That accomplished, Floyd set some to mending farm tools, others to repairing ladders and doors and roofs and rotting floors in cabins and barns that had been let go in the busier season or given at most a lick and a promise. The women made soap and candles, darned old clothes and quilts and made new ones, ripped open and restuffed mattresses and pillows with fragrant, fresh corn shucks.

The old ones sat before fires on the low-slung hide seats of creaking chairs that had settled exactly to their bodies’ requirements and dimensions. The children, including Rachel and Doreen and Annabel, attended school. Roman was a man of importance again, his pupils repeating his words and Sarah’s to their parents until they too learned the lessons. Adam and James had their tutor, Mr. Driscoll Proctor, and were lofty in the company of their sisters and Rachel.

Peace abided at Oaks and Beulah Land, but peace did not abide at the Elk place. Roscoe had taken solid satisfaction in the ownership of new slaves and land. He had set the grazing farm to rights with his whole team of mules and workers in four days, and then left Turnip alone there to tend the barn and a few head of cattle. In the spring, Roscoe would add more cattle.

Roscoe had made the home farm, the hundred and fifty acres combined, seem more his by shifting fences and tearing down old ones. He considered plans for winter plowing and speculated on what crops to set in which fields. His sons, Alonzo and Roscoe Junior, began to help him at his commanding them. They were lazy boys, but they knew how to move when their father spoke, and Junior had inherited something of his father’s sharpness of mind. Clovis trained her new house woman to do things her way, and she ordered new furnishings where they were needed.

All these activities gave satisfaction to Roscoe, but as December wore on, he became aware of an underlying dissatisfaction. He thought about it and decided that, although he could take pride in himself and his manipulation of events and his old employers, what he had done had also left them too much and too happy. It was not enough to make his independence, as he had, at their expense. He must punish them; he would make them unhappy if he could. A bold idea came to him one day with the force of a sudden clap of thunder.

22

First one and then another, depending on the lightness or heaviness of the sleeper, woke in the night to a ringing of bells such as might summon the dead to rise on Resurrection Day. Fumbling, stumbling out of beds and going to windows and doors, they asked one another the meaning of the sounds. It was the night before Christmas Eve, and so first natural thoughts had to do with that celebration.