It was a relaxed, and cheerful time when melons were cut and sections passed around, with salt for those who liked it that way, and in the hot weather some seemed to want salt on everything; but half an hour later when the melons had been eaten and the rinds collected in one spot on the porch but not yet taken away to the hog pens, flies gathered to sit in the sticky juice and grow drunk on sweetness. People drifted away into the house if they were of the household, to wash hands or merely to avoid the flies, and back to town if they were business people who had happened to be there when refreshment was offered. At such times Rachel and Adam would slip away and going from shade to shade as they had quickly learned to do, managed to avoid the worst of the open afternoon heat and to achieve the privacy of their glade.

On the first Sunday in August, before the frenzied activity of full harvest began, there was a spend-the-day party at Beulah Land for the family from Oaks. There had been no question of anyone’s going to church in Highboro that day; the logistics of transport alone would have been far too complicated. Both families agreed to “taking it easily.” The Davises were asked to come when they pleased—“but the sooner the better and stay forever,” Rachel had urged when issuing the invitation.

Every one of the two families at Oaks and Beulah Land was up at daybreak to bathe and shave, or crimp hair and primp faces, and to try to remember all the things they meant to tell each other and were always forgetting in the hurried meetings of the busy summer season. (“Aunt Pea, please remind me to tell Edna—now what was it?”)

To live is complex enough; to live and react to each other with anything like grace can demand anything from the most natural, effortless behavior to the greatest heroism. In our dreams we are hunted and threatened, hurt and shamed—glorified, all but deified. We know in familiar ways people we have never seen before or have merely known about; we act in what seems to be a manner contrary to our nature. The sleeping state makes acceptable those encounters that would be the subject of the grisliest fantasy at midday. All is possible, and sometimes an odd impulse from a forgotten dream surfaces during waking hours to astonish us.

Nell, being unthreatened by any personal demand, and suddenly panicked at the realization that nothing more would ever be asked of her in life, could slip into a reverie where today she looked at young James with his innocent physicality and felt a positive lust to put her hands to his red cheeks and taste his lips.