He did not forget Sarah Kendrick either, although he did not see her now. But he knew they were all of them at Beulah Land busy, as was he, with no time for idle riding or walking about. When they and he had leisure, he would pick up observing and meeting them again. Brought up to resent the Kendricks, he had not remembered the reasons. By now his resentment had been replaced largely by curiosity. Sometimes, standing on the farthest edges of his land nearest Beulah Land, he would see Floyd walking about among the field hands. There were so many of them the work seemed none too hard or pressing. And sometimes, to his surprise, they would sing, for no reason he could guess, their beginning cued by no signal he had seen or heard. Like a flock of birds they would suddenly begin all together and continue until moved to stop. He saw that Floyd was easy with the men and women, and they with him. There was easy laughing and joking, or they would all stop briefly and just stand there resting themselves and looking about, whereas his own people, when he was with them anyway, worked with their faces toward the ground.

Monotonous though being a farmer was to him, Alonzo was glad enough to have a place he could think of as his own, in spite of the regular visits of his father and Junior to see how things were going, to be critical and nagging, no matter how well he had done, never to smile and commend. But real life, good life, was over there at Beulah Land, he thought, across the invisible and invincible border line that ringed the big plantation as effectively as a Great Wall. Over there they were happy or seemed so. Over here they were not.

He sent his cotton to the Kendrick gin. Family hatred did not keep Roscoe from using what was convenient and cheapest, in spite of the bit of profit accruing to his old enemies. When the corn was dry, Alonzo sent it to the mill to be ground into meal, which was used more as a staple for bread than flour was. Alonzo took the first wagon with its sacks of shelled corn to the mill himself, for the change and adventure of leaving the farm even for a little while, and he came home covered with a fine, light dusting of corn meal that made him look, Clovis told him when he came in the door, like a spook.