“They good. Chillun love ’em. After we give most of these to the hogs, I’m gonna boil some in salt water for the young’uns. You welcome to come eat some, if you so mind.”

Roscoe looked at her steadily almost a minute before turning his mule and riding away at a steady walk. April had an open sore near her ass hole and carried her tail arched, which seemed to set both comment and question mark on the encounter.

When she thought he was out of earshot, Myrtis said, “Did you see?”

“Did I see what?”

“Did you see what I see?”

“What you see?”

“That man got a big bone in his britches whilst he sat on that mule talkin’ to us!” Myrtis laughed shrilly. “Enough to make a pussy pucker! Don’t it? You reckon it were cause of me or cause of you?”

“You,” Clovis said. “You the one gone die soon.”

Myrtis giggled, then laughed with her mouth open, then bellowed with her whole body shaking. It was hot, and life was boring, and anything could pass for an event with her. “You—girl!” she screamed and gave Clovis a slap and a shove.

Clovis straightened herself and said, “Stop pushing me. I got things to think about.”

Myrtis turned sullenly and began to pack the dying plants into a torn sack. “Wish I had.”

Clovis thought about him with interest but with her pores closed. She did what she said she would do—she boiled a mess of the fresh peanuts in their hulls in salted water. And she sat, the center of a crowd of children, late in the afternoon on the ground beside the cabin where she lived with the other single women. A big bowl of peanuts rested in her lap. Clovis took one, broke it carefully, let salty water in the hull drip into her mouth, then ate the peas and sucked the damp shells until their salt taste was gone.

Roscoe Elk walked by. He did not stop, or speak, or even look at her. The children, who might have acted as a natural bridge between the non-communicants, were too absorbed in trying to eat the peanuts in exactly the way Clovis had, to notice Roscoe, or the way Clovis now looked angrily at his back.

She had wanted him to stop, to speak; not because she favored him, but because by not doing so he denied that he favored her. That was the moment she knew she could have him. The knowledge did not soothe her but turned her mind to Leon and Floyd. She was aware of the children’s chatter without attending to it. Instead, she ate another peanut, letting its salt water seep under her tongue.

14