life Leon would sound a little Negro-ish to white people, and Floyd would sound to other Negroes not quite like they sounded to each other. They shared the same humor at that age, although Leon was jokier than Floyd, while Floyd was more often pensive than Leon and less likely to act on whim. Their being together was accepted by everyone with no question, only the feeling: what is, is.

Mindful of her curiosity and inclination, Clovis wondered if there might be something for her in them rather than Roscoe. She watched. One Monday morning in midsummer Floyd caught her at it.

It was a clear, hot day with promise of getting hotter, and not a cloud in the sky, a perfect washday. Clovis was at a tub scrubbing clothes, her sleeves rolled up, her face sweaty with exertion, her skirt damp from water she had sloshed out of the tub onto herself. She and four other women were at work, and they would be at it for most of the day. The big, round, black pots were fired and boiling linens and clothes from the big house.

Presently, when she finished the tub she was working on and passed it to the next woman to rinse, she stirred a pot with a long, wooden paddle, then used the paddle to lift out a wet load to a stump. Taking a stouter stick, she beat the clothes, loosening their dirt. Then she put them into her washtub with fresh water and soaped and scrubbed, enjoying her own rhythm of work, her body tuned and in harmony with the effort she made and her pleasure in using muscle.

Floyd was supposed to saw logs that day from two old trees that had been struck by lightning and removed from the edge of a corn field earlier that summer. He and Leon had worked together for a while, playfully, but getting the work along. Then they had been quiet a few minutes plotting together, Floyd at first shaking his head, then laughing and nodding agreement.

Leon then went away to dig worms for the fishing they had decided to do. Their bait bed was near the old gnarled fig tree that grew near the door of the kitchen to the big house, the same tree from whose branches they had swung as babies.