Then, just as he was beginning to feel content, even something like happy, his father or his brother would stop by with suspicious questions and glum, hard attitudes toward the work he was having done on the farm. Nothing was ever good. Nothing good would come. He must work harder, prod the slaves to greater effort. They were eating too much. The price of cotton was still low. The place didn’t pay. Jesus God!

After such a visit, Alonzo would find himself filled with resentment and anger that he had not dared direct toward Roscoe or Junior, and no longer felt inclined to take out on Geraldine or his mother. It turned in on him, bled what little pride he had, annulled contentment, rubbed out any budding ambition he had begun to nurture. After such a time with either one or both of them, he did not want to see or speak to his mother or Geraldine. He shouted at, even cursed them when they, knowing or guessing something of what he felt, tried to make comments to comfort and ameliorate.

He hated them all then; he rejected them all. His mind flew over to Beulah Land where the people were beautiful and mannerly even when they looked at him with dislike, where the slaves walked like men and their women sang of joy as well as sorrow. And he would find himself back at the glade, just over his own boundaries on Oaks property, as if only there could he believe there was a gentler, happier world than that he lived in.

In such a mood of impotent anger and need did he go one day and discover Sarah Kendrick and Casey Troy. He almost stepped into the open area that led to the brook before he saw them, for they made no sound at all. Alonzo froze, did not even breathe again until he had stepped back into the cover of the dark trees.

The woman leaned on the big rock by the brook, a look of calm thought on her face. She might have been about to smile or about to frown. It was as though he caught her at the dead center of an unfinished thought. Her hands were held one by the other loosely in front of her. The skin of her throat and neck glowed moistly. Her hair was not orderly nor disorderly but looked free and alive; tendrils of it around her face, soft as baby hair, moved in the gentle breeze.

The man stood six or seven feet away from her. His body was fully alert, as was evidenced by the muscular stance of his wide-apart legs. One arm firmly cradled the large sketch pad as the other swung both freely and meticulously over the paper with dark crayon that, too, seemed to be alive. The man’s neck was taut with his intentness. His eyes moved quickly between paper and woman.