The kitchen door opened again, and Lovey shook a dishcloth in the air.

“Morning, Lovey,” Leon called.

“Morning, boy.” Her face softened as she looked at him. To her he would always be a boy, the one she had defended from old Deborah’s cold discipline. “Come on in. Coffee’s boiling.”

“Thought we’d go check on the lines I set last night,” Floyd said.

“You got time. That’s all you have got. Come on.”

Half an hour later they went to the woods, after she had filled them up with batter cakes and fresh-made cane syrup, and coffee so black and hot it might have dissolved a stone.

After checking Floyd’s fishing lines and finding no catch, they sat on a log and talked, and then strolled to the higher, drier woods. Leon found chinquapins on the leafy ground and put a few into his pocket to give Rachel later.

They were together more often those days than they had been since childhood. With Bonard gone and Felix less ready to roister than he used to be, Leon had been lonely for man company. Floyd had been homesick since leaving two years ago. Beulah Land was many things to him: father and mother, and other less tangible roots, one being the childhood he and Leon had lived together.

They walked about, sometimes with direction and object and sometimes not, to the barns, into the woods, over the empty fields, beautiful in their autumn starkness as they were beautiful in their spring awakening and summer abundance. Each of them carried a stick, a habit from boyhood, to prod a goat or cow aside, to whack a weed or dry corn stalk, or together to send the sticks sailing through the air like javelins, for no other reason than idle fancy.

The resumption of friendship had been planned by neither. Neither thought about it beyond knowing he found it good. But Roscoe Elk saw in it deliberation and dark intent, a danger to his position; and his suspicion helped to make it so. Sometimes a stranger observing two people will suppose a relationship between them that does not exist at the time yet comes to be. Roscoe was no stranger to Leon and Floyd. He had seen their intimacy as a threat when they were boys. That intimacy had been dispelled by Clovis, who had thus put herself in the way of becoming Roscoe’s wife.

He suspected that Floyd and Leon would not long be content to repeat their childhood patterns. They would need to share a larger concern, and that could only be the running of Beulah Land. His mind having worked in such manner, he decided that he would not wait for them to act. He would surprise them.

17