In any event, he was glad to see her go, and she was glad to leave him. What did a house in town matter, if all she could do was sit in it alone?

Clovis was a woman of energy; she liked having things to do. It was the not having and not being needed that had set her to careless drinking. After observing Maude for a day and suffering her jabber, she struck her and sent her off to take care of the slave cabins and the yards. Clovis knew that Geraldine went to bed with her son when it pleased him to take her, and she didn’t care one way or another. She did not, however, consider that this fact gave Geraldine any privileges. She told the young woman what housework to do and showed her how to do it. When Geraldine alternately balked and feigned simplicity, Clovis smacked her on the head and showed her again. By the end of the second day Clovis and Geraldine had come to understand each other, and they were not displeased with their understanding either. Clovis continued to drink, but in moderation now and for pleasure. Her days followed a routine of activities. She had been born to farm work, and she found herself slipping into the first real contentment she had known since she was a girl. Town had not suited her, she decided. Here, she could be Clovis, instead of Roscoe Elk’s wife.

Alonzo was well pleased too. He talked to his mother and slept alone, not allowing Geraldine to stay in his bed after his need of her was satisfied. She was cleaner; the house was sensibly kept; meals were better prepared, and he did not have to listen to stupid, self-important old Maude. Without saying so, he was grateful to Clovis for the order she had brought to his life. He had always been a little resentful and shy of her, because he thought she favored his brother Roscoe over him. But since Roscoe, called Junior, had become more like his father in his arrogant self-assurance, assuming that everyone else, including his mother and brother, was stupid or weak or both Clovis had begun to look to her younger son for whatever familiar comfort she might hope to find.

Alonzo did not forget what he had seen and heard of his brother Roman and the white man who taught the Davis boys. Indeed, he regularly returned to the glade to see if he could catch them. But they had not come there again that he knew, and gradually his frequenting the place made it seem like his own, and instead of going there to spy, he began to go there to be alone and private when he grew bored with the farm and thinking of weather and weeds and crop yield.