“He’s taking so long,” she confided to Ann-Elizabeth Clay. “I suppose he simply doesn’t know what to do with the poor thing.”

Ann-Elizabeth replied, “It was the same with Margaret-Ella. How boring for a painter with his eye for beauty to be obliged to paint just anyone.”

The response of Ann-Elizabeth and Margaret-Ella to Annabel’s portrait had been gratifying and made the girls friends again, at any rate for a week or two until some new competition could drive them apart.

Both Bruce and Edna genuinely liked the portrait and said so. Casey listened to their remarks attentively, for the picture was more important to him than Annabel’s had been. As for Doreen, the first time she looked at it, she studied it quietly for so long that Casey became a little unnerved, when suddenly she smiled—a smile that grew and spread all over her young-girl face. “Why, I’m going to look like Granny,” she said with delight, as if she had just found out who she was. Casey thought he had never had such a gratifying compliment to his work.

9

Sarah was later to wonder if her hesitation had been prompted by some inner warning, even though she thought that what happened that summer might have happened, if not then and in the same way, at another time, for the inception of its events lay deep in the past, and their incubation had been long.

After Leon commissioned portraits of each member of the family, Sarah put off Casey Troy’s coming to them. It was the wrong time. Everyone was busy, she argued, and she feared Mr. Troy would only become bored and impatient waiting about while his subjects found time to pose for him. Yet there was never a really idle time at Beulah Land; there were only busier and less-busy days and seasons. Every farmer knows how things seem to come all at once, no matter how carefully he plans ahead, and to require his immediate attention with no possibility of postponement and not even much prospect of giving priority. This is the result of the infinite unpredictability of nature—not merely weather, but seed quality, and soil conditions which vary from hour to hour—and there is no arguing the point.

As far as order may obtain with such unpredictability, it did so at Beulah Land. Floyd was in charge of directing the slaves in their everyday work on the plantation, and he was in frequent consultation with Leon and Sarah. Leon’s areas of closest personal supervision were the cotton gin and warehouses in Highboro, which was three miles from Beulah Land, and the lumber works centering around the sawmill, which was five miles away from Beulah Land in the opposite direction from Highboro. To go from one to the other, which was often necessary, therefore meant riding or driving eight miles.